BRIAN: Hi, John.
JOHN: Hi.
BRIAN: My name is Brian.
JOHN: Hi, Brian
BRIAN: How you doing?
Let’s see, I consider this a privilege being able to ask you...you don’t know how many
times in my own personal studies I’ve always thought...Boy, if I could only ask Mac about
this thing.”
You know.
And so now what I’ve been graveling with lately and it’s kind of a trivial thing.
In Leviticus 11, I guess God didn’t give me the gift of speaking in public, just as
a side note....
JOHN: You’re doing great.
BRIAN: In Leviticus 11, God gave to Aaron and Moses the commandment about cleanliness,
unclean animals in hygiene and such.
And there was food that was forbidden, to kind of go along with the food and fellowship
thing.
A lot of that food that was talked about then is part of our cuisine now.
How do we address that?
JOHN: Sure, that’s good, very good question.
The critical thing for God dealing with Israel was this, they were to be repository, the
national repository of divine truth, okay?
They were the...they were the sole monotheists in a polytheistic animistic world, okay?
They were the true worshipers of the true God.
They were an island in a sea of polytheism, animism, whatever kind of false religion...multiple
gods.
How was God going to protect them and insulate them?
The food and fellowship thing comes into play.
They couldn’t dress like the other nations.
They couldn’t eat like the other nations.
And basically all social contact, as it still does, is built around the dining environment.
So what God was doing was isolating them.
They had cooking laws.
They had certain animals they could not eat.
There were ways they had to prepare the food.
They couldn’t mix milk and meat, that’s still part of being kosher today.
But all of that had no real purpose other than isolation, just a way to separate them.
This was part of their cleanliness so that they just couldn’t go over to anybody’s
place and interact with them and therefore be influenced.
God was designing a peculiar people.
Another way to view it on the big picture side was no matter how the other nations did
it, the Jews did it different.
No matter how they dressed, the Jews dressed differently.
No matter what they ate, the Jews ate differently.
No matter how they prepared the food, the Jews did it differently.
They had all kinds of laws with regard to Sabbath, ceremony, worship, all that isolated
them.
The design of God was to isolate the community for its own holiness, separation...separation.
At the same time, they were challenged to proclaim the truth but with in inability to
interact with the other cultures to protect them from evil influence.
And God was protecting the people to protect their future so that the Messiah would come
from Abraham through the line of David that that would still be in existence.
So that was part of the insulation and protection.
Once the Messiah came, all that part of the law goes away.
And that happens immediately in the book of Acts.
Peter has a vision, remember that in Acts 10?
He sees a sheet an din the sheet are all kinds of animals, clean and unclean.
And the Lord says to him, “Rise, Peter, kill and eat.”
All that’s gone...no more.
And his response is, “Wait a minute, I’ve never eaten anything unclean.”
And the voice comes back and says, “Don’t dare call unclean what God has cleansed.”
That whole part of the Old Testament law, that ceremonial part is gone.
That’s why in Colossians Paul says, “Don’t let anybody hold you to a new moon, a festival,
or any kind of food.”
And he goes on to talk about it a lot that we’re no longer under Old Testament dietary
laws.
So they’re gone.
So you can feel free to eat anything.
There were some issues in the past that in some of the elements of their diet were designed
to protect them from diseases.
There’s a wonderful book written about 35 years ago, it first came out called None of
These Diseases by McMillan, a medical doctor.
He showed how some of those laws in the Old Testament, even circumcision was a way to
prevent certain diseases as God protects His people in a very unique way.
But in the New Testament, all of that element of the Law is set aside and what remains is
the moral and theological elements of the Law, okay?
BRIAN: Thank you.