🍯 Why Did God Create Sweetness?

Why did God create sweet-tasting food?

It sounds like a trivial question—maybe even a bit silly. But in an age where sugar is treated as a kind of dietary original sin (keto, insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome—take your pick), I’ve genuinely been sitting with it. We are wired to experience pleasure when we eat something sweet. That wiring didn’t happen by accident. So what is it for?

I’ve landed on an answer I find deeply compelling: God created sweetness so that we would associate it with His Word—and so that we could use that association to teach our children.

This is apparently something the Jewish community has understood for a long time. When children are introduced to the Torah, they are given something sweet to eat. The idea is elegantly simple: you want the child’s first encounter with Scripture to be physically pleasurable, so that the body learns what the soul is meant to know—that God’s Word is good, that it is sweet, that returning to it is something to look forward to rather than endure.

“How sweet are Your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!”

Psalm 119:103 (NKJV)

“More to be desired are they than gold, yes, than much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.”

Psalm 19:10 (NKJV)

The Psalmist isn’t being poetic in the abstract here. He’s describing a sensory experience of Scripture—something that can be tasted. And I think God built that connection into us by design.

So here’s what I’m committing to going forward: every time we gather as a family around the Word—evening devotions, memory verses on the school run, Bible time of any kind—the children will have something sweet in their hands. A small thing, maybe. But small things, done consistently, are how we form souls.