Taste and See

“O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.” — Psalm 34:8 (KJV)

What is God to you, really? Tozer says that for most people, “God is an inference, not a reality.” They reason that someone must have made the world: “He must be,” they say, “therefore we believe He is.” Others only know about God “by hearsay,” from parents or teachers. For others God is a vague idea, another word for goodness or beauty.

And Christians, Tozer admits, are often not much different. They pray “Our Father,” which means God is a person they can know. Yet “for millions of Christians, nevertheless, God is no more real than He is to the non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle.”

The Bible talks very differently. It uses the language of the senses. “O taste and see that the Lord is good.” “My sheep hear my voice.” “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Tozer's conclusion is that we have spiritual senses, ways of knowing God that work as truly as eyes and ears do with the physical world. When God gives new life, those senses wake up. So why do so many believers seem numb? “The answer is our chronic unbelief.”

Then comes one of the most beautiful sentences in the book: “A spiritual kingdom lies all about us, enclosing us, embracing us, altogether within reach of our inner selves, waiting for us to recognize it.” God is not far off. “God Himself is here waiting our response to His Presence.”

Tozer is careful to explain two words. The first is “reality.” Something real exists whether anyone is thinking about it or not. God is real like that; more real, in fact, than anything else. “The worshipping heart does not create its Object.” The second word is “reckon,” which means to count on something. And this is not the same as imagining. “Imagination is not faith.” Faith doesn't invent anything. “Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that which is already there.” You are not being asked to pretend. You are being asked to count on what is true.

He has fun with clever thinkers who say nothing is really real and then live as if everything is. “Their ideas are brain-deep, not life-deep.” The plain person, by contrast, feels the wind and rain on his face and knows they are real.

So what's the problem? The visible world is loud. “The world of sense intrudes upon our attention day and night for the whole of our lifetime. It is clamorous, insistent and self-demonstrating.” Tozer wrote that in 1948. “The visible becomes the enemy of the invisible; the temporal, of the eternal.” We have trained ourselves to think only what we see counts. But “The spiritual is real.” And the spiritual world is not just somewhere we go after death: “It is not future, but present.” He ends with a short prayer:

“O God, quicken to life every power within me, that I may lay hold on eternal things. Open my eyes that I may see; give me acute spiritual perception; enable me to taste Thee and know that Thou art good. Make heaven more real to me than any earthly thing has ever been. Amen.”

Think about how much of your day is spent responding to things that demand attention: notifications, feeds, group chats, the next video. None of that is evil. But it is, in Tozer's word, “clamorous.” It shouts. God doesn't shout. He waits.

And notice what Tozer is not asking. He isn't asking you to work up a feeling, or picture God in your head until he seems real. That would be imagination. He's asking you to reckon: to act on what is already true. God is here, now, in your bedroom, on your bus, in the exam hall. “Every man must choose his world,” he says. Choosing doesn't make God real. It makes you awake to him.

One thing to do this week: take one fifteen-minute walk this week with no earbuds and your phone in your pocket. As you walk, tell God thank you for real things you can see, hear and feel. Then say, quietly, And you are here too. That is reckoning.