[sunday meditations]

1 PETER 2.2-3

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.

St. Peter just can’t get off the regeneration horse. He compares the Christians in Asia Minor to newborn infants. Just as babies are born and must grow up into adults, so Christians who have been “born again” mustn’t be content to remain as babies but must pursue maturity, which St. Peter here identifies as “salvation.” Peter’s main point is that, as regenerate human beings, Christians are to pursue genuine human living. This involves the “putting off” of verse 1 and embracing the exilic lifestyle Peter will lay out in the coming chapters.

“What does it mean to grow up into salvation?” It certainly doesn’t mean that once we are regenerate, we need to keep being holier and holier or we’ll lose our salvation.  It doesn’t mean that while we’re saved by grace we’re “kept in” by works.  It doesn’t mean that once we enter the fold of God, our position there is dependent upon the accelerating rate of our sanctification. Salvation, remember, is a multi-layered event, a process of sorts. There’s the past act of salvation: when God declares, in a climactic and decisive moment, the sinner to be “in the right,” forgiven and redeemed, by virtue of Christ’s death and resurrection, when the person receives the Holy Spirit. This is the moment of regeneration. Salvation also involves the present reality of implementing our salvation in our daily lives; in other words, it involves living-out the gospel and the fact that we indeed have been redeemed. And then there’s the future aspect: when our salvation will be completed at glorification, when those who have died will be raised and those who are alive will be changed. “Growing up into salvation” is all about sanctification; it’s all about how we’re to implement and put into practice the fact that we have been saved, are being saved, and will be saved.

A question is raised: “What’s the spiritual milk that St. Peter tells the Christians to long for?” Depending on your translation, the phrase might look something like this: “long for the pure spiritual milk of the word.” The phrase “of the word” doesn’t appear in the actual Greek text (kudos to the E.S.V. for resisting tradition here). The “milk of the word” addition appears as early as the 1611 King James Version, and we also see it in the more recent and scholarly New American Standard Bible (shame on them for the 1611 baggage). Translators originally added the phrase as an attempt to explain what they thought the verse was saying, and their take goes something like this: “The pure spiritual milk is the Word of God, the Scriptures, and through digesting it we’re to grow up into Christian maturity.” That’s all good and well, and there’s no denying that studying scripture, praying through scripture, memorizing scripture, or what have you is profitable to development as a Christian. The scriptures are “living and active”, and the Spirit works through them to transform us.

But the addition’s just too limiting: it does more harm than good. Keep in mind: the scriptures in the days of the New Testament weren’t the New Testament per se but the whole of the Jewish tradition, including texts such as the Wisdom of Solomon which are no longer considered part of the Old Testament canon. To assume that Peter’s talking about “the bible” is to ignore the fact that the bible, as we have it now, didn’t exist (and there’s no reason to suppose that Peter ever assumed his letters would end up in some big book consisting of strange documents thrown together).

The question, then, remains unanswered: “What is this pure spiritual milk?” Chances are Peter doesn’t have any specific thing in mind here. He probably isn’t thinking specifically of “prayer” or “bible reading” or anything like that. Rather, he’s using the phrase “spiritual milk” because it directly connects with the metaphor of the passage (newborn infants) and carries on the idea of growing up into maturity. Just as newborn infants need milk to gain the nutrients they need to continue developing healthily, so Christians (especially new Christians) need the nutrients of the Spirit to continue in healthy growth. As an infant deprived of the necessary nutrients will be accosted by all sorts of problems, so Christians who deprive themselves of the Spirit will find themselves in the same boat. Such spiritual milk involves anything whereby we come into contact with these spiritual nutrients; prayer, bible reading, and other spiritual disciplines are avenues by which we interact with the Spirit and find ourselves being fed. Thus St. Peter’s phrase becomes a “blanket-phrase” of sorts, embracing anything and everything that’s profitable to growing up into our salvation.

Does this include reading the bible? Absolutely.  Does it include prayer? Of course it does.  It includes all of these things. Peter’s simply using imagery to make the point that Christians aren’t just to sit on their butts all day and wait for things to change; no, we’re to be active in our pursuit of genuine human living, in our pursuit of our full and final salvation.

As a rhetorical clincher, Peter says that the Christians are to do this if indeed they have tasted that the Lord is good. He’s undoubtedly echoing Psalm 34.8, a pretty important psalm that remained relevant to the Asia Minor Christians as persecution loomed, a psalm which Peter will come back to later on in his letter. There’s much to psalm 34 and its relevance to all that Peter says, but we’ll leave that for later on in the study. The point is that Peter knows none of the Christians will deny that they have tasted the goodness of the Lord (here “Lord” being YHWH, the Judeo-Christian God, rather than solely Jesus); and so they’re without excuse to do what Peter has told them to do: to long for the pure spiritual milk whereby they will mature as regenerate human beings.