The part of the verse that I love so much is ".....since you have tasted that the Lord is good".
How have the Lord been good to you?
For me, the Lord has been good to me by making my body his temple and putting his word in my mouth.
Yes, the verse was written by a believer to believers about believers so its original audience might well have said the same thing because they too would have been made members of Christ's body. At least that is the predicate condition of the passage. Notice the "
if..."There is an implication being there will be no growth in salvation
if the reader has not tasted the goodness or kindness of the Lord.
I'm not certain but many discussion boards have limits on self-promotion. I encourage you to read the forum's rules and make sure you're not violating any such rules.
I think the ....pure milk that Peter refers to is the word of God. What do you think?
Yes, that apparently was the view of the medieval translators, too, but again I note
the phrase does not appear in the Greek manuscripts and has been added in certain translations, most likely as an allegiance to the tradition of the KJV.
You're a pastor and apparently an educated pastor so presumably you know the rules of biblical exegesis. This phrase was either a common phrase in the NT era, one so popular Jews throughout the Roman provinces would have understood it. Our first response should be to look to scripture for scripture's rendering, yes? When we do we find that the only mention of "milk" is Paul's use in his first letter to Corinth, chapters 3 and 9 - with which Peter was likely familiar since later in his own second epistle he compares Paul's letters favorably with "
the other scriptures." Based on the use of the idiom in 1 Cor. 3:2 and 9:7 I'm inclined to say the milk is
fellowship in the body of Christ.
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
"And I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual men, but as to men of flesh, as to infants in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not solid food; for you were not yet able to receive it. Indeed, even now you are not yet able, for you are still fleshly. For since there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not fleshly, and are you not walking like mere men? For when one says, "I am of Paul," and another, "I am of Apollos," are you not mere men? What then is Apollos? And what is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, even as the Lord gave opportunity to each one. I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth. So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth. Now he who plants and he who waters are one; but each will receive his own reward according to his own labor. For we are God's fellow workers; you are God's field, God's building."
What was the Corinthian congregation not able to receive? Whatever it is it has to do with the factions present in the congregation.
1 Corinthians 9:1-7
"Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? Are you not my work in the Lord? If to others I am not an apostle, at least I am to you; for you are the seal of my apostleship in the Lord. My defense to those who examine me is this: Do we not have a right to eat and drink? Do we not have a right to take along a believing wife, even as the rest of the apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas? Or do only Barnabas and I not have a right to refrain from working? Who at any time serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard and does not eat the fruit of it? Or who tends a flock and does not use the milk of the flock?"[/I]
Here we read the "milk" is the milk of the flock. Both these verses fit well with Peter's content in which he admonishes malice, deceit, hypocrisy, and slander - which are all corruptions of fellowship - and he couches his solution in knowing the kindness of the Lord. So if we use scripture to render scripture it appears this is an exhortation to pure fellowship, not the word. Remember: the readers already had the incarnate word in them and the NT canon hadn't been written yet. Any canon (word) to which Peter would be referring in the first century would be either the Tanakh or the epistolary (not the modern Bible).
