Psalm 34: Taste and See the Lord Is Good
Most people who know Psalm 34:8 know it apart from its neighbors, a fridge magnet verse, lifted clean out of its psalm. But David didn't write one line of poetry and stop. He wrote twenty-two verses, one for nearly every letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the invitation to taste comes wedged between a man's account of being terrified out of his mind and his sober admission, later on, that the righteous still suffer many afflictions. Read it whole and it says something sturdier than the verse alone. Quick answer Psalm 34:8 invites the reader to know God's goodness firsthand, not as a doctrine agreed to, but as something experienced, the way you know food by eating it rather than reading its ingredients. David wrote the psalm after escaping King Achish of Gath by feigning madness (see the superscription and 1 Samuel 21:10-15), so the invitation comes from a man who had just been genuinely desperate. The psalm does not promise a trouble-free life. It promises God's nearne...