NOTES for Pe1 2:3

An interesting idea sounds in Peter's message: it turns out that we cannot only see or hear God, but we can also taste Him. Although this idea is, perhaps, not so new. In psalms, for example, we sometimes find there the mention of the Torah that "is sweet" and "pleasant to the larynx". At first sight, such associations can show themselves strange and even a little bit low-lying: because the pleasure of taste and flavors, are generally mostly associated for us with food, and food (as usual to fallen people) with gluttony. But, maybe, it is just the problem of our sinfulness, our fallen human nature? In fact, it is especially in the Gospel that the messianic Kingdom is associated not with something "high" and "spiritual", but with “lowly” meals, with feast.

Moreover, the Jewish believers are always with pleasure ready to invite God on their table, all feasts suppose a meal, and for each meal they invite God, whether it is a Sabbath meal, Passover Seder or any other feast meal. And if it is so, then the sense of taste, from the eating of food are inseparable, in themselves no more and nor less spiritual, than any others. And God can speak with us through them as well as through sight or through hearing. But how - it is already another question. It is completely obvious that no sensation can tell us about spiritual realities nothing, if the sensual experience is reduced only to the information connected to the physical world. But why we should limit the domain of the perception of our feelings only with the physical world?

Only because is obvious for us the link of the sensual experience with physiology, with defined receivers and specific parts of the brain or the spinal cord? But is this link the proof that no other source of information, capable of forming in us such corresponding experience, except the physiology, does not exist? Obviously, no, quite as the existence of the physical world cannot be the proof of the non existence of many other worlds.

And when God reveals to us His Kingdom, He uses the same feelings to tell us something about another world, of which before the arrival of Christ we did not almost know, of which formerly we saw only from far and which we can now join. And our feelings will also serve us here in the same way as in the old world, familiar for a long time. But now they reveal to us not our world, not yet transformed, but rather the Kingdom, where we shall have to live from now on.

In today's reading the apostle Peter calls us to love the Word of God as a newborn infant loves milk. For an infant, loving milk is natural; more than that, he loves nothing else, because milk is his only food! So what - should the Bible be our only source of information? From today on, should we read nothing except the Bible and send all books to the recycling pile? Or should we ignore the words of the apostle Peter and choose the information that seems most suitable to us at the moment?

It is doubtful that the apostle Peter meant to say that the Word of God is the only word to which one should listen and which one should hear. But he certainly meant that His word must be more important to us than any other word. After all, the Bible does not give us exhaustive information on every existing question (for example, questions of theoretical grammar are not addressed in it). But if there is a contradiction between some philosophical theory I find appealing and the Word of God, I choose the Word of God; otherwise I am not a Christian. The same applies to questions of morals and ethics: the criterion of the truth of any statement is the Word; it is precisely the pure milk and true food for us.