After the resurrection, Jesus ate a piece of honeycomb. Follow honey’s golden thread through the Bible — and discover the value of the pure kind.
◆ Living Water Bible Study ◆
Jesus & the Sweetness of Honey
Why the risen Lord ate honeycomb — and what Scripture says about the value of pure honey.
Honey runs through the Bible like a golden thread — a picture of sweetness, blessing, and the goodness of God. The Promised Land flows with it, the Psalms compare it to God’s own word, and — in one tender moment after the resurrection — the Lord Jesus Himself sat down and ate a piece of honeycomb. Let’s follow honey through Scripture, and then pause to consider the quiet value of the pure, real thing.
The Risen Lord Ate Honeycomb
After He rose from the dead, Jesus appeared to His startled disciples, who could scarcely believe their eyes. To show them He was no ghost — that He was truly, bodily alive — He asked for something to eat:
“And they gave him a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb. And he took it, and did eat before them.”Luke 24:42–43 (KJV)
There is something deeply moving here. The risen Lord of glory, fresh from conquering death, reaches for the plainest of foods — fish and honeycomb — and eats it in front of His friends. Honey, the simplest of sweet gifts, became part of the proof that He was alive.
Promised Before He Was Born
Centuries earlier, the prophet Isaiah had spoken of a child born of a virgin, called Immanuel, ‘God with us’. Of that child he said:
“Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good.”Isaiah 7:15 (KJV)
Curds and honey were the everyday food of the land. Read down the centuries by the church, this points to the real humanity of the promised Messiah: God’s own Son would grow up eating the honey of the land, like any child of Israel.
A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey
When God called His people out of slavery, He promised them ‘a good land and a large, a land flowing with milk and honey’ (Exodus 3:8) — a phrase repeated again and again through the Scriptures. Honey stood for abundance, for a place of rest and plenty, for the lavish kindness of a God who loves to give good gifts to His children.
Sweeter than Honey
Most beautifully of all, honey becomes the Bible’s favourite picture for the word of God. David sang that the LORD’s judgments are ‘sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb’ (Psalm 19:10), and ‘sweeter than honey to my mouth’ (Psalm 119:103). ‘Pleasant words are as an honeycomb,’ says Proverbs, ‘sweet to the soul’ (16:24). When the prophet Ezekiel was given God’s words to eat, the scroll was ‘in my mouth as honey for sweetness’ (Ezekiel 3:3). To taste God’s word, the Bible says, is to taste honey.
The Wisdom of Honey
Scripture also treats honey with a wise realism. ‘My son, eat thou honey, because it is good’ (Proverbs 24:13) — yet it also cautions, ‘Hast thou found honey? eat so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith’ (Proverbs 25:16). Even the sweetest gift is to be enjoyed with measure. Honey teaches both delight and self-control: receive the good gladly, but do not lose yourself in it.
The Value of Pure Honey
All of this gives honey a special dignity — and makes the pure, real thing worth seeking. Raw, unprocessed honey is far more than sugar: it carries natural enzymes, trace antioxidants, and the faint flavour of the very flowers the bees once visited. For thousands of years people have valued it to sweeten their food, to soothe a sore throat or a cough, and, in older times, even to help dress a wound. Much of what is sold today, however, is heavily heated, blended, or stretched with cheap syrup until little of that living goodness remains. Pure honey — honey that is simply what it claims to be — is the kind worth having.
One caution worth knowing. Because of a small risk of infant botulism, honey — pure or otherwise — should never be given to babies under one year old.
And there is a quiet lesson in that, too. Just as we learn to seek honey that is pure and unadulterated — not watered down, not pretending to be what it is not — so the Bible calls us to the pure, undiluted word of God, and to a faith that is the real thing all the way through.
Honey through Scripture
A taste of honey’s golden thread, in the order it appears in the Bible.
From a land flowing with honey, to a word sweeter than the honeycomb, to the risen Lord eating honey before His friends — O taste and see that the LORD is good.