When you think of a work that has Jesus the Messiah as its sole subject, you would reasonably assume that the text is heavily dependent on the New Testament, and primarily the Gospels. But when you look through the text, roughly two-thirds of the passages used are Old Testament. That alone suggests its prophetic nature.

We [The Daily Declaration] present the first of a series on the prophetic voice inherent in Handel’s musical masterpiece, Messiah. This piece of sacred music presents God’s word to listeners, speaking of comfort, strength and ultimate victory for those engaging in spiritual battle.
A few months ago, Warwick Marsh asked me if I would write an article on Messiah, the Sacred Oratorio composed by George Frederick Handel (1685-1759), as we both felt that it was relevant to Daily Declaration readers, not merely as a celebration of one of the greatest musical masterworks in history, but primarily for the fact that we both felt it possesses a powerful prophetic anointing, which I’m not sure that the man who compiled the text entirely from Scripture, a rather vain and pompous aristocrat, Charles Jennens, was at all aware of.
But I realised very quickly that the subject simply couldn’t be covered in just one article, that the whole piece is so steeped in prophetic power. So, this will be the first in a series.
Reverberations Through the Ages
Before I get started, I want to appeal to those of you whose eyes just began glazing over when you saw this is about classical music, as though it’s just so stuffy and boring, especially when you compare it to the wonderful and inspiring contemporary worship music we’re blessed with today, or the secular music you may listen to. How can you possibly compare such out-of-date stuff to that?
The fact is that, without the music of Handel, and every great composer before and since, modern rock and other contemporary genres simply wouldn’t exist, and to listen to the masterworks of classical music with fresh ears will reveal why that is the case.
If any evidence were required, I can even go to the extreme of Heavy Metal, which my son loves in all its variants. He once loaned me a DVD series on its history, and the director of the documentary, who was also the “talking head”, first charted its origins to three particular classical composers: J. S. Bach (a direct contemporary of Handel — 1685-1750), Richard Wagner (1813-1883) and Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840), the first two being the inspiration for Hard Rock and Metal’s modal “Gothic” sound, and Paganini the violin virtuoso, whose showmanship is the model for every Rock guitarist, and whose style is a distinct influence for virtually every rock guitar solo.
If any proof were needed, here it is. First, compare the first three minutes of the Bach Toccata and Fugue for Organ with this clip for rock guitar.
Then listen to Wagner’s famous Ride of the Valkyries followed by its rock adaptation.
And finally to Paganini: (1) (2)
So much for “stuffy and boring”!
So, if you listen to the music clips from Messiah in this series of articles in the same way as you do the latest worship songs you will find that music is music, that there are many similarities, but they’re using different instrumentation and vocal techniques. To draw an analogy with speech, it’s not a different language, like English and French, but merely a different accent, like Aussie and American.
That’s because great music, of whatever genre or time period, has a paradoxical effect: it is both anchored in its own time, and yet timeless, all at the same time (actually, the same thing can be said in relation to the Bible).
So, in one sense, it is identifiable as belonging to the time and place it was composed; yet it can still profoundly impact us today — and that in a powerful way, body, soul and spirit (actually, the same thing can be said in relation to the Bible).
That fact holds whether it’s the secular music of Beethoven, Mozart or Schubert (my favourites), or in my own era growing up: The Beatles, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Pink Floyd, Yes, Cat Stevens, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, The Moody Blues (also my favourites), or a hundred and one other great singer/songwriter/composers/bands of that time right up to the present.
The same holds for the sacred works of the past four centuries, the traditional hymns of Wesley and Watts and so many others, and those modern worship songs, some of which we’ve been singing for a few decades, and more that we’ll be singing for decades to come.
As Bill Muehlenberg noted in his recent article,
When it comes to things like the arts (painting, sculpture, music, poetry, literature, and so on), there can be ungodly and immoral art, and there can be godly and moral art. The answer to the dark side of culture and the arts is not to say no to all these things, but to create good and godly versions of these things…
We can glorify God just as much in enjoying one of His beautiful sunsets, or by being enraptured by Handel’s Messiah, as by sharing our faith with others or by singing worship songs in church.
In short, the same Holy Spirit who inspires our contemporary worship songs equally inspired the works of the past. This is all worship music! That’s why Handel, at the end of Messiah, wrote the letters “SDG” for the Latin phrase “Soli Deo Gloria”, which means, “To God Alone be the Glory”.
My plea, therefore, is that you will listen to be inspired in the same way as you do when you listen to hymns or contemporary worship songs.
So, now that I have your attention, a little background is required on Messiah as a whole.
Inspired
Handel composed the music for Messiah in a feverish burst of inspiration in just 24 days in August and September 1741, after Jennens had compiled the text during July of that year.
When you realise that the whole work takes around two and a half hours to perform, and Handel was writing with a pen which had to be regularly dipped in ink, and that he had to compose separate music for vocal soloists, a four-part choir, five-part strings, trumpets, horns, oboes, bassoons, organ and harpsichord, you can understand how enormous a task this is.
As music commentator Miles Hoffman estimates, there are roughly a quarter of a million notes in Messiah. At a little more than three weeks of 10-hour days, Hoffman said that means Handel would have had to keep a continuous pace writing 15 notes a minute!
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Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress sees the benefits, counts the costs, tells us how we got here, and gives some advice on muddling through the bitters. No institution—including the Church—is immune from feminism’s influence, so no one can ignore its deeply personal wounds.

Human mastery over nature, exercised technologically, is how human beings experience “progress.” Better medical care to extend life. Cars that prevent crashes and protect us from their effects. More market opportunity for all. We rarely think of how the sweetness of progress comes with corresponding bitter costs—and what that fact teaches about the human condition.
Modern feminism expresses this dilemma of progress. On one hand, women have more schooling and degrees today than ever before; more political and economic rights; and more liberation from unchosen roles. On the other, we no longer really know what a woman is and how other beings (call them men) should relate to women. Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress sees the benefits, counts the costs, tells us how we got here, and gives some advice on muddling through the bitters. No institution—including the Church—is immune from feminism’s influence, so no one can ignore its deeply personal wounds.
For Harrington, feminism rides the wave of deeper movements like industrialization and technological thinking. In the beginning, families were communities, truly the basic units of society. They were economic units where husbands and wives produced what families needed together. These conditions coincided with patriarchal legal and cultural arrangements, but all was softened by the fact that teamwork was essential. Then came “the transition to industrial society,” which took men from the home and created “separate spheres” for men and women. The social and economic conditions for communal marriage vanished, so social mystiques like the “cult of domesticity” were needed to prop up marriage. “Big Romance,” as Harrington calls it, emerged, all the better to encourage women to love their chains. Soon the contradiction was unsustainable.
The first feminism—the good one, as Harrington sees it—defined a woman’s maternal value amidst this mismatch between the mode of production and family form. Such early feminists “valued maternity, care and interdependence alongside just measures of economic and political agency and individual freedom.”
That first feminism did not last, by Harrington’s account, mostly because the market continued to liquify, commodify and alienate and to reduce all human understanding to variations on the pricing mechanism. The result was second-wave feminism, an extreme version of the market mentality, where the male model of market success became the model for everyone. Women could only find their meaning outside the home in paid work, while housework was pawned off on domestics. Sex became transactional. The promise of liberation—indeed, the promise of progress itself— colonized human life through the market mentality.
As a result, as Harrington catalogs, we live in a time when relationships are more difficult to form, when motherhood is neither honored nor aspired to, and female bodies are thought to be the playthings of transgendered technological innovation. Upper-class women can buy some immunity from liquid modernity, but working-class women cannot.
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Written by Stephen J. Adams |
Sunday, December 4, 2022
In matters of serving the church body, we should first consider how the Lord has equipped us to serve others instead of what our preference might be or what such service might cost us in time or energy. This cost will look different at different times. The cost to the woman at Bethany was an expensive alabaster jar, enough to make the disciples indignant at such apparent waste. The cost to the disciples on two occasions was the apparent degradation of having to consider small children (Matt. 18:1–6; 19:13–15), who were often considered in Jesus’ day as not worth the time. Instead, Christ rebukes them and holds children out as our example, and as inheritors of the kingdom of heaven. May our service in His church be marked with the same humble estate that our Lord commends in His loving rebuke.

One of the unwavering needs of a local church is finding good people to serve. To serve in Sunday school. To serve coffee. To stack chairs. To serve in the nursery. To care for the infirm. To disciple young believers. To prepare the elements of the Lord’s Supper. To serve pizza at youth group. To prepare food for congregational gatherings. The list is nearly endless. Further complicating the task of finding willing people to serve in these roles is that these roles are not all, shall we say, equally prominent or desirable to fill.

Scripture teaches the importance of cohesion in the local church in the midst of a body made up of many and differing parts (1 Cor. 12:12–31). While some of the needs undoubtedly looked different in the first century, the challenge of taking a diverse group and assembling them to fulfill the needs of a singular body is an old one. The Apostle Paul often used illustrations from God’s created order to communicate truths concerning the Christian life, and in writing to the Corinthians, he does so with the illustration of the human body. Of course, when we consider a human body, not every part is equally prominent; nor does each receive the same outward honor. Yet the impracticality of a body of all eyes or ears requires no further explanation. Some parts are presentable and others require greater discretion, but each illustrates the complex yet organic unity of the human body and of the church body, as Paul summarizes: “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (vv. 21–27).
Adding to the challenge of finding people to serve in the church today is what has been discussed as a problem of institutions’ losing their formative power, and in turn becoming just one more venue to highlight the individual: his aims, his interests, his agenda, and ultimately his own prominence. In a certain respect, this self-importance is not new; we see it, for example, in the jealousy of Miriam and Aaron toward Moses (Num. 12). It seems indisputable, however, that we now live in a time when technology has greatly enhanced our ability to promote ourselves over against any group or institution to which we might belong.

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