How Good God Is

How Good God Is

Augustine, who had spent years pursuing pleasure, truth, and meaning through philosophy, relationships, and rhetoric, wrote of his conversion: 'You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.' The discovery that God was good — genuinely, fully, satisfyingly good — was not a doctrine he arrived at abstractly but a taste he experienced suddenly. 'Late have I loved thee,' he wrote, 'beauty so old and so new.' The taste of goodness he had been seeking everywhere else turned out to have been waiting for him in the One he had been avoiding.

Psalm 34:8's invitation — 'taste and see' — uses sensory language for spiritual experience. You cannot appreciate the goodness of God theoretically; it must be tasted. David is not describing an argument for God's goodness but a personal experience of it. The word 'good' (tob) is the word used in Genesis 1 for creation: 'and God saw that it was good.' The goodness of God is the quality of His very being, overflowing into everything He makes and does. To taste this goodness is to encounter the fundamental character of reality itself. The 'blessed' person (asher — happy, flourishing) is the one who has tasted enough to take refuge in the God who is good. Take a taste today.