FOOD: IS IT FOR BODY, BELIEF OR BOTH? BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVE – Part 2

IS FOOD FOR THE BODY, BELIEF OR BOTH? Read part 1 here.

Let me begin by boldly saying that: We are not saved by what we eat or don’t. Salvation is by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ alone (John 3:16, Ephesians 2:8-9) not by diet. People will not enter heaven because they ate clean meat and believed Jesus and neither will people miss eternal life because they ate pork and drunk alcohol, but the determinant for heaven is getting Jesus Christ right and in the right place.

I don’t know whether you realize or not but I have just discussed Mark 7:5-23 and Mathew 15:1-21 in the above statements.

To the Jews, food was a very important aspect of their economy for it had everything to do with their relationship with Yahweh. To the Jews, food was not just for the body but for belief. What you ate and how you ate it determined two things:

1. One’s/national Holiness (Leviticus 11) and
2. One’s/national Identity (Genesis 1:26, Deuteronomy 14).

Food could make holy and could as well defile and cause conflict between man and his God.

This is demonstrated well in Daniel 1:8-21. So what Jesus is doing in the New Testament (Mark 7, Mathew 15) is not to set a menu (what we should eat and what we shouldn’t) but instead to review the idea of the pure/impure and what really defiles a person.

The food conflicts in the New Testament like in (Acts 10:14; 1Corinthian 8 and 10; Romans 14-15; 1Timothy 4) are about the issue of what makes someone unclean before God, but as we all may or may not know, New Testament theology teaches that we are unclean to God before we even eat (Romans 3:9-18).

Food, however, has nothing to do with our eternal destinies. What you eat or donot cannot determine whether you got to heaven or hell. Food has everything to do with your body and that body includes your cerebral capacities. Am sure you all have heard of dietary therapies. Food is not just physiology but has psychological effects as well.

As Biblical students, however, we must be careful not to conclude that since food has effects on both our physiology and psychology, therefore it has some effect on our spirituality.

This is what Jesus laboured to teach through these words:

Do you not see that whatever goes into a man from outside cannot defile him, since it enters, not his heart but his stomach, and so passes on?” For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. (Mark 7:18-19, 21-22)

So as Christians, what we eat matters for two reasons:

1. Our Physiology and
2. Our Psychology but not for our salvation.

A Christian should not take little poison (reasonable alcoholic drinks), and neither should we measurably abuse drugs (just one smoke, one marijuana puff, just shisha etc.), Christians should abstain from all.

A Christian should be sober, not tipsy. We are not called to be high but to worship the Most High God. I wish I had time and space to explain the Greek terms translated in Titus 2:2:

Teach the older men to exercise self-control, to be worthy of respect, and to live wisely. They must have sound faith and be filled with love and patience. (Titus 2:2).

We are God’s representatives on earth, we, therefore, should be sober and have the self-control to start with food and in all things.

God bless you, I invoke Truth, Reason and Faith
Pr. ITM White
The Gospel Hawker