Told About Him for Thirty Years and Never Once Tried Him

She could give the whole lecture.

She could tell you what God is like, in an orderly way, with support. She would not make anything up and she would not overstate anything. If you needed the subject explained you would come away well served.

And she said out loud, once, to one person, that she is not sure she has ever tried Him.

She meant something quite specific by that and it is worth getting right. She was not doubting anything. She was not describing a crisis. What she was describing is that everything she has is about Him rather than from Him: it is the accumulated report of thirty years, held accurately, and she has never once gone directly and found out.

Psalm 34 uses the most direct sense available and makes it an imperative.

The verb is the most direct one available

Here is the verse.

O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him. (Psalm 34:8, King James Version)

Taste. Of all the senses available he picks the one that requires contact and cannot be done at a distance.

Sight works across a room. Hearing works through a wall. Taste requires the thing to be in your mouth, which is why it is the right verb for what this article is about: everything else can be done on a report and this one cannot.

And it is an imperative. He is not describing what happens to people who taste. He is instructing somebody to do it, which means it is an available action rather than an experience that arrives.

You are given an instruction rather than told to wait for something. Psalm 34:8 is an imperative using the one sense that cannot be exercised at a distance, and it is the Spirit who searches the deep things of God, 1 Corinthians 2:10, and reveals them.

And see comes second

The order in the verse is worth having, because it is the opposite of how most people go about this.

Taste and see.

Seeing is second. The understanding follows the contact rather than qualifying somebody for it.

That reverses the arrangement in the head of the person at the top of this article. She has been assembling understanding for thirty years on the assumption that it prepares a person, and the psalm has the tasting first and the seeing after, as a consequence.

I am not making an argument against learning; the same psalm is full of instruction and the same writer wrote a hundred and fifty more. What the order says is that the understanding is not the qualification, and that a person who waits until they have enough of it is waiting for something the verse never asked of them.

You are able to taste before you have finished understanding. Psalm 34:8 puts taste first and see second, and it is by the Spirit, 1 Corinthians 2:12, that the things freely given are known rather than deduced in advance.

The verse before it is a face

Three verses earlier there is a line about what happens to people who look at Him, and it is physical.

They looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed. (Psalm 34:5)

Their faces were not ashamed.

That is a strange thing to promise and it is exactly right for somebody who has been carrying the worry in this article. The fear underneath never having tried is usually not that nothing will happen. It is that trying and finding nothing would be humiliating, and that the humiliation would be private and permanent.

The verse addresses the face specifically. Not: they got what they asked for. Their faces were not ashamed.

You are able to look and not be ashamed of having looked. Psalm 34:5 says their faces were not ashamed, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:15, that a person comes as a child rather than as somebody risking embarrassment.

What the verses after it promise and what they do not

The two verses following the taste are worth reading carefully, because they are easy to misread as a promise about circumstances.

The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger: but they that seek the LORD shall not want any good thing. (Psalm 34:10)

They that seek the LORD shall not want any good thing.

Notice the qualifier. Any good thing, which means the psalm is not promising that everything a person wants arrives; it is saying that nothing genuinely good is withheld, and it leaves the definition of good where it belongs.

And the psalm's own author, a few verses later, says plainly that many are the afflictions of the righteous. He is not describing a life without trouble. He is describing a supply that is not short.

I say that because I would not want anybody to taste on the strength of a promise the verse does not make, and then conclude that nothing happened because a circumstance did not move.

You are promised a supply rather than an outcome, and the psalm says so in the same paragraph. Psalm 34:10 says shall not want any good thing and Psalm 34:19 admits many afflictions, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:16, that the witness is borne rather than a circumstance being arranged.

Peter quotes it as something already done

The New Testament picks the verse up and changes one thing about it.

If so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious. (1 Peter 2:3)

If so be ye have tasted. Past tense, and it is addressed to a whole congregation as an assumption rather than as a challenge.

Peter is writing to people scattered across five provinces, most of whom he had never met, and he assumes they have. Which means the tasting he has in mind is not a rare or advanced experience; it is the ordinary entry point of an ordinary believer.

And the clause that follows in his letter is about growing, which puts the tasting at the beginning rather than at the summit.

That is worth having by somebody who suspects they have never done it. It is possible that they have, some time, briefly, and did not recognize it, because they were expecting something larger than what actually happens.

You have possibly tasted already and not recognized it. 1 Peter 2:3 assumes it in the past tense of a whole scattered congregation, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:16, that the witness about it is borne rather than remembered.

What the tasting actually consists of

Practically, because the imperative has to be doable.

It is not an experience a person arranges. Nobody in Psalm 34 constructs anything; the psalm is written by a man who had recently done something undignified out of fear and who describes crying out and being heard.

What it consists of, as far as I can tell from Scripture and from watching people, is going directly rather than about. Speaking to Him rather than about Him, in your own words, on a subject that is actually live in your life, and then stopping and not evaluating it.

That is why the physical action on this page is what it is. Saying out loud, alone, in your own words, what you actually believe about Jesus is a small act of going directly, and it is the smallest available version of the imperative in verse 8.

You are able to go directly rather than about, and the verse asks for nothing larger. Psalm 34:8 is a two-word imperative rather than a described experience, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:26, who helps in the praying of somebody who does not know how.