Hebrews 5:11-14
Spiritual Food

About him we have many words to say, and hard to interpret, seeing you have become dull of hearing. For although by this time you should be teachers, you again need to have someone teach you the rudiments of the first principles of the oracles of God. You have come to need milk, and not solid food. For everyone who lives on milk is not experienced in the word of righteousness, for he is a baby. But solid food is for those who are full grown, who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern good and evil.

World English Bible

In my readings this week, I came across a meditation explaining that God's interaction with us changes as we mature in our spiritual lives. One writer had a vision in which God knelt closely beside an immature Christian, God stroked the shoulder of a more seasoned Christian, and God appeared not to interact at all with the mature Christian. The vision explained that each of the three Christians had received from God what was the best response, based on how each had grown in their faith.

I am convinced there is truth in this illustration, but I find myself resisting this concept because I struggle with a similar modern heresy. Like me, most people I know never have enough time to do what we need and want to do. Because of this pressure, we often project these same limitations on God, and we resist bringing "small" things in prayer to God because we don't want to waste the Maker's time. The illustration above could be twisted to support that heresy by encouraging experienced believers to "go it alone" so that God has more time for the new believers.

This is a foolish and dangerous way of thinking that would cut us of from the Giver of Life and break the relationship that God longs to have with each one of us. Jesus knows exactly what it is like to have time pressures (and Jesus often responded to those pressures in startling ways). But God had to be born in human form to experience time pressures, because God rules time, while we are subject to time. Psalm 90 tells us that a thousand years in God's sight are like a watch in the night, and a modern psalmist would tell us the converse is also true, that God can experience with us a million lifetimes in an evening.

I am convinced the meaning of the vision in the first paragraph follows the same line of thought as the censure the writer of Hebrews gave to his readers about their lack of growth. That community of faith had resisted making progress in their faith journey, and we don't have enough information to know why. Certainly, they were resistant in taking direction and instruction, as they seemed to be "dull of hearing", and there must have been sins and heresies eating at the foundation of their fellowship. More than that, the writer's frustration indicates the congregation had grown far too content to remain in the early stages of spiritual maturity. They did not perceive that needing to be taught the basics again and again was a problem, and they saw no benefit in moving beyond this "baby food".

It is a bit stressful for an infant (and the infant's parents) when he moves beyond the bottle and starts to eat solid foods. There's the whole adaptation to a spoon and the trial and error of figuring out how the food gets from the utensil inside the mouth without too much spread across the face. The infant starts to experience variety and express choices—strained peas are good, and the pureed carrots are acceptable, but never, ever, those beets! With age, the choices propagate, including favorite sandwich condiments, preferences for a fast food chain's hamburger, and the overwhelming range of options at a salad bar. By adulthood, what one random individual chooses to eat in a week may have nothing in common with another random individual's meals, and this is magnified if we cross major cultural and geographic boundaries.

Eating as an adult is much harder than eating as an infant. There's cutting and chewing, proper use of a fork, a steak knife, a butter knife, and a spoon. There are particular techniques to eating foods like corn-on-the-cob, lobster, spaghetti, and soup. Some foods take getting used to, like jalapeño peppers, bleu cheese, and espresso. But we use the utensils, learn the techniques, and partake of all manner of unusual dishes because we are gratified by the variety of these foods. Of greater concern, if we only drank milk, our bodies would suffer from acute nutritional deficiencies.

The writer of Hebrews encouraged his readers to expand their spiritual awareness and embrace more advanced spiritual teaching. I believe that his instruction also applies to the challenges we encounter in life. God has a myriad of ways to instruct us, and some of these ways are painful. We experience loss, frustration, doubt, and even the anguish of feeling alone, and in that pain, we crave the nurturing and God's close presence that we remember from earlier times in our spiritual development. In God's infinite love, sometimes we must confront life's difficulties with just our meager energy and our imperfect faith. While we intellectually accept that God is always near, at those times we can't sense that presence, so we must act on what we believe, experience the pain, and continue with steadfast resolve as the storms batter us.

Certainly the pain of rejection in a broken relationship is more harsh than our first taste of a jalapeño. Certainly the years of uncertainty waiting for a wayward son to return home is so much more of a struggle than learning to chew our steak before we swallow it. We all understand the importance of nutrition, even while our bodies instinctively crave foods that will sustain us, but our spiritual knowledge and instincts are not as strong when we face the struggles of life. We choose what we put in our mouths, while life rarely gives us a choice when we are knocked down.

Still, there is truth and reassurance that God uses every incident in our lives to teach us, mature us, and bless us. Each experience, whether we perceive it as uplifting or agonizing, provides God with the opportunity to further transform and renew us. We will rarely recognize what God is developing in us as we endure the struggles and confront the fears. Sometimes, maybe years later, we will be blessed by recognizing how God equipped and prepared us in the past; other times, we will have to wait for heaven to learn how our toughest times were transformed into blessings. We do not know what we need for spiritual nourishment—and we should not expect to be our own spiritual dietician—but we can always know that God always provides what we need.