Tired of Tasting a Cardboard Jesus?

Taste is a mind-blowing marvel of engineering we take for granted.  I recently taught my three teens a kitchen science course that introduced me to amazing aspects about taste I’d never known.  I hadn’t grasped how taste combines all five senses, not just taste buds and smell.  What would a potato chip be without hearing it crunch?  Our brain uses sight to interpret how something tastes.  An unflavored jello colored red tastes like cherry or strawberry; color it green and now it takes like lime.  Even touch makes a big difference.  When foods were blended up smoothie style to dissolve their familiar textures, people couldn’t discern banana, pear, or even steak.  Although today’s scientific discoveries were unknown to Peter the fisherman, he knew that taste had a spiritual counterpart.

Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation— if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. 

1 Peter 2:2-3 ESV

Longing “for the pure spiritual milk” is more nuanced than simply reading the Bible.  Peter means craving the word that actually tastes, experiences, the Lord.  We’ve all experienced the blandness of reading Scripture without tasting the Lord.  The ink on the page is dry, boring, lifeless.  Jesus put it this way: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (Jn 5:39-40). 

Fortunately, God didn’t leave us in the dark about how to have life from His word.  Our fearfully and wonderfully made bodies teach us about spiritual life.  Our tongue recognizes food’s plethora of textures.  The spiritual counterpart to touch is feeling, emotion.  Tasting the Lord has a “texture” that we can feel.  Joy has a texture.  So does peace.  And comfort.  Our redeemed emotions help us taste that the Lord is good.  Peter earlier drew from his readers’ familiarity with experiencing joy.  “Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (1Pe 1:8).  Contextually that joy comes from seeing Jesus by faith in the writings of the Old Testament prophets.

Taste: Surprising Stories and Science about Why Food Tastes Good, a fascinating read, explained the complex dance of ten thousand taste buds of our tongue with ten million smell receptors of our sophisticated nose.  This huge imbalance is why taste buds contribute only 20% to our taste experience whereas smell provides a whopping 80%.  That’s why food tastes so blah when we have a stuffy nose.  Our brain even knows which smells enter through our nose versus the back of our mouth.  If it didn’t, turkey would taste like the freshly cut flowers on the table.  The author coined “nose-smelling” and “mouth-smelling” to differentiate them.  Mouth-smelling detects the freshly released flavor molecules (through chewing) that had been locked up in our food.  Furthermore, mouth-smelling won’t work without the taste buds.  To illustrate, the book cited a woman who’d severed a vital nerve in her tongue when she licked a can with a sharp lid (I still cringe thinking about that!).  The lasagna she once loved tasted like cardboard, even though she could smell its tantalizing aroma. 

Many Christians rightly understand that the Bible is all about Jesus.  Praise God for that!  But what’s been puzzling to me is how some, whether in print or audio, present a Jesus that tastes like cardboard to my soul.  It’s like soda without the fizz.  Flat.  Or to put it in road-to-Emmaus vernacular, my heart didn’t burn when they were presenting Jesus from the Scriptures.  Now, all communication involves both transmitter and receiver, so it could be me as the receiver not being spiritually in tune.  But one must first taste Christ in reality before one’s hearers can experience more than a cardboard Jesus.  It’s not enough to intellectually connect the dots from a Bible passages to Jesus.  That’s just nose-smelling, a Jesus tasting like cardboard.  We need nose-smelling, but to light us up with the aroma of Christ, “a fragrance from life to life” (2Co 2:16), we need spiritual mouth-smelling, too.  We must chew—meditate upon—God’s word in total reliance upon the Spirit who emancipates the exhilarating aroma of our flavorful Christ. 

This authentic, Spirit-induced tasting of the Lord cannot be faked.  “The crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes” (Mt 7:28-29).  That’s mouth-smelling.  The scribes had only nose-smelling.  “No one ever spoke like this man!”  Mouth-smelling.  “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?”  Mouth-smelling.  We’re better off having the Spirit within us than having Jesus physically among us.  The Spirit of truth came to do in us what Jesus did for the two disciples on the road to Emmaus: open the Scriptures to see Jesus and to kindle a burning heart for Him!  The Spirit of revelation is the antidote for the cardboard Jesus. 

Our tasting of Jesus includes spiritually seeing His glory.  Remember how red unflavored jello tastes like strawberry but green like lime?  Physical taste’s counterpart to sight is the eyes of our heart seeing this glory of Christ.  Paul used the metaphor of a veil for spiritual sight in our tasting of Jesus.  The Spirit lifts the veil off a black and white, cardboard Christ so that we’re dazzled by His multicolored, 3-dimensional glory that transforms us “into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2Co 3:18).  Leading up to this, Paul employed an unexpected double meaning with “Lord”—”Now the Lord is the Spirit” and again, “the Lord who is the Spirit” (2Co 3:17, 18).  Everywhere else in the New Testament “Lord” applies to Jesus Christ.  What’s the Spirit “Lord” of?  The veil upon the word of God.  “But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.”  The double meaning is this: turn the Lord, the Spirit, to lift the veil; turn to the Lord, Jesus Christ, to be transfixed by His glory.  So our tasting of Jesus includes spiritually seeing His glory, splashing “color” upon the Scripture we’re reading.  The Spirit takes seemingly tasteless Bible verses and unleashes the exquisite taste of Jesus to our hungry hearts.  All it takes is one real taste to crave another.

Certain flavors blend deliciously well together, such as chocolate and raspberry or lime and mint.  The innumerable combinations in the world of food is but a paltry shadow to the reality of spiritual taste: “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!” (Ps 34:8)  We take our coffee and cuisine seriously.  How much more the reality to which it all points to—Jesus!  Continuing our taste metaphor, the Spirit pairs dazzling flavor combinations within the word of God.  He’s the unequaled expert of “combining and interpreting spiritual thoughts with spiritual words” (1Co 2:13 AMP).  He combines passages detached from one another to whet our appetite for the Lord who’s so good.  The Holy Spirit is our barista who knows which verses to pair together to achieve the best flavor combinations of the glory of Christ.  Peter illustrated this in the second chapter of his letter, joining three different “stone” quotations from the Old Testament that feast upon the goodness of Jesus as Cornerstone and Stone of stumbling.  The Spirit will never cease to overwhelm us with the infinite combinations of lovely tastes of Jesus in the word of God!   He’ll do this for you simply by you asking.   

The grand drama of redemption ends as it began—with the tree of life. 

…On either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month.

Revelation 22:2 ESV

The tree of life here pictures an endless sampling of our Lord Jesus Christ for all eternity.  Thank You, Lord, for creating our spiritual senses to enjoy and experience You now until the day of eternity!