Eating with Grace
Feb 2020
Many of you have grown up with saying “grace” in a prayer of thanks before you eat. Something like “Thank you Jesus for giving us this good food, bless the hands that prepared it, bless and sanctify it to our bodies, in Jesus Name, Amen”
My personal worldview as a Christian is that God created this world and all in it, including us. I am not an evolutionist. My worldview has a part in most of what I believe about food and eating. Now we all have mindsets and paradigms that we use to filter what we hear, many times without realizing it. In my Christian walk I have only recently realized many of those were wrong and I have changed. With food it is the same. But for medical intervention and Gods guidance on that I would be dead by now, quite possibly.
I believe God designed us as amazing creatures. I believe He made food for us designed to give our bodies and minds sustenance. The problem is our ancestors and us got it wrong and made it all more complicated than it should be.
Now I don’t want to make this way of eating (WOE) to be legalistic or too complicated. The closest description is WFPBNO – Whole Foods Plant Based No Oil. My most used website is drmcdougall.com, the site of Dr John & Mary McDougall, who are about my age as well, 72, pushing 73 at present.
My base is a bit different I suspect. Lets look at the Bible verses in Genesis 1:29,30 NKJV “And God said, “See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food.
Gen 1:30
“Also, to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, in which there is life, I have given every green herb for food”; and it was so.”
God originally had us, and the animals, start off as vegetarians.
Something changed when the Fall happened and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Some versions say it was an apple but we don’t really know.
I don’t want to deal with the theology of that, many have already done it better than I can, many worse, I suspect. Suffice to say many have been eaters of animal protein since then.
There have been many ways men and women have used the vegetable and animal resources on the planet since, in terms of preparation, combinations, amounts and storage.
Then God made some rules about many of these matters when He made a covenant with Moses and the children of Israel, variously called the covenant of Moses, or Old Covenant since, around 1,350 BC. In very rough calculations the covenant of Moses, or the Law of Moses, covers 71% of a Bible’s pages, but only 22% of the years of the time from Adam to year 2000 AD. It has had a profound effect on the world and still does in many ways, many good, but I believe has been misapplied in the New Covenant era in some ways.
This Law had a lot of rules regarding food for the Israel. These applied to Israel for 1,380 years. Some of these made sense at the time because of the different factors and hygiene practices of the day, some were ceremonially part of the Law. Jesus inaugurated the New Covenant between Jesus and the Father about 30 AD.
Regarding food, Paul wrote in Colossians 2:16 “Do not let anyone therefore bring a restriction to your freedom by reviving religious rules and regulations pertaining to eating and drinking: all Jewish festivals, new moons, and Sabbaths have come to an end in Christ! “Mirror Bible.
So, in relation to eating now, we can go back to the original. Then we can add people’s experiences and gained knowledge since. We can incorporate modern science-based knowledge, more on that later. You personally have the freedom and responsibility to adapt the current knowledge to your situation and location. You need to exercise some discernment in what you eat and you need to be disciplined to keep with the plan. A Bible verse in Hosea 4:6 says, in part, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge”. God was referring to spiritual things here but it also applies to what we eat!
Have an attitude of gratitude and watch what you eat!
February 2020