Day 189: Clean/Unclean Food [1]

Today's Connected Readings: 

• Genesis 9:1-3 
• Leviticus 11:1-47; 20:25-26; 25:7  
• Deuteronomy 14:1-21 
• Daniel 1:8-16 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome to the Canon Connected, where we read the connections, see the connections, and study the connections of the Bible. I am very grateful you've decided to join us here on day number one hundred and eighty-nine of the Canon Connected, and right now we are studying a six-part, six-day series of connected readings on three subtopics that all center around the idea that in the Old Testament God considered some things clean and some things unclean. And as we've seen already and will continue to see, the idea here, truly, I think at its heart is that God wanted his people to see the need for, based on his nature, okay, as a perfect and morally perfect God, especially, um, to see the importance of purity, to see the importance of cleanliness. Even on things that may seem strange and odd to us when it comes to things like skin diseases and even the physical human body, and today and tomorrow we're talking about food. Some of these things may seem odd and strange to us, but I can assure you, in the time in which they were set, they did make sense. And God was absolutely using, as I've said many times, and I'll continue to say, He was using physical reminders to represent spiritual realities. And at times, even to modern ears, some of these things may seem unfair, but I can assure you, God is always good, never unfair. And so when God asked his people to um to do things in response to, you know, cleanliness and the need for purity and in a variety of areas, three in which we're discussing this week, um, I can assure you God had his people's best interest at heart in mind, as well as foundationally, even for them to understand his nature and and how we live in response to his nature. This truly is, again, the heart of the of the gospel in the Bible. We need the gospel because we need to know how to respond to God as sinners. And that, of course, at its heart is believing in the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus and following him with wholehearted devotion. And so we have talked about against skin diseases the last couple of days, and today we're going to talk about something equally as practical in my mind. Today, not nearly as much as tomorrow, because we're going to see just how God, and especially through Jesus, but also the other New Testament writers, undid what the Old Testament law had to say about food, and how we are definitely by no means under that law anymore. It was temporary, and we'll talk about that. But today we're going to see the Old Testament foundations for it, and even not just the law, because the first passage we see in Genesis absolutely does give us a standard by which God asks his people pre-law, okay, when they weren't surrounded by other pagan, ancient Near Eastern nations with their abominable practices, that God's heart for how people eat in Genesis is how we're going to see it come full circle tomorrow. So again, spiritual realities that God asks people to understand through physical means, including food. So again, I as I just alluded to, let's begin with Genesis. God made it clear in Genesis, okay, because this is when there's just one family on the earth. They are not surrounded by paganess, wickedness, you know, idolatry, that sort of thing yet. That's coming, and that's where laws like we read in Leviticus 11 come into play. But in this passage, it says, All the animals of the earth, all the birds of the sky, all the small animals that scurry along the ground, and all the fish of the sea will look on you with fear and terror. I have placed them in your power. I have given them to you for food, just as I have given you grains and vegetables. All the animals of the earth. In Noah's day they could eat anything, all right. Nothing was unclean, all right. Everything was considered to be a means by which to honor God through eating. Then we get we jump ahead a few hundred years. And so, as again, Chris and I discussed, you know, weeks ago now when we talked about the Ten Commandments, and again, this this kind of study would have gone well even with then. But again, it's hard to always know exactly how to put these readings together because there's so many connections across so many themes. It's just it's just absolutely overwhelming to think about the trying to come up with a perfect way to put a reading plan like this together. There is no perfect way. But doing it now, though, we can see though, again, the ceremonial, the civil law, uh the sacrificial law, all of these things, again, um, were very important at the time for the Israelites. But some of them were temporary because, as we've talked about, God wanted them to be different. Circumcision was a means by which God was wanting them to show that they were different than the nations around them. The civil law, again, in the very specifics as far as how they were interacted with each other, was even on subjects like slavery, we talked about, was to show that they had a higher moral standard for their people than the pagan nations around them. They were distinct, as in that they were holy because God is holy, and they were supposed to be clean because God is pure. They were supposed to be pure, and so God put restrictions for a time on his people to distinguish them from the other nations around them. And that included things like eating animals that chewed the cud and had and had split hooves. And uh again, this was something that again was very important to them. This was so important, as we'll see tomorrow, that Peter even told God no when God told him he could eat anything, a little preview for tomorrow. But again, if you've studied this before, I'm so I'm sure the vast majority of my listeners have, perhaps even all of you, then you'll know this is coming. You know, that what how Peter, how God taught Peter as well as everybody in the New Testament, especially the Jews, that this was being undone, that it was no longer prevalent, it was no longer applicable in their lives, but it was so ingrained in a Jewish mind and heart that Peter simply couldn't believe it in Acts chapter 10. But that ties in again with one of the one of the ones we read today, because you can read all the law, you know, in Leviticus 11, Leviticus 20, Leviticus 25, one verse, and then Deuteronomy 14, all teaching the same thing about how what they were supposed to eat. And then Daniel comes along, and again, whenever he is exiled, okay, he and his friends, and he is offered the king's choicest food, which surely would have included things that Jews were not allowed to eat. Um, he absolutely is adamant that he is not going to eat that. And he even takes it a step further. And this, I'm not 100% sure why. My guess is why Daniel said just vegetables and just water was again to sharply contrast, because he understood, if anybody understood in the Old Testament, what the reasoning was, the eternal principles that were at play here for the restrictions of food, meaning they were supposed to be distinct and set apart and separate. That Daniel understood that and he wanted to highlight it even further by saying, I'm not even going to eat meat, and perhaps it wasn't even available, I don't know, but I'm not even going to eat any sort of meat, even if it isn't a part of the Levitical, you know, um law in Leviticus chapter 11. I'm not going to eat anything other than vegetables and water. And you can see at the end of 21 days who looks the healthiest. And there's no surprise, again, what the result of this is because it was done out of faith. It was not done out of just ritual, you know, mindless obedience. Daniel had a heart for God, that's obvious from his book, and so God blessed him by allowing him to look healthier and to survive on just the barest essentials as far as food and drink. And he did not want to participate again in the king's sort of, you know, I'm sure there was a lot of pagan revelry, you know, a lot of a lot of partying, so to speak, sinful partying that went along with what the king did, even as far as eat eating and drinking. And Daniel and his friends stood in sharp contract to that, c contrast to that, especially Daniel and Daniel chapter one, by choosing what he was going to eat. And so he adhered to the Levitical law. Again, that's what Jews did. I mean, it was so so vitally important to them because God made it important. And so Daniel is a model of that. But this again, as we'll get to tomorrow, is gonna lead into how this kind of mindset is not for us today, because we stand in contrast to the wickedness and the paganists around us, not by how we what we eat, all right, but in a variety of other ways. And so tomorrow we're gonna look at all of these passages in the New Testament, and there are a lot of them, and there all of them that could have been in there definitely aren't in there. Sometimes I leave things out by accident because I'm just ignorant, and sometimes I leave things out on purpose because to keep the readings from being uh astronomically long. But we're gonna look at a sufficient amount of text in the New Testament to see that again, this sort of thing was temporary. It was only for God's people for the Old Testament until Jesus came, because all foods are clean now, just as they were in Genesis chapter 9. So we know this was a temporary, you know, thing that God wanted his people to do. So come back and be with us again tomorrow for part two of this sub-study under this larger study of clean and unclean, but on food, we'll do part two tomorrow. So come back and be with us as we continue to read the connections, see the connections, and study the connections. Thank you.