Eating unclean and/or kosher food

[pescador]

In another thread, Yeshuaslavejeff wrote this...

http://www.therefinersfire.org/eating_kosher.htm

Doesn't 1 Corinthians 10:27 tell us we can eat anything we want, anything that is put in front of us?

Our Response....

No, it doesn't. YHWH (Yahweh) outlined for us in Leviticus what He considered "clean" and "unclean." How does eating at your unbelieving cousin Joe's house suddenly reverse that? How did the death of Yeshua reverse that? He was our final SIN sacrifice who - contrary to popular belief - NEVER negated His Father's Divine Instructions in Righteousness (Torah).

The answer is: It didn't. Yeshua Himself ate only kosher foods. You never see anything in the Bible that suggests otherwise. Let's take a look at "the short answer" from an excerpt from Welker's book, "Should Christians be Torah Observant?"....

"Unclean" animals/birds/fish are those that are carnivorous, those that are scavengers, those that eat roadkill and whatever they can scrounge, and those that eat dead things off the bottom of the ocean floor. YHWH wants His people to be "clean" from the inside-out, in thought, word and deed...Eating the "garbage disposals" of the world not only makes our insides filthy, but also serves to cause us to be disobedient to God! The bottom line is: God commanded us NOT to eat "unclean" things. (This Wikipedia article contains some valuable info concerning the "kosher" issue.)

YAHWEH never said pork, shellfish, etc. were food. People called these animals food in rebellion against God....

It didn't belong in the thread about Christians having tattoos so I thought I would start a new thread about this topic.

I totally disagree with the above quote which is full of errors and in opposition to the New Covenant. Keeping kosher is a rabbinical construct that has no basis in scripture. To begin with, what food did Abraham serve to the angels that visited his tent? A kid cooked in its mother's milk. There is no greater violation of the kosher law than this, yet the father of believers by faith served this to God's appointees!

In the New Covenant there are no unclean foods and to say that Jesus ate only kosher food is total and absolute nonsense. To prohibit the eating of any food is to put that act under the Law and believers have been set free entirely from that law. Believers are free to eat and drink whatever they want with no restrictions. In Matthew 15:11 Jesus said "What goes into someone's mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them."

All of Matthew 15 is about Jesus explaining why the legalists of his time, the Pharisees, were wrong about God's instructions about people's behavior. The Pharisees depended upon scrupulously keeping the Law, including Old Testament dietary laws (and the ones they added) yet their legalism caused them to misunderstand God and to miss the Savior when he was right in front of them.

Believers who put themselves under the law as they (mis)understand it are no different. Justification by works is a denial of grace and God's finished work in Christ. We are no longer under the Law. We have been set free in Christ to live by the Spirit

 

[BryanW92]

Joseph Farah, on WorldNetDaily (wnd.com) is a huge proponent of the idea that Christians should be exactly like Jews. I quit reading WND when he proclaimed that when Jesus returns, he won't be eating bacon.

Well, duh. He's a Jew.

But, we are not. Paul tells us that we aren't, and that those laws do not apply.

Of course, the folks like Farah don't put much stock in Paul.

Eat your bacon, fellow Christians.

9 The next day, as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the housetop about the sixth hour to pray. 10 And he became hungry and wanted something to eat, but while they were preparing it, he fell into a trance 11 and saw the heavens opened and something like a great sheet descending, being let down by its four corners upon the earth. 12 In it were all kinds of animals and reptiles and birds of the air. 13 And there came a voice to him: “Rise, Peter; kill and eat.” 14 But Peter said, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.” 15 And the voice came to him again a second time, “What God has made clean, do not call common.” 16 This happened three times, and the thing was taken up at once to heaven. (Acts 10:9-16 ESV)

16 Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. 17 These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. 18 Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, 19 and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God. (Col 2:16-19 ESV)

20 If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations— 21 “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” 22 (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? 23 These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh. (Col 2:20-23 ESV)

We may be slaves of JESUS, but not Jewish law and custom.

 

[JGiddings]

I believe when Jesus performed the miracle of the loaves and fish, the food wasn't prepared kosher!

 

[Svt4Him]

I believe when Jesus performed the miracle of the loaves and fish, the food wasn't prepared kosher!

Rules of preparing kosher food are found where in the Bible? The fish was kosher, how was it prepared? I think this is a slippery slope to go down, as Jesus came in the fullness of the Jewish law, He only violated additionally imposed laws.

 

[Akjv]

Jesus Always Perfect, Absolutely Righteous In Every Way.... Never Ever, Not Once, Broke Torah , Torah which exists as Yahweh's Instructions/Directions Never To Change, As Jesus Himself Says.

I wonder what he ate outside of Israel?

 

[Aaron112]

I wonder what he ate outside of Israel?

Most important food was/is/continues to be/ just as when He Told His Disciples

"I Have Food To Eat You Do Not Know"
John 4:32
But He told them, "I have food to eat that you know nothing about."

 

[Akjv]

Most important food was/is/continues to be/ just as when He Told His Disciples

"I Have Food To Eat You Do Not Know"
John 4:32
But He told them, "I have food to eat that you know nothing about."

This food to eat that they do not know is not for the physical body it was a spiritual food. imo

 

[Aaron112]

This food to eat that they do not know is not for the physical body it was a spiritual food. imo

The disciples wondered why Jesus was not PHYSICALLY hungry , as they had traveled together some distance, and some time, since eating.
When the disciples came back from town with food to eat for Jesus, they were surprised He was not hungry, and wondered as written if someone else had brought Him PHYSICAL food.

 

[honey badger]

we eat from two tables ... a double portion received on the sixth day which we carry over into the seventh ...

 

[Akjv]

The disciples wondered why Jesus was not PHYSICALLY hungry , as they had traveled together some distance, and some time, since eating.
When the disciples came back from town with food to eat for Jesus, they were surprised He was not hungry, and wondered as written if someone else had brought Him PHYSICA

we eat from two tables ... a double portion received on the sixth day which we carry over into the seventh ...

If you mean leftovers from the sixth day I agree.

 

[honey badger]

If you mean leftovers from the sixth day I agree.

the two tables we eat of ( one from within and one from without ) can be seen in the two seeds ... the double portion speaks to our duality of mind (a double minded man is unstable in all his ways) and why the chosen fast is to only eat of that which grows of itself, which is one and the same as keeping the law "thou shall not eat of it" in reference to a tree bearing two fruits ...

 

[Soyeong]

In another thread, Yeshuaslavejeff wrote this...



It didn't belong in the thread about Christians having tattoos so I thought I would start a new thread about this topic.

I totally disagree with the above quote which is full of errors and in opposition to the New Covenant. Keeping kosher is a rabbinical construct that has no basis in scripture. To begin with, what food did Abraham serve to the angels that visited his tent? A kid cooked in its mother's milk. There is no greater violation of the kosher law than this, yet the father of believers by faith served this to God's appointees!

You should be quicker to think that you must have misunderstood as verse than to think that it makes perfect sense to interpret servants of God as speaking against obeying what He has commanded, and even if your interpretation were correct, the bottom line is that we must obey God rather than man, so you should be quicker to disregard everything that any man has said than to disregard anything that God has commanded. So we should still obey what God has commanded regardless of whether or not your interpretation is correct.

In Jeremiah 31:33, the New Covenant still involves obeying God's law. The post that you quoted in the OP was speaking in regard to the laws that forbid eating unclean animals in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14, which is not the same as Deuteronomy 14:21, which forbids boiling a clean animal in its mother's milk, which the text does not say that Abraham did.

In the New Covenant there are no unclean foods and to say that Jesus ate only kosher food is total and absolute nonsense. To prohibit the eating of any food is to put that act under the Law and believers have been set free entirely from that law. Believers are free to eat and drink whatever they want with no restrictions. In Matthew 15:11 Jesus said "What goes into someone's mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them."

The New Covenant instructs us to refrain from sin and sin is the transgression of God's law (1 John 3:4), which includes the command against eating unclean animals, and to say that Jesus was sinless means that he never broke that command. In Titus 2:14, it does not say that Jesus gave himself to set us free from God's law, but in order to set us free from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people of his own possession who are zealous for doing good works, so becoming zealous for doing good works in obedience to God's law is the way to believe in what Jesus accomplished from the cross (Acts 21:20) while returning to the lawlessness that he gave himself to redeem us from is the way to reject what he accomplished. In other words, the freedom that we have in Christ is the freedom from sin, not the freedom to sin.

In Matthew 15:1-9, Jesus criticize the Pharisees for setting aside the commands of God, so Matthew 15:11 should not be interpreted as him then proceeding to even more hypercritically do what he just finished criticizing the Pharisees as being hypocrites for doing. In Deuteronomy 4:2, it is a sin to add to or subtract from God's law, so if Jesus had done as you suggest, then he would have sinned and disqualified himself as our Savior. Furthermore, in Deuteronomy 13:4-5, the way that God instructed His people to determine that someone is a false prophet who is not speaking for Him was if they taught against obeying His law, so if Jesus had done as you suggest, then according to God we should consider him to be a false prophet. They would not have needed to find false witnesses at his trial, but this incident was never even brought up and no one reacted as if he had been making a radical statement in rebellion against the Father. Jesus was not even discussing the topic what kinds of animals are acceptable to eat, but whether it was acceptable to eat bread with unwashed hands (Matthew 15:20).

All of Matthew 15 is about Jesus explaining why the legalists of his time, the Pharisees, were wrong about God's instructions about people's behavior. The Pharisees depended upon scrupulously keeping the Law, including Old Testament dietary laws (and the ones they added) yet their legalism caused them to misunderstand God and to miss the Savior when he was right in front of them.

Jesus set a sinless example of how to walk in obedience to God's law, so he was much. more zealous for obedience to it than the Pharisees were and he never criticized the Pharisees for obeying it, but he did criticize them for not obeying it (Matthew 15:1-9) or for not obeying it correctly. In Matthew 23:23, Jesus said that tithing was something that they ought to be doing while not neglecting weightier matters of the law of justice, mercy, and faith, so he was not opposing their obedience to God's law, but rather he was calling them to a higher level of obedience to it in a manner that is in accordance with its weightier matters.

Believers who put themselves under the law as they (mis)understand it are no different. Justification by works is a denial of grace and God's finished work in Christ. We are no longer under the Law. We have been set free in Christ to live by the Spirit

God is sovereign, so we are all under His law. We do not earn our justification as a wage as there result of having first obeyed God's law because God's law was never given as a way of earning our justification even through perfect obedience (Romans 4:1-5), so that was never the goal of the law. The fact that we do not earn our justification by obeying God does not mean that we are not obligated to obey God.

In Psalms 119:29-30, he wanted to put false ways far from him, for God to be gracious to him by teaching him to obey His law, and he chose the way of faithfulness by setting it before him, so this has always been the one and only way of salvation by grace through faith. In Ezekiel 36:26-27, the Spirit has the role of leading us to obey God's law, and in Romans 8:4-7, those who walk in the Spirit are contrasted with those who have minds set on the flesh who are enemies of God who refuse to submit to God's law. The Spirit is God, so it shouldn't make sense to you to think that living by the Spirit involves refusing to live in accordance with what God has commanded.

 

[Soyeong]

Joseph Farah, on WorldNetDaily (wnd.com) is a huge proponent of the idea that Christians should be exactly like Jews. I quit reading WND when he proclaimed that when Jesus returns, he won't be eating bacon.

Well, duh. He's a Jew.

But, we are not. Paul tells us that we aren't, and that those laws do not apply.

Of course, the folks like Farah don't put much stock in Paul.

Eat your bacon, fellow Christians.

In Matthew 4:15-23, Jesus began his ministry with the Gospel message to repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand, which was a light to the Gentiles, and God's law was how his audience knew what sin is (Romans 3:20), so repenting from our disobedience to it is a central part of the Gospel message. Furthermore, Jesus set a sinless example of how to walk in obedience to God's law and we are told to follow his example (1 Peter 2:21-22) and that those who are in Christ are obligated to walk in the same way he walked (1 John 2:6). So Jesus spent his ministry teaching his followers to obey God's law by word and by example, so Gentiles can look at what he taught and decide whether or not to become his follower, but Gentiles can't follow him while refusing to follow what he taught.

9 The next day, as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the housetop about the sixth hour to pray. 10 And he became hungry and wanted something to eat, but while they were preparing it, he fell into a trance 11 and saw the heavens opened and something like a great sheet descending, being let down by its four corners upon the earth. 12 In it were all kinds of animals and reptiles and birds of the air. 13 And there came a voice to him: “Rise, Peter; kill and eat.” 14 But Peter said, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.” 15 And the voice came to him again a second time, “What God has made clean, do not call common.” 16 This happened three times, and the thing was taken up at once to heaven. (Acts 10:9-16 ESV)

It should be noted that Peter did not just object by saying that he had never eaten anything unclean, but also that he had never eaten anything common and God only rebuked him for his use of the word "common", but not his use of the word "unclean", yet you interpret his vision as though God had instead rebuked him for his use of the word "unclean". In other words, Peter had correctly identified the unclean animals as being unclean and correctly knew that he was not suppose to eat them, but he had incorrectly identified the clean animals as being common and had incorrectly declined to eat them. Peter interpreted his vision three times as being in regard to incorrectly identifying Gentiles without saying a word about now being able to eat unclean animals, so his vision had nothing to do with a change in their status.

16 Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. 17 These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. 18 Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, 19 and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God. (Col 2:16-19 ESV)

20 If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations— 21 “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” 22 (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? 23 These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh. (Col 2:20-23 ESV)

We may be slaves of JESUS, but not Jewish law and custom.

Paul described the people who were judging the Colossians as teaching human precepts and traditions, self-made religion, asceticism, and severity to the body, so the Colossians were being judged by pagans because they were celebrating God's holy days and Paul was encouraging them not to let any man judge them and prevent them from obeying God. So it is ironic when people try to use these verses to justify their refusal to obey God.

 

[Aaron112]

If you mean leftovers from the sixth day I agree.

No , we do not agree.
That is not what the Creator's Word Says -
Jesus Said "I have food to eat you know nothing about"...
people , the disciples and messengers of Yahweh chosen by Yahweh ,
knew about the leftovers...

 

[Aaron112]

Gentiles can't follow him while refusing to follow what he taught.

Multitudes think they can, and likely, some or all, are among those in Scripture "Jesus said to them, be gone from Me, I never knew you" on judgment day ....

 

[Akjv]

No , we do not agree.
That is not what the Creator's Word Says -
Jesus Said "I have food to eat you know nothing about"...
people , the disciples and messengers of Yahweh chosen by Yahweh ,
knew about the leftovers...

I believe Jesus meant when he said "I have food to eat you know nothing about" at that moment his meat was saving the soles of the people the Smartian woman would bring back to meet Jesus. What I meant was Jesus was in a human body and at some point the human body would have to eat food

 

[Aaron112]

34 Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work.

34 Jesus said to them, My food (nourishment) is to do the will (pleasure) of Him Who sent Me and to accomplish and completely finish His work.

34 Yeshua said to them, “My food is to do what the one who sent me wants and to bring his work to completion.

 

[Akjv]

we eat from two tables ... a double portion received on the sixth day which we carry over into the seventh ...

The bible in Exodus says to prepare the Sabbath food the day before.

 

[honey badger]

The bible in Exodus says to prepare the Sabbath food the day before.

chapter verse please

 

[Akjv]

chapter verse please

Ex 16:
And it came to pass, that on the sixth day they gathered twice as much bread, two omers for one man: and all the rulers of the congregation came and told Moses.

23 And he said unto them, This is that which the LORD hath said, To morrow is the rest of the holy sabbath unto the LORD: bake that which ye will bake to day, and seethe that ye will seethe; and that which remaineth over lay up for you to be kept until the morning.

24 And they laid it up till the morning, as Moses bade: and it did not stink, neither was there any worm therein.

25 And Moses said, Eat that to day; for to day is a sabbath unto the LORD: to day ye shall not find it in the field.