Wild rumors had begun to circulate in some places about what Christians actually taught and did in their meetings together. To clear the air and defend the good name of Christianity, a church leader in Carthage named Tertullian wrote a brief explanation of Christian practices and a critique of the unjust accusations that had been made against them. In his work, he wrote at one point that these attacks against Christianity were made out of jealousy, because Christians displayed a character of life that their pagan neighbors did not possess. His statement highlighted a quality that will be the focus of our study of 1 Peter today.
Here is what Tertullian wrote: “It is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us. See how they love one another, they say, for they themselves are animated by mutual hatred; how they are ready even to die for one another, they say, for they themselves will sooner put to death (The Apology, ch. 39).”
There is much food for thought in that quote. If people outside our church today were to take a careful look at us, would their overall impression be, “Those people sure love each other!” If people slandered our Christian faith, could we say, “You know, they’re probably a bit jealous of us because we have such a good thing going on here with our love for each other.”
Regardless of where we might think we are with respect to a goal like that, it’s always good for us to remember that that kind of mutual love is, in fact, one of our goals as a church. When we think about that kind of love, a couple of important questions come to mind: what does that kind of love look like, and how can we sustain it? Peter is going to touch on those questions in our text for today, so let’s take a look at how he answers them.
1. Build upon your baby steps (1:22)
In verse 22, Peter affirms the steps that these believers had already taken toward loving one another, and he calls on them to round out their love with passion and purity [READ v. 22].
I’d like you to notice one thing about Peter’s language in that first phrase. He wrote that they had purified their souls by obedience for a sincere brotherly love. That word “for” indicates the purpose or goal behind their obedience. In their obedience for the Lord, they had this goal in mind of obeying not only for their own benefit, but to build up a mutual love within their Christian community.
I think persecution had taught these believers just how much they truly needed each other. They may have been having a difficult time just meeting their own daily needs, so their experience taught them that they badly needed to band together.
This is a goal that we need to keep in mind as well as we as individuals seek to grow in the Lord. Obviously there is an individual element for each of us in our relationship with God, but we need to remember that our individual relationship with God does not exist merely for our own benefit. We must always deal with this inescapable fact that we have been placed into the body of Christ – a fellowship with many different parts that have different functions, yet they are all designed to work together as one.
So as I seek to obey God in my life and you seek to obey God in your life, we must remember that one of the goals of that process is not simply that I might hold the hand of Jesus more tightly, but that I might also tighten my grip with you as well – that I might become better equipped to show love to you.
In his command, then, Peter explains how to fill out or round out our love for each other. He says, “love one another earnestly from a pure heart.” The word “earnestly” speaks of a deep-seated passion or drive. Your translation might say “fervently,” and that’s a good word. The word “fervent” comes from the Latin word for boiling. We could paraphrase this command, “love one another with a love that is boiling over,” or “a love that has reached the boiling point.” Water that is boiling has much more energy and potency to it than water that is simply at room temperature.
But how can we get that kind of life and drive flowing through our love, and how can we maintain it? That is what Peter explains in verses 23-25.
2. The Lord can use His word to sustain our love for each other (1:23-25)
[READ vv. 23-25] Make sure you don’t miss Peter’s basic argument here. He states that we can love one another earnestly because the seed from which our new life in Christ sprang is imperishable. It is lasting. It is not like our physical strength, which is wasting away and perishing, rather it is constant, always pulsating with life, and thus our love can always be alive and fervent as well.
Now the Holy Spirit is the source of our new life, but the channel or the conduit or the pipeline that he used it to send new life to us was the word of God – God’s message from himself about himself to mankind. This is the same channel that God still uses today to accomplish spiritual work in our lives, so God’s full message to us, found in the Bible, causes this book to have a unique quality about it that makes it unlike any other book in the world.
That’s why we call it the “Holy Bible.” The word “Bible” comes from the Greek word that simply means book, but obviously, God’s word is a special and unique book, and thus we call it the Holy Bible, or the holy book. And because God continues to do work in our lives through the message of this book, he has protected it and preserved it so that it will remain forever.
Let me give you just one example from history that reveals how carefully God has preserved the Bible. During my recent trip to Israel, one of the sites we were able to visit was Qumran, the place where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Many of the Dead Sea Scrolls were copies of the books of the Old Testament, and these copies were written in the centuries just before the birth of Christ.
Prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest copy of the Old Testament in Hebrew that archaeologists had ever found was from 1000 A.D., or 1000 years after the birth of Christ. So the Dead Sea Scrolls gave us copies of the Old Testament in Hebrew that were 1000 years older than any copies we possessed before. And when the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls was compared to the text of the manuscript from 1000 A.D., it was seen that the text was virtually identical, which served as further confirmation for our conviction that the message we read in the Bible today truly is the same message that Moses wrote and that Isaiah and Daniel wrote and so forth.
God has miraculously preserved the Bible for thousands of years now because it is the channel through which he accomplishes his spiritual work in our lives. That process of God’s work in our lives is what allows our love for each other to be sustained with such a deep fervency. It’s not so much that simply reading a book fuels our love for each other, but it’s the fact that the author of the book is still alive, and in fact he has sent his own spirit to live with in our hearts. So the author of the book takes the message of the book and makes it become a living reality in our lives.
So our power to love one another is not fading away as our physical strength is. It remains within us and is fed as we read the word of God, because the author of the book makes it a reality within us as we yield to his will.
Now we may still have a question about what it looks like to love one another from a pure heart. This is what Peter goes on to describe in the first part of chapter 2.
3. A pure heart comes from putting away evil and feeding upon what is good (2:1-3)
In verse one, Peter gives us a good list of attitudes and behaviors that defile our hearts and thus need to be put away in order for our hearts to be pure. Notice how these attitudes and behaviors could all undermine and compromise our relationships with each other [READ v. 1].
It’s not hard to see how these attitudes and behaviors cannot coexist with love. Malice refers to having evil intentions toward someone. Deceit, of course, refers to lying or trickery. Hypocrisy is what results when we try to hide things like malice and deceit with a good face, pretending that all is well between us and the person for whom we have malice in our hearts. Envy makes it difficult for us to work for the good of someone else because we’re jealous of the good that they already have! Slander is a very active effort to harm someone else through the things that we say about them.
Peter’s solution is for us to put such things away from us. The word picture behind that verb is the action of taking off a piece of clothing and setting it aside. When your clothes are really filthy, you don’t just put something else on over the top of them. No – you take them off and replace them; you change into something else.
Likewise, when you discover one of these attitudes or behaviors in your own life you need to lay it aside and go on without it. You must not tolerate it and carry it around with you any longer. Let these things disgust you the way your clothing might disgust you if you got filthy while working cattle or if you had a good workout with no deodorant on. Put these things away from you! Confess them to God and ask for his forgiveness, and if you have done harm to someone else, like through slander for example, then confess your sin to that person, ask for his forgiveness, then try to undo any damage that your words may have done.
Having put those things away, we are then ready to grow in a different direction. Let’s see what Peter writes in verse two [READ v. 2].
Your translation might say something like “long for the pure milk of the word.” The only difference here is a question about the translation of one word in the Greek text. The ESV translation here makes a bit more of a general statement about spiritual growth, but the point really ends up being the same. God accomplishes his work in us through his word, so we must long for his word if we desire to see his work in our lives.
Peter tells us to make our longing like the longing that newborn infants have for milk. How intense is that longing? Do infants send a message like this: “Hey mom, I think I might be feeling a little bit of an empty stomach coming on here, so if you think about it, maybe you could pencil me in for a feeding here in a little while. I don’t really want to butt in on everything else that you have going on, so whenever you can squeeze it in, that’s fine. Meanwhile, I’ll just remain calm and totally peaceful as I wait patiently.”
Is that how infants long for milk? Of course not! They demand it, they cry out for it, they act like they’re instantly going to die if they don’t have milk now, now, NOW! If they don’t have their milk, nothing will satisfy them until they do.
My friends, if we are going to have a pure love for each other that is at a fever pitch, that is boiling over, we need to realize just how desperately we need to feed our souls with the word of God. The Bible is the channel through which God accomplishes his work in our lives. It is the way that he offers his promises to a whole new generation. It is the way that he corrects our thinking so that we can be transformed by the renewing of our minds. It is the way that he points out our faults and our flaws so we can put them away and grow in a different direction – grow until this salvation that God has given to us actually starts to have a good fit on us, so that the status of being a child of God actually comes to fit us rather well.
Peter closes this little section in verse three with another motivation for all of this that is a stroke of rhetorical genius. He says that we should put away sinful things and long for the pure spiritual milk “if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”
Peter isn’t really questioning his audience’s experience with the Lord so much as he is drawing them in to have them reaffirm it. When we read these words, the idea is that we will say, “Wait a minute! What do you mean ‘if indeed?’ I’ve tasted that the Lord is good!”
When I make that affirmation, what have I just done? I’ve just taken Peter’s bait! I’ve just affirmed that what he said is true, and that I really should live the way he is describing. If I have tasted that the Lord is good, how can I do anything but long for his pure spiritual milk? Any other response would be improper, so with this little rhetorical flourish, Peter leaves us with no choice but to agree that we should love one another earnestly from a pure heart and long for the pure milk of God’s word. Any other response toward our good Lord would be improper. May God help us to have such loving and such longing!