"Craving Food"
I Peter 2:1-3
June 14, 1998

The first three verses of 1 Peter chapter 2 offer an argument in three parts, each of which is simple enough to grasp. There isn't much disagreement about what Peter means.

In the first place he says that when these folk became Christians, when they were born again -- as he put a few verses back in 1:23 -- they left behind a certain way of life. The NIV and some other English translation renders the opening verse of 1 Peter 2 in the form of a command. The verb is not in the imperative, it is actually a participle, which may be meaningful to some of our students and a few of us who remember our grammar from long ago. It is possible to render it as a command, not perhaps the most likely rendering, however. Most other English translations and virtually all commentaries choose to render the verb in the more ordinary way. "Therefore, having rid yourselves of all malice, and all deceit, hypocrisy, etc." The idea is then that having crossed the boundary into a new country, having left behind the ways of that former country, there is a new citizenship to practice. It doesn't make a great difference how one takes the verb in v. 2, but that latter way seems the best.

Peter is not, of course, saying that we have, as Christians, so left these sins behind that we are no longer troubled by them and never commit them. Not at all. But he is saying that, having renounced that former way of life, we should no longer practice it.

Peter's manner of speaking is very similar to Paul's in Romans 6, where the great Apostle to the Gentiles speaks of all Christians having died to sin and risen to a righteous life, of sin no longer having mastery over them, that their old self was crucified with Christ so that they might no longer be slaves to sin. But Paul does not mean, even with such strong language as that, that Christians are freed from sin and sinning. Not at all. His point is rather this. It is quite possible for an adult to act childishly, we see it all the time, as a matter of fact. But, it is not possible for an adult to become a child again. When an adult acts like a child, we very properly tell him to act his age, or to grow up, because he is, in fact, an adult not a child. Well so with a Christian, with a man or a woman who has been born again. He has a new life, he should live that life not his old one! No doubt, when Peter wrote that list of sins down in v. 1, he thought of how often he himself succumbed to those very sins and knew very well the bite these words would have in the hearts of Christians who still knew themselves full to the brim with envy and hypocrisy! It is not their life anymore and they should be done with such things.

The second stage of the argument is then a summons to grow up in this new life of God's grace and righteousness. When the old ways are renounced one does not suddenly live as a master of the new. No, he must begin at the beginning, as a child, and begin to grow up into that new way of life. He must mature. And Peter summons his readers to do just that. Take milk so that you may grow thereby. Indeed he summons them to crave that spiritual food. It is a strong word. It appears in the LXX translation of Ps 42:1: "As the deer pants for the streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God." Like a newborn baby craves the breast, cries for it, even wails for it, we Christians are to crave this milk.

Here "milk" is not, as elsewhere in the NT, used as a contrast to meat or solid food. It is not as though Peter is saying that these Christians are spiritual children who can handle nothing but milk. They should be ready for meat but they are not. No. Milk is simply the appropriate food for the newborn and the young. Milk is here a symbol of spiritual nourishment, especially the nourishment that is brought by the Word of God, to which reference was just made at the end of chapter 1.

It is interesting that this picture of milk as spiritual nourishment was so powerful that, according to the Apostolic Tradition, a third-century work by Hippolytus, at least in some parts of the Christian church, after baptism a cup of milk mixed with honey was given to the new Christian along with the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper. Life had begun, growth in that life, maturing to adulthood was now called for.

The idea of growing up in salvation makes sense because Peter is speaking of salvation not as a synonym for the forgiveness of sins or justification, but for the entire process of renewal and restoration of life that culminates only when Jesus comes again. That is how the term has already been used in 1:5,9. Here "salvation" is the whole course of a believer's life.

And, then, the third part of the argument, in v. 3. There is good reason to go on, for you have already tasted the goodness of the Lord and you know that nothing can compare to that! It is an interesting verse, verse 3, by the way. It is a free rendering of Psalm 34:8 from the LXX, which Peter regularly quotes because it is the OT his readers know, for they spoke and read Greek not Hebrew or Aramaic. "Taste and see that the Lord is good." In the original psalm, of course, "the Lord" is a reference to Jahweh or Jehovah. The NT regularly applies such references to Jesus Christ. It is one of the proofs of his deity that Jesus is so often identified with the Jehovah mentioned in OT texts.

And it is interesting also for the way in which so artlessly the attention is shifted from the Word of the Lord to the Lord himself. Drink the Word of God and you get not the Word of the Lord only but the Lord himself in all his goodness and kindness.

So, it is not all that difficult to gather what Peter is saying to us here. He is telling us to "crave spiritual milk" and giving us reasons why we should. There are some commentators on this passage who argue that this command to crave milk is the central command of the letter, the central imperative in the entire book of 1 Peter. But whether that be the case, there is no question that this is the central imperative, the central focus of this part of the letter. What comes before prepares for it, what comes after explains it and justifies it -- all the material to the end of v. 12 at least.

Crave to drink up the Word of God -- in all its forms, in all the ways you can, drink up the Word of God by which you come more and more to taste the goodness of the Lord and grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord and in the godliness, love, and virtue of the Christian life.

And we can easily imagine how someone who craved this spiritual milk would seek to drink it in.

He would take up the Word of God often, daily, and read it not simply to read it -- that is always the danger and the temptation of reading programs that take us through the Bible in a year, they contribute to a reading that is more for reading's sake than for nourishment's sake. So much must be read today or I fall behind and so I read to get my chapters in. But this is not the same kind of reading by which one drinks in spiritual milk. That reading is a careful consideration of the words of Holy Scripture, their meaning, and meditation on their application to one's own soul and life at that moment. It is reading with an ear open, listening for the voice of the Lord speaking in his Word. I don't mean to say that you cannot read the Bible through in a year with such an avid reading of God's Word. There have been many who have. The late T.C. Hammond, the evangelical archdeacon of the Church of Ireland, used to read the Bible through each quarter, and he read it prayerfully and carefully, craving spiritual milk for himself. But, however much one reads, it must be reading that is careful listening to God speak at the same time.

It is reading like Rabbi Duncan said he used to read the Bible with his young Jewish converts in Budapest when he was a missionary to the Jews in Hungary. "They used to read day after day the Epistles of Paul, as if they had been letters that had come by that morning's post." [Moody Stuart, Life of Duncan, 71." James Denny used to say that when one took up the Bible to read there should be an almost visible bracing of oneself and keying up of oneself and when one puts the Bible down an almost visible relaxation.

And the same might be said of that drinking of the spiritual milk that occurs in the hearing of sermons. One comes to church eager, expectant, wanting to hear the voice of the Lord in one's soul. He attends the word of God as it is read and then preached as if God were speaking only and directly to him or to her.

There is an anecdote told of Robert Bruce, the great figure of the Scottish Reformation, whose sermons on the Lord's Supper I have read to you from time to time. It seems that one Sunday the time for the service to begin had come and gone and Bruce was nowhere to be seen in the sanctuary. After he had still not appeared a few minutes later the church officer was sent to look for him in the vestry, the little room off the sanctuary where the minister prepared before the service. The door was shut and he did not open it because, he told the people later, there was apparently another person in the room with the minister and a conversation was underway. Mister Bruce was saying emphatically and repeatedly that he wouldn't go into the church unless this other person would go with him! It was Bruce, of course, in prayer to God!

Well, if a minister should not enter a pulpit without having plead for the presence in and blessing of the Lord upon his preaching of God's Word, should not a congregation likewise not enter and sit down to hear the Word of God without pleading with the Lord to speak to them through that Word. That surely is another way in which one craves pure spiritual milk.

And, then, of course, there is the Lord's Supper, the Word of God in another form, that actually can be eaten and drunk. Indeed, any number of commentators through the ages have thought that Peter is really speaking about the Lord's Supper in these verses and the nourishment that believers receive in coming to the Supper with open mouths, seeking nourishment for their souls from the divine host and his banquet.

All of that and much more could be said in explanation of how one craves the Word of God. But, in a sense those are the easy, the simple questions. The far more difficult matter is how a soul, a Christian soul, comes to crave that spiritual milk so much that he will do these things by which to feed himself on the Word of God.

I will tell you plainly. My problem is not knowing what to do when a craving for spiritual milk is upon me. My problem is that I don't crave that milk as I should, as I want to! I have many times had that craving on my soul and in my soul. I have sometimes had it very powerfully, until it almost hurt, until like a newborn I was crying for milk myself. I too, after all, as you, have tasted the goodness of the Lord. But, I say to my shame, that I don't always feel that way about the Word of God. I can read that Word with hardly a thought to the milk it contains or to my need to grow strong in the life of faith. And I can sometimes hardly read the Word of God for days. I come to the Lord's Supper sometimes very hungry and thirsty, but I sometimes come self-satisfied and with little sense of my great need for the food that is set before me on this table.

Where does the craving come from? How does one come to crave? That is the question! If I had a proper craving for the Word of God, what wonderful things would come to pass in my life, what blessing would be mine.

And here is the hard truth of the matter. I can't tell you how to find that craving. No one can. I can tell you what is right for you to do, how you ought to seek it. You ought to pray for it. You ought to read the Word of God in hopes that the glory of that Word will itself awaken in you a hunger for more of it. You ought to come expectantly to the worship of the Lord's house on the Lord's Day. You ought to engage in spiritual conversation about it with other believers. You ought to read of other believers in the past who craved the Word of God until their example and the evidence of the blessing that came to them through the Word of God stirs your soul as well. You ought to talk with yourself and argue with yourself from gospel principles, just as Peter argues with you here from gospel principles, and make the case to yourself that you ought to crave pure spiritual milk and that no one would have the blessing of that more than yourself. All of that we should do, and if we don't do it, we have no one to blame but ourselves if we do not grow up in our salvation.

But all of that being said, I cannot say why at one time there is such a craving for this milk and at another time there is not. The Spirit blows where he wills. Nor can I tell you why one sermon penetrates your soul and another does not; why sometimes the words of Holy Scripture leap off the page into your heart and at other times your reading of the Word is hard work.

Peter says that we are to crave pure spiritual milk. And sometimes that craving is an act of obedience on our part, a doing what we would do naturally and inevitably and eagerly if that hunger was upon us. It is the difference between ordinary Christian living and revival. What comes powerfully and wonderfully down from heaven into the soul in the one case, must be labored for in the other.

Let me give you an illustration of this -- which is, after all, a most important reality to come to terms with in the living of a faithful Christian life -- I mean that there are times and seasons in our walk with God, and that the Christian life is sometimes a running before the wind and sometimes marching into the teeth of a gale.

I had a telephone call from Ian Tait the other day. Mr. Tait is known to many in this congregation from his visits to us through the years and from the visits of some of us to his various homes in England over those years. He was for many years a pastor of the Evangelical Church of Welwyn, England. He was a friend of Martin Lloyd-Jones, a founding member of the Evangelical Library in London, a collector of rare theological books, especially of the works of the Reformers and English puritans. Many of these have made their way into the Ian Tait Collection at the Covenant Seminary Library. He was a natural scholar and a gifted and original thinker. I slavishly copied my approach to the annotating of my Bible from him and for that and many other things owe him a great debt.

As many of you know, Mrs. Tait, Mae, died last Autumn after a long illness and her death has been a terrible blow to Mr. Tait for their relationship as husband and wife through 48 years had been wonderfully close and affectionate. I have not spoken to him since her death when she has not been the main subject of conversation, even if one or the other of us had called ostensibly to speak of something else.

In this particular call, which was about some other business, he soon fell to talking about her and about how they came to meet. They had become acquainted through their attendance at the same meetings for Christian young adults. The war was on. She was a nurse; he was an RAF pilot. He said that he had admired Mae from a distance for "her spirituality and her eyes."

Well it happened that one night he was visiting some friends and she happened to be there when he called. Up to that point, he said, he had shaken her hand exactly twice! He offered to take the dog for a walk and asked her if she would like to go along. They came back engaged and he said he wasn't sure who was the most shaken!

Well, they weren't able to see one another every day in those war years and the next meeting of fiances was two weeks later. It was at a restaurant, "Fullers," near one of the London railroad stations. There was not a great deal to eat in restaurants in those terrible days, so they ordered what they could -- he described it as a congealed mass of macaroni and cheese. Twenty minutes later the waiter came by to ask if he should heat up their plates again. It was only then that they noticed that they had been staring into one another's eyes for all that while and, while their food grew cold, they had become the object of amusement for the other patrons in the restaurant.

What a wonderful moment to look back on. But here is my point. Oh that life were always, oh that marriage were always like that! But life is not, nor is marriage. Life for them was not always such an ecstasy of emotion. The rest of the world did not always recede from view because completely without effort they found one another so entrancing. No doubt there were difficult days in the Tait marriage the weariness of raising children, the pressures of work and here he is now, all alone, grieving, without the partner of his life, without the one who was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. Life, true life, and true Christian life, is a mixture of both things -- the wind and the calm; the downhill and the uphill; the easy and the hard; the natural and the unnatural.

I tell you, it is a very interesting thing to me, and I think it is very important, that Peter calls on us to crave the milk of the Word of God. Like a newborn baby. But a baby doesn't have to work at craving, it comes on him and he cannot do anything else. And sometimes it is so with us. But many times it is not. And that is the nature of our lives, having to work to do what we wish nature, the Christian nature, would do for us, having to work at doing what we feel ought to come without effort or attention. It is no accident that Peter tells us to do what, in his illustration, new borns do not have to be told to do, for they do it by nature and instinct.

Perhaps the key lies here. What newborns do by nature does not count for nearly so much as what adults do by effort and character and out of loyalty to God. What requires real effort and the assertion of a godly character is what most pleases God. He does not lower the standard -- it is still "craving" that we must do. But it is a much harder thing to crave by the act of the will than it is by the instinct of the body! In that he is treating us as adults, he is paying us that respect and showing us that regard.

So much of the Christian life is this way. And it is what makes it wearying and difficult, amidst all of its exquisite pleasures and compensations! But remember this: Jesus said to Thomas, when upon seeing the Lord after the resurrection, an overpowering experience sent him to his knees, "You believe because you have seen, blessed -- the implication is more blessed -- are those who believe even though they have not seen."

Sometimes you don't have to be told to crave spiritual milk to grow up in the grace of God. Sometimes it is the hardest work to crave that milk. But it is always to be done. It is the way of our new life into which we have been reborn. Take comfort from the fact that craving that a Christian must work at, counts for more than craving that comes without effort. And, we have, after all, tasted the goodness of the Lord. It is not as though there is something better for us to do with our time and energy.