Gluten Free & God Seeking: What Does Partaking of the Divine Nature Mean in 2 Peter 1:4?

Sunday, January 18, 2015

What Does Partaking of the Divine Nature Mean in 2 Peter 1:4?

Where would we be without God’s promises? Verses like He who has begun a good work in you will also complete it unto the day of Christ Jesus have strengthened my faith many times. For several years I have been adding to my own personal list of promises. 2 Peter 1:4 lets us know that not only are God’s promises anchors for our faith, but they’re also the means by which we partake of God’s nature.

I took this on a walk around a nearby lake in December.

Through which He has granted to us precious and exceedingly great promises that through these you might become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption which is in the world by lust. 2 Peter 1:4

Now partaking of the divine nature may sound a bit strange because normally when we think about partaking, we think about eating food. Actually that's the thought here. God's word is spiritual food. The Lord Himself told us this in John 6 when he told the people who had gathered that He was the true Bread that came down out of heaven (John 6:32-35).

Then He said something that many of them could not figure out, "As the living Father has sent Me and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me, he also shall live because of Me (John 6:57). The Bible tells us that many of them got stumbled by this and stopped following him. Later on in verse 63 the Lord clarified to His disciples that He didn’t expect them to eat His physical flesh but to receive His word as spiritual food!

When I was in college I learned that coming to the word in a prayerful way (See Ephesians 6:17-18) is how to receive God's word as spiritual food. And I liked the parallel on physical and spiritual eating on pages 44-44 of chapter 5 of the Life-Study of 2 Peter:

Just as we are constituted physically of the food we eat, so the disciples were constituted of the God of which they partook. This should also be our experience today. If we enjoy God and partake of Him, we shall be constituted of Him. Of course, we shall never become God in the sense of attaining to the Godhead or becoming an object of worship. However, we may be thoroughly constituted of God's nature. We all are constituted physically of the food we eat. For example, someone may eat so much fish and be constituted of fish to such an extent that he even smells of fish. In like manner, we may become so constituted of God that we express God in all that we are and do. We may even give off a divine fragrance.... When others contact us, they will see in us the expression of the Triune God (Lee, Witness. Life-Study of 2 Peter. Anaheim: Living Stream Ministry, 1982, Print).