TUESDAY August 22nd
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.’
We have come today to the second chapter, but remember that the chapter and verse divisions have been a later addition to help us navigate around the word of God, and so Peter uses the words ‘Like newborn infants’ in verse 2. I like to think that the term ‘newborn infants’ takes us back to verse 23 of the previous chapter that tells us that we have been born again. When we were born again, we became spiritual newborn infants, but we shouldn’t remain as infants, we should mature and develop to become mature men and women of God.
This is one of the reasons why the different authors had written the letters or epistles so that we can 1) take up and read the word of God so that we can 2) move on from infancy to maturity.
The word of God is our spiritual sustenance or our spiritual diet and in these few verses Peter is drawing a comparison between what would be an unhealthy diet versus what is a healthy diet. Picture it this way, for example if we were to look into our food cupboards and put what we find in two piles, the unhealthy and the healthy, then if we were determined to live in a way that would suit us best, to enable us to be fit and well, we would put the unhealthy to one side and make a decision to use the healthy only.
Peter gets us to look into our spiritual cupboard and he starts off by considering the unhealthy option, things that if we allow them to be our daily diet would lead us to be unhealthy Christians, in the pile he puts malice, then deceit, then hypocrisy, then envy and he tops the pile with slander. ‘Look at this pile’ he would say ‘and put it away, bin them, for these things will cause you to be spiritually unwell, bitter and twisted and you will not progress to be spiritually healthy and mature’, Paul gives the same advice as we see in Ephesians 4:31 ‘Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, along with all malice’ and Colossians 3:8 ‘But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth.’
Peter then says, ‘This is what you need’ and he makes a simple pile, there is only one item in this pile, and it is the word of God. ‘Feed on this’, Peter then continues ‘take the milk first if you need to, but progress just like a newborn babe and move onto the meat and you will soon find that you will be spiritually healthy and will mature as a child of God’.