Milk, and the meat nobody was ready for

Two writers use the same image for the Word and mean opposite things by it, which is why the pair is worth a day.

Peter uses it as a command, and it is affectionate.

Crave pure spiritual milk, like newborn infants. Nothing shameful there. A newborn wanting milk is a newborn doing exactly what it should, and the intensity of the wanting is the point of the picture. Nobody has to teach a baby to be hungry.

The writer of Hebrews uses the same image as a rebuke.

By this time you ought to be teachers. You need milk, not solid food. Same substance, opposite verdict — because the difference is not the milk. It is how long you have been drinking it.

Set the two side by side and the tension resolves into a sequence.

Milk is right for a new believer and right for every believer at the start of every morning — the plain, nourishing, obvious things. Nobody outgrows the gospel.

But milk was never meant to be the whole diet permanently, and Hebrews is blunt about what a permanent milk diet produces: someone unacquainted with the teaching about righteousness, still an infant, after enough years to have become a teacher.

And then Hebrews defines maturity, in a way that cuts against how most of us would define it.

Those who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

Three words carry it. Constant use — habit, repetition, over time. Trained — a word from the gymnasium, the vocabulary of an athlete’s discipline. Distinguish — the ability to tell two similar things apart when it matters.

Which means solid food is not advanced information. It is the diet that produces discernment. A man can accumulate a great deal of Bible and remain unable to tell a good spirit from a bad one, a wise decision from a plausible one, a true teacher from a fluent one. Hebrews would call that an infant with a large vocabulary.

And note that Peter attaches a condition to the craving. The verse before tells them to rid themselves of malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy and slander; the verse after says now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. Appetite is bracketed by repentance on one side and by having actually tasted on the other. A man with no appetite for Scripture might look first at what he has been feeding on instead.

And the training is not glamorous. Constant use. The same book, most mornings, for years, until the palate changes and a man can taste what is wrong with something before he can explain it.

Peter’s adjective for the milk, adolos, means unadulterated — without deceit or additive. It was used of goods sold without dilution. The image assumes a market in which milk was routinely watered down, and the word choice is a claim about purity of content rather than simplicity of content.

There is a translation question in 1 Peter 2:2. The word rendered spiritual is logikos — related to logos — and can be read as of the word or rational, reasonable. Most translations take it as milk of the word, which fits the previous verses where the enduring word of God is the seed that gave them birth. Paul uses the same adjective in Romans 12:1 for reasonable or spiritual worship.

Hebrews 5:11–6:3 is one continuous rebuke, and the phrase in 5:11 — you have become dull of hearing — uses a word meaning sluggish or slow. The condition is described as something they became, not something they always were. It is reversible in both directions.

The word for trained in 5:14 is gymnazo, the root of gymnasium, and it recurs in 1 Timothy 4:7 for training oneself in godliness and in Hebrews 12:11 for those who have been trained by discipline. The New Testament’s picture of maturity is athletic rather than academic.

The rebuke in Hebrews is aimed at a congregation, not an individual, and the writer says he has much to say that is hard to explain because you have become dull of hearing. The obstacle he names is not the difficulty of the material but the condition of the audience.

Note what Hebrews calls the elementary teaching in 6:1–2 — repentance, faith, washings, laying on of hands, resurrection, eternal judgment. That list would count as advanced doctrine in many churches today, and the writer calls it the foundation and urges them to move past it.

Look it upG1051 γάλα gala, milk · G97 ἄδολος adolos, unadulterated · G1128 γυμνάζω gymnazo, to train or exercise · G1253 διάκρισις diakrisis, discernment

Then read 1 Corinthians 3:1–3, where Paul makes the same charge and names the evidence: jealousy and quarreling. Immaturity in the New Testament is diagnosed by behavior, not by an exam.

Where this touches1 Peter 2:1–3 · Hebrews 5:11–6:3 · 1 Corinthians 3:1–3 · Psalm 34:8 · 1 Timothy 4:7. Honey, fire and hammer, the lamp, the sword and the seed were the earlier self-portraits.