Psalm 34 (Summer of Psalms #2)

A few weeks ago I was whining to our administrative assistant. I was being a big baby, complaining about having to go on a corn-free diet, and specifically about not being able to eat popcorn anymore.

She said, “You know, I was at the store and I picked up something that isn’t a true replacement for popcorn, but you might like it.” Later that day she dropped off a bag of roasted, seasoned broad beans.

Little did she know she was about to create a monster. I have become an absolute evangelist for these things. Her husband and I love them so much that we text each other about flavors. His curiosity got the better of him and he went out and bought the variety box — four or five of every flavor — put one of each in a ziplock bag, and had her deliver it to me so I could try them all.

I have been sharing them with everybody. I handed them out at a track meet with my daughter. I put them out as the snack at a college Bible study I lead, and the students devoured them. These are so good.

So would you believe there are people I have shared these with who tasted the gloriousness of it and went, eh?

How could they? Clearly these are people who cannot be trusted. Whatever opinion they hold on anything, disregard it — because these are the best snack ever invented, and I cannot believe anyone would taste one and think they would rather have something else.

When the Reality Doesn’t Match the Review

Have you ever had someone hype something so high — set expectations so far up — that you were certain this had to be the greatest snack, or the greatest jacket, or the best movie you would ever see? And then you experienced it, and the reality did not match the review.

You watch the trailer, or you read the reviews, and it convinces you this is going to be incredible. And when it is over, you are genuinely wondering how anyone gave it even one star, let alone five.

That experience — that gap between the review and the reality — is exactly how a lot of people have felt about God.

Back in 1987, U2 released a song about searching for something and not finding it. In it, Bono sings about Jesus — about the bonds being broken, the chains loosed, the cross carried — and then says he still has not found what he is looking for.

A lot of people feel exactly that. They have been searching for something. They have tried Jesus. They have tried the church thing. They have tried the Christian activities. They have said the prayers. They have raised their hands during worship. And when it is all said and done, they feel empty. They still have not found what they were looking for.

I bring this up because today we are going to hear King David urge his readers to taste and see that the Lord is good.

But what if you have tasted, and he was not good?

Christian evangelism has for years dangled a carrot: if you just give your life to Christ, if you just put your faith in God, you will find happiness, you will find peace, you will find meaning. It is almost like voting for Pedro in Napoleon Dynamite — all your wildest dreams will come true.

So what do you do when they do not come true? What do you do when you taste it and the experience leaves you flat? What do you do when the review does not match your reality?

A Bit of Background on Psalm 34

The Psalms are made up of 150 poems or songs, and eight of them are known as acrostic psalms. An acrostic is where you take a word, write it vertically, and build off each letter — like the six-year-old making a Mother’s Day card who writes M-O-T-H-E-R and comes up with marvelous, outgoing, tartar sauce maker, or whatever else occurs to them in the moment.

All the acrostics in the Psalms are alphabetical, working through the Hebrew alphabet, which has twenty-two letters. So you look at Psalm 34, see twenty-two verses, and assume each one starts with the next letter.

You would think so. But it turns out — and I am not a Hebrew scholar, so I had to let others show me this — that in verse 6 David places the next letter not at the start of verse 7 but in the second half of verse 6. Then verse 7 resumes the pattern, which means when you reach verse 22 it no longer fits, and he tacks on an extra phrase using another letter.

There may be deep significance in that. If so, I could not find it. But if you are a Bible trivia nerd, you now have another nugget to impress your Bible nerd friends with.

The Text: Psalm 34

“I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul makes its boast in the Lord; let the humble hear and be glad. Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together!

I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them.

Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him! … The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all. He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken. … The Lord redeems the life of his servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.”

Why This Psalm

Two years ago, while I was on sabbatical, we did a series through the Psalms with the same graphic and the same title. So this week, as I prepared, I went back and looked — and discovered that one of our elders, who is currently stationed with the National Guard, had already taught through Psalm 34. I wondered whether I should pick a different one.

But I kept getting drawn back to Psalm 34, because it contains my wedding verse.

The reason I was not here last Sunday is that my wife and I got away for our anniversary and celebrated twenty-eight years of marriage. She has put up with me a long time. She should be applauded.

And with the anniversary on my mind, I kept thinking about the verse printed on our wedding program on June 4th, 1994 — verse 3: “Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together!”

When my wife was in high school, her youth pastor taught a lesson with a side note in it that stuck with her. He encouraged the teenagers not to evaluate someone they were romantically interested in by asking whether they were attractive enough, funny enough, kind and respectable enough, or whether their parents would approve. He said the real question they should be asking is: Is this a person I could worship God with? Could I magnify the Lord with them?

I am so glad she took those words to heart. Because I was nowhere near as tall as she had hoped for in a guy. I was nowhere near as handy as she expected in a man. And I was not nearly as good-looking as she probably could have landed.

But when she looked at our friendship, she thought: that is a guy I can magnify the Lord with. We can exalt his name together.

So it became our wedding verse.

Other Familiar Verses Here

As precious as verse 3 is to me, it is not the most famous verse in the psalm. Reading through, you may have recognized several phrases and thought, oh, that’s where that comes from.

Verse 20 may have stood out: “He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken.” That is familiar because in John 19, as Jesus is dying on the cross, the soldiers come to take the bodies down. The way to hasten death was to break the legs — because with arms extended, a crucified man cannot breathe, and pushes up on the nail through his feet to get air into his lungs. Break the legs, and he can no longer push up, and dies of asphyxiation. But when they reach Jesus, they believe he is already dead. To be sure, they thrust a spear into his side, into his heart, and blood and water pour out. They never break his bones. And John says this fulfilled the prophecy in Psalm 34:20.

Maybe verse 18 was familiar: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.” Perhaps you have used it to comfort yourself or someone else in a hard season.

Or maybe you have heard a sermon on verses 13 and 14: keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit; turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.

But I would argue the most famous verse in the whole psalm is verse 8: “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!”

David is so convinced of God’s goodness that, like me with those beans, he simply says: taste it. Try it. You will see the Lord is good.

And in context, you understand why he is so excited. Verse 4: “I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears.” Verse 6: “This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles.”

If you have ever gone through something genuinely awful and then come out the other side, you understand. If you survived a horrific car crash and walked away, you cannot help but praise God. If you were in a health battle and then the doctor tells you it is gone, you cannot help but sing his praises. If you were in a financial crisis, wondering how you would make the mortgage, and a check arrives or a deposit shows up from nowhere in exactly the amount you needed — you know precisely where it came from, and you are echoing David: taste and see that the Lord is good.

But What About the People Who Tasted and Walked Away?

There are people who have tried to taste and see and walked away convinced the Lord is not good. Sometimes they walk away convinced there is no God at all.

After we moved here and were trying to meet people — because we were not here to start a church that would simply gather Christians from other churches, but to reach people with no church background — we ended up talking with a man I will call Josh.

He asked what brought us to town, and I said we were here to start a new church. From his reaction I could tell church was probably not his thing, so I asked whether he and his family attended anywhere. No, that’s not really our thing.

In my head I was already thinking, great, I get to invite you. And then I learned he was agnostic.

So I started asking questions. How did you come to the conclusion there is no God? He said, I’m not saying there is no God. There might be. I just don’t see any evidence of him.

It turned out Josh grew up in church, where he had been taught that if you pray, God answers your prayers. His family was very poor. So he prayed before every single meal — breakfast, lunch, and dinner, including lunch at school, where his friends made fun of him for stopping to pray. And his main prayer was always the same: God, would you provide for my family?

And for years, his family stayed in poverty.

By the time he reached middle school and high school, he was convinced not only that he had tasted and seen that the Lord was not good, but that there was no God there at all.

Or I could tell you about a woman who believed that if she simply applied everything her church and her parents taught her, God would bless her — a good marriage, good kids, a good life, a good career. And then she found herself in a deeply unhealthy relationship that included abuse, and it caused her to question everything.

Or a young man who was being named as the next great evangelist of his generation — until he saw a photograph of a malnourished mother caught in a drought and wondered how, if there really is a God, he could allow that. That began the crumbling of his faith, until he concluded either there is no God, or he is not good, or he is not powerful enough to fix it.

He saw the reviews about God, and they did not match his reality.

And I could keep going. I could name a dozen more people who tasted, tried it out, found the reality did not match the review, and walked away from all of it.

So Do You Throw It Out?

What do you do? Do you just chuck it all out the window?

This will not surprise you, since I am a pastor, but no — I do not think you should throw out the Bible or Psalm 34. What I think you need to do is change the lenses you are reading it through.

Almost all of us wear a pair of mental reading glasses whose lenses are me and now. So we read a passage like this asking: what do I get out of this? What is in here for me, in my present circumstances?

And I think we need to swap those out. Because wearing the glasses of me and now sets you up for hurt.

I cannot blame you for wearing them. I wear them too. They are the glasses we were born with.

When you came out of the womb, you were furious. Your warm, comfortable world had just been rocked by the earthquake of labor, and some cruel masked doctor dragged you out into freezing cold and blinding light. How dare they. So you screamed — because it was all about me, and now. And as we have grown up, we have kept viewing life and faith and Scripture through those same lenses.

Now, some people wearing those glasses will taste God and see that he is good. I could tell you about times God has done great things for me in the here and now — times he provided financially. The mere fact that my wife is still married to me twenty-eight years later is evidence of God’s goodness. There are absolutely times I have tasted and seen that the Lord is good.

But I can also tell you there are times I have tasted and did not like what I tasted.

I have confessed here before that during the first year of planting this church I went through a horrific depression. During that time I was nowhere near God, I love you, this is wonderful.

Look at verse 1. David opens the whole psalm: “I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth.”

On my good days I can say that easily. During that first year I could not. I found myself shaking my fist at God. Really? I was obedient. I left everything behind to plant this church. And this is how you treat me? You are not providing financially. You are not providing relationally. People are saying all kinds of things about me. There was no way I was going to say, but God, I will thank you and praise you in the middle of the storm.

When life is good, Psalm 34 is wonderful. On the bad days it is nearly impossible to believe.

Which is exactly why we need different lenses. The reason I was struggling so much is that I was looking through the lens of me and now. I did not like how uncomfortable I was. I could not see God working right then. And I had lost hope.

“But Isn’t David Doing the Same Thing?”

You might push back: reading Psalm 34, it sure seems like David is looking through the lens of me and now. There is a lot of I and my, and it all seems to be about the present.

I will give you some ground there. If we take Psalm 34 in isolation, you could say it is all about me and now — and since God is not working in my now, he clearly does not love me.

But you have to look at all of David’s life.

David did not have an easy life. Yes, he became king of Israel, the most famous king they ever had, the prototype through whom God brought Jesus. And his life was brutal.

As a teenager he was anointed the next king. Israel had begged for a king; God kept saying they did not need one because they had him, but they wanted to be like the other nations. So God allowed it, and they got Saul. And Saul was a bad king who looked at everything through the lenses of me and now, and he was not faithful. So God told the prophet Samuel that he had rejected Saul and to go anoint David.

And for years afterward, David was running for his life — because Saul refused to give up his throne and wanted his own son to inherit it. Never mind that Jonathan actually wanted David to have it. Saul went after David to kill him.

That is why in Psalm 22 David cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He knows the dark night of the soul. He knows what it is to look at God and say, really? This is how you treat me? I thought the Lord was near the brokenhearted. Where are you?

So on the bad days, David writes Psalm 22.

And Psalm 34 was not written on a good day either

Look at the little prelude above verse 1. It points to a very specific and very strange episode in David’s life.

David is being hunted by Saul, so he goes to the land of Gath. While there, some of the people recognize him — that is the great warrior David, the one who killed Goliath, the one who has killed tens of thousands in battle — and they want to bring him before their king.

David fears that the king of Gath will simply hand him back to Saul, and Saul will kill him. So David starts acting insane. He lets drool run down into his beard. He scratches at the doorposts. He puts on a vacant stare and makes strange noises.

So they bring the mighty David before the king of Gath, and the king looks at him and says, essentially: This is a madman. I have enough madmen in my kingdom. Get him out of here.

And David escapes with his life.

Maybe you would walk out of that thinking, that was great. I think I would walk out thinking, that was humiliating. That was not my best day. God, why did you let me end up in that situation?

And out of that situation, he writes Psalm 34.

So how could he possibly write, “I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth. Come, let us exalt his name together”?

Because I do not believe he was only wearing the glasses of me and now. I think he took those off and put on a different pair.

The Glasses We Need: Eternity and the Gospel

The lens of eternity

We have to stop looking only at now and start looking bigger and broader. The lens of eternity lets us look both backward and forward.

Looking back reminds us of what God has done — that just because my current situation is not what I want does not mean everything is over, or that God has gone silent and will do nothing more.

Remember Psalm 22, where David cries out that God has forsaken him — the words Jesus quotes from the cross. Just three verses later, in verses 4 and 5, David writes: “In you our fathers trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them. To you they cried and were rescued; in you they trusted and were not put to shame.”

So here is David fleeing for his life, afraid Saul will kill him, wondering where God is — and then it is as though he stops himself. David, hold on. Look at the past. Look through the lens of eternity. You can see God at work. He could see how God had worked in the lives of his ancestors. And if God worked then, maybe God can work now.

If you follow Jesus and God has done great things in your life, let me encourage you: when you are going through something difficult, look back. See what God has done. Remind yourself, I went through that terrible season and God worked, so I can trust him now. Let that bring you hope.

And you do not only have your own past to draw on. We can look at the biblical past and see what God has done throughout history — especially what he did through the cross.

Looking forward matters too. In John 3, Jesus is talking with a rabbi named Nicodemus, who has come at night because he does not want others to know, but who senses something different about Jesus. In that conversation Jesus says those famous words: for God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Anyone who puts their faith in Jesus — who believes in his work through the cross and the empty tomb — has eternal life. That does not mean this physical body lasts forever; we will be given new physical bodies in the afterlife. But the spirit of who we are continues forever with God.

And Revelation 21:4 tells us that in heaven there are no more tears — because there is no pain, no sorrow, no mourning, since there is no more death. Death has been defeated. Death has died.

So even if God does not heal you of the cancer. Even if he lets you remain alone. Even if he allows you to remain barren. Even if he does not change the financial situation. If your life is in Christ, God will rescue you. It may simply be at the end.

This is why Paul, weighing the glory of eternity against the pain of this life, calls it a light and momentary affliction. It will pass. And we get an eternity with a good and glorious God.

Please do not misunderstand me. This does not mean you should stop praying for the here and now. God loves you. He is passionate about you. By all means appeal to him on the basis of his love, his mercy, and his grace. Ask him to bring healing now. Ask him to change the financial situation. Ask him to bring someone into your life to encourage you.

But even if he does not answer that, it does not mean he has abandoned you. He will answer eventually. And if he does answer here and now, then you will start sounding exactly like David in Psalm 34.

The lens of the gospel

I have a conviction that all of Scripture is really about Jesus.

I do not think the Bible is merely a book of history, even though it contains a great deal of history. I do not think it is merely a book about moral living, even though it holds life-changing truths. I think ultimately it is all about God’s love for humanity as shown through Christ.

So I believe the Old Testament predicts and prepares people for Jesus. The four Gospels present Jesus to us. And the New Testament letters point back to Jesus, showing the difference his life and resurrection make.

Which means Psalm 34 is not really about us. It is about Christ. And I see that in two ways.

First, Jesus fulfills this psalm. Who is better able to bless the Lord at all times than Jesus? Who better to invite us to magnify the Lord with him and exalt his name together? Who better to say, come, listen to me, I will teach you the fear of the Lord? Who better turned away from evil and did good, sought peace and pursued it?

No one did it better. Jesus lived this out perfectly. You and I can certainly try, but we have our bad days — the days we are not pursuing peace but pursuing our own way, our own wants, our own desires.

But if you have put your faith in Christ, the Holy Spirit has come to live within you and is working to mold you into the image of Jesus. So instead of a list of platitudes you cannot live up to, you can surrender to God and let him keep working — because Jesus has already fulfilled this in full.

Second, David is unknowingly pointing to the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

We know David as a king, a shepherd, a warrior, and a poet. What we often miss is that there are moments where David functions as a prophet, and his psalms end up pointing to the gospel. I already mentioned verse 20, which John identifies as prophecy. But I think the whole ending points to Jesus.

Look at verse 19: “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all.”

I learned this week that the word translated afflictions can be rendered dangers or trials — but when I looked it up in a Hebrew dictionary, it really means evil.

So let me ask: what is more evil than sin? Some of you are already thinking of several things. But the things you are thinking of — that is sin.

Nothing is more evil than sin. We face the afflictions of sin every day. We feel the brokenness in our own lives and see it in the world around us.

And what does David say God will do? The Lord delivers him out of them all.

Through the cross, Jesus brought us out of the affliction of sin. God no longer holds our sin against us. When we put our faith in Jesus, he forgives that sin and begins restoring the image of Christ in us, so we can have eternal life with our loving heavenly Father.

So here is David, probably thinking he is writing about his own predicament and encouraging others to follow God — and unknowingly pointing straight at the gospel. The afflictions we face, we are delivered out of. We are delivered from our sin because of Christ.

Which is why he finishes: “The Lord redeems the life of his servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.”

If you follow Jesus, your life has been redeemed. Just as you redeem a coupon, Jesus redeemed you. He paid the price so you could come to God, so he could make you his.

Put On Different Glasses

Psalm 34 is about the gospel. It is not about me and now. It is about the love of God shown across eternity and bestowed on you through the cross of Christ.

So if you are going through something genuinely hard, and you have tasted and feel like you are not seeing God as good — put on different reading glasses. You will suddenly see that he is good. He can be trusted. He is at work. And even if he is not resolving it the way I want in the here and now, he will resolve it eventually. And he has already done everything necessary. He has given me Jesus.

So let me put my faith in him. Let me trust him. And let me say: I will bless the Lord at all times, and his praise will always be on my lips.

Let Us Pray

Heavenly Father, help us to be people who can genuinely worship you in all circumstances. We need you to give us different reading glasses. We need to see differently, because we live with ourselves — our own desires and wants, which try to capitalize everything we do and think and say. So transform us. Give us new minds and new hearts. Give us your Spirit, so we might begin to see life the way you see it, from your side of heaven — and see that you are at work even when we cannot see it directly.

So we repent. We repent of our selfishness, of our narcissism, of expecting you to jump through hoops to fit what we want. We repent of looking at everything through the lens of me. And we repent of looking at everything through the lens of now — of expecting you to microwave a miracle and drop it in our laps so we can stay happy and comfortable.

Instead, help us trust that you are at work deeply in our lives — that you can use both the good and the evil to shape us into the image of Christ, so we can be your vessels in this world, loving like Jesus loved and living like Jesus lived.

We surrender ourselves to you right now, asking you to take these old glasses off and put the new ones on. Through the power of Jesus, help us see what you have done in eternity past and what you will do in eternity future. Help us see what you did for us through the cross — that you, Jesus, loved us so much that you went to the cross to die our death and pay our penalty, so you might give us your life, so we might step into relationship with our heavenly Father, so your image in us might begin to be restored and shine.

Change us through these very words of Psalm 34. Let us stop reading it for what we can get out of it and start hearing what you are calling us to — hearing your love, sensing your grace, knowing you are around us, seeing your power, and truly being able to say that we have tasted and seen that the Lord is good. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.

Come to the Table

There is no better way to keep understanding what God has done for us than to come to the communion table.

If you follow Jesus, come. As you take that bread, remember it represents the body of Christ given for you. As you taste the cup, remember it represents the blood of Jesus shed for you. The love of God is revealed in what Christ did.

And then celebrate — because he did not stay dead. He rose. He came out of the grave. He has authority over all things, even death itself. And one day he will kill death, and we will have an eternity with no tears, no pain, and no sorrow, because we have put our faith in him.

If you are here or online and you have not put your faith in Jesus, I invite you during this next song not to worry about the elements, but to focus on this gospel. God loves you so much that he paid for your sin. He did not expect you to pay it. The penalty of sin is death — and Jesus went and paid it for you. And David told us about it, unknowingly, right there in Psalm 34. Your affliction of sin has been removed. You can be delivered.

But it begins with what Jesus said in John 3:16 — that whoever puts their faith in his name and believes in him will be forgiven, will not perish, and will have everlasting life.

So do not worry about the elements. Stay where you are and pray. Ask God: is this real? And if it is, then confess your sin, accept the work of Jesus on the cross on your behalf, and begin a new relationship with him.

If you follow Jesus, come. And if you do not yet, come to God in your heart. Let his Holy Spirit do what he needs to do right now, for his glory and for our joy. Let us do this in remembrance of him.