Stupid song lyrics: Rogue theology in pop music

Whereas, it is the second Wednesday of the month, AND,

Whereas, I have listened to a lot of music in my life, AND,

Being that I now write a blog,

BE IT RESOLVED THAT,

On this Twelfth day of May, Two Thousand Ten,

I will now give you another installment of STUPID SONG LYRICS.

1. On the drive home from work a few weeks ago, I heard a countdown of the top five songs from April, 1985. Of course you remember the monster hit “We Are the World,” written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, and performed by a host of well-known American singers (and I use that term loosely with regard to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen). Here is a verse from the song:

Send them your heart,
So they'll know that someone cares,
And their lives will be stronger and free.
As God has shown us, by turning stone to bread,
So we all must lend a helping hand.

As I heard this, I thought, “Whoa, hold on. When exactly did God turn stone to bread?” I remember that in Moses’ day, God caused a stone to produce water for the Israelites in the desert. And later, in the New Testament, when Jesus was being tempted in the wilderness, Satan challenged Him to turn a stone into bread, but Jesus refused (Matthew 4:3-4). But unless I am sadly mistaken, there is no biblical account of God turning stone to bread. Of course, to be fair, Jackson and Richie don’t claim that God showed us this in the Bible. Perhaps this event happened in the Himalayan Mountains in the 14th century, and has been revealed only to the song’s writers. But I doubt it.

Anyway, this episode got me to thinking of other unbiblical, theologically deviant, or erstwhile unholy verbiage that has made its way into popular music. Such as . . .


2. In 1991, Sting scored a hit with “All This Time,” a catchy tune with the following lines:

Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the earth,
Better to be poor than a fat man in the eye of a needle.

Sting, Sting, Sting. First of all, it’s the meek who shall inherit the earth, not the poor (see Matthew 5:5). Regarding the poor (or “poor in spirit”), “theirs will be the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 5:3, Luke 6:20). What I find disappointing about Sting’s Beatitudinal confusion is that several years before this, while with the Police, he performed a song called “Walking in Your Footsteps” (the album was Synchronicity, released in 1983), in which he got it right when he sang, “They say the meek shall inherit the earth.” Just goes to show you, you gotta keep up with studying the Bible and learning good theology or you’ll forget it.

Second, Matthew 19:24 says that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Just my opinion, but I think it would be better to say “Better to be poor than a rich man in the eye of a needle,” but perhaps I’m splitting camel’s hairs.


3. Billy Joel’s River of Dreams:

I don’t know about a life after this,
God knows I’ve never been a spiritual man.
Baptized by fire, I wade
into the river that is running through the promised land.

You’ve never been a spiritual man? Not exactly a news flash. We all sort of knew that after “Only the Good Die Young” came out back in 1977. All I’ll say here is, if you’re aware that a river is running through the promised land, why would you be wading and not swimming with all your might to get there?


4. In the 80s, the Philadelphia-based band The Hooters scored a hit with the song “All You Zombies,” which said,

Only Noah saw it coming,
Forty days and forty nights.
Took his sons and daughters with him,
Yeah, they were the Israelites.

Well, to be exact, Noah took three sons (Shem, Ham, and Japheth) and three daughters-in-law on the ark with him (along with his own wife, for a total of eight human passengers), but that is a minor lyrical quibble. More to the point, his sons and daughters-in-law were not Israelites, because the nation of Israel was not founded for at least a few hundred years after the flood. However, it would be accurate to say that Noah and his sons were the direct ancestors of the Israelites, since Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Israel) came from the direct line of Noah. I’m sure, like me, you often find yourself hashing through Old Testament history while listening to the radio on the way to work . . . What? You don’t?


5. Finally, most people have heard the Byrd’s hit from 1966, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” It is a near verbatim recitation of Ecclesiastes 3, “to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.” That is, until the last line of the song, which states,

A time for love, a time for hate,
A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.

This last line is not in Ecclesiastes. Earlier in the song, they sing about “a time for war,” “a time to gather stones,” and “a time to kill,” which all appear in the biblical passage. The last sentence is in line with the prevailing sentiment in popular culture of the 60s emphasizing peace, protest against the Vietnam War and war in general, etc. I’m not saying this line is bad or wrong in and of itself. It’s just not in the Bible, and that can be confusing given that the rest of the song is. Lyrics like this remind me to be careful—what may sound biblical, true, or theologically correct in popular music sometimes is not.