Taste and See, Part 2
In November, the Lord put Psalm 34 on my heart, and I compared the Jeremiah 2:19 account of the bitterness of sin with tasting of the Lord’s goodness in Psalm 34:8. But Lord, as You continue to “open our eyes to behold wondrous things of Your law,” we do not want to merely stop with understanding the evil is bitter. We want to go a step further and identify the bitters we taste.
Specifically, we can expound on this statement from the last post:
“Evaluated experiences alight our vision with the fire of understanding. When you compare your experiences with sin and those experiences with God, we shamefully find sin decidedly lacking, and we can then see life with an understanding that sin will not satisfy what our heart longs for. Seek Him.”
What does the Word say? Isaiah 2:5-8 says,
5Come, house of Jacob, and let us walk in the light of the LORD.
6For You have abandoned Your people, the house of Jacob,
Because they are filled with influences from the east,
And they are soothsayers like the Philistines,
And they strike bargains with the children of foreigners.
7Their land has also been filled with silver and gold
And there is no end to their treasures;
Their land has also been filled with horses
And there is no end to their chariots.
8Their land has also been filled with idols;
They worship the work of their hands,
That which their fingers have made.
Does that sound familiar? Have we not been filled with foreign influences? We, who claim to be sojourners in this world as Abraham (Hebrews 11:8-10), forget that the passions of our flesh wage war against the soul of the sojourners (1 Pet. 2:11-12). The foreign influences creep in.
Psalm 34:8 holds the key to a more intimate relationship with God: taste of Him and know He is good. If only you will taste, then you will see His goodness and draw near for more of Him. But wait, not everyone will drawn near and taste. James 4:8: “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.” Cleansing and purification precede drawing near. In the preceding verses, James wrote, “You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” (v4). When I taste of the world, I can not taste the fulness of God’s goodness. Both Psalms and James point to this, for how can we expect to taste the good if our mouth is still filled with the bitter? One who has filled his mouth with the rotten can not quickly turn and taste of the sweet. The sweet will be mixed with the bitter, and will not be fully appreciated.
Is this to say that we should not taste of the Lord until we have removed all impurity from our life? No, sanctification is a process. To be pure, unmixed with sin, set apart unto His worship alone is the ultimate goal but not the immediate state of the saved. Rather, the effect of bitterness to the spiritual tongue is all the more reason to “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). We see the way bitter evil distorts our vision and taste of God, so we pursue purity out of a love for God Himself and a desire to know Him truly.
As I develop the application for Psalm 34:8, I want to bring this this idea specifically to bear on “tastes of the world” such as entertainment, clothing, and finances. This is not legalism. It is a heart driven by a desire for a true taste of the Lord because we want to know the One we love. Love is the polar opposite of legalism’s motivation.
We love you Lord, show us Your glory as we seek to truly taste and see that You are good. We come with a heart void of legalism but full of a love for our Father.
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