To Eat or Not to Eat

Why we made our kitchen kosher

This is a topic that is important to all of us, because it deals with the question of whether to eat or not to eat. That is the question.

I remember when I first began to observe kosher, in 1974. The reason we koshered our kitchen at home was that Orthodox rabbis came to visit us and could not eat anything, because our kitchen was not kosher. We usually had big shrimp in the house and enjoyed every bite of it, but the guests who came could not eat. So we asked the rabbis to help us make our home kosher, so that we could receive religious Jewish guests and offer them refreshments, something to drink and something to eat. That is the common Middle Eastern practice: when a guest comes, you have to feed him something. That is why we began to keep kosher.

Some of our brothers in the States were upset. Why are we keeping kosher, as if there were some spiritual benefit in it? I must say that I see no spiritual benefit in eating bacon or pork either. One of the rabbis said to me that if he could become more spiritual, closer to God, by eating pork, he would eat the pig from the nose to what it leaves behind. We do not have to eat pork in order to be more spiritual, and we do not have to be vegetarians in order to be more spiritual. Food and drink are not crucial to the kingdom of God. Paul says that very clearly in Romans chapter 14.

The text everything rests on

So, to eat or not to eat. The traditional evangelical Christian position rests essentially on First Timothy chapter 4, and I want to read all four verses:

That is the text that has been used since the late second century to say that all foods are clean, that you can eat anything you want to eat, as long as you eat it with thanksgiving and it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.

But read this text in the context of the first century, or in the context of Jewish believers in the land of Israel today, and it says something more particular. And it is not valid only for Jewish believers. The principle is valid for every believer, because Paul does not say that he is speaking specifically to Jews or specifically to Gentiles. He is speaking about all believers.

Notice also that he pushes the text forward in time. This is something that will happen in the future, not in his own days, but in the last days, in the latter times. The latter times in Hebrew is acharit hayamim, and that phrase is what introduces eschatology, the end times. In the simple understanding of the Torah it does not yet mean the end times, only some time in the future; but in later Judaism, in second temple Judaism, acharit hayamim is already understood as the end times. So Paul is setting this in the context of the end times: people will forbid marriage and teach others to abstain from certain foods.

We are living in an interesting time

We are living in an interesting time, because now it is not only the Jews but mainly the West, the Christians in the West, who are all hyped up about eating certain foods and not eating certain foods, mixing certain foods and not mixing certain foods. It is all because of the great obesity that has overtaken Western civilization. There are proportionally more overweight people in the United States than in nearly any other country in the world, and this is a matter of percentage and not only of absolute numbers. If you travel in China, in Korea, in Japan, in other Asian countries, you do not see nearly as many overweight people as you see in the West. So now there are all kinds of diets. People are selling diets, dieting here and dieting there, and everything is about diet. That is one of the reasons I decided to tackle this issue.

Paul says that these people, false teachers speaking lies in hypocrisy with a seared conscience, are telling people not to marry and not to eat certain foods. Clearly the source of this teaching lies in a time future to Paul, when people will teach such things, and he is not at all complimentary about those teachers.

Sanctified by the word of God

Now verses 4 and 5 give the principle that Paul brings into the discussion.

The first principle is that God created all things good. We all agree on this. There is not a single Jew and not a single Jewish rabbi who would say it is wrong. We have the story of Genesis, where every day God said, behold, it is good. On the third day he said, behold, it is good, twice. That is why Jews like to get married on Tuesday, because they know that every marriage needs a double blessing. Even in the New Testament, the wedding that Yeshua attended in the village of Cana with his mother was on the third day. In Hebrew we say yom rishon, yom sheni, yom shlishi, yom revi'i, the first day, the second day, the third day, the fourth day. That is how we count the days. We do not have Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, named after pagan gods and idols. We have first day, second day, third day. So when John says in chapter 2, verse 1, that they went to the wedding on the third day, he means they went on Tuesday, because it was a Jewish wedding.

Back to our issue. All things that were created by God were created good, and nothing should be refused if it is received with thanksgiving. Thanksgiving here means the blessing, the prayer, the gratitude we show to God by thanking him for the food that he has provided for us, that the land has provided for us. It does not mean the American holiday of Thanksgiving. It means praying to God and thanking him for the food we have received. So if it is received with thanksgiving, if you can bless it, if you can thank God for it, then it is kosher and should not be refused.

But Paul qualifies that in verse 5. He says that it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer. Food that is edible for a believer, and especially for a Jewish believer, has to be sanctified by the word of God and by prayer. That is conditional, folks. It is conditional. Everything can be eaten and nothing should be refused, if God has sanctified it in his word.

How do we reason that out? We have the Bible, and we know that it contains lists of what may be eaten. In Leviticus chapter 11 there is a long list of which animals, which fish and which birds we may eat and which we may not. We may not eat birds that eat carrion, that eat roadkill, or that hunt and eat other animals. We may eat birds that eat seeds and grain and vegetation, but we may not eat a raven or an eagle or a hawk, because these are hunters and they kill in order to eat. We may not eat a fish that does not have both fins and scales. A shark or a whale we cannot eat, and we cannot eat what scavenges at the bottom of the sea and feeds on the refuse of other fish, like shrimp and lobsters and crustaceans. There are good reasons for all this, but that is not the lesson right now.

In the same way we cannot eat animals that hunt in order to survive, like the lion and the leopard. A giraffe, for example, is kosher. It only eats vegetation, like a cow, so a Jew may eat giraffe, though we do not have giraffe meat in the grocery here. We may eat animals that do not hunt to survive, animals that eat grass and vegetation. God sanctified them in Leviticus chapter 11.

And in Leviticus chapter 17 we are told that we may not eat blood, because blood is for the altar, to atone for our sins.

This is the interesting point. Paul says our food should be sanctified by the word of God and by prayer, and in the word of God we have direct commands about what is food and what is not food, what is edible and what is not edible, and a direct command not to eat blood.

In the New Testament, in Acts chapter 15, the apostles gather with the elders of the congregation in Jerusalem to discuss what to do with the Gentiles, and they decide that the Gentiles should abstain from idolatry and everything similar to it, from sexual immorality and everything similar to it, and from strangled meat. The Greek word means strangled, that is, an animal that was not slaughtered, whose throat was not cut, that did not bleed, whose heart did not go on pumping the blood out through the jugular veins and drain the body, so that the meat would be edible. Blood is forbidden in the Torah. And blood there may mean more than eating blood. It probably also means bloodshed, killing people for the sake of killing, and we are witnessing in our own time things so bizarre and so cruel and so crazy, with people killing one another.

Freedom inside the body of the Messiah

If I summarize this, I have to bring in two texts that deal with similar issues.

We have Romans chapter 14, which deals with freedom inside the body of the Messiah, inside the community, between Jews and Gentiles. Some people eat unto the Lord and others do not, and that is all right. Some people eat certain foods and others do not eat those foods, and that is all right. The kingdom of God is neither food nor drink. It is righteousness, it is the love of God, it is a relationship made in heaven, and what we eat or which day we rest is less relevant to our salvation and to our community than people on both sides of the aisle want to make it.

Then we have Colossians 2:16 and 17, which says not to judge one another. Do not judge one another means do not judge one another. It means letting people have freedom in what day is a Sabbath, what day is the day of rest, which holiday they keep, what they eat and what they drink. Our community is based on the love of God, on the grace of God, and on the sacrifice that Yeshua made for all human beings to be redeemed from their sins. That is our relationship. We do not have the same culture and we do not have the same face. We have brothers with an Asian face, brothers with an Indian face, brothers with a black face, and brothers with purple hair, or green hair, or blue hair, as is common nowadays. It is all right. We do not judge our fellowship and our relationship on these grounds.

Paul commands the Jew to remain Jewish and the Gentile not to become Jewish, because it is not important whether you are a Jew or a Gentile, and it is not important what you eat or what you drink. What is important is how you relate to the commands of God. That is what Paul says in First Corinthians 7, verses 17 to 23.

So you have freedom to eat or not to eat. But if you want to observe the commands of God, then according to Paul's own text, in Paul's own pen, in First Timothy chapter 4, verses 1 to 5, you will do two things. You will not follow the false teachers of the end times who say do not eat this and do not eat that. And on the other hand you will follow what God's word says, and eat what you can sanctify and what you can pray over. How can you pray over something and thank God for something that he forbade you to have?

What goes in and what comes out

There are other texts that belong to this question, and one of the most important is in the context of the washing of hands, in Mark chapter 7, where there is a discussion between Yeshua and the Pharisees.

The washing of hands did not become a commandment until after the destruction of the temple. It was a custom. Some of the Pharisees made it their custom to wash their hands before eating bread, and the custom is still valid in Jewish circles to this very day. Jews normally wash their hands before they eat, and at Passover we wash twice, not once.

In this discussion Yeshua makes a ruling. I am reading from Mark chapter 7, verse 14:

Let me explain that in simple English. There is nothing you can ingest that will defile you. Now, to defile you means to make you impure. It does not mean that you are a bad person and it does not mean that you have sinned. It means that while you are in a state of impurity there are certain things you cannot do. You do not have to eat anything at all to become impure. You could touch a dead person. If a relative of yours dies and you touch him, turn him over, undress him and wrap him, you are impure. You cannot do certain things, you cannot go and offer a sacrifice for several days, and you have to go to the mikveh, to the baptistry, to be immersed and purified, and then after all the prescribed procedures and days you are free to go to the temple, to worship God, to offer a sacrifice, whatever you want.

Defilement is not only a question of eating. It is a much larger matter. If you touch a leper, a person sick with leprosy, you become very defiled, and then you have to go through a procedure to be purified. Eating something impure that God forbade, like pork, does not defile you for long. Let us say you ate it for breakfast, and in the evening you go to sleep, you go to the bathroom, you wake up in the morning and you are pure. There is no punishment, there is no sacrifice, you do not have to go to the mikveh, you do not have to be immersed for purification. Nothing. On the day you ate it, you cannot go to the temple. That is the upshot of it. That is all.

So whatever enters into your body does not defile you. There is no such teaching in the Torah, in the law of Moses, nor in Judaism. Whatever comes out of the body defiles you. If you have a sore and pus is coming out of it, that defiles you. If you have an issue of seed during the night, that defiles you for that period. And if you speak evil of other people, if you gossip, if you backbite, if you falsely accuse people, that defiles you too.

The rabbis before Yeshua, before the first century, had already reached that conclusion, because the word for leprosy is metzora and the word for gossip and backbiting and false accusation is motzi shem ra. It is a play on words. The rabbis decided that whatever comes out of your mouth, if it is lies, if it is gossip, if it is backbiting, if it is false accusation of a fellow man, that defiles you.

That is what Yeshua is doing here. He is making a midrash on the portion of the Torah that is called Metzora, which deals with whatever comes out of your body defiling you: pus, an issue of seed, a woman's period, all the body fluids, and gossip and what comes out of your mouth. So when he says that there is nothing that enters a man from outside which can defile him, that is true according to Jewish law, and when he says that the things which come out of him are the things that defile a man, that is true according to Jewish law to this day. And then he says, whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.

The text continues in verse 17,

That means it goes out in the bathroom, in the WC. It is eliminated.

Then some manuscripts add, thus purifying all foods. That is a question of textual criticism, and whoever has the knowledge to read the text will see that this was a later addition in some of the later manuscripts of the New Testament. Until that point he is not even talking about food. He is talking about defilement, about what defiles you and what does not, and all of a sudden somebody comes and says that by saying this he purified all food.

But the text continues, and the words of Yeshua continue.

Notice that in that list he does not mention food at all. There is no food here. Adultery, deceit, lewdness, wickedness, covetousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride: that is what defiles a man. Compare these things with the works of the flesh in Galatians and you will see that Yeshua was not talking about food in this text. He was talking about what defiles a man. Food does not defile a man for longer than until the evening, when he goes to the bathroom. That is what Yeshua says about food.

So do not use this text to say, go and eat a bacon sandwich, or a lobster, and by my ruling the stakes are going into the lobster. I love lobster, and I have not had any since I began to keep kosher in 1974. It is not because the food is bad for you. It is because this is what the word of God says, this is what the word of God teaches, and it is what Paul teaches in First Timothy 4: that if you can, according to the word of God and prayer, eat something, enjoy it, praise God and be thankful to God for it.

And alongside that, he says not to judge one another. In Romans chapter 14 he says that the kingdom of God is neither food nor drink, but righteousness and peace. This was said in a situation in which the body of the Messiah was made up of Jews who were religious, like the community in Jerusalem, of which Acts 21:20 says that Jacob, James in English, told Paul to see how many tens of thousands of Jewish believers there were in the city of Jerusalem, all of them zealous for the Torah. They remained Jews. They remained observant Jews. They did not become Lutheran or Baptist or Methodist or Catholic or Russian Orthodox.

This is, I know, a controversial issue and a difficult issue, but it is an important one. To eat or not to eat, that is the question, and each one of us decides it for himself. May God bless you, and enjoy whatever you eat, and thank God for it.