Selah

In our church at the moment, we've had a month of teachings on the theme of "Selah".  I've yet to listen to all the preaches on this subject from the last month due to time (slaps my own wrist for making an excuse! but kids are ridiculously time consuming!!) but I have been enthralled with the snippets I've heard. So much so, that I've resurrected my blog to write about my own thoughts on the matter.

So, SELAH.
My preferred Bible version is the Amplified, which kindly gives a bit of an explanation to this strange word. It says "pause, and calmly think of that" when the word Selah is used. 

The word itself somehow makes me breathe out in a kind of cleansing, calming way just by saying it. It's a word that once I've said it, makes me stop before I say another word. It is calming just by pronouncing it. I like it.

Selah is mainly used in the Psalms, and a couple of times in Habakkuk (where the section is a prayer possibly set to music). It is, in some translations, not written as Selah, but rather "interlude". As the psalms were often sung to music, some seem to think that the interlude refers to an interlude in the song. This may well be. The definition of Selah is suspension (perhaps of music). But the root of the word is to weigh, value; to hang up. If God is telling us to weigh up something, to take an interlude and value something, then I think we should take heed.

Many times in this fast paced world, we hear or read something and we don't even remember it hours later. We suffer from information overload  - we're bombarded by images, adverts, information, status updates from people we don't see very often and perhaps don't even know! We get updates on news headlines, weather forecasts, celebrity tweets downloaded straight to our phones. Our brains are constantly being bombarded by pieces of useless information. Pictures of places, people, people's children, people's meals.....we're all guilty of either posting these things, or taking the time to look at them. And I'm not saying we shouldn't be part of an online community and share tidbits of our lives with people who we might otherwise not connect with.  But all this has an impact on us and on what we retain and take into our spirits. When I've sat and read the news online, then checked my facebook page, caught up on my twitter feed and watched half an hour of tv in the evening, I can look back and not actually remember a single article I read in the news. I can read a couple of chapters of the Word in the evening before bed, and when I come to continue the next night, I sometimes have to look back at what I read the previous night, as I can't remember. Anyone with me??? Surely I'm not the only one?!

So is it any wonder that God needs us to stop every now and again? Not just to stop, but to weigh up and think about what we've read.

But I have to say, I like the way the amplified Bible puts it - pause and calmly think. There's a world of difference between calmly thinking and just thinking. Have you ever had a conversation with your boss about something, then gone home that evening and thought about it..."that wasn't actually my fault. If so-and-so had done their job right, that wouldn't have happened". It could be any kind of situation. Perhaps a disagreement with your friend/spouse etc. Or any kind of confrontation; perhaps with a company you've placed a complaint with..."If only I'd have said this or used that example". You think about a situation and you think of things you wish you'd said, or you think about what happened and you feel a bit het-up inside about what someone said or did, or what you should have said and done at the time. Often we build things up in our minds and we get very subjective, rather than objectively looking at something.
That's not thinking calmly. That's not giving value and weighing up the words that were said to us. We need to give value to the words that God gives to us. We need to give weight to them. I used to think of Selah as meditating on God's Word, but I think it's different because the Strongs definition of meditate actually describes it as murmuring or muttering. In other words, to actually speak out God's word when we meditate. Whereas Selah is to suspend yourself and your mouth, and to think. 

What's also struck me when thinking about the whole theme of Selah is why it appears mainly in the book of Psalms. The Psalms are songs of praise to God. Some are not all happy, lovely praise songs - we see a lot of David's struggles in the Psalms too. Now praise and worship is powerful. It's a weapon in our spiritual armory that we should use. The reason it's so important is possibly because Lucifer was the archangel of praise. His function was to praise God. He probably produced the most beautiful music and songs of praise that we could not even imagine. But in his fallen state, he manipulates music and hates it when we praise. 

So why is God telling us to have an interlude in praise? Why is God telling us to stop and think? Perhaps, because we can go through the motions? Perhaps because we need to praise then take an interlude to think about what we are praising for;Who we are praising. Because sometimes it's good to be calm and let our mouths take a break, think about things in a calm manner and think about the awesome God we serve and that He will always be worthy of our praise and that He will never let us down. Maybe because during a time of praise and worship we're at our most receptive to God's guidance and if we stop, close our mouths we might learn something? I don't know. I just know that when God tells us to do something some 74 times, then we need to do it! Selah......