Clough Acts Lesson 26

Dietary Laws of the Old Testament – Acts 10:9-20

I’d like to answer two feedback cards: In your exegesis of Acts 6:9-10 you made an assumption that Paul debated with Stephen in the synagogue. Through the rest of the lesson you referred to this several times as if it were an historical fact. Could you please list your documentation for Paul’s debate with Stephen as historical rather than assumptive. It’s inferred based on two reasons. And it’s an inference that I myself am not the first to make; several have made it before me. It was made first because of Paul’s nature and the historical fact that he was definitely present when Stephen made his great speech. And knowing Paul the way we do from the writings of the New Testament, it’s highly inconceivable that he would have stood there very meekly and let Stephen get away with the kind of address that Stephen did. The second reason for making that assumption was that Paul’s hermeneutics, or the rules by which he interpreted the Old Testament, are very, very similar to those of Stephen, so much so that people have thought that he gained most of his insights through Stephen.

A second feedback card has to do with Daniel. In Daniel 4 [25] “seven times shall pass over” King Nebuchadnezzar; Bible commentators give this period as seven years but that can’t be for he was stricken in the 38^th year of his reign and that leaves only five years till his death in the 43^rd year. The rabbinical records of the Jews state he died one year after his recovery, leaving only four years for the insanity period. Could the “seven times” be prophetic therefore, that is 2520 years? The handwriting on the wall in Daniel 5:25-27 added up also comes to 2520. If Babylon’s fall started the clock, that would bring us to 1983 from 537 BC.

First of all, with all dating the problem is that certain things are being brought in here that are not in the text, besides the fact that the Lord cautioned us against dating. First, we don’t know from the Bible when Nebuchadnezzar died. That 43^rd year did not come out of Scripture. Secondly, certain assumptions have to be made to get 2520 out of 5:25-27. I think the most important response is that apparently the Lord does not want us to date, to predict His coming. One of the rare female coeds at MIT was the great-granddaughter of a man by the name of Miller; she was in a Christian group and I knew her while I was going to college and she used to tell a story about this great-grandfather of hers who gathered people on a hill in upstate New York in 1844, I believe it was, because he hand unquestionably predicted that Christ would return in 1844.

When you hear about the people that gather on hills in white clothes selling all their possessions in anticipation of Christ’s return, that is not an evangelistic illustration just, that happens to be narration of a historic event that happened in New York state in the 19^th century. Obviously Christ did not come back in 1844, Christ did not come back in 1914 as the Watchtower Society insists. In other words, every time someone tries to set a date and it invalidates, it casts dispersions on the whole idea of Biblical prophecy. This is why the world ridicules the whole concept because of these misapplications and the Bible explicitly forbids us to even dream of setting dates when Jesus Christ returns. All we can say is that certain signs indicate it’s closer but that’s not a very profound statement since obviously it’s going to come at some point in the future, every time you move through time you’re getting that much close. So the reason the Holy Spirit has forbid this emphasis on date setting, I think, is to keep us going with the perspective of dealing with the great commission, the things that are very clear from the Scripture, and never mind about this; if Christ happens to come back tonight or this noon and you never make it to lunch that’s His business. The last information we had from the throne was to go into the world and preach the gospel to every creature. And therefore this is what the Church ought to be doing. If the Commander in Chief wishes another order then He can pass it down but it’s not for the troops in the frontline trenches to devise and predict and worry about what the commander is going to order next.

Having said that let’s turn to Acts 10 because in Acts 10 we do have an order coming down from the Commander in Chief and in Acts 10 we therefore have a highly significant passage on the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the Church Age. Remember that we have said time and time again that the book of Acts is a book of transition. That is, it begins with emphasis upon the kingdom and winds up with emphasis on the Church. It begins in Jewish Jerusalem; it winds up in Gentile Rome. There’s been a great movement through the book of Acts. The book of Acts, therefore, is a documentary of how the Holy Spirit phased in the great commission. He did so in three stages. The first stage, witnessing in Jerusalem; that’s Acts 2-6 and 7 was Stephen’s speech. And then we have Acts 8 and 9, stage 2 in the great commission, witnessing in Judea and Samaria. Now in Acts 10 stage 3, witnessing in all the world.

The big point that we have been making over and over and over and over again is for us to examine and appreciate the fact that the Holy Spirit in these days led the Church with an unconscious guidance. That means not that the Holy Spirit was unconscious but that the Holy Spirit’s overall guiding was not caused by men actually seeking it all. The Church was actually slapped, knocked, driven, tricked into fulfilling the great commission. It’s a picture of the fact that man, naturally speaking, does not want to obey Scripture. In our depraved nature, even when born again to carry out what He has told us to do. And so therefore the Holy Spirit has to work behind the scenes to see that we do, in fact, carry it out. And this should be a source of comfort to you because no matter how confused your life may be, no matter how many adversities, you may be facing, no matter how chaotic things may appear to you right now, if you are a Christian and have trusted in Jesus Christ, that means the Holy Spirit is bringing you along the line of sanctification into conformity with Christ and you can relax because it does not all depend on who and what you are. It does not depend on you sitting down and trying to figure out every little thing that the Holy Spirit is doing in your life. You object is to start with the obvious and move with the obvious; start with the known and move with the known and then let the Holy Spirit put it all together for you. This is how the Church operated and this is the picture we want to see throughout Acts.

We’ve already seen a little bit about this man Cornelius. We studied the first 8 verses of Acts 10 where Cornelius, the Roman centurion, probably with in rank corresponding in modern military from captain to lieutenant colonel, depending on whether he was commanding the 100 as a platoon or whether he was in fact commanding a larger number which would correspond to a company in the modern army. Cornelius was destined for this role. It wasn’t any accident that the first Gentile won to Christ just happened to be a member of the Roman establishment. Why is that important? Because the Roman establishment was the fourth kingdom of Daniel. It wasn’t any accident that this man also was a Roman soldier in that establishment, because what was the omnipresent sign of Rome? Everywhere the Roman went went that standard with the Roman eagle SPQR; everywhere went the Roman legionnaire and so it was that the first Gentile led to Jesus Christ was a Roman soldier.

And not only was he a Roman soldier but he was a member of the Italian cohort, which meant that he was mated to the Italian Peninsula and therefore even more firmly identified with that fourth kingdom of man. So all of this was planned out sovereignly by the Holy Spirit. “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to His purpose.” And you see in this drama of the first conversion of a Gentile every detail worked out. We see, for example, in the passage before us, from Acts 10:9-22, the emphasis Luke placed on the timing of the Holy Spirit. Everything’s worked out for timing. Notice in verse 9, “On the morrow, as they were going on their journey, as they were drawing near to the city,” notice it says “Peter went to pray about the sixth hour.” Notice in verse 17, “while Peter was doubting” something else happened. Verse 19, “While Peter was thinking” something else happened. And then the adverbs of time and the verbs of time continue with great frequency in the rest of the passage.

What’s the point? The point is that the Holy Spirit has timed it perfectly, neither too early nor too late. Now we Americans have many admirable qualities in our Americanism and we ought to be proud of it. We’re not to be the world’s doormat like our leaders apparently think we are supposed to be. We are to be proud because of our country but as Christians we also have to remember that our highest allegiance is not to our Americanism but to the Lord Jesus Christ. And therefore we have to understand there are traits and qualities about us as Americans that are not admirable, and one of those things, one of those traits that we have that has been our success in business, but has been our demise in spiritual things, is our impatience to get things done yesterday. Always we have to rush, rush, rush, rush, rush.

Now fortunately for the universe the Holy Spirit is not an American. And therefore when the Holy Spirit organizes He doesn’t rush, rush, rush into things. He always kind of like coasts along, He always is right there at the right time. Before He finishes Acts 10 we’re going to observe that it took five days for the Holy Spirit to just win one family to Christ. There were thousands of families unsaved, up and down the Levant, the eastern end of the Mediterranean; thousands of them, millions of them and the Holy Spirit seemingly just bypassed them all and emphasized only one family, the family of Cornelius. Why? Because that family was ready, that’s why, and because the believers were being prepared for that one family at that one time in that one place at that one hour. And so the Holy Spirit organizes time extremely carefully, never hurried, never rushed, never too late.

There is something else about this Acts passage that we want to understand before we begin the details of it and that is its importance to defend our Christian position against the modern sociologist and anthropologist who criticize missionary activity. It’s quite fashionable; every once in a while you hear it on the news; it’s more fashionable in the college classroom. It’s more fashionable than the printed page, to brand missionaries as upsetters of native culture, it’s somehow wrong for the Christian missionaries to go from America to Timbuktu and there evangelize the people and upset their pagan culture pattern. This, they say, is wrong, and their argument always follows the same syllogism, it’s the same old thing cranked out of human viewpoint. It goes like this: all men, no matter where they are, no matter where they’re located in history, are trapped in a cultural cage. That means they make their ethical and their judicial and their religious pronouncements out of their habits, what they’ve grown up with. They are limited to their culture and so, for example, a missionary leaving from Texas just has a Texas-American way of looking at things. And the anthropologist says what right has this Texan-American got to go down to South America, for example, Columbia, and tell the natives in Columbia how they ought to do this and they ought to do that; he has no right as a Texas-American to go down there and butt into the Columbian’s business; that’s wrong.

Now that sounds very persuasive, in fact, many times missionaries have been guilty of this. But the overall argument has to be rejected from our point of view. Why? Because it starts out in the wrong place; all men are not trapped in a cultural cage. Proof: Acts 10. Peter was, you might say, trapped in a Jewish cage and he had to witness to Gentile culture, and therefore he had certain cultural hang-ups, hang-ups that had to be dispensed with before he could go witness clearly for Christ to people of another culture and of another race. How is he going to do this? If the sociologist is correct, if the unbelieving anthropologist is right, there is no way that Peter can do that. He can’t avoid bringing his Jewishness with him as he goes from point A to point B. Ah, but here is exactly where the modern thinker is wrong. The modern thinker has excluded the God of the Bible from the universe. He’s built a lead field over room so God, if He exists, is above the lead field and never gets down into the room and influences things in the room.

And therefore Acts 10 is the important counter passage to show that the Holy Spirit protects the problem and can filter out cultural prejudice out of His missionaries. This is the central Biblical counter reference to the modern sociological argument against missions. It assumes, Acts 10 does, that the universe is made the way God says it was made in Genesis. It assumes there is such a thing as a Triune God, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit that speak down from eternity into time and can direct us with absolute truth. The anthropologist and sociologist who are making this criticism say that’s not the case, the universe is not built the way the Bible says it is, there is no God of the Bible who effectively speaks. So since we start, one of us, with 2 + 2 = 4 and the one, 2 + 2 = 5, no matter how brilliant we are, no matter how logically consistent we are, it doesn’t make any difference, we’re going to come out with a different calculation and the reason is that our starting points are different. Our starting point is in the Biblical framework and therefore Peter has this situation develop in his life.

Acts 10:9, “On the next day,” that means the next day after Cornelius has sent his body guard, down here is Joppa, it is the southwestern suburb of Tel Aviv; you can get a bus and go up along the coast route and make it in about half an hour, but it took these guys a day and a half to walk 28 miles down there. That’s how far… Cornelius up here, Peter down here. The Holy Spirit has already begun to prepare Peter for what’s coming by arranging him to stay at a certain motel, the house of the tanner. And remember what was significant about that particular motel? The house of the tanner was a place that would be considered ritually unclean to the Jew. What does a tanner deal with? He deals with carcasses; and no Jew could come and be clean and deal with carcasses. And so the fact that Peter happens to be rooming at this motel, an unclean one, is already evidence that the Holy Spirit is moving in his life to get Peter in the right position, with the right mentality, with the right mental attitude, with the right vocabulary to evangelize effectively the culture he is about to evangelize.

“On the next day,” this is as they approach the city, and notice the participle here, this is a present participle, and the force of the Greek participle is to emphasize the time, durative time, as they were coming on their journey and as they were nearing the city of Joppa, then this is what happened. So obviously Luke, by using these participles says reader, pay attention to how I am showing you the timing of the circumstances. “As they are drawing near to the city, Peter went upon the housetop to pray about the sixth hour,” it tells you exactly the time of day. Why does it say that? Because it’s a very unusual hour. You see, there’s no official reason why Peter should be praying at the sixth hour; the sixth hour is the sixth hour after sunrise, which is assumed to be 6:00 a.m. so therefore the sixth hour is at noon. And there’s something unusual about this not only because it was not an official time of prayer but also Peter is going to involve himself in a little meal situation here; there’s going to be food involved. We think nothing of this, of course food is involved, what else do you do at noon. We’re all programmed to salivate at 11:59 but that’s our Gentile background. In the Biblical times, from the ancient records the Jewish people used to eat their breakfast in early forenoon, and eat their heavy meal in late afternoon, and very rarely did they eat when we eat, at noon. But guess what the Romans did? The Romans ate when we eat, at noon.

So it’s very interesting the very timing here, Peter is going to get a Gentile time for his meal. This is going to be a Gentile lunch that he’s going to be offered, in more ways than one, that he’s going to be offered, and it starts out with this little note, he “went up to pray at the sixth hour.” See, Peter didn’t know what was going to happen; this is the unconscious leading of the Spirit. And as he went up to pray, it says in Acts 10:10 that “he became very hungry,” now that’s unusual because again his body wasn’t timed to become hungry at this particular hour, “and as he was going to eat,” this is the imperfect tense, it means he’d made the decision to eat and the people down below were getting the food ready, “he fell into a trance.”

Now be careful you don’t misunderstand that. I’ve sat in restaurants here in Lubbock and fallen into a trance while I’ve waited to be served but that’s not due to the fact of the Holy Spirit. Here it was a supernatural intervention that God was working with his physical hunger, timing it just within minutes of the time that these people are going to knock on his front door. He isn’t given this vision ahead of time, so Peter has three hours to write a thesis on the analysis of the Holy Spirit’s vision in my life. Peter is a quick kind of person, he’s going to have to respond within minutes to this vision; it all happens very fast. It takes a little time to read it, a lot of time to study it, but if we really programmed it out, say in a film, the whole thing that we are reading here would take about two minutes. So remember that there’s a speed up of time involved here.

So Peter falls into a trance, verse 11, he “saw that heaven had opened,” perfect tense, it means that by the time he saw it in his vision the heavens had torn apart. I don’t know why this is but all through the Scriptures whenever you have someone seeing a vision, there is a constant description, the same phenomena in all these passages, and it’s always describing it the same way. So that tells me something; it at least tells me that these people are observing the same kind of thing and that is they visualize heaven as lying down, you’re out camping, you’re lying down looking up at the tent, and they visualize the heavens as the tent, as the canvas, and they view the heavens opening as a scene opening in that canvas. So the stars were here and then the heavens would just open and out of the heavens would come these visions. Now I don’t know what the significance of this is but it is a constant phenomena recorded in Scripture.

And so he sees the heavens opening, “ and a vessel is descending [unto him],” this is due to the Holy Spirit’s ministry, the Holy Spirit at this point is becoming a little waiter and He’s going to serve him the menu, and he looks at this, there’s “a great sheet, knit at the four corners, and it’s let down to the earth. [12] Wherein were all manner of four-footed beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air.” Verse 12 repeats the language of Genesis 1:24, the creation narrative. It describes the animals in exactly the language of Genesis. And you’ll note that it says all kinds of animals, this is the central philosophic dilemma between the creationist scientist and the evolutionary scientist; the creation scientist believes that there are inherent categories in the zoological world within which there is adaptation and variation, the boundaries of which, however, are never crossed. There’s not a continuum. The evolutionary person who has a philosophy of the continuity of nature, that nature can transform itself up and down the spectrum of complexity whereas the creationist says no, God has created certain categories in the universe and these categories are inviolable under God. There’s no way you can compromise the two; the two views are separate. And here we come in verse 12 to that view, the view that there are different kinds of animals displayed here, absolute categories of animals.

Acts 10:13, “And there came a voice to him,” that said, “Rise, Peter; kill, and eat. [14] But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean. [15] And the voice said unto him again the second time, What God has cleansed, don’t you call common. [16] This was a third time; and the vessel was received up again into heaven. [17] And Peter was doubting in himself [perplexed],” it means he was completely confused, completely confused by this thing.

Now we have to pause in our study of Acts 10 and we have to understand why was Peter so thoroughly confused by this abridgement of dietary law. So we’re going to back and study the Old Testament dietary laws and I think we’ll find some interesting things about Old Testament dietary laws. Let me preface this by saying something about why the Bible talks to the food problem. I’ve often thought it funny that in Christian circles, particularly fundamental Christian circles there are people who would get bent all out of shape if you dared get a glass of wine and drink it in front of them. The Bible has nothing to say that’s wrong about drinking a glass of wine. In fact, it’s used in Passover and communion. But there are fundamentalists who would have almost heart failure if you were to drink a glass of wine in their home.

Now the Bible has nothing to say about wine, but the Bible does have, in fact, a lot to say about food and the very same fundamentalist who is upset about a glass of wine drunk on the table thinks of nothing of gorging himself until he’s overweight. That’s the sin of gluttony. Now isn’t it interesting, the Bible does have very clear things to say about gorging yourself with food. That is considered the sin, not drinking a glass of wine. Nothing is sinful about drinking a glass of wine. Now there are some who kind of get flipped out when the cork comes off the bottle and you have your problem, I grant you, but for most normal people you can stand a glass of wine with no ill effects, and the Bible, therefore, allows it. But the Bible has to say about food and a lot more to say about food in the Old Testament. Why does it have to say about food?

It was brought out in the words of one of our modern Jewish scholars who said this, he was talking about modern Judaism but this describes the Old Testament. “The three strongest natural drives in man are for food, sex, and acquisition.” That means accumulating of wealth. “Judaism does not aim at the destruction of these impulses but at their control and sanctification. The Bible speaks to the food issue because the Bible is once again saying you must trust God in this area as well. This is not an unrelated detail of life; this is where you show your obedience and submission to Him or you show your defiance, an ‘I don’t care’ attitude toward Him.”

Now let’s look at the background for the dietary laws. We’ll look at this, we’ll summarize it for you as we study it this morning, then we’re going to come back to Acts 10 and see why the Holy Spirit had this tremendous job of breaking down a culture barrier so the Word could flow from one person to the other unhindered. And the reason that Acts 10 is such a powerful illustration of the Holy Spirit’s ability to break down cultural barriers is that this was one cultural barrier that was bona fide. Now we have other cultural barriers, it may be that a missionary from Texas would like all the natives in the jungle of Columbia to wear ten gallon hats but that is not a Biblical authorized cultural prejudice. That is easy compared to this cultural prejudice of dietary legislation.

So we want to go back and get the sympathetic thought of the Old Testament. How did they see the food problem. Let’s go back to Genesis 1:28; if you stay in the Bible long enough you deal with everything. On Christmas we were going through the Mosaic Law and all the things we had to preach on the Sunday before Christmas was how they dug latrines outside the camp, but again, the Scriptures speak to every problem. Genesis 1:28, the original diet of man at creation. Don’t picture man as some guy that dropped out of a tree and fell on a banana peel; man in the Scripture was instantly created, miraculously created. If you want an example of it Jesus created wine out of water. You don’t have to be a chemist to know that at least carbon atoms had to appear fro some place to make the wine out of the water and it appeared very rapidly, such that when the governor of the feast asked the guy about the wine he said hey, this is vintage wine; vintage wine takes years to produce, how’d you do this? He didn’t drop a pack of Kool-aid in the water and mix it around and come out with something; this is a miracle and it had, therefore, as a miracle, apparent age. Adam here appears and he is given certain instructions. He is to “be fruitful,” he is to “multiply,” he is to “replenish the earth,” that means to fill the earth, to “subdue,” he is to have “dominion over the fish, over the fowl of the air,” but that doesn’t mean eat them because in verse 29 the diet is mandated. “I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of the tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for food. [30] And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, to everything that creeps upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for food: and it was so”

So the first dietary regime on the face of this planet was vegetative, vegetarian; man originally was a vegetarian; this is the Biblical position. Apparently in this day, in that era before the fall had a chance to work its way into the botanical world and through accumulated mutations and pure adaptations you had a diminishing of vegetative proteins, apparently it’s possible to get all the essential amino acids on a vegetarian diet without the fancy manipulation that you have to go through today to make sure you get all the amino acids if you want to be a vegetarian. So in this day it was possible to get all the nutrition completely from vegetarian sources.

Also in verse 29 is another little fine point that many people do not appreciate it said the seed was also given for food, and I was interested to notice a few years back in Prevention Magazine there was an article entitled, Is There an Anti-cancer food? And the article went on to point out that in the seeds of many of our fruits, seeds that we normally dismiss, for example, you eat an apple but you don’t eat the core; animals when they eat the apple always eat the core and the seeds in the core. But the reason we don’t like the seeds, particularly, is they have a bitter taste to them but that very bitter taste is due, in fact, in part to a chemical called [sounds like: my troll oh sides] that they’re finding have some sort of, at least analgesic affect on cancer. So in these bitter seeds that we just throw out, spit out and ignore, happens to be quite a bit of nutrition. In fact, the seed is the place from which the next generation of plant comes; it is the center of nutrition. God gave us the herb and the seed thereof for food. That was the first dietary regime.

In Genesis 9:2 you have the second dietary regime given to the human race after the flood. After the global worldwide flood man descended in his longevity from 930 years down to 70 years. In such a situation you have the diminishing of the strength of the human body, you have obvious adjustments that had to be made and one of those adjustments is described in 9:2, “And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moves on the earth; into your hand they have been delivered. [3] Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.” But then there’s a restriction on the diet because it says in verse 4, “But the flesh with the soul” or “the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, you shall not eat.” And so when man was allowed to become carnivorous, allowed to use animal protein, the restriction that God said he placed upon our carnivorous diet was that when we eat meat the blood is to be drained carefully from the meat.

Now there may be nutritional reasons for this and we’ll go into it later but here there’s a primarily spiritual reason for this and here’s what it is. When God allowed man to begin to eat into the zoological world, it meant that life had to be shed that we might survive and the little ceremony, as it were, of slaying an animal and draining its blood, the pause, the time that it takes to drain the blood out of the meat is a time to just stop and say now just a minute, I’ve had to kill this animal for food, there’s nothing wrong with that. You can tell your local guru there’s nothing wrong with animal protein, God has commanded it, but having said that the Bible comes back and says yes, but pause a minute and understand, a life has been shed in order that you may live. And so the draining of the blood theologically is showing respect for the animal life that had to be lost because of your survival. It’s ultimately a picture of Christ dying for our sins, but at this point the blood was drained for spiritual and religious reasons.

Now that’s the second area of dietary regime; now we’re going to come to the third dietary regime given by Moses to the Jewish people; the Old Testament dietary laws. Before we do we have to understand that they divided the animal world into two parts; the clean and the unclean, very distinct categories. Certain meat was off limits to the diet of the Jew. Certain meat could be eaten, it was all right. Though there may be health reasons and apparently health reasons for this, again the reason is primarily spiritual. Turn back to Genesis 7:2, this verse you’ll agree in context occurred before man became carnivorous. Nobody is eating animals here, that was given in Genesis 9. Yet in Genesis 7:2 what does it read: “Every clean beast you shall take to thee by sevens, the male and his female; and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.”

Now how come Noah had to make a distinguishment among all the animals that he brought to the ark, he had to make a distinction between the clean and the unclean. What it was is because the clean animals were used for sacrifice; the clean animals had some function spiritually, which goes to an interesting principle. And this makes a fascinating study and some of you, I hope, will be interested in zoology will pursue this further, animals, scripturally speaking, are designed systems that reflect Bible doctrine. For example, take the sheep; the sheep is an animal that wasn’t created at random; God didn’t just drop wool down from heaven and put four feet on it and say well, there’s another one for Adam to name. The lamb was deliberately designed, knowing the complete plan of salvation that was to come in the ages to come and God said I’m going to design an animal and man, as they study this animal are going to understand something about My Son. And so the animal, the sheep, has been designed not only to show something about believers, it also has been designed to show something about the character of Jesus Christ when he died. Wisdom can be gained from studying the zoological world. And apparently the clean animals are all animals that mirror, in their biological niche, in their ecological function or some way, they mirror some facet of Jesus Christ and His saving work because all the clean animals were become authorized pictures of Christ, either something about the way that animal dies, it is something about the way that animal lives, it is something about how he gathers food, something about that animal is a mirror of Jesus Christ.

In coming Sunday evenings we are going to show you certain phases of nature and how those phases teach Bible doctrine. One of the first things we’re going to do is show a film on how they sacrificed lambs out of the Old Testament, and we’ll show a film that some of our photographers in the congregation took about the sheep doing their thing out in the pasture so you can understand why you are called a sheep, if you are a believer, good old stupid sheep and we’ll see how stupid we all are and God’s sense of humor in calling us sheep. But this is how you learn doctrine from the concrete animal kingdom.

So we have the clean and unclean division made before the whole thing became a problem. Now we come to the Mosaic dietary law, Leviticus 11:2. There are two chapters in the Bible that list clean and unclean meat; one is Leviticus 11, the other Deuteronomy 14. This listing clearly divides animals into two categories. “Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, These are the beasts which ye shall eat among all the beasts that are on the earth.” That’s just the word for animals, don’t think of some beast out of Daniel. [3] Whatsoever parts the hoof, and is cloven-footed, and chews the cut among the beasts, that shall ye eat. [4] Nevertheless these shall ye not eat of them that chew the cud, or of them that divide the hoof: the camel, because he chews the cud, but divides not the hoof; he is unclean to you.” And it goes on and describes things, like for example in verse 7, “And the swine, though he divides the hoof, and be cloven-footed, yet he chews not the cud; he is unclean to you.” That’s a probation on hogs, pigs and ham.

Now why is this prohibition there? We have two basic reasons; for religious, and now we’re discovering the health reason. First the religious: we’ve already said that the clean animals depict in some way spiritual truth. There are other reasons; the unclean animals are animals that tend to be scavengers; most of the animals listed in Leviticus 11 as unclean are nature’s garbage men, they go around and eat all the putrid flesh, they keep the place clean. And God simply doesn’t want his sacred people, chosen and elected to be a testimony for Him, to be eating garbage, trash; it’s beneath their dignity. So they don’t eat unclean animals.

Now the religious reasons include the fact that the Egyptians, to cite a particular people, used to think drinking blood was a delicacy and on some of the paintings on the release underneath or in the pyramids you see these pictures of Pharaoh holding up a great bowl and he’s drinking the blood out of it. This is because, apparently it was considered to have life-giving qualities and he would consume the blood, as well as many of the Egyptians. Blood was a staple in their diet, but it had a staple in the sense it was a religious type thing. And therefore the Mosaic Law reacted against this by prohibiting the Jewish people from ever having blood with their meat.

Another thing, animals like the pig were considered sacred animals in Egypt to the god Seth and therefore the Jews are forbidden to eat the sacred animals of the Egyptians, so there are religious reasons for this dichotomy. Another thing; the Gentiles are physically cruel in how they kill their animals, they would kill the mother animals and the baby animals together and this is why the Mosaic Law says thou shalt not roast a kid in its mother’s milk, because the Bible is humane toward animals; it says kill because you have to, you have to survive but don’t be malicious and crass, you are killing living things when you kill. Always remember that.

Those are some of the religious reasons for it, but there also turn out to be health reasons for this. I’m showing you all this background because this is what stumped Peter; Peter was used to all this religion, he’s used to all this health-given qualities and then along comes this voice from heaven that says go ahead Peter, kill anything you want and eat it. What’s going on? Peter was justly confused, it would seem like.

Health reasons, beside the religious reasons. Here’s an article I was given by one of the people who was getting her master’s degree in nutrition and I asked her if she’d go through the library and see if she could find any papers written to this subject of clean and unclean animals. She came up with these two; one from Food Technology Magazine, July, 1966 and a paper written by Rabbi Samuel [sounds like: Corse] President of the Rabbinic Council of the State of Massachusetts who gave a paper to the 25^th annual meeting of the Institute of Food Technology entitled The Jewish Dietary Code. Said the Rabbi, (quote): “Modern research recognizes that certain animals harbor parasites that are disease creating and disease spreading. Their flesh is consequently harmful to man. Such animals are excluded from the Jewish diet. Furthermore, as it in the blood that the germs that the germs and spores of infectious disease circulate, the flesh of all animals must be thoroughly drained of blood before serving for food. Statistical investigation has demonstrated that Jews as a class are immune from or less susceptible to certain diseases and their life duration is frequently longer than that of their neighbors. Competent authorities have not hesitated to attribute these healthy characteristics to the influence of the dietary laws.”

So there are reasons, possibly health wise for this legislation. Now your average sidewalk skeptic will say ha-ha, there can’t be any health reasons for the Mosaic Law, after all, the Mosaic people didn’t know about germs, they didn’t know to put their clothes out in the sun that that was ultra violet sterilization; they didn’t know that to dig the latrine outside the camp kept it away from water pollution, they didn’t know about those things so you can’t say that this legislation grew up out of an awareness for health giving factors. Oh, but your presuppositions are showing again friend, because you’re still operating in your naturalistic universe. Who gave the Mosaic Law? Man or God. God did, and I would rather suspect that God knew a lot more about ultra violet radiation than we do, even to this day, and so on with the germs and so forth. God did not, in other words, have to wait for Louis Pasteur before He could talk about germs. The Mosaic Law is designed to fit the universe as God Himself created it.

So what are some of the things that we find? We find ham forbidden, and what did we find in the 1850’s? Trichinosis. We found a host of other parasites that seemingly flock to the pig, the pig being an extremely unclean animal. And where is the pig usually found? Snorting around the manure pile, a beautiful place to raise meat that you want to eat. Plus the fact, the digestive of the pig is not very profound compared to, say, the average head of cattle. In that situation the food is digested far more in far more detail and takes a longer time than it takes the food to pass through the GI tract of the pig. The pig basically is a garbage man designed to clean up the garbage. From the sea, food like shrimp and other things are prohibited because they too are scavengers of the water and they too are given for a purpose in creation. So thus things like shrimp and ham and other things in the Scripture are forbidden to the Jewish people.

Now that was the Mosaic Law and it had a number of other things, for example the eating of blood provision of Genesis 9 is repeated in Leviticus 7, then they also had another one of interesting medical value. In Leviticus 3:17 no person could eat the fat of the meat. The kosher meat had to be stripped of all of its fat. Why? Because… well God just said it then, but we sort of know now that fat in meat has a lot of stuff in it, chemicals in it that are very hard on our digestive system and can be very dangerous on our system if everything else doesn’t work right. And so therefore we have the refusal of the Jew of the Old Testament to eat any fat on his meat. In the course of doing research on this I came across an article written recently in The Wall Street Journal about a little problem; if you are Jewish today I could offer you a good job; starting salary is $27,000 a year and they’re begging for people.

What is the job? It’s the rabbi that is specially trained as a shochet, that is, the one who slaughters animals for kosher meat in the meat packing and they have to go through an elaborate ritual, some of which is biblically authorized, some of which isn’t, but in order to do this, first, before they kill the animal they have to visually inspect the animal for any bodily deformity; if there’s any body deformity on it they won’t even slaughter it; they just turn it over and let the meat packing people take care of it. Then they must use a particular blade to slit the throat of the animal. The blade must be the width of the throat of the animal; it’s length must be two to three times the width of the throat of the animal. The blade must be sharpened to the point to where when it’s drawn across the animal’s throat no piece of hair or flesh will stick to that blade; it must emerge from the animal without any accretion. When the animal’s throat is slit it must be slit in such a way that the slit doesn’t cut at all into the spine; that must be left intact. After the animal dies, the organs are opened up, particularly the lungs, and examined for any disease. The USDA requires any meat packer to discard any organs that have disease on them, but in this case if any organ in the carcass has disease the entire carcass is rejected from the kosher rule.

And then it goes on from one ritual to the next, salt is used to pull the blood out from it in a special draining system, and then and only then will the rabbi place the kosher seal on the meat. And the story was about the fact that both the manufacturer and USDA and all sorts of other government people are on the backs of the rabbis to relax these restraints because at times the rabbis hold up all the meat production because they refused to authorize this particular meat to be kosher because it somehow… like last winter, the cattle were coming in and they had mud on them, the rabbis refused to kill them until they washed the cattle first, this kind of thing. So it’s an interesting case of individual freedom in our land. The rabbis refuse, they say you want to buy a meat, and you want our kosher public to buy your meat, then you’re going to let us do it the way we say it ought to be done and we don’t care what USDA, OSHA or anybody else says, we’re going to do it our way. And it’s one of the great victories for the small business man, in that these small rabbis are able to talk to the USDA and OSHA and tell them we are going to run it our way and get away with it, because their standards are superior to the government standards.

That’s the dietary law; let’s go back to Acts 10 and see why Peter is so confused. This is the way he was brought up; he can just see himself going up on a day’s journey to Cornelius’ house and being served shrimp the first thing, or ham. So having this on his mind he’s very, very disturbed by the time we see him in verse 17. Peter was doubting in himself, that means he’s mulling it over, Lord, what does this mean, what are You doing to me? I’ve got to go up there and eat non-kosher food, you’re crazy. Now this introduces an interesting principle that we’ll get to in verse 19 about who interprets Scripture correctly. “Peter is doubting in himself,” imperfect tense, he’s continually doing it, “what this vision he had seen should mean, behold, the men which were sent from Cornelius had made inquiry,” remember what I said about timing? The dietary law is going through his mind, dietary law, dietary law, dietary law, and just as he’s saying this knock, knock, somebody knocks on the front door, perfect timing, unconscious guidance of the Holy Spirit, they “made inquiry [for Simon’s house, and stood before the gate,]” [18] “And called, and asked whether Simon, which was surnamed Peter, was lodged there.” Verse 19, Peter’s still up on the roof, and “While Peter was thinking on the vision, the Spirit said unto him, Behold, three men seek thee.” Some of you have a new translation, it says “two men,” there’s a difference in the text. [20] Arise therefore, and get thee down, and go with them, and stop your doubting [doubting nothing]: for I have sent them.”

That shows you, incidentally, the Holy Spirit is not an “it,” it’s not some kind of divine ooze that drops out of the clouds like some people believe, the liberal theologian does not accept the personality of the Holy Spirit, Watchtower Society does not accept this, the personality of the Holy Spirit is orthodox Christian Trinitarianism. The Christian church for 1900 years has held to the personality and deity of the Spirit; He says, “I have sent them.” The pencil sharpener doesn’t say I have sent you; a cloud of steam doesn’t say I have sent you, a person says that. The Holy Spirit is a person. And this shows you that God is the final interpreter. Peter is interpreting God’s Word and God is interpreting God’s Word, and God says Peter, there’s nothing wrong with this, I know, I gave the dietary legislation and now I’m telling you to forget it to go up to Cornelius’ house.

Now we’ve got to pull this together and figure out what’s happened. This is a good stopping, and I want to stop and then pull it together to figure out what has the Spirit done in this changing and culturing preparing Peter to go into Gentile culture. What’s happened? How can we summarize that in one place in the Bible we have dietary laws given and in another place in the Bible we have dietary laws dismissed. Is this a contradiction? Does God contradict Himself from one point of history to the next? Not at all.

Here’s the problem. The Mosaic legislation was given in time past to the nation Israel from 1440 BC on up to the time of Jesus Christ. The Mosaic Law was a hedge, built around a nation so that within that nation you could develop a divine viewpoint counterculture, a culture which originally gave us the Bible, gave us Jesus Christ, and will in the future give us the kingdom. In order for those products to be given to mankind, God had to put a fence around him and say now look, I’m going to work with you people in a special way and I’m going to rule this nation in a special way and I’m going to tell you what you can and cannot do and one of the things you can and cannot do is you can eat your clean meat, kosher meat, but not unclean meat. That’s what I tell you to do and you will do it, period. That’s how he operated in the days of the Mosaic Law.

But now, second thing, when the Church Age began you had a shift, and this shift involved two things; two things that had to be dealt with and the only way you could deal with these two things is to remove the dietary legislation. The first thing was that the great commission required Christians to go into every culture on the face of the earth. Now how are you going to go into every culture on the face of the earth and not sit down and eat with people, have fellowship with people, live in their system as witnesses for Christ if you’re going to bring all this garbage of 613 Mosaic Law’s along with you to say well now I can’t live with you if you don’t have the free market system of Leviticus, I can’t live with you if you don’t have the charity system of Deuteronomy, I can’t live with you unless you have the dietary legislation. No, you couldn’t do that. So the fact that there was going to be Christian missionary work in heathen cultures required that these Mosaic hedges and fences be knocked over and relaxed. That was one thing at the beginning of the Church Age.

Another thing involved the fact that the Christians, after they trusted in Christ, would still be living in Rome, in Athens, in Alexandria, in all the cities of the ancient world and they couldn’t follow Jewish kosher rules, and they couldn’t follow all the economic rules. Now it would be nice if they could but under the circumstances God wasn’t asking them to do that. All God was asking them to do was “believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” The gospel was not believe on Kosher meat and thou shalt be saved; it was not believe on the Levitical free enterprise system and thou shalt be saved; it was believe in Christ and thou shalt be saved, and that was where the priority was placed.

Now having said all that, let’s come back with a balancing statement. This is not to say that you as a Christian, in your local family, in your local home, in your local community, we as a Christian remnant in the United States of America can’t, to some degree, try to impose Biblical wisdom on our fellow man; not forcing it on them but selling them on it, that there is, in fact, a wealth of information in here that works. For example, the modern trends of socialism and central control of the economy is anti-Biblical. In a sense it’s foolish; it’s an expression of modern man’s messianic complex, that the almighty state has the quality of omniscience, that the council of economic advice is so well informed on the volition of every buyer in the market place that they can predict with absolute certainty what you want. Now if that’s really true, and I don’t care how many computer economists you have you still have to make certain assumptions and these assumptions are that the planners know more than the people in the market place. The Bible doesn’t make that; the Bible doesn’t go for centralized economy. The other ancient nations did but Israel did not and the reason is because that’s the wise thing to do. Israel had sanitation laws; Israel had laws that you had to wash your hands in water and not just water but running water.

Dr. Semmelweis, the story of the medical profession, and how as late as the Middle Ages did not know enough who, when they did examinations on women who were having children, to wash their hands when they went from one woman to the next and so they’d spread disease; the woman would go into the hospital to have her baby and she’d die before should could have her baby and they didn’t know why. And one day Semmelweis got up and said the reason is because we’re carrying something on our hands, we must wash our hands. Dr. Semmelweis died in an insane asylum, that’s where they put him for suggesting washing your hands before you examine someone. That’s the story of our western culture, the advance scientific western culture. That’s the way it was. And if we had just listened to the wisdom principles of the Mosaic Law, what did the Mosaic Law say? Wash your hands in running water; put your clothes in the sun during the daylight hours so that they can be sterilized by the sun. All of these things; yes, it’s true that Semmelweis and his medical student’s wouldn’t have been won to Christ maybe, any faster by that method. In fact, many of the women who died might not have been won to Christ any faster, but it sure would have made life a lot more pleasant for those women who were having their children in the hospitals if somebody, some Christian had said hey, you know what, the Holy Spirit did give two-thirds of this Bible out of the Old Testament; now if that’s the case you know, there possibly might be some wisdom here.

Maybe we ought to study these pages and see if there aren’t some medically valid reasons for some of those admonitions. So as Christian, yes, you can take some of those dietary laws and you can apply them, but don’t ever make them an obstruction to the gospel. That’s the point of Peter in Acts 10; don’t let them become an impediment. If you have to go eat worms with some Gentile, then say grace and really mean it and go ahead, if that’s what it takes to present the gospel. And missionaries have to do this. A guy was telling me one day, he said you people at home, you never understand what it means to say grace before your meals; you get out there and some guy comes up and here’s this thing with maggots or something and he’s giving God thanks for that; then you really mean it, God bless this food, you mean God sterilize it before it gets to my lips. So food laws are not to become an impediment; the Holy Spirit has thus guided the church and to commemorate that we’re going to sing hymn number….