The title over this psalm sends the reader back to one of David's least dignified moments. Fleeing Saul with nowhere else to go, David ran to Gath, Goliath's hometown, was recognized by the king's servants, and saved himself by pretending to be insane, scratching at the doors and letting spit run down his beard (1 Samuel 21:10-15). This psalm comes out of that humiliation.
The Hebrew word the title uses for changing his behavior, *ta'am*, is the same word that means taste. That day David changed his taste, faking madness to survive. A few verses into the psalm he says, 8"Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!" The word that once described a man pretending now invites people to experience something true. The invitation is to first-hand knowing, and no report or reputation can substitute for it, just as no recipe substitutes for the meal. Whatever else the psalm teaches, it begins by insisting that God's goodness is meant to be experienced as well as believed.
David starts in testimony before he turns to instruction. 4"I sought the LORD, and he answered me." He does not claim the fear went away first. He sought God in the middle of it. 7"The angel of the LORD encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them." A man who had just spent his own strength pretending to be mad in an enemy's court describes a different kind of protection, unearned and unmanufactured, given to anyone who takes refuge in the God David turned to when his cleverness ran out.
From testimony David turns outward: 11"Come, O children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the LORD." What follows is plain and practical, the wisdom a father passes on at a kitchen table: He tells them to guard the tongue and to 14"seek peace and pursue it." The fear of the LORD this psalm teaches grows out of having tasted his goodness, the way anyone who has tasted something good wants to tell someone where to find it.
Near the end come two promises that reach further than David knew. 18"The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit." That is nearness at the point of greatest crushing, of a kind no distant sympathy supplies. And then: 20"He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken." At an execution centuries later, soldiers went down a row of crucified men breaking legs to hasten death, until they reached one who was already dead and left his legs alone. John records it deliberately: "Not one of his bones will be broken" (John 19:36). What David wrote as a general promise over every righteous sufferer was kept to the letter in the one truly righteous sufferer.
19"Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD delivers him out of them all." This psalm never promises an easy life. It promises a present God, near enough to taste and close enough to keep every bone whole when the world has broken everything else.
Think of the hardest night you have come through. David turned his into an invitation, and yours may be someone's reason to taste and see.
Prayer
Father, we have admired your goodness from a safe distance when we could have tasted it. Thank you for being near to the brokenhearted, for saving the crushed in spirit, and for keeping whole what the world has tried to break in us. Teach us the fear of the LORD as a father teaches a child, and let our testimony, whatever desperate night produced it, become an invitation for someone else to taste and see. In Jesus' name, amen.