Psalm Chapter 34

Psalm 34: Taste and See

The heading of this psalm tells us something easily missed: David wrote it after pretending to be mad before a foreign king in order to save his own life. He drooled on his beard. He scratched at the gate like an animal. It was, by any account, a humiliation. And yet out of that indignity came one of the most luminous invitations in all of Scripture: "O taste and see that the Lord is good." Not "think and conclude." Not "study and agree." Taste. The appeal is to something deeper than the intellect — to that part of us that knows goodness the way the tongue knows sweetness, immediately and without argument. David had tasted the bitterness of fear and the sourness of desperation, and he found that even there the Lord was near — nigh unto them that are of a broken heart. The psalm does not pretend that the righteous are spared affliction. "Many are the afflictions of the righteous." But it makes a staggering promise: the Lord delivers out of them all.

00:00 I Will Bless the Lord at All Times
01:00 Taste and See His Goodness
02:00 Near to the Brokenhearted