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Text: Isaiah 55:1-5 (Matthew The
Biblical Diet Plan In the name of him who satisfies the hungry with good things to eat, dear friends in Christ: You can find all kinds of interesting stuff in Christian bookstores. And some of what you find there can be very good. I’ve found, however, that a larger portion of what you’ll find contains some good mixed in with stuff that’s not so good – or worse, mixed with stuff that’s really bad. And the sad truth is that a lot of what you’ll find in Christian bookstores, perhaps even the majority of it, is just plain awful. In any case, I recently read a
book called The Word on Health, which, in my estimation, belongs to the
second category: the kind that has both good
and bad in it. Though on its jacket, it
promises to be a book that revealed what the Scriptures have to say about all
health related matters, it turned out to be mostly about diet. The author, a medical doctor, is advancing
the idea that in terms of health and nutrition, the best possible diet for the
vast majority of people is the same as that used by Israelites in the Old
Testament. And by piecing together
passages that mention what they ate, the author has designed a “biblically
correct” diet plan for people today.
Specifically, the diet he came up with consists mostly of bread; bread
that has to be homemade from freshly ground, whole-grain flour – none of that
refined white stuff! No, instead he
recommends that you buy a small electric mill and grind your own flour every
day before baking your bread. With your
bread you can have modest portions of milk, yogurt, and butter (not
margarine!), and also nuts, lentils, and garbanzo beans. He recommends lots of fresh fruits and
vegetables; but the vegetables have to be uncooked and eaten raw if at all
possible. For a treat you can have a
small serving of fish a couple times a week, maybe a small piece of skinless
chicken or quail breast or once a week or less; and on very special
occasions, like the high holy days of Christmas and Easter, if you have been good and diet
conscious, and if you feel the need to splurge, you can have a colossal 4 oz serving of very lean lamb
or beef (which, just so you can picture it, would be about the size of a
standard deck of playing cards). The
meat has to be roasted – because
frying just about anything is definitely a no-no (but, of course, if you were
to roast such a small piece of very lean lamb or beef, you’d end up with
something about as tender and easy to chew as a deck of playing cards – still in the box). Oh, and lest we forget sweets, the diet says,
“Forget sweets”; especially if they contain processed sugar of any kind. But if you absolutely must, honey is okay in very small
portions: smear it sparingly on a piece
of your homemade, whole-grain bread. Okay: the good doctor and author of this book had
much more to say about diet; but at this point you’ve heard most of what his
plan would be like if actually tried it on a daily basis. And I think that most of us would agree that
it sounds pretty labor intensive, drab, and unappealing. But to be fair, there’s probably some good
advice here because most of it is what doctors and dieticians have been telling
us for years: more fiber and complex
carbohydrates, more fresh fruits and vegetables, and less fat, fewer fried
foods, and much less of that succulent, lip-smacking, deliciously well-marbled
red meat we all love so much. So there’s
nothing startling here. But as good as
his advice is, there are a couple points where he went
wrong in his assumptions and assertions. First, he assumed that the dietary
restrictions that the Lord imposed on the Jews in the Old Testament were made
primarily for health reasons. For example, pork and shellfish were
prohibited. The author said that the
Lord made this rule because pork and shellfish are potentially harmful to eat
if not prepared properly. What he failed
to mention was that any meat is potentially harmful to eat if not
prepared properly. God didn’t give the
restrictions for health reasons; he did it to keep his people separate from the
other nations so as not to come under the influence of their faulty
philosophies and religions. In New
Testament times, the Lord removed those dietary restrictions. He wanted his people to get out and share the
message of the Gospel with all people.
If you follow the author’s argument through, you’d have to say that in
Old Testament times the Lord was concerned about the diet and nutrition of his
people, but now, in the age of grace, he no longer cares if we eat things that
are bad for us. Does that make
sense? (Maybe he wants us to come home
to heaven quicker?) Secondly, the author assumed that
when it comes to questions of diet, the Bible is prescriptive
rather than descriptive.
That is to say, he thinks that because the Bible says that Abraham and
Sarah ate this or that, we should eat them too.
And if they didn’t eat something, well, then it’s better to leave it
alone. The problem with such an argument
is that what Abraham ate were the only things available to him at the
time. He lived his whole life without
ever having heard of turkey, rice, pasta, most kinds of beans, tomatoes,
potatoes, peppers, corn, avocadoes, mangoes, coconuts, bananas, ice cream,
chocolate … you could keep adding to the list all day. The point is that the Bible never mentions
Abraham having a slice of pizza, or a plate of spaghetti, or turkey with
stuffing and cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes with gravy because they simply
weren’t available to him. I’ve a hunch
that if he could have grabbed a cheeseburger with fries and a soft drink to
wash it down with, and maybe a banana split for dessert, he might have done
that once in while. Finally, the author of the book
neglected to mention the fact that it would have been impossible for people in
ancient times to regularly eat the diet he designed. They didn’t have the luxury of refrigeration,
freezing, or canning; and they had no shipments of fresh fruit and produce from
the southern hemisphere during the winter months like we do. Instead, due to a very limited and short
season of rainfall, for the vast majority of the year they had nothing to eat
but what could be dried and stored, or that could be taken from the herd and
slaughtered, cooked, and eaten today.
Even then, it would be problematic.
In our day and age and in this country, I’ve heard that we work until
something like mid May just to pay our taxes.
In Old Testament times, most people worked 90% of the time to be sure
they had something – anything at all – to eat. Finding and keeping enough food just to
survive was always a major task and usually the first priority. And they didn’t worry about balancing their
diets. Usually all they thought about
was filing their empty stomachs with whatever they happened to have on hand; so
malnutrition was common. And there were
plenty of days when they couldn’t eat at all.
No, back then you never knew when a drought, a fire, an enemy attack, a
blight of some kind on the crop, or who-knows-what-else might leave you with no
food for weeks or months. The specter of
starvation was never far away. And
that’s why, too, that when they did have an abundance of food, they
feasted lavishly, sometimes for days or weeks at a time – something I’m sure
that the author of the book describing the “ideal biblical diet” would
disapprove of. Oh, and they would have
accompanied their feasting with large amounts of wine – something that
the author of the book that gives the “ideal biblical diet” never even
mentions. (Here, I believe, his
pietistic prejudices are showing.) What I’m
driving at is that it’s wrong to think of the Holy Scriptures as a guidebook
for finding the world’s best possible diet.
Nor is it the guidebook for giving us the best possible investing strategy,
exercise program, business leadership model, or hints on home decorating. It will not tell you what car you should
buy—though you can find books in Christian bookstores that offer the “Bible’s
secrets” for that and everything else I’ve mentioned so far and more. But just
because you won’t find the biblical diet plan in the pages of the Holy
Scriptures doesn’t mean that the Bible doesn’t have a lot to say about food and
eating. The truth is that it’s a
constantly recurring theme. I mean, if
you want to eat what Abraham ate, well, then go for
it. He lived to be 175; maybe you will
too. That’s not the point. The point is that in the Scriptures, the Lord
uses the metaphors of hunger and food to convey spiritual truths because these
were such familiar and powerful images to the ancients – and they still are
where food is scarce today (which is the majority of the world). We don’t think about it too often because in
our time and in this country food is plentiful and relatively cheap (thanks to
God’s grace and the industry of our farmers). So, to
really appreciate what the Bible is saying when it uses food related themes, we
have to mentally place ourselves in the sandals of the men and women who
understood what it meant “to eat their bread by the sweat of their faces”, and
who knew about malnutrition and starvation first hand. We have to imagine what it would be like to
labor all day every day with our hands in the fields and know that if the rains
didn’t come on time or if a swarm of locusts came along, it wouldn’t just be a
tight year, it would be a disaster. It
would mean desperation, slow suffering, and painful death. If we
could mentally put ourselves there, then we could begin to appreciate what the
Lord is saying to us in today’s Old Testament lesson in which we hear him
effectively ringing the dinner bell and saying, “Come and get it!” He says, “Come … you who have no money, come buy and eat!
Come buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why waste your labor on what cannot satisfy
you? Listen to me and eat what is good,
and your soul may delight in the richest of fare.” Food. Good food.
The best.
And all you can eat for free. Can
you imagine what that would sound like to a person who lived in That’s
the biblical diet plan, and we hear it over and over again in the
Scriptures. Earlier in the book of
Isaiah, for example, the prophet describes the But the thing to understand is
that when the Scriptures are talking about food like this, we’re supposed to be
picking up the spiritual message.
It’s not about a feast for the body; it’s about a feast for the
soul. It’s spiritual
hunger the Lord is addressing. He’s
talking about the emptiness of the soul and the unfulfilled desires in our
hearts, and the futility of trying to satisfy them with the things of this
world. That can only lead to starvation
and death. So he’s calling us to the
table to feast on his Word, on the forgiveness he offers to us in Christ Jesus
his Son, and on the gifts of the Holy Spirit that he pours out so generously
that our cups overflow. He invites us to
load up with his best delicacies and go back for seconds, thirds, and desert
too. It’s with these things that he
wants to fill our plates and our lives every day. And it’s no coincidence that it is
specifically through eating that he gives us the very body and blood of our
Savior sacrificed for us to assure us that for his sake our sins have been
taken away. That itself is the greatest
feast for the soul. Unfortunately it often happens
that we who are so used to having plenty to eat physically impose upon
ourselves the spiritual equivalent of near starvation rations. We minimize our time with the Word of God, we
avoid opportunities for deeper study, and we “skip meals” as it were, by
avoiding the assembly of the saints.
There are even times when some of us get our noses out of joint with
someone and think that the best solution is to go on a hunger strike for a
while, not realizing that only person suffering any consequences is the one who
is not eating. Then again, sometimes
when not exactly fasting, we try to silence the grumbling in belly of our souls
with the spiritual equivalent of junk food:
the sugary-sweet words of various TV preachers or the latest cotton
candy selling like hot-cakes at the Christian bookstore. And when we do these things, we wonder why we
keep getting that empty feeling deep down inside. No, there’s only one way to
satisfy our true hungers; and that is to stick religiously to the
biblical diet plan. May we then, by
God’s grace, make every effort to answer his call when he says, “The feast is
ready. Come and get it”. In Jesus’ holy name. Amen. Soli Deo
Gloria! |
