One of the arguments in favor of using musical instruments in worship points to the commands in the Psalms. Psalm 33:2 is an example. “Give thanks to the Lord with the lyre; Sing praises to Him with a harp of ten strings.”

Charles Spurgeon comments: “Men need all the help they can get to stir them up to praise. This is the lesson gathered from the use of musical instruments under the old dispensation. Israel was at school, and used childish things to help her to learn; but in these days, when Jesus gives us spiritual manhood, we can make melody without strings and pipes. We do not believe these things expedient in worship, lest they should mar its simplicity.”¹

Spurgeon drew a distinction between this present age and the older dispensation under David and Solomon. As a result, Spurgeon practiced what he taught in his Metropolitan Tabernacle in London. “There was no organ and no choir. A precentor set the pitch of each hymn with a tuning fork and led the singing with his own voice.”² As God ordered the use of musical instruments in the stated worship of Israel under David, a transition from the standards of worship under Moses, so God again altered the standards for worship in the New Testament church.³

Calvin was of like mind. “I have no doubt that playing upon cymbals, touching the harp and the viol, and all that kind of music, which is so frequently mentioned in the Psalms, was a part of the education; that is to say, the puerile [childish] instruction of the Law: I speak of the stated service of the temple. For even now, if believers choose to cheer themselves with musical instruments, they should, I think, make it their object not to dissever their cheerfulness from the praises of God. But when they frequent their sacred assemblies, musical instruments in celebrating the praises of God would be no more suitable than the burning of incense, the lighting up of lamps, and the restoration of the other shadows of the law.”⁴

For Calvin, the use of musical instruments in corporate worship was a reinstitution of the ceremonial law. Along this line, Thomas Aquinas declared “the Church in his time did not use them lest they should seem to judaize.”⁵

Psalm 71:22 announces, “I will also praise You with a harp, even Your truth, O my God; to You I will sing praises with the lyre, O Holy One of Israel.” Spurgeon commented on this use of instruments: “There was a typical signification in them; and upon this account they are not only rejected and condemned by the whole army of Protestant divines…so that we might as well recall the incense, tapers, sacrifices, new moons, circumcision, and all the other shadows of the law into use again.”⁶ Instrumental music was therefore “part of the abrogated legal pedagogy.”⁷

Calvin agreed. “In speaking of employing the psaltery and the harp in this exercise, he alludes to the generally prevailing custom of that time. To sing the praises of God upon the harp and psaltery unquestionably formed a part of the training of the law, and of the service of God under that dispensation of shadows and figures; but they are not now to be used in public thanksgiving.”⁸

Your inclination may be to go back to the ways of Old Testament worship, to the ceremonial. However, the ceremonial was typological, pointing forward to Christ and all He accomplishes. You ought to worship, not by acting out the Old Testament types, but as those caught up in the fulfillment of those types.

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