In Psalm 34:8 the Psalmist
tells us to taste and see that the Lord is good. Knowing the goodness of God
intellectually is not enough. We are
encouraged to use our senses to take in the fullness of the goodness of God.
Our finite minds need help to experience
the fullness of God. God’s goodness is
far beyond man’s ability to reason. We
will never comprehend God’s goodness without experiencing Him in a similar way
that we taste and smell, touch and see.
In the same way that our senses help us experience the realities in this
world, so we develop spiritual senses beyond the capacity of our intellect to
connect to the goodness of God.
I experienced this in a big way
during a week I spent ministering to women who live with little exposure to
physical beauty. I was welcomed to their
dark homes located near a large dump. Some
homes retained the same overcast of dust and dirt that was on the outside. Others felt light and happy. The difference was the presence of God’s love. Everyone’s life had heartache and
sorrow. Each homeowner had little reason
to feel completely secure in the future and had no confidence that they would have
enough food to eat that week. All the
neighbors I met were basically living day to day on what God’s provisions were
to be.
Some were convinced of God’s love,
not because the evidence of God’s goodness was more obvious. Rather they believed and trusted God and
could experience Him in the depth of their souls. It was as if they had a God-sense that
allowed them to feel His peace when all around them was chaos and uncertainty.
We all live in a world that is
shattered by sin. The intellect will
lead us to conclude that God does not care or at best He has left us here with
our own resources. Our intellects will
deceive and mislead us. When we allow
our intellects to take in the truth of God’s word, it opens up our senses to a
spiritual sense so that we can taste and we can see that God is good beyond
what our minds take-in. We see beyond
what is right in front of us and believe that there is much more for us in the
world to come. Standing in some of the impoverished,
ill-furnished homes I could taste the goodness of God. We taste a goodness that makes us long for
more. We realize that we are just
beginning to grasp that God is good, and it creates in us a longing for more of
God.
The spiritual senses are beyond
understanding. The spiritual senses are
the receptacles for the peace of God. It
is the peace that Paul describes in Philippians 4:7: And the peace of God, which transcends all
understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
If you really want to understand the
goodness of God, you must go beyond your intellect. This is one of the reasons that Jesus left us
the Lord’s Supper to orientate our senses to the Gospel itself. He asks us to take bread and eat it as if we
are eating His body and drink the cup as if we are drinking His blood. He uses the common elements found on every
table in the world to awaken our spiritual senses to the amazing reality of the
Gospel. We take Jesus’ flesh into our
flesh, and we become one with Him.
Look for God’s goodness, bite into
and taste that God is a good God. Perhaps
you get a taste of God’s goodness from a person who has no reason to trust in
Him, but sincerely loves Him. You can
look to the moon and the stars that His hand have put in place as King David
did in Psalm 8. Awaken your senses to
consolidate spiritual truths that your intellect alone cannot contain.
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