Taste Then See

Taste and see that the Lord is good. (Psalm 34:8)

Have you ever been to the grocery store when a company was giving out free samples of food? If you have, maybe you walked up to the booth, took at look at what the company was offering, and after that, decided if you wanted to try what they had on display. The nice thing about samples is that you have a chance to taste it, to investigate it, and to survey it before you decide you want to fully commit.*

The motivation behind offering samples is simple: if you will try it, you will like it. And if you like it, you’re even more likely to keep coming back for more.

Unfortunately, while this might work out when it comes to sampling food at Costco, it’s not the case when it comes to trusting God.

In Psalm 34:8, David tells us to, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” The Hebrew word for “and” used in this sentence can also be translated “then.” This means that you could read this sentence as, “Taste then see that the Lord is good.”  In other words, how our faith and trust in God works is completely different from how we sample food at the grocery store.

This is where our faith comes in. What we learn from David’s wise words is that we have to trust God’s faithfulness, or taste it, before we see it come to fruition. In other words, we have to choose to follow God unconditionally with complete devotion without knowing the outcome, without knowing the next step, and without knowing the long term plan. This means we don’t necessarily know how things are going to turn out, but even still we can have faith in the fact that our God is always worth trusting.

Even when we can’t see what God has in store for us, we can have peace knowing that He will come through for us, He will be faithful, and He will continue to prove Himself trustworthy as He works to give us His best.

*This analogy was first used by No Limits Ministries.