Psalm 34

Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of Romans 12:1-2 nicely captures some of what the middle part of Psalm 34 is also trying to say: So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

Although the final scene of the last episode of the TV series The Sopranos remains a bit of a mystery, most viewers concluded that the meaning of the last and sudden appearance of a completely black, blank, and silent screen indicated that the show’s anti-hero, Tony Soprano, had gotten shot through the head and died. Over the years of the series viewers were simultaneously drawn to Tony and repulsed by him. But in the end Tony was a violent man whose violence led to his own demise. Evil will slay the wicked. The wicked self-destruct. So if Tony did indeed die a violent death at the end of the show—and in front of his whole family at that—well, then there is a sense in which one could say “What do you expect? You cannot spend your life murdering people and forever seeking vengeance and not expect it to come back to bite you eventually.” What Tony did unto others, others finally did unto him. What you sow, you reap...

One of the ways to understand the Psalm’s call to “taste and see that the Lord is good is to discover it in our actual experience. In “Mere Christianity” C. S. Lewis says that one of the ways to begin to follow Jesus in the Christian life is to begin to live as though you were a Christian. The chapter called “Let’s Pretend” suggests that whenever we say the first words of the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father,” we are, in fact, pretending to be God’s sons and daughters. “To put it bluntly, we are dressing up as Christ. If you like, you are pretending…. You are not the Son of God whose will and interests are at one with those of the Father: you are a bundle of self-centered fears, hopes, greed, jealousies, and self-conceit, all doomed to death.” Why? “What’s the good of pretending to be what you are not? Lewis continues, “When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And, in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were. Very often the only way to get a quality into reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.” In this way, we “taste and see that the Lord is good."

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