So Much Sweeter

Have you ever eaten a warhead? If you are not familiar with what I am talking about, a warhead is a sweet hard candy coated with a thick layer of hellishly sour glaze. 

Now, when you eat a warhead, you can literally burn your taste buds off. There are videos on YouTube of people taking the "Warheads Challenge", and their tongues are literally bleeding at the end. That is how intensely sour these candies are.

As a child I would buy these and I would eat the first one, I would suffer through the pain just so I could taste the sweet inside. To me there was nothing that tasted sweeter or better than the middle of a warhead. The center made it worth the pain. However, being the clever individual that I am. I decided that I would just run the next few warheads under the faucet until the sour coating had dissolved. It was brilliant, I thought. After running my blue raspberry candy under the faucet, I was so excited to get to the sweet without having to go through the sour. But when I put the candy in my mouth, it wasn't nearly as sweet as it usually was. I was incredibly disappointed. I thought I had found away around the sour and made my way directly to the reward.

So, why didn't it taste as sweet? Because, there was no contrast! There was nothing to prepare my tongue for the difference in sour and sweet, so to me it didn't taste any better than any other candy! 

This goes with life as well. People often ask, "Well, if God is so good, why would He allow evil?" (We know from Isaiah 45:7 that God is actually the creator of evil not the "allower"). The reason that God creates evil in our lives and the reason that we are even on this Earth to begin with (yes Adam and Eve eating the fruit was planned), is because God is bringing us through the sour so that the sweet will be that much sweeter. Without the contrast that we will get from experiencing this life, in our current evil eon, the next two eons would be no big deal to us. 

So yes, God could have let us take the easy way out, He could have rinsed the sour coating off for us. But, thanks be to God, He didn't. Now, the next eons will be THAT MUCH SWEETER!