Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
1 Peter 2:1–3
“So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation—if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”
Our Father in heaven, by His Holy Spirit, causes us to be born again of an imperishable seed, through the preaching of the Word of God (1 Peter 1:23–25). Because this seed is imperishable and is the very truth of our omnipotent Creator implanted in our renewed hearts, if we are once born again, we will always be born again. Regeneration cannot be repeated, and the new spiritual life it imparts cannot be lost. All those whom God calls to saving faith will be finally glorified (see also Rom. 8:29–30). While regeneration and conversion are once-for-all experiences, however, our reception of God’s Word is not. Peter reveals as much in today’s passage when he tells us to “long for the pure spiritual milk”—the teaching of the Scriptures (1 Peter 2:1–3).
Receiving the pure spiritual milk of God’s Word is how we “grow up into salvation” (v. 2). The Apostle describes here again the ongoing aspect of salvation that we commonly call sanctification, our growth in conformity to the image of Christ. We decisively receive salvation at conversion, but God intends for our salvation to mature over the course of our lives in the sense that we increasingly exhibit the qualities of virtue, knowledge, steadfastness, love, self-control, and so on (see 2 Peter 1:5–8). Human beings achieve physical maturity in part by eating the foods that cause our bodies to grow. Milk is one of these staple foods, especially important for infants. Similarly, we grow into spiritual maturity by consuming the food provided by the Holy Spirit, the written Word of God. Through the Scriptures, we receive and grow in the grace of the Lord. Matthew Henry comments, “The word of God is the great instrument whereby he discovers and communicates his grace to men.”
Other scriptural texts such as Hebrews 5:11–14 stress the importance of consuming the Word of God as solid food, meaning that we have to graduate from the milk of the basics of the Bible to its deeper things. Peter’s teaching is not opposed to this. First Peter 2:2 considers all of God’s Word as that which provides essential nutrition for spiritual health, not making distinctions within the Word as the author of Hebrews does. The point is that we are to look for the nourishment that only divinely revealed truth provides. We will be nourished by receiving God’s Word sincerely, shunning the deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander that keep us from receiving the optimal nutrition from the Scriptures (1 Peter 2:1).
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
Christians have a longing to know God’s Word, and we are blessed to live in a day when the Scriptures are more accessible to believers than ever before. Audio Bibles, smartphone apps, and trusted websites, and the print Bibles in our homes and churches are just some of the resources we have for learning the Scriptures. Let us consider how we can use these things and others to deepen our longing for God’s Word.
For further study
- Psalm 19
- Proverbs 3:1–2
- John 6:60–69
- 2 Timothy 2:15
The bible in a year
- 1 Samuel 20–21
- Luke 16:14–31