Lately I’ve been cultivating a growing love for the book of Proverbs. In the past I’ve always had difficulty with the book, mainly because it’s so scattered and non-linear. Give me a good treatise on justification by faith any day of the week.
But I’m beginning to love pithy one-liners. The power of a sentence to illuminate is really quite remarkable. In the future I hope to have a whole category devoted to exploring Proverbs. For now, I’ll just keep it in Exe-Jesus.
My son, eat honey, for it is good, and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste. Know that wisdom is such to your soul; if you find it there will be a future, and your hope will not be cut off. Proverbs 24:13-14
One of the stated goals of this blog is to help us learn to read God’s two books, the Bible and Creation. We learn to read the latter by listening carefully to the former. Here we see one of the many purposes of honey, and by extension other pleasant foods that we encounter.
Why did God make honey so tasty and sweet? So that we would have some idea what wisdom was like. The sweetness of honey points beyond itself to the wisdom of God. Honey is “good” and we are exhorted elsewhere to “Taste and see that the LORD is good!” Our souls have taste buds, just like our tongues, and we can train the soul-buds by exercising the tongue-buds. We savor the sweetness of honey or sweet tea or pumpkin crunch cake, and in the moment engage in a fancy bit of remanating, transposing the physical enjoyment of taste onto our souls and offering thanks to God, not only for the simple pleasures of food, but for the spiritual pleasures to which the food is but an echo.
