timmopussycat
Puritan Board Junior
My question is still outstanding, though: how do you get from this to the declaration that God permits only the Psalms to be sung?
If the argument is traced carefully, it will be seen that we get to this from the fact that we restrict ourselves only to what God has commanded to be sung. In other words, the exegetical consideration is first, and from there we come to the issue of order and decency. Exegetically, we can see where God commands the singing of psalms with grace in the heart. From there we can see His wisdom in binding us to His set form so that we can sing with the full assurance of faith.
Although one may argue that the it might be held to be a possible inference from the biblical data, the conclusion that God has commanded only the biblical psalms to be sung cannot be proven a good and necessary consequence of the same. For we have no NT statment that explicitly and unambigously commands the sole use of biblical psalms in worship. So we must derive the view that such is commanded by GNC reasoning from other statements. But Paul's categorizing of the sung worship of the churches as "teaching" in Col 3:16 makes it impossible to logically prove that the apostolic church saw sung worship as a separate worship element governed by different rules than the element of teaching. In addition, Paul's includsion of "a hymn" in the list of benefits that prophetically gifted members were bringing to the church services in 1 Cor. 14:26, (note that the context is the proper use of prophecy and tongues), makes it impossible to apodidically prove that the hymns so brought were limited only to the biblical psalms.
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