We’ve seen in this series that contemporary worship music has become dominated by songs modeled on romantic, experiential, subjective musical expressions. We’ve further seen that, though such songs are a legitimate stream of Biblical worship expression, they have been historical and Biblical worship models (such as the Psalms or the Book of Revelation) held in balance with objective, doctrinal song content.

We then began to investigate how and why such an imbalance has occurred in arriving at such an experiential overemphasis. We began by seeing that the deep alienation between God and mankind engendered by the Fall leads men to see the world dualistically, as split between the “pure” spiritual realm and the flawed and imperfect physical world, a view which is a result of the simultaneous and inescapable knowledge that men have rebelled against their Holy Creator while they attempt to suppress that inescapable knowledge (Rom 1: 18-32).

This split was institutionalized in Platonic thought, which hugely influenced monastic thought, which shaped to a certain extent the way the Medievals viewed Reality, resulting in a Late Medieval and Renaissance perspective which located emotion and instinct in a "religious" zone, while reason and normative life were seen as belonging to the "secular" sphere.

Christian reactions to the rationalism of the Enlightenment fused with Victorian and pietist viewpoints to produce a feminized, experientially-fixated Evangelicalism whose worship music institutionalized these attitudes for that branch of the Church.
This was all the easier because there is a legitimate strand of subjective and emotional aspects included in Biblical worship paradigms (for instance, in Ps 51, 56, 3, 6, etc.). 

We began in the last article to consider the ramifications of the Holy Trinity for worship (considering that we humans are created in the Image of the Triune God, and that all we do, including worship, should reflect that Image accurately), and saw that, just as God possesses a Unified Perspective common to His Three Persons in His Oneness, He also possesses Diversified, Differing Perspectives amongst His Persons in Their Diversity, and that our worship of this Unified, yet equally Diverse Trinity should also reflect, from our participation in that worship, both an objective (general) praise of What He has done and Who He is for us all, as well as a subjective (specific) praise for What He has done and Who He is for me (each of us individually). At this time, Evangelical worship is imbalanced with an overemphasis on the subjective, individualized aspect of worship, warping worship to reflect only a God of the subjective individual, rather than the Triune God Who is also the God of the objective and of us all.

We continue now in our consideration of the implications of God's Tri-Unity for worship, as we see how God's Three-Personed Attributes speak to the issue of continuity and change in worship. In God's Oneness of Essence is Absolute Undifferentiated Unity, as God shares among His Persons the Same Perspective and Experience. However, Each of the Divine Persons also enjoys a Unique Personal Perspective, which is Differentiated Each from the Other. 

As God is, in both His Unity and Diversity, Changeless (Malachi 3:6; Hebrews 13:8), we who live in the changeable, mutable Creation, subject to time's passage (with a created beginning, history, and end), cannot truly replicate the Lord's Changelessness in It's Essence. However, we can symbolically represent God's Changelessness within time's boundaries by enacting continuity across time, emphasizing the same across the changes in history, the things which are most changeless in humanity's experience. Change being constantly experienced by humanity, the contrast between change and the most changeless aspects of human life itself emphasizes the difference between them, as well as the shared enactment of those things in human existence. 

This has pertinence for our worship in that we should enact in our worship a Trinitarian balance of continuity and change, with elements that stay the same and elements that vary.
As for continuity in worship, we see in the Heavenly Worship a song endlessly repeated by the angelic Living Creatures, which is endlessly responded to by the twenty-four Elders (Rev 4: 8-11), and we also see the Song of Moses recorded in Exodus 15 and Deuteronomy 31 repeated in the Heavenly Liturgy in Revelation 15:3-4, which shows the utilization of a song across thousands of years of human history (and beyond...). These are elements of continuity in worship.

However, we also see elements of change in the Heavenly Worship, as Revelation 5:9-10 and Revelation 14:3 both record the introduction of new songs into the worship, of songs new to their employment in the worship in God's Presence.

Now, these respective worships of continuity and change are both present in the same worship service in Heaven: a Trinitarian balance in the worship revealed by God in His Word as a model for us who still worship on Earth. 

Today's Evangelical worship is obsessed with the novel, with the new, to the detriment of the element of continuity in worship, which is not only a (hopefully unintentional) assault on the representation of God's Tri-Unity (and thus a displeasure to the Lord), but also causes our worship to not fulfill God's Intended Ministry to the worshippers themselves, who also are created in God's Triune Image, and thus are to be ministered to on deep Trinitarian levels, on levels both of continuity and change in balanced fashion. If these elements are not both present in worship in a balanced fashion, there is a massive failure in worship's pleasing of, and fulfilling the Purposes of God, especially as they minister to God's Image-bearers, humanity.

More implications, this time of the Incarnation of Jesus, next article, Lord willing.

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A helpful book on the relationship of the Trinity to history: