“You can’t have your cake and eat it too! Or can you?”
March 28, 2020
I was recently reminded of the phrase, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too!”, while speaking at a women’s church retreat which was celebrating their 25th anniversary of “retreating”. One of the women in attendance made a cake, in honor of the occasion, displaying the topic for the weekend along with an appropriate graphic. When the cake was cut and I was given my piece of the cake, my slice had the word “EAT” on it (see picture below). Immediately, I exclaimed, “Who said you can’t have your cake and eat it too? Look here! The cake is actually telling me to eat it!” The proof was in the pudding, or the cake batter, that it was okay to have my cake and eat it!
However, what does that phrase really mean? It is a bit confusing because why would you have cake and NOT eat it? Well, part of the confusion, for me at least, rests in how I was used to hearing the phrase— “you can’t have your cake and eat it too”. Apparently, the original version of this idiom was actually the reverse: “You can’t eat your cake and have it too!”. That makes a lot more sense. In the reverse, it is clear that if you eat your cake then you can no longer have it (except on your hips and thighs) because it has gone the way of all devoured food.
Now that the meaning is cleared up, why would we even use this phrase? We use this phrase whenever we’re trying to convince someone that they cannot have two mutually exclusive realities, like eating their cake while still somehow possessing it. In modern paraphrasing, “You can’t have it both ways!” or “You can’t have the best of both worlds!”
This caused me to wonder if the Bible has anything to say about eating your cake and having it too! Sure enough, in Proverbs 14: 4 we find, not cake, but stables and cattle:
Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean,
but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.
If you want your manger to be clean, then you cannot have oxen in it. However, if you want the abundant crops to be harvested, you need the strength of the ox – you need oxen in your barn. So you have to choose: clean barn or big harvest? You cannot have both the clean barn and the abundance of crops that the strength of the oxen helps gather. You can’t have your cake and eat it too!
How often do I attempt to have it both ways in my walk with the Lord? How often do I want to have my will and way be done in my life along with God’s will? My cake and eat it too?
But is it possible to eat our cake and have it too? I think it is if we eat spiritual cake–God’s Word! Jeremiah reminds us we can eat God’s Word, while Psalm 34:8 tells us how good it is:
Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart, (Jeremiah 15: 16)
Taste and see that the Lord is good. (Psalm 34:8)
The bonus in this eating is that we can still have this spiritual cake, even after we have tasted and eaten, because Matthew declares,
Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. (Matthew 24: 35)
And Isaiah reads,
The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God will stand
forever. (Isaiah 40:8)
So, go ahead! Enjoy! Eat your spiritual cake and have it too and enjoy the goodness of God in your life!