"As new-born babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may
grow thereby." (1 Pet. 2:2.)

Is not this a passage often misconceived of? Does it mean that we
are to be always as babes in Christ returning to the first elements
for nourishment? I apprehend this is how many take it. But it is
not its force, as a little consideration may suffice to show.

There is of course a stage in our life as Christians in which
we are necessarily and rightly "babes". The apostle John addresses himself to these
(1 John 2). But the Corinthians were rebuked for the continuance of such
a state, and to them carnality was the true synonym for its protraction:
"I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto
carnal, even as unto babes in Christ" (1 Cor. 3:1). And both here
and in the epistle to the Hebrews the apostle blames them for the
necessity they had for "milk".

Here in Peter the thought is different. The Word itself is milk, the
whole of it, and we are to be not simply as babes, but
as new-born babes in our desire for it. To a new-born babe what
is milk? Its very life, we may say. And such is God’s word
to us, and such is to be its place in our affections. The
Word, the whole of it, is that which God has provided for us,
and it would be but dishonoring it and Him who gave it, to
extract certain elements from it, and dismiss the rest as not available for
food. It is all food, if appropriated as such. The highest and most
advanced truths, so-called, do but expand, illustrate, and confirm, the Gospel itself, than
which no truth is more wonderful, deeper or "higher." We do not leave
the Gospel behind as we go on with Scripture, nor even have to
turn back to it to find the refreshment it supplies for our souls;
but it is the Gospel itself that travels on with us, more and
more learnt, more and more developing itself to us continually.

FRAGMENT ……When we are beginning to believe that the battle is over, and
that our victories are to be now only in the quiet battlefield, — in
the ingathering of souls from the seed sown by the evangelist, or the
recovery of the people of God themselves out of the superstition and error
that have enwrapped them, — then in deed it may be that, while we
are congratulating ourselves that we are leaders of the blind, lights of those
who sit in darkness, instructors of the foolish, teachers of babes, the pit
of darkness may be opening at our feet, to engulf us all.    F. W.
Grant