Selah is one of those words that scholars guess at, kinda like how we guess at what's going on with Donald Trump's hair. I like how the Amplified Bible describes it: pause, and think of that. Selah that is, not the Don's bangs.
One of my favorite Selahs in the Book of Psalms is in chapter 77. Asaph's is in a bad way. God does not seem to be there. Verse after verse he focuses on his present anguish and God's inactivity. Then we have our first Selah.* He's is now digging through his memories of the good days when God was there and songs poured from his heart. This only makes the present pit worse. It takes Asaph to where his heart has rarely gone: Has God forgotten me? (it's even more raw in the Message).
And now we have my favorite Selah. After sinking deep inside himself, Asaph pauses and unfolds himself outward. He begins to think about God, His mighty works, His awesome wonder. At the apex of Asaph's gut-wrenching song he declares:
Your ways, O God, are holy.Asaph's heart had turned inward on itself. God couldn't be found there. But he turned and acknowledge through the pain that not only is God holy, but His ways are holy. Asaph doesn't understand it. His pain isn't gone. His circumstances haven't changed, but his focus has.
What god is so great as our God
And that might be the power of a Selah -- a pause to allow us to wrestle with our circumstances, our pain, our shame, our sin and idolatry, and see that God is there. Not inside our self-focused heart. But outside. Outside waiting to come in and be our focus, our center. And it's out of a Selah like that we sing not the I, the me and the we songs, but a song that proclaims
Your ways, O God, are holy.
What god is so great as our God
*note: you won't see the Selah markings in the BibleGateway link to NIV - if you want to see them, click on the ESV translation
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