The 'great artist' behind Prince

"Today, the world lost a creative icon," Obama said in a statement offering condolences to Prince’s family and band. Obama reminded that Prince once said "a strong spirit transcends rule," adding, "nobody's spirit was stronger, bolder, or more creative."

Jordan always reminds: “Satan’s spirit works in lost people and the creative genius of unsaved men and women is satanically inspired.

“Did you know that music is one of the most dangerous things in your life, second only to false religion? In fact, it’s false religion that gives it its power in your life.

“How many of you when you get up in the morning turn on the radio or put in a CD to get yourself motivated instead of God’s Word?

"You’re looking to a spirit in the world to produce in you what God said His Word is designed to produce in you and you make that choice.

“You watch a movie, TV program, radio theatrical production and there’s not a one of them that doesn’t have music in the background. It’s all boring without the sound; you need the mood music to make it meaningful.

“Music is powerful. It’s called the universal language and it affects everybody the same no matter what language you speak. The moguls that produce that stuff have a spirit behind them. People say, ‘Well, I like what it does for me.’ Uh-huh, that’s why you choose it.”

*****

Music is the only language in the world that affects people even when they don’t know it’s happening. It’s designed to control.

“Your music influences your spirit, your soul and your body,” says Jordan. “You don’t have a choice about that; it does it and it controls. It controls you and you respond to it.”

*****

In what has to be one of the dumbest observations of all in Rick Warren’s Purpose-Driven Drivel, he writes, “God loves all kinds of music because he invented it all—fast and slow, loud and soft, old and new. You probably don’t like it all, but God does!”

To make matters worse, he then observes, “Christians often disagree over the style of music used in worship, passionately defending their preferred style as the most biblical or God-honoring. But there is no biblical style!”

*****

All through the Bible are references to music—the kind that pleases God and the kind that doesn’t.

We know from the Book of Genesis God was the one to set up music and it degenerated with the fall of Satan. Exodus tells us how God restored music to its original purpose when He called the nation Israel out of Egypt. It later degenerated. From I Chronicles 16, we know God rescued music once again with David, and then it degenerated again.

“The world you live in, if you’re under 30 years old today, you have never have been fed a steady diet of music that pleases God,” says Jordan. ‘And if you’re over 30, it was way back when when you maybe heard it.

“Christians will deny evolution of the species and everything else but they believe music’s getting better and better and better and the Book indicates it’s not. The fact is, the music we are exposed to is music designed not to please God; it’s designed to please you, whether it’s contemporary Christian music, or gospel music, or bluegrass, or jazz, or the blues, or rock, or easy listening stuff.

“Contemporary Christian music is gutless. It has to do with the way it’s written; it has nothing to do with the people doing it. Good people, nice people may be doing it, but if you write bad music—if you follow the rules of music that cause it to be weak—

what kind of music do you get? Weak music.

*****

Listed in I Chronicles 16: 8-12 are nine reasons David gives for the music he’s writing and they match what Psalm 68:4 and Col. 3:16 say about the three categories of music.

“God has music and He does it His way all through the Bible,” says Jordan. “What you want to do is find out how God does His music and do your music that way—not just your church music, but your music.

“There’s an order and a structure to the way God does things and you can’t miss the fact that God is a God of planning, order and structure. Proverbs 11:1 says, ‘A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is his delight.’

“If you take that word balance, you’ve got the key to good music, and when I talk about good music, I’m talking about music that pleases God.

“Music is a language and a language has grammar. When you write a sentence, you have a subject and a predicate. It has structure to it. If you see a prepositional phrase, you know how to diagram that; you learn the parts of speech. Well, in music there’s three parts of speech. Melody, harmony and rhythm. Those three things are what music is constructed out of.

“Melody, that’s the tune. God’s spirit works through His Word and melody in music is designed to carry the words. It’s designed to help you understand the words and to say the words and to preach the words. Melodies are constructed in very specific ways. There’s an exact, mathematical design that you construct a melody with.

“Now, harmony is when you play two or more notes at one time and it carries the melody. All of this has an exact science to it. Melodies run horizontally. Chords—or the harmony—run vertically. The chord is how you get your feelings affected.

“By the way, the melody makes you think something and harmony makes you feel something. Rhythm makes you do something. Each one’s designed to affect your spirit, your soul and your body, in that order. The melody impacts your spirit (Phil. 3:3), harmony impacts your soul (Eph. 4:16) and rhythm impacts your body or your flesh (Rom.13:14).

“God works through His word as you in your inner man trust it and His word works out through your soul and your body. In music, the place you’re going to worship God is in the melody because we worship God in spirit and the melody’s what matches your spirit. That’s what God’s interested in.”

*****

From Isaiah 51:3, a passage about the future kingdom when God redeems Israel, we know there’s going to be a pure music restored by God and it will be carried in the melody.

The verse says, “For the LORD shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the LORD; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody.”

By contrast, Amos 5:21, in which God tells Israel He despises their idea of “feast days” and “solemn assemblies,” contains the sharp rebuke, “Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.”

Jordan explains, “They’ve got a melody that God says is nothing but noise. Now, it is a melody, but God said, ‘It’s not a melody I want; take it away!’ So their church music had degenerated from something that God designed it to be into noise and into violating the rules of the language of music to the extent that God said it’s just noise.”

(new article tomorrow)