Does God Really Care?

11/12/2014

The book is called "Holy Cow! Does God Care About What We Eat?". I began reading it this week because I was interested in seeing if the author came to the same conclusion Ben and I had. It's written by a young woman named Hope Egan who was raised in a modern Jewish family and who came first to believe Jesus is Messiah and then to recognize the validity of God's words for everyone who believes in him.

In the first chapter of the book, Hope summed up the quandary any believer feels when they try to read the Bible from start to finish in the belief that it really is the Word of God and is to be looked to and regarded as authoritative.

"I eventually committed my life to Jesus, but my journey was filled with confusion," she writes. "Whenever I asked questions, my friends always turned to the Bible as the ultimate information source. Their reverence for this book seemed extreme, but their wise ways of dealing with life's toughest issues hooked me. Since the Bible was the foundation for that wisdom, I was compelled to read it."

That is a powerful thing for a young Jewish woman to state, by the way. She was drawn to read the Bible because the Christians she knew had wise ways of dealing with life's issues.

What threw her for a loop was the fact that most of the things God spelled out that he wanted anyone who followed him to do were actually being ignored. All the instructions for celebrating Passover were right there in the Christian Bible just as in the Jewish Bible she'd grown up with, but none of her Christian friends - who seemed to be looking to the Bible for direction about everything in life - even mentioned Passover or seemed interested in God's way of living. When she asked why, she got what she termed "confident answers" saying things like "Jesus fulfilled that law so we don't have to". This was extremely confusing to her. In the end, her confusion boiled down to one big question:

Does committing our life totally to God mean turning over everything to his direction and control...or are there some things he gave directions about that we can safely disregard?

"Committed to doing God's will in all areas of my life," she writes, "I took the plunge and decided to give up pork and shellfish. Since the other areas that I'd submitted to Him (like money, work and relationships) had always turned out beautifully, I trusted that the pork thing would too."

She came to the conclusion that if she was going to say God was her Creator, Redeemer and Lord...she'd better place everything in her life under his control. Up to and including her favorite barbecued pork ribs.

"This book is not about doing something (or avoiding something) so that we can have a relationship with Him or be "saved"," she continues. "Rather, exploring this topic is a response to our faith. It arises naturally from our longing for obedience to God. Because we already have a relationship with Him, we respond to His love for us by seeking His will and wisdom in all areas of our lives - including what we eat. As redeemed people, we bear the most fruit when we submit our whole selves to our Creator. In other words, dietary issues are not the core of my faith, but they are the main focus of this book."

This is beautifully simple overview of something I have been trying to describe for years. In a few paragraphs, Mrs. Egan is pointing out the dilemma of what to do with God's commandments once coming to the belief that Jesus is the Messiah and the solution of following those ways out of love and gratitude. The question of whether to obey or not obey is not one of salvation. It's one of practicality: does God really care about all aspects of our lives coming under submission to his will?

Luke 8:9-15
And when his disciples asked him what this parable meant, he said, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’ Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God.

When I read this recently, this sentence jumped out at me. When Jesus spoke it, the word of God did not include the writings of Paul. Or Peter. Or James or Jude or John or Luke or Matthew or Mark. When the Seed was sown, it was the seed of what we call the Old Testament. The seed was sown to produce fruit in us, the fruit of love for God and obedience to him.

Jesus was teaching his disciples about what we today abhor and call "the Law".

He continues:

"The ones along the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved."

According to Jesus, God detailed his ways for us so we may absorb those ways - write them on our hearts! - and be saved. That is the foundational characteristic of all God's words: to save us. Sometimes God's words have been given to save us from physical death - as he saved Noah and his children. Sometimes God's words are given to save us from bad things like sickness and strife and sorrow - like his commandments governing Human marriage relationships. Sometimes God's words are given to save our very souls - the essence of our beings that he has promised to make immortal if we will only come to him in complete trust and believe he is God and his son is our Savior who has become the way we can get to him in the first place. He is the Human personification of the Word of God, as if we took those Torah scrolls Moses wrote to God's dictation and manifested them into a Man who could walk and talk and eat and explain what God was really saying.

More from Jesus' explanation of his parable of the different soils:

"And the ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe for a while, and in time of testing fall away. And as for what fell among the thorns, they are those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature.

These people are not willing to submit everything to God. They don't devote all the space of their heart to God's seeds growing and bearing fruit. They want to withhold the cares of their everyday life, to keep their lives separate from their salvation. I would go so far as to say these two soils are examples of those who believe that because they are saved, they are free to go and concentrate on anything that seems good to them without regard to the seed of God's Words. They believe having the seed is enough and are not interested in submitting to the responsibility of nurturing and caring for it.

The only way for God's good seed to grow in our hearts is to give up what we would do and seek after what God would do! That's the way we water the seed so it will grow. It's the way we clear the weeds out of the ground so there is room. When I don't eat my favorite clam chowder because I believe God wanted something different for those who follow his ways, I'm turning away from a pleasure of this life for the sake of watering the seed that God in his grace and mercy scattered onto my heart. It's not enough for me to just have the seed: I want it to grow. I want to be a fruitful soil. Does this mean I can do anything to be good enough to receive the seed? Nope! But it does mean I can strive to do everything in my power to help it grow in me without choking it by going my own way.

Jesus finished by describing the kind of garden I want to be:

"As for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience."

God, the Creator of the Seed, the Speaker of the Word, the Living Word, wants every single part of my life to be clear and fertile ground for his seed to grow in. He is a jealous God. He wants every part of my life devoted to him. That's what it means to be a slave to righteousness. It's what it means to love God with all my heart and soul and strength. It's what Jesus himself stated when he looked up to his father and said, "Not my will but yours be done."

So...does God really care what we eat? Absolutely! He cares about everything we do, because everything we do reflects what's in our hearts. He cares about every single action we take or don't take because everything we do betrays whether we are more concerned with what we want...or what he wants for us.

11 Comments

Emily

11/16/2014 09:31:42 am

Looking forward (presumptively) to a blog post concerning the reasons Paul and Matthew and Luke speak the way they do concerning the law, especially in regards to diet and circumcision. :)

Lauren

11/17/2014 02:59:21 am

You know that's going to take me a while to write in between babies, right? ;-)

The easy answer - the answer that tests our presumptions of what is true - is to make sure that the Apostles are saying what we've been told they're saying. For example, I can shortly tackle Mark 7:19 saying "Thus Jesus declared all meats clean", which seems on the face of it completely self-explanatory.

But it isn't.

First of all, that all-important sentence isn't in the earliest manuscripts.Even the King James Version in English from the 1600s didn't add that one line to the end of Jesus' conversation about the Pharisaical interpretations of God's Law. There is good reason to believe that sentence "making all meats clean" was a very, very late addition to our New Testament. What Jesus actually said was that food doesn't stay in your body because it comes out the other end, thus ridding a person of it while what is in your heart is here to stay.

This indicates the supposedly clear statement about kosher food was placed by later (Gentile) translators who had their own opinions on what Jesus was saying. It is an opinion that slipped into the text. That changes everything. If that sentence was added almost two thousand years after the original text, it means that what Jesus actually said is back open to interpretation, so you have to read the whole chapter.

On further reading what Jesus was talking about in this chapter, he was specifically calling out and criticizing the "hedge commands" that the rabbis of the day had placed around the straightforward law God himself gave. "You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God for your own tradition!" As an aside, I would argue that as Christians, we have had great opportunity to be accused of exactly the same thing.

Today's Orthodox Jewish translations of God's ways indicate the same issues - if you eat Jewish Kosher, you cannot mix any dairy or animal products because God said not to eat a young goat cooked in it's mother's milk. In my view, by saying that you can't eat ANY meat or milk together, this tradition violates a further command of God that "you shall not add to or subtract from these laws" (Deuteronomy 4:2 and 12:32). Jewish Kosher is therefore in violation of God's Law in places. I have confidence in this view because Jesus himself held it. He had no problem violating man-made laws and in Mark 7 is explaining completely why he had no problem ignoring what men say to not eat or touch.

But the original Biblical Kosher laws were not given by men. They were given by God. And in order for Jesus to be perfect, he himself obeyed God's given law and did not deviate from it. We know this for sure because he was only accused of not washing his hands before eating (man-made law) rather than eating any meat he chose. Jesus' enemies would've pounced on any hint of that in a second. So we know our Savior, the Son of our Creator and the living personification of what God desired for his children to be, did not himself consider all meats good to eat.

There's a beginning anyway...

Love,
Me :-)

Rachel

11/19/2014 10:15:50 pm

In response to your comment about the Mark passage, I humbly suggest that you look at the original Greek before making so serious an accusation as the idea of someone adding their own thoughts to a translation of the Bible. If that were the case, it completely destroys the idea that the Bible is accessible to anyone, and suggests that you're going to have to research everything before you believe it....because if there's one error, than there could be any number of "personal opinions" That being said, I do recognize that some of the more modern Bibles have completely strayed from the original Greek/Hebrew, but that's clearly not what you are talking about. I found it interesting that the comment, which you cast doubt on, "making all meats clean" IS in the original greek, though the term meat was better translated food. But the word for declared clean, katharizō, is actually used twice, at the beginning and the end of the phrase. So I would conclude its pretty important.

11/20/2014 12:53:33 am

Ben and I have actually been carefully going through the original Greek of the Gospels. This is not an accusation and it's not an invalidation of the Bible. However, any time you declare something that God has said to now be null and void, that passage had better be very carefully scrutinized. To declare anything God said to be "done away with" is a serious accusation indeed! To say that Jesus our Messiah nullified a command of God is an overwhelmingly serious accusation because that would actually call his qualifications to BE Messiah into question. So this is an incredibly serious situation, the reading of this verse.

For me, reading what Jesus had to say - which was all surrounding a debate about a man-made handwashing law, not God's law! - made no sense with the conclusion in my NIV Bible that Jesus had almost off-handedly told his followers they no longer had to obey what the Father specifically directed his people to do.

The sentence in question IS a commentary. It is not in quotations. It is usually in parentheses. That is an aside or a comment on Jesus' quoted teaching. The real question is...who commented? The Gospel writer or modern scholars?

On reading what all the other Bible versions said, there began to be some further doubts because I was curious about the parentheses surrounding "(In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean)". First of all, the word Jesus is not in the text at all, so this little sentence immediately began looking very suspicious. Someone had tried to "clarify" Jesus' teaching with a nice neat conclusion.

Here is what "A Textual Commentary on the New Testament" by Bruce M. Metzger says (this, by the way, is a very handy little book Ben has been using extensively as he's been working through translating the Gospels):

"The overwhelming weight of manuscript evidence supports the reading of the word 'katharizo' [as 'clean']. The difficulty of construing this word in the sentence prompted copyists to attempt various corrections and ameliorations [improvements]."

(Brackets are my insertions)

Whoa!!! Copyists were trying to "correct" what the Gospel writer said? They were trying to "improve" it?"

Continued in footnote:

"Many modern scholars, following the interpretation suggested by Origen and Chrysostem, regard 'kathorizo' as connected grammatically with 'lego' ['to lay forth' or 'to speak', which has become 'he declared'] in ver. 18 and take it as the evangelist's comment on the implications of Jesus' words concerning Jewish dietary laws."

By any way I view this statement, therefore, that Mark never intended the sentence "Jesus declared all food clean" to be a part of the text. When traced to it's root, it is modern scholars' attempt to "clarify" something they didn't understand because it didn't fit their picture of Jesus and how he lived his life in obedience to God's Law. And they used the interpretation provided by the very anti-Jewish sources Origen and Chrysostem to back up this "clarification".

Ultimately, it would be hypocritical of Jesus to declare all foods clean and then continue to follow God's Laws regarding food: and we know for a fact he did obey those laws because Peter - Jesus' student - later was completely insulted that in his vision of the sheet God might be asking him to eat unclean animals.

11/20/2014 12:57:27 am

Also, this does not destroy the idea that the Bible is accessible to anyone. It is completely accessible. It has always required thought and study to understand.

Yes, it is absolutely true that we have to test everything we THINK we know when it comes to what God says because our goal is always supposed to be the truth of God's words as opposed to the traditions of men. There may be errors in our translations, but I believe God's truth is always available and there to be found by anyone if we only look for it.

11/23/2014 12:43:12 am

Thanks for taking the time to answer my comment so quickly....I know how busy life is with little ones! I want to apologize if it felt like I was attacking you. It was not my intention. I meant it as an "iron sharpens iron" sort of challenge. But in light of some recent comments, I'm sure its a sensitive area. It was something I heard about second hand, and didn't actually see myself, so I had forgotten. There will always remain the dilemma in written word, of misconstruing intent because of the absence of body language and tone!
I am following your posts on this subject with great interest. They make me think. and I'm glad to know that you are being so thorough....if I had put more thought into it, I would of realized that of COURSE you would have looked at the original. You have never been one to do things by halves! And I do remember now, your mention in an earlier post that you and Ben have been going through the Greek.
So, that being said, some thoughts on your reply..... As to the idea that Jesus could be contradicting the words if His Father, my running assumption has been that any seeming contradictions in the Bible can and must be simply a lack of understanding on our part. If all scripture is "God breathed," than it doesn't matter who said it.....because it was all God. So, I try not to fit something I don't understand into the box of "my own understanding of who God is" but work on the assumption that its true, even if I haven't figured out yet how it fits. (and I think that, although we are coming at this from two different angles, that's what you are doing too) I find, in my own self, that it is so easy to slip back into the trap of trying to simply fit things into my own understanding! (And I'm so thankful that the Lord constantly works on my heart and understanding, and is Faithful in continuing to change my thoughts to make them more like His....His perfect work in us is so wonderful!)
So, I guess I don't understand where you are coming from.....are you saying that even though the word 'katharizo' is generally translated as "clean", going on the manuscript in context, as a whole, it might not mean that in this case? Or that it was a side note of Mark's, not coming directly from Jesus, and so not as valid? Or am I missing your point completely?
I believe that the beauty and mystery of the Scripture is that it is both straightforward and simple, such as a child can understand, and deep in a way that requires thought and study. Only God could write something like that!
So, I know I am rambling a bit, and just throwing out thoughts as they come to me, and not really methodically going through your thoughtful reply. I apologize.....my kind of answer to my own thoughtful and time consuming replies frustrates me to no end! In explanation, Miriam has not been sleeping well these last two weeks, so my brain is not at top performance....and on top of that, our household is extra busy, because Tim's sister and her 3 children are living with us right now while she finishes working on her own gutted home. But I don't know how long this craziness will go on, and I didn't want to leave my answer till I could answer in equal thoroughness.....it might be a long time! So again, thanks for taking the time to reply :-)

11/23/2014 02:06:00 am

Just have time for a quick post right now, but wanted to say i really appreciate this morning's comment and recognize that it's very tough for genuine tone to carry through in writing! I'll answer better later, but for now I'm sorry to hear Miriam isn't sleeping well and definitely appreciate how that can make brain function get fuzzy fast. I start to forget words in my sentences when the girls have kept me up for a few nights...

11/23/2014 02:27:44 pm

Okay, back from the busy day! Comment fields have a limit of how many characters I can fit in, which is probably good...

What makes this passage in Mark particularly compelling is the simple conclusion "In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean". It makes it so completely easy to say, "Oh right, of course that's what Jesus is talking about! See, he's saying right here that foods are made 'katharizo', which means 'clean'."

To consider HOW Jesus said foods are made clean and link that to what we should eat would get kind of funny, though. He said foods were made clean by passing through the digestion and ending up in the latrine. If he were really talking about things being good to eat or not, a literal conclusion would be that according to Jesus, all food that's gone through the body and ended up in the latrine is clean for eating. *grin*

It's the conclusionary sentence stating Jesus was talking about dietary law that's the added comment. It's a conclusion Mark never made when he wrote the Gospel. His report did not include anything whatsoever about a discussion involving whether God's people should go ahead and eat food God previously called not fit for eating. He did not make that comment and neither did Jesus.

Matthew also records the same story but does so with some subtle differences that make it much more obvious what Jesus is talking about.

Matthew 15:1-20
Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat.” He answered them, “And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God commanded, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ But you say, ‘If anyone tells his father or his mother, “What you would have gained from me is given to God,” he need not honor his father.’ So for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God. You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said:

“‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’”

And he called the people to him and said to them, “Hear and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.” Then the disciples came and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?” He answered, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up. Let them alone; they are blind guides. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.” But Peter said to him, “Explain the parable to us.” And he said, “Are you also still without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone.”

I absolutely believe Jesus was saying the word "clean" or "cleanse" when he spoke of what happens to food exiting the body. People even say that today - certain detoxes that flush your bowels are referred to as cleanses, right?

I'm taking issue with the idea that this passage has anything to do with refuting God's instructions regarding food, and I believe the only reason it's used to teach us that we don't need to obey God is because there is a conclusion added to the text that is so simple and compelling it can blind us to the rest of what was going on.

Jesus was not talking about clean and unclean foods and whether or not it was still important to God that his people not eat pigs. He was focusing on something else altogether; and I believe he was doing this because he knew his followers didn't need to be told to avoid eating unclean foods, but he also knew they could be trapped into having the bad spirit of honoring God with their lips while not caring what God really thinks.

12/4/2014 12:06:01 pm

Interesting commentary.

I get pretty nervous when folks tell me I can't trust my bible as is. its been happening since I first became a Christian.... Always a reason why scripture doesn't mean what it actually says in front of me when I open my NKJV to page 1025. Always having to do with original languages or different intentions. Hearing explanations on why my bible doesn't mean what it says automatically makes me squirm. I've developed a bit of a phobia over the years because of that, which is why it has taken me so long to reply.

A lot of ink has been used on both sides of this argument. I've only dabbled and haven't done full out research on it. Maybe one day I'll study the original languages for myself. That day is not today obviously. I'm doing well if I am able to sit and read quietly for an hour.

I have always taken those verses as Christ making the Gentiles clean.. the uncircumsized ones who ate pigs and shellfish...now clean because of Christ. Hallelujah!. The bible doesn't give any instructions to these new gentile believers to live as the jews did with regard to the law. One could argue that its because that would have been assumed.. , but Paul especially seems to come awfully close to saying the opposite.... and I wouldn't even say awfully close. I'd say he just comes out and says the opposite (circumcision is nothing! Uncircumcision is nothing! he writes) ..whoa.. nothing? really? Circumcision is NOTHING?!?!?! And other things he writes are decidedly "anti-law for gentiles even though they are grafted in" sounding... So is the matter that you don't trust Paul much? Or is it that we have another original language problem (squirm) .. Or things are just being added into the bible left and right and we can't really trust the New Testament? Or we can't trust our modern minds with what was actually being said because its such a different time and place?

Anyhow.. I have definitely not studied the issue even a quarter as much as you have. So I feel kind of silly even replying with my limited knowledge. But I didn't want to not reply.

:)

12/5/2014 03:02:48 am

Remember when you had that conversation a long time ago with Ben and he was being very scholarly and you just handed him a Bible and said, "I can't answer you...why don't you read it for yourself?"?

This may be another of those conversations.

I apologize for getting scholarly. I was actually answering Rachel more on that one when she asked if I had really read what the Greek text said. What I was really trying to say to you was this:

When I read the Bible I ask myself two questions: "Is God good?" and "Does God change?"

In my opinion, you do not need to know anything about original languages. You do not need to spend hours studying. You do not need to squirm about your Bible not saying what you think it says.

The answers to every question (I think) are contained in the answer to the two questions I just asked.

For Ben, the important question was this: "Did Jesus come to start a new religion?" If so, then things like the Sabbath, dietary laws, circumcision, etc., were all on the table to change.

If not...then they weren't and it was a matter of trying to understand apparent contradictions.

I do not believe God changes. I believe he is and always was perfectly good in everything he does and says. I do not believe Jesus came to start a new religion but to rightly do and teach what were always God's perfect ways. And that is ultimately how we end up at the conclusions we've reached!

12/5/2014 03:11:05 am

I forgot something:

You asked if we simply don't really respect Paul. The answer is, we respect him very much indeed.

We do not necessarily respect the way he is commonly understood. Because if he really wrote as is commonly understood, then he is contradictory to the rest of the Bible and could not have spoken with the Holy Spirit.

Hence...why we have looked at him so carefully to try to find out if he really said what he seems to be saying or if he has been badly translated. We do believe he spoke with the guidance of the Holy Spirit and has been seriously misunderstood - and that misunderstanding has made it's way into our English versions of the Bible.

However, I grew up listening to the Living Bible, which has Paul blatantly saying God's Law is now useless and a relic...but because I also listened to the rest of the Bible, I knew there was a disconnect somewhere and did not lose respect for the rest of God's words because Paul was confusing.

Does God Really Care?

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