Psalm 67 Commentary

You don’t see it in Bible translations much anymore these days other than in a footnote.  But when I was a child, I recall seeing the word Selah pretty often in the Book of Psalms in the Bible version we used at Ada Christian Reformed Church.  I don’t recall if I ever asked my parents or anyone else what it means.  Probably just as well since the answer is that basically no one knows.  However there seems to be a strong hunch that this is a musical term and may have had the function of a rest.  Selah says pause.  Stop a moment.  Let whatever was just sung or read sink into your heart and mind.  Ponder this, reflect on this before moving on to what’s next.

Selah occurs twice in Psalm 67.  The first one, interestingly enough, comes immediately after only the first phrase.  “May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine on us.”

May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine on us.

Selah.

Soak up the richness of these words and what they mean for a follower of God.  We perhaps needs this pause more than we think.  These words are altogether familiar to us—perhaps too much so.  They are derivative of the famed Aaronic Benediction in Numbers 6.  As such, this is the blessing many people have heard more often than they could count at the conclusion of a worship service.  That familiarity makes it more likely that we could indeed glide overtop of that opening stanza without much wondering about it at all.

That would be a shame.  Because what the desire behind those opening words of Psalm 67 speaks to is what we should all want as dearly as almost anything else one could name.  We need the blessing of Almighty God.  We need this God’s grace and graciousness.  Indeed, we speak to God’s graciousness first before asking for a blessing or for the light of God’s face to shine on us like the sun.  Because those comforts cannot come our way as sinful people if in God’s grace he does not first blot out our every sin as well as the fact that we simply are sinners.  We don’t become sinners when we sin.  We sin because we are sinful in the first place.  But in the Hebrew Psalter nothing about God elicits more praise all over the psalms than that characteristic of God that is encapsulated by that rich Hebrew word chesed.

The God of Israel is radiant with lovingkindness, with mercy, with what the New Testament will celebrate as grace.  As it was already in those first moments following the first sin in the Garden of Eden, so the Bible celebrates over and again the fact that God is inclined to forgive us our sins.  So if God can be gracious to us, then he can further bless us and shine on us.

Psalm 67 then says that once we are finished pondering this, it is our job to make this God and his gracious blessing known to all the nations of the earth.  We are to call on all peoples and all nations to praise the one true God.  Then verse 4 says that God rules the people and guides the nations of the earth with equity, with justice.

Selah.

Again, pause, ponder, wonder about this claim.  But if the first line of Psalm 67 is a source of lyric delight and beauty, this second pause might cause a small furrow to appear on our foreheads.  Because we do believe in God as a just God.  We do believe in the superintending providence of our God.  But too often when we look at the nations of the earth, we cannot always quite discern how God is guiding everything to some state of equity.  Alas, this eventually became true of even the nation of Israel itself.  So if God’s Chosen People struggled to incarnate the justice of their God, it is a cinch that other nations typically fell well short of this goal as well.

So as we ponder this line during our little Selah rest period, we reflect on it as what we yearn for but also as something we cannot always spy very readily when we look around us.  This then may lead us to that well-known quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., that the arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.  If this is the case, then as Christians today we ground such a hope ever and only in the character of the God who we believe is, appearances sometimes to the contrary, on the throne of the cosmos.  If justice comes, it won’t be because humanity eventually got its collective act together but only because at the bright center of all things there is a God who will draw all things to Godself in the end.

Perhaps this is why it is fitting that this psalm is assigned in the Year C Lectionary just ahead of Ascension Day.  Because that is the holy day when we remember that Jesus ascended to the throne of heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.  Jesus alone is our hope for equity and justice.  Thus we seek out his blessing alone so that, as the conclusion of Psalm 67 says, all the ends of the earth may reverence our holy God in Christ.

Illustration Idea

It has happened a little less frequently than it did when I first started teaching preaching nearly 20 years ago now but in my early years of reading student sermons, no single source of illustrations cropped up quite as often as J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” books and the Peter Jackson movie versions of them (the latter having been in theaters relatively recently at that time).  Some of you who read my commentaries here on the CEP website may be concluding that I use Tolkien a ton as well and so just to prove the point, here is another one!

But in this amazing scene, the Hobbit Frodo is near the dark land of Mordor, home to the evil Lord Sauron whose Ring of Power Frodo has been tasked to destroy.  In this scene Frodo has become separated from his best friend Samwise Gamgee and the weariness of it all causes Frodo to collapse.  But no sooner does he do so but he receives a bright vision of the Elf Queen Galadriel.  She quite literally causes her face to shine upon Frodo in ways that somehow re-energize him and bring him back to his feet.

Perhaps we don’t often pause to wonder why Israel so often pleaded with God to cause his face to shine on them but if we do think about it for a moment, perhaps we can understand why this is so needed as we, like Frodo, stumble through a world that is so very often a very dark place.