The Lord Is Good

6 min read

2 Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, 3 now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.

4 As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him— 5 you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
— 1 Peter 2:2-5

The result of growing up in our salvation is that we are “built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” And the way that we grow up in our salvation is by drinking pure spiritual milk, which is the word of God. But we are never going to “crave pure spiritual milk”—the word of God—unless we “have tasted that the Lord is good.”

Having “tasted that the Lord is good” means that we have come to experience the life-saving, transforming power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Through faith, the life-saving, transforming presence of Jesus Christ in us through the Holy Spirit is the benchmark by which every other experience in our lives is measured.

If we have not “tasted that the Lord is good,” we will not crave the “pure spiritual milk” that is the word of God, and we will not grow in spiritual maturity to be what God wants us to be. If fact, if a person has not “tasted that the Lord is good,” that person may not be saved.

How do we get to a place of tasting that the Lord is good? The apostle Peter uses the language of God’s sovereignty. He addresses his audience as “God’s elect, … who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father” (1:1b-2a).

But it’s really important to remember that the Bible is not so much theological as it is rhetorical. I mean, theology must come from the Scriptures. But the biblical authors were never really intending to write theology. They were encouraging, exhorting, strengthening, training, or rebuking congregations so that they might live godly lives.

We need to keep this in mind especially when we are reading passages about election, foreknowledge, predestination, etc. Because theological language is generally more straightforward, but rhetorical language always has some metaphorical edge to it—sometimes more, sometimes less. That means that it is generally a mistake to try to read the Bible as a straightforward theological treatise.

So then, how do we get to a place of tasting that the Lord is good? If it’s all a matter of God’s sovereign election, there is nothing for us to do, and there would be no point of Peter writing any of this, unless he simply wanted to feed us theological information about God’s election—which was not his point.

For me, the first step of tasting that the Lord is good came from tasting that the world is bitter, stale, life-sucking, evil. If I had lost all hope of never tasting the goodness of life, then my life would have been effectively over.

But I held on to hope. And I realized that I had never tried tasting the Lord. And when I did, I tasted that the Lord is good.

Father, I thank You for saving me. If the language of Your election in Your word is more theological than rhetorical, forgive me for my misunderstanding. All I know is that You have saved me. I have tasted that the Lord is good, and I crave pure spiritual milk, and You are building me to be a spiritual house. It is my greatest joy. In Jesus’s name. Amen.