Crying for Milk

Picture a three-week-old baby at four in the morning. There is no reasoning with that cry. Nothing in the room settles until the one thing arrives, and nothing else will do in its place.

Peter picked that hunger on purpose: "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby." The word for "sincere" means pure, with nothing mixed into it. In Greek it is the word for "guile" with a small "not" in front, so it means milk without guile. Peter used that very word one sentence earlier: "laying aside all malice, and all guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and all evil speakings." So he tells you to put the mixed-in thing out of yourself, and then he hands you the one thing that has never had anything mixed into it.

Milk is used as an insult in other places, and it helps to set them side by side. Hebrews is impatient with its readers: "for every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe." Paul says much the same to Corinth: "I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it." Both of them are complaining that their readers have not grown up. Peter is talking about hunger, and hunger is the one thing a newborn has in full. Nobody has to teach it.

So what Peter commands is an appetite, and the next line makes that plain: "If so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious." That is David's invitation passed along: "O taste and see that the LORD is good." Think about what you reach for late at night when the house is quiet. Is God's word one of those things? If it is not, start small, the way a baby does. Once you have tasted that the Lord is gracious, the hunger grows, and God "hath filled the hungry with good things."

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 240 is A Table in the Presence of Enemies (Psalm 23:5).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two