23 for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God. 24 For, “ALL FLESH IS LIKE GRASS, AND ALL ITS GLORY LIKE THE FLOWER OF GRASS. THE GRASS WITHERS, AND THE FLOWER FALLS OFF, 25 BUT THE WORD OF THE LORD ENDURES FOREVER.” And this is the word which was preached to you. 1 Therefore, putting aside all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander, 2 like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation, 3 if you have tasted the kindness of the Lord.
I have heard it preached that in our world today there are more Christians being openly persecuted and killed for their faith on a daily basis than in any period of the history of the church; even from the first century.
That should give us pause, here in America, for serious reflection. Because if that assertion is true, then it is only a matter of time before we find ourselves subject to the same.
Peter wrote this letter to Christians going through persecutions and trials and his counsel to them just may be what the wisest of Christians in today’s church will seek after and take to heart and put to action.
A point that should be of great interest to us is that scholars put the date of the writing of this letter at approximately 64 A.D., which would have been just before Nero’s great persecutions against Christians, wherein many were killed violently.
So considering the Holy Spirit’s timing in getting these words out to the churches throughout the Rome-controlled regions, it may be very sagacious of us in a time of relative peace and prior to out and out persecution of the church in our own day, to take a careful look at the encouragement Peter has to give.
Now he begins his letter encouraging them in reference to trials they are in and are facing in the future, giving them assurance of their salvation and hope for an eternal outcome.
Then he goes on to exhort to holy living and the expression of Godly love among the brethren, and he quickly gets to the heart of where their help lies for living this existence of mutual love and support and joyful confidence in their secure place in Christ.
I want to go straight there today, and jump right in at verse 23 of chapter 1.
THE LIVING AND ENDURING WORD
23 for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God.
Everything Peter has been saying up to now has led to this word ‘for’. For you have been born again.
Believers, that is the very heart, the very foundation, the very center of all the New Testament epistles. All encouragement, all exhortation, all predication and prediction is built up on the fact that you have been born again.
We’re most familiar with the term from the third chapter of John’s gospel and Jesus’ discourse with Nicodemus. He said, ‘you must be born again’. It is the imperative upon which hinges death and life, spiritual understanding or spiritual darkness, eternal life with God or separation from Him.
But when we come to the epistles we see ‘you have been born again’. Peter begins this letter telling them that God caused them to be born again to a living hope.
Christians we should be overcome with rejoicing when we contemplate what God has done for us. He has caused us to be born again! A second chance. A second start. But this time it’s different.
This isn’t a second chance in the sense that He has wiped your slate clean and now you begin all over and try hard not to blow it again.
Peter says ‘not of seed that is perishable’. By that choice of wording he is contrasting your new spiritual birth to that of the physical birth, which doesn’t last.
Your human father’s seed was of the flesh. As all physical life begins with a seed, so does ours. It is perishable. Peter uses Isaiah’s words to drive the thought home (vs 24).
But this time, he says, you are born of imperishable seed, the seed of the Spirit through the living and abiding Word of God.
You had no part in it. It was all God’s doing. You had no part in your physical birth, and you had no part in your spiritual birth from above.
God caused it, and now you have been born again to a living hope; to a life that does not perish, through the Word which does not perish.
I want to share something with you that may seem like an aside at first, but there is very pertinent application with what Peter is teaching.
Verse 22, which quotes Isaiah 40:6-8, ends with “But the Word of the Lord abides forever”
Now if we go to Isaiah 55:10-11 we read this:
10 “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, And do not return there without watering the earth And making it bear and sprout, And furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater; 11 So will My word be which goes forth from My mouth; It will not return to Me empty, Without accomplishing what I desire, And without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it.
In the course of studying for this sermon I ran across this passage that I know I’ve read and heard many times before, and something jumped out at me that I hadn’t seen any other time.
This is God speaking through the prophet and His words are, “…as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there without watering the earth…”.
When I read that I wondered, when did men figure out the cycle of water from evaporation to condensation to precipitation to collection and realize that water just continues in this cycle to the earth and back to the heavens and to the earth again?
So I did a little research and found out that it was primarily the efforts of several 17th century scientists that came up with the water cycle we now learn about in grammar school.
But right here in Isaiah 55 God revealed to us that water comes down from heaven and returns there, after accomplishing the purpose for which it was sent.
Even so, His Word proceeds from His mouth, and it accomplishes the purpose for which it was sent, and returns to Him in the form of the fruit that it has borne. New life. New growth.
I found a kid’s website that explained scientific concepts in simple terms, and they began explaining the water cycle by saying that the earth has a limited amount of water, and that same water just continues to cycle.
So it is with God’s Word. Not that it is limited, but it is the same, it never changes, it continues to proceed from Him and return to Him having done His work. It is living and it is enduring. The word of the Lord abides forever.
And, says Peter, this is the word that was preached to them. That word translated ‘preached’ refers to the proclamation of good news. It is a direct reference to the Gospel message, because no other message could have caused them to be born again. They could rejoice, and so can we.
The living and abiding Word of the Good News of Jesus Christ has caused us to be born again to a living hope. That is the truth that purifies our souls and brings us to the obedience of sharing a sincere and fervent love for one another, as he talked about in verse 22.
THE CONVICTING WORD
Moving on to our next point; the Word of God convicts of sin. That is a good thing. I think we seldom think this through to see what a blessing it is that the Word convicts.
The word ‘convict’ has negative connotations for us, and fundamentally it is a negative word. It means to find guilty, to make aware of error or sin.
Putting the emphasis on the other syllable we call people in prison ‘convicts’ because they were convicted of crime.
Put in a spiritual context though, it is the first step toward seeing God. The Holy Spirit exposes sin and brings repentance to the heart of the sinner so that he or she, newly aware of that sin, might turn from it and turn to God.
Now that is not just a truth pertaining to initial salvation.
Peter is telling his readers to put off or put aside certain things because the presence of them hinders our relationships toward one another, and supplants our desire for God’s Word.
Do you see it? In verse 22 he says that the purification of their souls by the truth of God’s Word, that is, the specific truth pertaining to the Gospel, makes them able to have a sincere, unhypocritical love for one another, and in verse 1 of chapter 2 he’s exhorting them to lay aside certain things as a prerequisite to experiencing a real desire for the Word, and again, each of these things listed has to do with our relationship to one another.
So the convicting power of the Holy Spirit works in the lives of believers to expose those things that hinder, not for the purpose of condemning; there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus; but for exposing so we might ‘put them aside’. I want to say something about that term also but first let’s look briefly at this list of words in 2:1
Malice: In English it has the idea of wanting to harm someone else. It is wickedness; hatefulness toward another.
Deceit (or guile): It’s a term that relates to a fishhook. Falsehood, treachery. The act of defrauding someone or tricking them for one’s own gain.
Hypocrisy: The word originally was used of an actor wearing a mask, pretending to be something he was not.
Envy: Resenting someone for what they have that we do not. Of course the outward manifestation of that is going to be bitterness, hatred, conflict.
Slander: Gossip. Defamation of character.
Folks, it’s sad to note but true nevertheless, that this list of words could accurately describe many of our churches today. They could be placed, each capitalized, on a placard and hung over the front door of many church structures across our land. Because if you go inside and stay awhile it is these things you will see being acted out, not a longing for the pure milk of the Word.
Malice. Deceit. Hypocrisy. Envy. Slander.
And whereas we had no part in our salvation as mentioned earlier, in this we are called to be the actors. Put them off. Put these things aside.
The ancient church had a custom when baptizing, that the candidate would remove and cast away the garments they were wearing before baptism, and after the baptism ceremony the church would give them a new garment to wear. It was symbolic of putting away the old life and putting on the new man now that they were identified with Christ.
Peter admonishes them and us to make a deliberate effort to cast those things away from us so that our hearts might remain pure, and therefore our relationships be of a sincere and fervent love, and our desire for the Word will not be quenched.
When those things exist in the church and there seems to be no conviction and no repenting present, that is a sure sign that the Holy Spirit is being ignored. The time will come when those people who are feeding on one another like frenzied sharks may as well write ‘Ichabod’ (the Spirit has departed) over the door and go home.
Our relationships with one another have a great bearing on the health of our relationship with God and His Word and we should be thankful that He convicts our hearts by His Spirit so we can cast them off and be healthy once more.
“Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts…” (Heb 3)
THE NOURISHING WORD
2 like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation,
The Word of God nourishes. It brings life and as long as there is a true desire for that Word it continues to nourish.
There is an interesting point to make about these words, ‘like newborn babies’ .
Deferring to a student of the Biblical languages rather than making the point on my own researching steam, I’ll quote John MacArthur.
“Peter could have made his point just with the term brephe, but to underscore it he added the modifier artigenneta, which literally means ‘born just now’. The two words identify an infant that has just emerged from its mother’s womb and is crying for milk from her breast. That sole and desperate hunger for milk is the newborn’s first expressed longing designed by God to correspond to their greatest need, and it illustrates how strongly believers ought to desire the Word.” The MacArthur New Testament Commentary – I Peter – Moody, 2004, pg 98
When I read these words of MacArthur’s my thoughts went immediately to something I learned in the process of being a new father years ago, so I looked up the details to share with you here to perhaps magnify what the Holy Spirit is impressing on us through Peter.
“Colostrum is the early milk made by (the mother’s) breasts, and is usually present after the fifth or sixth month of pregnancy. Once the baby is born, it is present in small amounts for the first 3 days to match the small size of the baby’s stomach. Most babies do not need additional nutrition during this time. … Colostrum is designed to meet the special needs of a newborn. Colostrum has a yellow color, feels thick, and is high in protein and low in fat and sugar. The protein content is three times higher than mature milk because it is rich in the immunities being passed from the mother to protect the baby.” California Pacific Medical Center, San Francisco, CA – www.cpmc.org (Parenthesis mine in substitute for the word ‘your’)
Now I know I’ve said this before and you can be certain you will hear it .from me again.
When a churchgoer, a professing Christian, has no desire for the Word of God, or even little desire for the Word of God, there is something wrong. He or she is sick.
If they are a newly professing believer they will have an insatiable hunger for the Word, and they will be soaking it up like a sponge. If they are not, there is something wrong and red flags should go up.
If that person is really born again then there is something in the life hindering their relationships both horizontally and vertically.
I don’t know if Peter knew anything about Colostrum, but the Holy Spirit certainly does… and He inspired Peter to write to believers that the desire in them for God’s Word should be like the singularly focused desire of a baby fresh out of his mother’s womb for the nourishment his body needs and all the benefits of growth and protection that milk brings.
Now don’t get confused here. Peter is only using this analogy to impress upon us the sort of desire we should have for the Word. He is not telling us that we should always want only milk or that we should remain babies.
In I Corinthians 3 Paul criticizes his readers for not being ready for meat and the writer to the Hebrews does the same in the fifth chapter of that letter.
Peter’s admonition here in our text is not necessarily addressed to new believers, but to all believers, pertaining to the intensity of our desire for God’s Word.
Look at verse 3 now. “…if you have tasted the kindness of the Lord”
Don’t be thrown by that word, ‘if’. It’s an unclear rendering from the Greek into English, and Peter is just saying to them that since they have tasted the kindness of the Lord in saving them, by their desiring and partaking of the pure milk of the Word they will continue to taste of the blessings He has for them in it, including continued spiritual growth.
Christians, I have a growing sense of urgency about this and I hope you do also.
The time was never more ripe than right now for true believers in our nation’s churches to put off the things that cause division and strife and conflict among us, and both corporately and in our individual lives to go at the Word of God with voracious appetites.
If you examine yourself honestly and find that your desire for God’s Word on a daily basis is waning, then pray and ask Him to search your heart and reveal to you anything that may be hindering and making you lose your appetite.
Once that is done and you know you’ve dealt in a Biblical way with anything He has revealed to you, then pray and ask Him to give you a great hunger; a longing; for His Word, and devour it.
The first desire of the righteous, those who are declared right with God, should be for the pure milk of the Word. It’s the sign of a healthy birth and a continuance to thrive.
Troubled times are ahead, believers in Christ, and the time to get ready for them is now, and the way to be ready is to let His good news purify our hearts so that we can live in unhypocritical and fervent love with the brethren, putting off the evil ways of the old nature, and voraciously devouring the pure Word of God so it can grow us and mature us and make us stand.
