Psalm 34: Tasted Anything Yet
Psalm 34 is what came after — not a formula for how the LORD's goodness works. Before Achish, king of Gath, David let spit run into his beard and clawed madness onto the gate, dust on his face, playing the fool to stay alive (1 Samuel 21:13). It worked. He walked out of that gate breathing. What came after was a testimony, built the way testimonies are built, from a morning he could still describe exactly.
Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him. — Psalm 34:8, ESV
Taste assumes contact. It is what is left after a meal, not a conclusion reached at a desk. David is describing something he went through, and inviting others toward the same kind of encounter, because he knows the difference between goodness reasoned about and goodness that has actually touched you. It would be convenient to stop there. Convenient, and not quite true to what David says next.
Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD delivers him out of them all. — Psalm 34:19, ESV
Many. The deliverance David describes in verse eight sits inside a life the psalm admits will keep breaking open, not once but repeatedly. And two verses later comes the promise that has to carry that weight:
The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. — Psalm 34:18, ESV
Nearness turns out to be the whole promise: presence inside trouble that keeps returning, which is a harder thing to trust, and harder to write a devotional about, than trouble that simply stops.
We would like David to have walked out of Gath and been done with it. He wasn't. Saul kept hunting; the fear kept coming back wearing different clothes. If tasting goodness once didn't stop the chase, what exactly are we tasting when we say it?
We know what it costs to keep saying the LORD is good on the far side of a year that didn't go the way we prayed it would, and to mean it a little less certainly than we did the first time we said it.
Which is where the detail in verse twenty stops being decorative.
He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken. — Psalm 34:20, ESV
It's a small detail. Small enough to miss, and easy to read past if you're moving quickly, the way most of us are — until John names it as the very bone-keeping preserved, unbroken, in the body of Jesus at the cross (John 19:36). The bones kept whole in this psalm belong, finally, to the one whose body was given instead, so that the brokenhearted David wrote about would have somewhere permanent to stay near.
We were not at the gate of Gath. Most of us have never clawed madness onto a wall to survive an enemy king. But most of us have a morning we could still describe exactly, the way David could. Psalm 34 does not ask us to reason our way into believing God is good from there. It asks whether we have tasted anything yet ourselves.
Developed with the assistance of AI writing tools, under the author's full theological review and final editorial control.
