We are what we eat

A Jewish friend of our family attends synagogue and celebrates Jewish holidays with her family but puts no restrictions on her diet. She eats ham, shrimp, crab, etc. So does her brother. As far as I can tell, there’s no feelings of guilt.

A longtime Jewish friend of mine in Chicago stopped following Kosher restrictions to his diet after he divorced his wife, also a Jew, and married a Gentile, leaving his native New York City in the process. His wife told me once, “He’ll eat a whole block of cheddar cheese in one setting.”

When I lived in Manhattan, it was my downstairs neighbor, a Jewish man from Boston with the last name Cohen, who taught me how to break apart and eat whole Maine lobster, sucking the legs and all.

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The Bible starts out in Genesis with human beings following a strict vegan diet. Then God says to Noah in Genesis 9, “You were a vegetarian before the Flood but now, if you can catch it you can eat it. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you.”

When God brings the nation Israel out of Egypt, He gives them another set of instructions through Moses in Leviticus 11.

“He says, ‘Here’s some things you can eat but here’s some beasts, some animals that you cannot eat,’ ” explains Jordan. “If you look at verse 7, He refers to the swine. Uh-oh. There went bacon and eggs for breakfast because the swine is the bacon. The pig. ‘You shall not eat the flesh of it.’

“In verse 9 He says, ‘Whatsoever hath fins and scales in the waters, in the seas, and in the rivers, them shall ye eat.’ Verse 10 says, ‘And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you.’

“What’s the matter with catfish? The verse says you can’t eat it because it doesn’t have fins and scales. Why did He tell them that? He didn’t tell them that because there’s something wrong with eating it.

“Somebody comes along (such as a Seventh-Day Adventist) and says, ‘If you go through the dietary laws God gave Israel, they were given for health reasons. For example, it’s not healthy to eat pigs because pigs have trichinosis germs in them.’

“Somebody answers, ‘You cook the pig and kill the trichinosis germs,’ and they respond, ‘But who wants to eat dead trichinosis germs?’

“Don’t spend your time running through Leviticus trying to figure out what’s wrong with catfish, river buzzards; those cleaning up the bottom.

“In Leviticus 22, God tells you, ‘I gave you all these quirky things to do so that when people look at you and say, Why do you do that? you can only say back, Well, our God told us not to do it.’

“There’s no moral impact in it. These were ceremonial things. There was no sinfulness in it except God said don’t do it. He said, ‘Don’t do it because I’m making you a separate, distinct people who look different than all the other nations of the earth. You look different in your diet because there’s things you won’t do.’

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“One of my favorite families in the Bible is in the Book of Jeremiah--a bunch of Gentiles, the Rechabites. God told Israel, ‘Go down to the Rechabites and invite them to come for supper and put wine and a big meal in front of them,’ and so they did.

"The Rechabites told them, ‘Well, we’ll enjoy the meal with you but we don’t drink wine.’ They said, ‘Why not?’ and the Rechabites answered, ‘Because our daddy told us don’t do it and we do what our daddy told us. We love our dad.’

“God told Jeremiah to tell Israel, ‘There’s a bunch of Gentiles who don’t know anything about me but they love their daddy and they do what their daddy told them. You guys, you know me, the God of the Bible, the Creator, and you don’t do what I tell you to do. Those Gentiles honor their father and mother and you don’t honor me.’

“God told the Rechabites, ‘You’re going to have a place in the kingdom forever.’ Why? Because they obeyed what their daddy told them. God gave Israel some things to do because He told them to do it.

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“People ask, ‘When you were down in New Orleans eating shrimp, crawfish and seafood gumbo, which Bible passage were you obeying?’

“Well, I wasn’t obeying Genesis 1 because I wasn’t eating rabbit food.  I wasn’t obeying Leviticus 11 because I was eating fish that didn’t have fins and scales. I wasn’t obeying Genesis 9 either. I was obeying I Timothy 4:4-5 because it says, ‘[4] For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving:
[5] For it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.’

 “And you know what I do every time I sit before a meal? I say, ‘Thank you, Lord.’ Now, I don’t try to pray for the missionaries when I’m fixing to eat. I don’t pray for everybody in the world. But my heart says, ‘Thank you, Lord.’

“You need to be thankful to God that He’s given you food and raiment. He’s provided for you. Now He gives to the just and unjust alike, but the thing that got the unjust into trouble was not thanking Him, so I don’t want to be like the heathen.

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“The simple question of, ‘What can I have for breakfast?’ can be confusing in the Bible if you don’t study it dispensationally. That’s one of the real easy illustrations to show people.

“Moses wrote all of the different dietary instructions (in Genesis 1, Genesis 9 and Leviticus 11). So an Israeli comes up to Moses and says, ‘Mo, I really don’t like what you wrote in Leviticus 11; I really like Genesis 9 better and I think I’m going to claim the Word of God in Genesis 9.’

“He can be completely out of the will of God, quoting scripture that Moses wrote to Moses’ people because that’s not where they were dispensationally. They had moved from ‘promise’ to ‘law,’ and law had been imposed, or added, and that was God’s Word to them dispensationally.

“So when you come to Paul he says the first thing you got to understand is that right division sets you apart from all that legalism where people are coming along and legislating morality, rules and regulations and rites and rituals and celibacy and fasting and all that stuff.

“All that violates what grace is about because grace’s given you abundantly for you to receive with thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is just rejoicing in the abundance God has given you and it’s designed for you to receive it because it’s sanctified by the Word of God rightly divided.”