Taste And See

Taste and See

Taste and see that the LORD is good. Oh, the joys of those who take refuge in him! Psalm 34:8

DAVID FOUND HIMSELF IN PHILISTINE TERRITORY after fleeing Saul’s court and his irrational wrath. The Philistine king’s officers recognized him, and David could have been in just as much danger there. So he feigned madness before the king and was kicked out, escaping to hide in a cave—not typically circumstances a person would expect to celebrate. But David had trained his heart to see God’s goodness, and he wrote a psalm about it. He urged all who would read it, even these three thousand years later, to find their joy in the nature of God.

David could have told us to imagine how good God might be. He could have expounded on his theology of divine beneficence or given us hypothetical platitudes about God’s nature. He could have suggested we think of our best moments and single them out as the rare exceptions of God’s favor. Instead, he put it all on the table and invited us to taste and see. “Test the evidence,” he was saying. To him, all the evidence pointed to an extravagantly generous God.

While many people imagine the best of life’s experiences as their baseline and then lament everything that falls short, David (at least at this point in his life) saw survival as his baseline and celebrated everything that rose above it. The first approach undermines faith and anticipation of God’s goodness; the latter builds faith and anticipation. Many of us spend quite a bit of time thinking God hasn’t provided for all our needs, when actually he has a different definition of need than we do. Still, God goes well beyond it in his dealings with us. When we understand this, we grow in faith and expectation. We pray increasingly confident prayers, never assuming too much but also never hoping too little. We bank our lives on the fact of God’s goodness and being able to experience it in the here and now. We have tasted and seen, and we are sure we will taste and see even more.

God is not merely good, but goodness.