The Book of Psalms

Word Study

"taste," Hebrew ta'amu (טַעֲמוּ), taste, perceive by experience. Having testified that God delivered him from all his fears (v4), David turns to invite everyone else to prove God's goodness for themselves: "O taste and see that the LORD is good." The word makes it personal and experiential. You cannot know the sweetness of honey by hearing it described; you must taste it. So it is with the goodness of God: it is not enough to hear about it secondhand.

"see," ur'u (וּרְאוּ). Notice the order -- taste, then see: the tasting comes first, the seeing follows. We do not first prove God good and then trust Him; we trust Him, and in trusting we discover His goodness.

"good," tov (טוֹב). This is what the soul finds out by tasting: that the LORD is good. This is one of the warmest invitations in all of Scripture, addressed to every doubting, hungry soul -- do not stand at a distance debating God's goodness; come and taste it.

"blessed," ashrei (אַשְׁרֵי), O the happinesses of. To the invitation a promise is added: "blessed is the man that trusteth in him." The happiness of those who come and taste is not left in doubt; it is declared.

"trusteth," yecheseh (יֶחֱסֶה), takes refuge in. Literally, the man who takes refuge in Him. Those who flee to God for shelter find Him good, and their happiness is secured. Trust Him, take refuge in Him, and you will find for yourself that the LORD is good.

Explanation

Two things about this invitation deepen when you notice them. The first is the setting. The psalm's title says David wrote it "when he changed his behaviour before Abimelech", the day he feigned madness, scrabbling at the gate and letting spittle run down his beard, to escape death in the enemy city of Gath (1 Samuel 21). And this psalm, born out of that desperate hour, is in Hebrew an acrostic, each verse beginning with the next letter of the alphabet, aleph to tav. The man who once faked insanity to survive now sits down and writes the most orderly thing imaginable, an A-to-Z catechism of true wisdom, the sane invitation of a man who has learned where safety really lies. The second thing is the verb "taste." Of all the senses, taste is the one that demands you take the thing inside you. You can see a feast across a room, smell it, hear it described, all at arm's length; but you cannot taste it without receiving it into yourself. So David does not invite us to admire God's goodness from a distance or to weigh it as a theory; he invites us to take God in. And he even fuses two senses on purpose, "taste and see", as if to say that the tasting becomes a kind of seeing: experience opens an eye that argument never could. Some things about God are simply not visible until they are first swallowed.

Gospel Focus

"O taste and see that the LORD is good", the Apostle Peter applies this very verse to the goodness of the Lord Jesus Christ experienced in the gospel: "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby: If so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious" (1 Peter 2:2-3). To taste that the LORD is good is, in the New Testament, to taste the grace of Christ, to come to Him and find Him gracious. Jesus makes the invitation His own: He is "the bread of life," and "he that cometh to me shall never hunger" (John 6:35); He calls, "If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink" (John 7:37). The goodness of God is not merely a doctrine to be discussed but a Person to be received, and those who come to Christ prove for themselves that He is good. Hebrews speaks of those who have "tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come" (Hebrews 6:5). So the ancient invitation stands wide open in the gospel: taste and see that the Lord is good; come to Jesus, trust Him, take refuge in Him, and you will find Him gracious, the living Bread who satisfies the soul. Blessed, truly happy, is the man that trusteth in Him.

Word Study

"nigh," Hebrew qarov (קָרוֹב), near. This is one of the tenderest promises in all of Scripture. We might expect that God would be near to the strong, the joyful, the successful; but the psalm declares the opposite: "The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart." The world pulls away from the broken and the grieving; God draws close to them.

"broken heart," nishberei-lev (נִשְׁבְּרֵי־לֵב), the crushed in heart. God draws especially near, not to those who feel whole and self-sufficient, but to those who are crushed. This does not mean brokenness is pleasant, but that it is not abandonment; the very place of our deepest crushing is the place where God is nearest.

"saveth," yoshia (יוֹשִׁיעַ), from the root of the name Jesus. Nearness is not the whole of the promise; God also acts. "And saveth such as be of a contrite spirit" -- and the root of the verb is the root that will one day name the Saviour Himself.

"contrite," dakke (דַּכְּאֵי), crushed, beaten small. The word is stronger even than "broken": beaten small, ground down. This includes both the crushed by sorrow and the crushed by conviction of sin; to all such God comes near. As another psalm says, "a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise" (Psalm 51:17).

"spirit," ruach (רוּחַ). The crushing reaches the innermost man, and so does the salvation. If you feel shattered by grief or shame, this verse is for you: God is not far off but near, and He saves the contrite. The broken heart is not the place God flees but the place He comes to heal.

Explanation

Read this verse in the run of the ones before it, and it quietly answers a question they raise. Verses 15-17 keep promising good to "the righteous", "the eyes of the LORD are upon the righteous... the righteous cry, and the LORD heareth." A struggling reader might well wonder, "but am I one of the righteous? I feel anything but." Verse 18 tells you exactly who they are: "The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit." So the "righteous" of this psalm are not the flawless and the strong; they are the broken and the crushed. God's favourites are not the intact. And there is a piercing paradox in the word "nigh." Brokenness feels like abandonment; when the heart is shattered, the very thing we conclude is that God has withdrawn, that He is far off and has left us to our ruin. This verse flatly contradicts the feeling: the crushing we take as a sign of God's distance is in fact the exact place of His nearness. The felt distance and the real nearness are perfect opposites. So the soul that feels furthest from God in its brokenness is, by God's own word, standing closest to Him, for that is precisely where He draws near.

Gospel Focus

"The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart", this nearness to the broken is embodied in Jesus Christ, who came for exactly such. He announced His mission in the words of Isaiah: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me... he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted" (Luke 4:18). Jesus did not seek out the proud and the whole, but the broken and the crushed: "they that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick... I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance" (Matthew 9:12-13). To the weary and heavy laden He calls, "Come unto me... and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28). And the word "saveth" in this verse, yasha, is the very root of the name Jesus, "the LORD saves": the God who saves the contrite is the Saviour who came in flesh to seek and save the lost. At the cross He was Himself broken for us, that the broken-hearted might be healed, "with his stripes we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5). So the promise that God is near the broken is fulfilled in the Christ who draws near to sinners, welcomes the contrite, and binds up the wounds of the crushed. However shattered you are, He is near; bring your broken heart to Jesus, and He will save.

Word Study

"keepeth," Hebrew shomer (שֹׁמֵר), guards, watches over. In its setting, the verse is a promise of God's watchful care over the righteous even in the midst of many afflictions: "Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the LORD delivereth him out of them all. He keepeth all his bones: not one of them is broken" (vv19-20).

"all his bones," kol-atzmotav (כָּל־עַצְמוֹתָיו). God guards His own so completely that not even a bone is lost apart from His will. The picture is of a care that reaches to the smallest part of a man.

"not one," achat mehennah (אַחַת מֵהֵנָּה). The promise is stated with a precision that leaves no exception -- not one of them. And the Holy Ghost, who inspired these words, wove into that precision a prophecy that would be fulfilled with startling literalness at the cross.

"broken," nishbarah (נִשְׁבָּרָה). When Jesus hung crucified, the soldiers came to break the legs of the condemned to hasten death, as they did to the two thieves; "but when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs" (John 19:33). And John declares the reason: "For these things were done, that the scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken" (John 19:36). The same truth was written into the Passover law, that no bone of the lamb should be broken (Exodus 12:46). So this quiet line about God keeping the bones of the righteous was, all along, a prophecy of the crucified Christ, the true Passover Lamb, of whom not one bone was broken.

Explanation

Before this line ever reached the cross, it made a careful promise in its own place, and the promise is more honest than we sometimes read it. Look at the verse just before: "Many are the afflictions of the righteous" (v19). The psalm never pretends the godly are spared suffering; it says plainly their afflictions are many. What it promises is not exemption but a boundary: "He keepeth all his bones: not one of them is broken." The afflictions may be many and real, but there is a line God's providence draws around His own that trouble cannot cross without His leave, "not one bone" beyond it. God's keeping is not the absence of pain but its limit. And there is a striking wordplay running through this psalm that an English reader misses. The Hebrew root shavar, "to break," appears in both verse 18 and verse 20. In verse 18 it is the "broken heart" (nishbar) that God draws near to; in verse 20 it is the bones of which "not one is broken" (nishbarah). Put them together and you see the two-sided way God keeps His own: He permits the heart to be broken in sorrow and contrition, drawing near to it there, while He guards the frame so that not a bone is broken beyond His will. Near to the broken, and keeper of the unbroken, at one and the same time.

Gospel Focus

"He keepeth all his bones: not one of them is broken", this line is a prophecy of Jesus Christ, the true Passover Lamb, fulfilled at Calvary. God had commanded that no bone of the Passover lamb be broken (Exodus 12:46), and when "Christ our passover is sacrificed for us" (1 Corinthians 5:7), that ancient type was honoured to the letter: the soldiers, breaking the legs of the two crucified beside Him, found Jesus already dead and broke not His bones, "that the scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken" (John 19:36). What a marvel of providence, that in the very hour of the cross, when everything seemed given over to cruelty and chance, God so ordered the Roman soldiers' hands that not one bone of His Son was broken, fulfilling a word written a thousand years before. This is a comfort to every believer: the God who kept the bones of His crucified Son keeps His people too, so that though "many are the afflictions of the righteous," the LORD "delivereth him out of them all" (v19). And it seals our confidence in the Scriptures, that even a passing line about the righteous man's bones was a hidden prophecy of Christ, fulfilled exactly. Behold the Lamb of God, of whom not a bone was broken, and know that the God who kept Him will keep you.