Bible Study
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Text: 1 Peter 2:1-8
Theme: Bible Study
Verses 1-3
So I’ll go ahead and say at the start that the reason I felt it necessary to publicly apologize is because what I did turned out to be slander. That certainly wasn’t my intention, but slander is when you say something bad about someone or accuse someone of doing something wrong and it isn’t true. Slander is slander regardless of intention. And 1 Peter 2:1 doesn’t say “well-intentioned slander is fine.” It says to put it all away.
I think it’s important to bring that out. Intention is important, but intention doesn’t excuse mistakes or make it suddenly not necessary to apologize. I think there are a lot of things that can happen between friends or family that we or they fail to apologize for because of intentions. You say something hurtful to a family member. You didn’t mean for it to hurt, but it did. So you decide not to apologize because you didn’t mean to do something wrong.
I think it’s a mistake to do that. Whatever intentions might have been, someone was hurt and the best way to help them heal and help yourself heal is to apologize for what happened. And, again, it says to put these things “all” away. Not just the on purpose or mean intentioned times.
In general, we should be quite careful before bringing an accusation because of the potential for slander. I’m not the only one to accidentally do that. It’s really quite common. I hear it happening in private conversations all the time, work places all the time. I think a lot of people can engage in slander and they don’t even realize that they are slandering. They believe what they are saying is true. Maybe the person they are slandering has hurt their feelings at some point. Maybe they don’t really know the person they are talking about.
They think they are right to be saying negative stuff about someone, but they just think they are. Actually, what they are saying is harmful and false.
I’ve worked plenty of secular jobs so I know you hear slander going on all the time. A co-worker starts discussing another co-worker behind their back, attacking their motives, saying negative things they feel to be true but that might not actually be true. It should not be done, period.
Malice, deceit, hypocrisy, and envy are also all to be put away in their entirety. In all forms. Malice is destructive intention. You know, it is quite possible and common to be polite and yet have destructive intention. Polite words spoken with toxic intention are still toxic. Sometimes even more so than overtly hostile words.
I’ve heard it said before that sarcasm is the speech of the devil. Now, there can be genuinely harmless and well-understood moments of sarcasm. I’ve had plenty of healthy and hearty laughs at some well-timed and harmless sarcastic comments. But sarcasm is more often just being mean in disguise.
Passive-aggressiveness. Being passive aggressive might not sound or feel like it deserves to be described as malice, but a passive aggressive comment or attitude is still malicious.
The silent treatment – what is the purpose of the silent treatment? Is it to build people up, grow in love, enhance the day of the person who is getting the silent treatment? No, it is born of malice. It is done to make the other person feel bad and so that you can gain power over them in some way.
We are not just to put maliciousness that results in physical harm away; we are to put all malice away.
Deceit. Now, I have encountered so many times, so many people, so many sincere Christians even, who feel that it is OK to deceive so long as you don’t lie. That is warped thinking that misses the point entirely. The reason that God has a problem with lying is because He loves the truth. Why do we think God would be OK with us leading other people to believe lies, so long as we use truthful words to do it?
We aren’t supposed to be tricking and misleading people, period. God is a God of love and He is a God of truth, and tricking and misleading people isn’t loving or truthful – even if you use entirely truthful words to do it. God isn’t clapping and admiring our intelligence when we manage to deceive through honesty, trust me. He is disappointed at our lack of love for Him, for others, and our arrogant presumption that our way is better than His way of honesty.
Satan himself richly uses truth in his acts of deception. Do you think God was impressed when Satan said something technically true to Eve – that she would come to know good and evil by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – in order that he might deceive her into eating?
And so, we are to put away all deceit, period. Not just direct falsehoods.
Hypocrisy. We had a couple sermons on that not long ago so I won’t say as much. But hypocrisy is not much different from deception. Hypocrisy is when we pretend to be something that we are not in order to please a crowd. Hypocrisy is acting. Acting in a movie or play where everyone knows it is an act is one thing. Acting in real life, especially when that acting is to pretend that you love God and people when you don’t, is not. Our relationship with God should become genuine so that we are not hypocrites.
And then envy or jealousy. Feeling bad because you want what someone else has, feeling resentment toward someone for having what you don’t have, thoughts and feelings like those must all be put away.
If you think about all of these things, you can once again see God’s heart of love driving these commandments. All of these things are a problem because they are either unloving toward God, or toward other people, or toward both.
When we love God with all our heart, soul, and mind and love our neighbor as ourselves, then malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy and slander have no place. Envy says I am not happy with what you have given me God, and not happy that someone else has happy things. I want them to be unhappy like me.
Malice, deceit, and slander are certainly unloving toward people as in one way or another it hurts them.
And hypocrisy is unloving toward God because you are only pretending to love God. God wants you to actually love Him, not just pretend to.
As an alternative to all this behavior, and a remedy for all this behavior, Peter tells us to long for pure spiritual milk. Newborn infants grow speedily and powerfully by the milk they consume. So too, Christians grow by consuming spiritual milk.
So, what is spiritual milk, then?
Well, verse 1 says “so” – that means verses 1-3 are in consequence of what came before. Because of chapter 1, so go and do this now.
Peter says just before “having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; for all flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever. And this word is the good news that was preached to you.”
So here’s the parallel. Peter says love one another earnestly from a pure heart. The “so” of that is to put away all malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander. Peter says you have been born again by the Word of God. The “so” of that is to desire pure spiritual milk – the word of God, which abides forever.
Taking in God’s truth, found in the Bible, helps us to grow up into our salvation. We are saved in position – we are holy and forgiven by God judicially, wholly and completely. But in practice we might not be very holy or look very Christian at all. Growing to understand and follow God’s Word helps us to live as saved people ought to live.
Sometimes, saved people practice malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy and slander. But that is not what we were saved to do. That’s not who we were saved to be. And that’s not what salvation is supposed to look like.
But as we desire God’s Word, learn and grow by receiving it, so we grow up into our salvation and look more and more in practice what we are in position – holy and redeemed people. Malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander then are equated with childish behaviors. Newborns grow up as they drink milk. Christians grow up into mature walking-in-their-salvation people as they take in God’s Word.
Application:
So then, malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander are all bad because they are either unloving toward God or toward people. Are you guilty of any of those behaviors? Have you listened this morning and though: “mmm actually I have been practicing deceit” or “I’ve been saying bad things about people that actually might not be true after all?” Then here’s something practical we can work on to help us put these behaviors behind us.
Peter says putting these away involves taking in God’s Word so that you can grow up into your salvation. That means that taking in God’s Word is something that will help us to grow to love God more and love people more and is something every believer ought to be trying to do. Found that there’s been some failing to love God or other people properly in these areas? Taking in God’s Word is a good place to start addressing that.
Now there’s multiple ways to take in God’s Word. We are privileged to have our own Bibles, and reading the Bible ourselves is one of the easiest and best ways. If you don’t have your own Bible, we do have extra ones at church we can give out. Just let us know.
Reading the Bible is not the only way to take in God’s Word. In fact, most people before the printing press did not have their own Bibles. Certainly not an entirely complete one like you and I have. Preaching and singing were and still are good ways to take in God’s Word.
A word of caution about both, though – we are to long for pure spiritual milk. Just because a Christian preacher says it or a Christian singer sings it, doesn’t mean that it is pure. We live in a free country, praise the Lord for that, I wouldn’t want it any other way. But in a free country anybody who wants to can call themselves a Christian and preach a sermon and anybody who wants to can call themselves a Christian and sing a song. The sermon or song might have no spiritual milk in them at all. I have heard many sermons and songs that feature little to no Bible. They might be enjoyable or entertaining, but there’s no spiritual milk in there.
Or maybe there is milk but it’s not pure – it’s been spoiled a bit by untruth or crudeness, poor interpretation or selfish motivation. It’s possible for a sermon or song to include a lot of milk but completely warp the meaning of the Bible they are using into something other than what God intends.
And some sermons and songs could be just straight poison disguised as milk.
It’s a little like this: our wonderful, free country is a vast grocery store filled with tons of stuff that you could eat. Grocery stores have a lot of healthy food in there, but they also have a lot of junk food. They also sell bleach and rat poison. I think we are all quite smart enough to know not to drink the bleach or rat poison, so I’m not worried about that. But you know, there’s a lot of tricky stuff out there that might not be as healthy as they try to make it sound. The label might say fat-free, but it’s stuffed with chemicals. They might have cut the sugar out, only to replace it with stuff that will give you cancer.
There’s meat-substitutes out there that play off the idea that vegetables are healthier – only they have a lot more fat than meat, and, even worse, 18 million times the amount of estrogen in there which can contribute to breast cancer if you are a woman and contribute to breasts if you are a man. Of course, that isn’t put on the label.
Sometimes, we might know that it’s not really the purest and the healthiest, but we choose to eat it anyway because the impure stuff makes it taste good.
Frankly, a lot of stuff out there that calls itself Christian can be the same way. Some is easy to spot as false, some harder. How do we spot the falsehood?
That’s why I highly recommend that we all take advantage of the privilege we all have as Americans to have our own personal Bibles, and to read our own personal Bibles. God’s Word in the Bible is pure. It is your measuring tape by which you determine if something is pure spiritual milk or spiritual Doritos. You might find a Christian sermon or song or book that says “some deceit and malice are OK.” How do you know that they are giving you spoiled milk?
You know because God’s word is pure and says right here that all of it must be put away, not just some.
Another advantage of reading the Bible on your own is it will help you to be discerning in the other ways that you take in God’s Word. As you grow to understand the Bible, you’ll be able to hear me or another preacher on a Sunday and say “you know, that part right there isn’t pure. I think they’ve mishandled the word a bit there. I won’t take that part in.” Or to read a book written by a Christian and say “wait, that’s not what that verse means.”
But on the positive end, we’ll be able to identify the truth there or the well-spoken spiritual content and meditate on that and grow by it.
And it’ll help you to identify the most beautiful, pure, nourishing songs to sing and enjoy and grow from.
It won’t just help you to be critical and recognize the bad. It’ll help you to recognize and cherish the good.
Broccoli begins to taste a lot better when you realize that candy contributes to heart disease and cancer.
Conclusion:
Bible study helps us grow and become healthier, more mature Christians. It aids us in putting away all malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, slander.