15 October | Youth
«But at midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them.» Acts 16:25
Paul and Silas’s passage through the region of Macedonia was marked by strong emotions. After expelling the fortune-telling spirit out of a slave, there was an uproar in the city, as that woman’s owners lost their profit from her predictions. Paul and Silas were then flogged and imprisoned in the city of Philippi.
While they remained tied to a log, around midnight they both began to pray and sing praises to God. This is one of the few nominal mentions found in the New Testament of people singing.
What did they sing? What was Paul’s relation to music?
Since he grew up in a multicultural environment and was versed in several languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin), Paul probably also received musical influence in his childhood. In the Greco-Roman environment, music played a significant role in education. “Familiarity with music, or at least with musical terms, was considered part of the cultured individual’s education, just as such an individual was expected to know how to speak and write Greek” (Donald Grout and Claude Palisca, History of Western Music, p. 33).
Greek music resembled early church music in many ways. It was, firstly, monophonic, that is, a melody without harmony or counterpoint, almost always improvised. Often, however, it was accompanied by var-ious musical instruments and also by a group of singers, thus creating a heterophony.
There is another aspect worth noting. Because Greek mythology attributes divine origin to music, the Greeks believed that it had the power to perform miracles in the natural world, in addition to curing illnesses and purifying the body.
In this cultural context, we find Paul and Silas singing in a Macedonian prison, at midnight.
Suddenly, there was a strong earthquake, which destroyed the prisoners’ chains and opened the cell doors. This fact also shook the life of the jailer who, after the intervention of Paul and Silas, gave his life to Christ, and so did those in his house.
This is the power of praise! Wonders happen when we use our voices to sing or talk about Jesus.