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The Sound of Heaven
From Scripture, it is clear that God cares about the nations of the world.
“Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go forth from your country, and from your relatives and from your father’s house, to the land which I will show you; and I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great; and so you shall be a blessing; and I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed‘” (Gen. 12:1-3).
“God be gracious to us and bless us, and cause his face to shine upon us–Selah. That Thy way may be known on the earth, Thy salvation among the nations. Let the peoples praise Thee, O God; let all the peoples praise Thee. Let the nations be glad and sing for joy; for Thou wilt judge the peoples with uprightness, and guide the nations on the earth–Selah. Let the peoples praise Thee, O God; Let all the peoples praise Thee. The earth has yielded its produce; God, our God, blesses us. God blesses us, that all the ends of the earth may fear Him” (Ps. 67).
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you” (Matt. 28:19-20a).
“And they sang a new song, saying, ‘Worthy art Thou to take the book and to break its seals; for thou was slain and didst purchase for God with Thy blood men from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. And Thou hast made them to be a kingdom and priests to our God; and they will reign upon the earth’” (Rev. 5:9-10).
God desires the praise of the nations in all the glorious multiplicity of languages and cultures that He designed us for. There is a very real sense in which each language is uniquely equipped to express God’s character, and He is magnified and glorified by the worship of the whole of humanity. The Perspectives on the World Christian Movement course (in which I’m currently enrolled) highlights this theme and rightly takes the Bible’s emphasis on God’s glory among the nations as the primary motivator for obedient missionary activity.
Perhaps no other time in my life has this truth been brought home more than my recent trip to Greece with AMG. As this was somewhat of a “vision trip” for our church, we participated in a wide variety of ministries in order to gauge where best to plug in for longer-term partnership. As such, we experienced different slices of the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual metropolis of Athens each day–working with Greek-speakers primarily, but also with Farsi-speaking refugees from Iran and Afghanistan and Romanian and Moldavian immigrants.
The unique sounds and pitches of each language were, and still are, unintelligible to me (true to form, I am a functionally monolingual American save several semesters of Spanish in college), but the joy of each when tuned to the praise of God was easily recognizable. Worship in the Greek churches was a wonderful time of fellowship as we clumsily worked our way through Greek melodies and sang the English words to hymns we knew, together praising the same God with our “joyful noise”.
In a Romanian church in the crowded municipality of Kallithea (part of metro Athens), I was ministered to by music in a way I’ll not soon forget. I had written off this service as a “byway” of our trip schedule, and I was admittedly skeptical after hearing that their Sunday evening service lasted at least 2 hours and was “very formal”. After spending 20 minutes driving around the block looking for a place to park, I stumbled in to the service late, and prayerful worship was the last thing on my mind.
As I sat down, the choir (which appeared to contain roughly 1/3 of the church members, each dressed to the nines) began to sing a setting of the Lord’s prayer in their native tongue. As the perfectly pitched hymn filled the room, I began weeping, both for the beauty of their worship and for my sinfully selfish attitude and prejudice toward them. The service (which lasted every bit of 2 hours) seemed to fly by with song after song lifted heavenward. I remarked to a teammate that this must be what heaven will sound like.
That Romanian choir will be part of the soundtrack of heaven, but even more beautifully brought into harmony with the worship of the nations. In that day, when every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, we will cry together in every language, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing” (Rev. 5:12). Participating in God’s work around the world is our act of obedience to His plan, and when we follow Him, He sometimes allows us the opportunity to see just a small picture of the magnitude of His glory among the nations.
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