Raising children, even for my wife and I in the late stages in which we find ourselves with the youngest of our three at 17, offers a plethora (love that word) of opportunities to bring the reality of God into their lives. Christian parents in a secular culture hostile to all things Christian must understand this is a full time job. Fortunately, the opportunities are never ending because so is our God! He is, after all, the Creator of all things, and therein lies a multitude of opportunities. Having a music obsessed son offers many of those in our house.
I had a priceless evening with this youngest son seeing a band called the Strawberry Girls (yes, a strange name for a band, but they sure don’t play like girls! Calling PC police?). At his age I too was obsessed with music, and found meaning for my existence in it. Time changes things and perspectives, especially when our understanding of God expands the picture. It’s difficult after that’s happened to go back to before when the created thing was everything. Now with the big picture firmly in mind, the created thing, all of them, point undeniably and irresistibly to our Creator God! In this case, the created thing of music.
After we left the concert I said to him that it’s so sad that most if not all the people in the building (all of them younger than me!) completely miss the point that all that incredible music points beyond the music itself. It has to because music didn’t create itself! Back when this same son was 13, we were walking into church one Sunday morning, just he and I, and we’d been listening to some apologetics I had loaded on my MP3 player. As we’re walking he said to me, “Dad, I think I like music more than apologetics.” Duh! What 13 year-old on earth wouldn’t feel the same way. I replied, “Dude, music is apologetics!” I told him music, as with all created things, points beyond itself, that it speaks of something ineffable, something we all know but can’t put our finger on. Or are we to think that music invented itself? That melody, harmony, and rhythm are just there by chance, that they just are? That the beauty and intensity of music connecting with the human soul is just an accident? That it’s all just played and enjoyed by some lucky dirt (i.e., us!)? Even the most hardened secular, atheist types would agree that there is something “spiritual” about music, something you just can’t put your finger on. We would call that . . . . God!
It’s simple to persuade your children that music is not some isolated phenomena arising from a purely material order, and that music requires God. As my children were growing up I always used what is called “the design inference” with them. We know without a shadow of a doubt that everything in our world that is not nature had to be created. Whether that’s a TV, a car, a pencil, a house, you name it. We naturally infer that intelligent agents, i.e., human beings, designed, built, and produced these things. We would never think that given enough time these things would just fall together. I joked with my kids in a visit to Mount Rushmore some years back that what an amazing coincidence it is that after billions of years and natural processes four United States presidents ended up on the side of a mountain! In America! Chance and time could no more result in Mount Rushmore than it could result in a human being, or the human eye, or a flower, or a sunset, or a sun! The creation is one of the most powerful apologetics available to us, as Scripture says. Use it!
Recent Comments