Taste & See! 

Psalm 34:8 says: “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good; Blessed is the man who trusts in Him!”

But there are other areas in the Bible that also speak about tasting - in both a physical and spiritual sense.  Our first encounter with tasting is in Genesis - chapter 3, verse 6: “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.  She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate.”  Eve had gotten word that there was something good to eat.  She didn’t consider the source of the information.  She just decided that she liked what she saw and she wanted to taste it.  Unfortunately, it left a bitter taste in her mouth.  It wasn’t what she expected.  Have you ever seen food that looked absolutely delicious but when you tasted it, you wanted to spit it right out?  Well, I have a feeling that Eve might have wanted to do that very thing.  She had the choice to believe God - taste Him and see how good He is, or rely on her eyes and taste what the world had to offer.  She quickly discovered that she had tasted the wrong thing.

There is another verse about tasting.  It is in John chapter 2.  Jesus and His mom are at a wedding and they run out of wine.  Jesus tells the servants to fill some water pots with water and then He turns the water into wine.  Then the master of the feast tastes the wine and discovers it is the best wine he has had.  Usually, the good wine is put out first and when everyone has had enough to make them unaware of what they are tasting, then they put out the inferior stuff.  But here, at the end of the wedding feast, when most people couldn’t tell if they were drinking wine or vinegar, the best wine is being poured out.  Jesus didn’t skimp on the wine.  He could have made the inferior stuff - no one would have noticed.  But God is good and He gives us good gifts.  And there was that one man at the feast who did notice how good the wine was and the servants who knew how the wine got in the water pots. Jesus’ first miracle happened at a time when almost no one would have noticed it.  I am thinking that the master of the feast and the servants must have been pretty special to Jesus because it looks like He did it just for them.

The last verse I have is from Psalm 119:103 “How sweet are Your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!”  God’s Word never leaves us with a bitter taste.  But there is just something within us that makes us want to taste what the world has. It looks so good and we have no idea how rotten it is inside.  There are times when we are so hungry we can eat a horse.  We should approach the Bible as if we can’t get enough.  We can eat His Word and never be too full.  There will never be a time when we have feasted on too much of God.

We need to know that there is only one taste that is sweet - sweeter than honey to our mouth - the taste of God’s Word.  Are we tasting of the Lord or are we trying all the different flavors of the world?  The world will entice us to eat and eat and eat.  We stuff ourselves and then we have a stomach ache or indigestion.  We have regrets and remorse.  We will never be sorry we partook in feasting on God’s Word.  

My encouragement is this: Taste the Lord - get a really good bite - and see how sweet it is!