Lesson 27

Details of Death and Diet – 14:1-21

…deals with loving the Lord thy God with all thy soul, which means in all the details of life. You have details in your life, fellowship with other believers, relationship with loved ones, sex, money, job, relaxation, health, and relationships with law and government, and friends. These are the details of life so the problem in loving the Lord with all our soul means how do we love the Lord and express His will in each one of these areas. In chapter 12 we found that the nation Israel was told to unity about the presence of God. In other words, when they were to worship they were to worship at one place, not because there was something holy about that place but simply it was at that location where the presence of God was. This is different in the New Testament.

In chapter 13 we dealt with the fact that the nation was to unify around doctrine; it was not to tolerate any doctrinal changes or any doctrinal aberrations. People who dared to change the Word of God got severely disciplined in the nation; you remember the rock throwing incidents etc. This is the way they executed people in the ancient world. That’s how they dealt with people who offended against the Word of God. Why? Why so serious? Because if you unify the nation any attack against the basic foundation of that unity becomes an act of treason. They still, in those days realized what the word “treason” means. In our day we don’t know what treason means any more. But they did in that day and they dealt with it accordingly.

In chapters 14-15 we get into a third area and this deals with religious practices. That’s the only thing I can call it, there are a lot of things in chapters 14-15 and the best thing I can come up with is unity in religious practices. The interesting thing about all of these religious practices is that they have a common theme, and I think this is the big idea and not all the details of diet and who ate what, when, where, how and so on. Don’t lose the forest for the trees. The point in all these religious details is that God is a good God, and He’s interested in the welfare of His people. He is not interested in making them feel raunchy, He’s not interested in making them feel they have to come to Him on bleeding knees, He wants them to feel openly acceptable with Him. And He wants to express His love to His children by guiding them away from the things in their life that will cause them suffering and heartache. This is the big idea behind these religious practices. They express God’s love toward us in steering us away from things that will bring sorrow into our life. There are many things that we are going to cover in this section; we’ll cover two tonight.

Chapters 14:1-2 deals with death and here you are to have no undue grief for dead people. People who died [can’t understand word/s] you are not to go around and express undue grief over this incident. The second thing, 14:3-21, they were to eat no corrupt food. Verses 22-29 the people were told that they were not to have any undue hardship from their giving program, which was tithing. You’ll see how God’s mercy acted through the tithing program so that people would not be shoved into poverty by how they gave to the Lord. He always ensured that their basic needs would be cared for. Here you have God’s mercy, even when He asks us to give Him stuff, He turns right around and blesses because He doesn’t want the act of giving, a freewill response on our part to be burdensome. That’s the section in 14:22-29.

In Deut. 15:1-11 we have God saying that He does not want any unrelieved poverty and here we’re going to get into the poverty program of Israel, no unrelieved poverty. You will see the difference between welfare in Israel and how we have distorted that concept in our time. In 15:12-18 there is a strange one, no endless indebtedness. In other words, a person was not allowed to constantly get themselves in debt, constantly feel under this burden, constantly be the slave of someone else. There were provisions in the nation so you stayed out of habitual debt, not necessarily that you stayed out of debt but out of habitual debt. The last section, 15:19-23 deals with no unblemished offering. When the people come to give their offerings to God they are not to give a broken down animal, they are to give the best to the Lord.

There are three words which I think summarize the characteristics of these practices; joy, freedom and purity. I think these three words, if I were to cite three, would summarize the whole idea behind these things. This shows you the God of the Old Testament is not a meany. After you’ve read chapter 13 you wonder, these people got taken out and stoned, etc. things looked pretty gruesome at the end of chapter 13. But when you get through chapters 14-15 you’ll see the other side of God’s character and see how He cares for the people.

Now let’s examine the first section in 14:1-2, no undue grief for the dead. Here, as in the New Testament, God did not want them to be engaged in suffering. In verse 1, “Ye are the children of the LORD your God: ye shall not cut yourselves,” now we don’t know exactly what that means but we get a glimpse of it, several points in the Old Testament and it’s when people who would express their grief would slash their wrists, slash their bodies until it would be one bloody pulp and it was a way that they had in the ancient world of appeasing their gods. They were afraid of their gods and they were to appease this god for the dead person, the person that died, it’s kind of a salvation by works system for the other person. If I cut myself up enough then the god will feel sorry for the person and save him in eternity. But the Old Testament saints were commanded don’t cut yourself, God doesn’t want you to suffer unnecessarily; God doesn’t want this behavior for His children. “… nor make any baldness between your eyes for the dead.” “Baldness between your eyes” is when you sit down and the Canaanites used to shave off a section, this was a technique that was used throughout the ancient world to express sorrow. Why it expressed sorrow I don’t know, but it expressed sorrow some way by making “baldness between your eyes.”

This last phrase is important because it tells you something about what went on in chapters before. Do you remember when we got into Deut. 6 it says I want the Word of God to be between your eyes for a token, and you wonder what’s the Word of God got to do between your eyes, that would put it right here on the bridge of your nose. But this verse shows you what the Hebrew expression between your eyes means; it means between your eyes going this way, in a circle over the top of your head. So when it says the Word of God between your eyes, it mean up here, in the frontal lobe and that is why in Deut. 6 I said that it doesn’t refer to something here on the bridge of your nose, it refers to something in the frontal lobes, something that’s remembered. How did I make that point? I made it from here; you don’t shave hair (unless you have heavy eyebrow line) between your eyes, so how do they do it then? They must have figured this way, from your eyes up and around, and this was the expression that they used. So this, then, is the expression of intense sorrow in the ancient world.

Hold the place and turn to a section in the New Testament where you find one of the most powerful passages in all the Gospels that shows God’s true heart toward the suffering of His children. John 11:33. I see it often when I give the reasons for suffering; every time you tell someone something you never can tell it with enough qualifying phrases so someone won’t go out and misquote you or take it wrongly or something like that. So I’ve given up trying to qualify myself, I just run the risk; I figure if I repeat it a couple of times people will get it. The point is that often times when I teach suffering and I show the reasons behind suffering I often wonder if some of you think deep down in your heart that God likes this, that somehow He has reasons for suffering, it’s kind of that He likes it, it’s not that He doesn’t really hate it, it’s not that it’s a deep aversion to Him. Here in this passage in John 11 you will see the true attitude of God toward all suffering.

John 11:33, here’s Mary and Martha. Let’s look at verse 30, “Now Jesus was not yet come into the town, but was in that place where Martha met Him. [31] The Jews then, who were with her in the house and comforted her, when they saw Mary, that she rose up hastily and went out, and follower her, saying, She goes unto the grave to weep there. Notice who went to see Jesus—the lady that spent the time in the Bible classes, Mary. Verse 32, “Then, when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw Him, and she fell down at His feet, saying unto Him, Lord, if You had been here, my brother had not died. [33] When Jesus, therefore, saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping who came with her, He groaned in the spirit, and was troubled.” You don’t catch the force but in the Greek it means He was deeply angry, there was something that was deeply offensive to Jesus Christ at this point, something that angered His heart.

Verse 34, “And [He] said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come and see. [35] Jesus wept,” and there’s the shortest sentence in the English Bible, not in the Greek text. Verse 36, “Then said the Jews, Behold how He loved him! [37] And some of them said, Could not this man, who opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died? [38] Jesus, therefore, again groaning in Himself, comes to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it. [39] Jesus said, Take away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh; for he hath been dead four days. [40] Jesus saith unto her, Said I not unto thee that, if thou would believe, thou should see the glory of God? [41] Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead was laid. And Jesus lifted up His eyes, and said,” by the way, this is the only prayer that Jesus ever made in the Gospels before He did a miracle, notice why He prays, “Father, I thank Thee that Thou hast heard Me. [42] And I know that thou hearest Me always; but, because of the people who stand by I said it, that they may believe that Thou hast sent Me. [43] And when He had thus spoken, He cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. [44] And he that was dead came forth….”

The point to remember about this whole passage is the personal attitude of Jesus Christ toward suffering. It made Him deeply angry and you can say why, couldn’t God have stopped the suffering. Here is God in the flesh, and yet He comes in verse 33-34 and He sees believers who are weeping, they see a sister who has lost her brother and it’s caused grief in the family, and not only grief in the family but grief in the friends of the family, and it angers Jesus. Why does it anger Jesus? I suggest two reasons why Jesus was angry. First He was angry of the suffering, it wasn’t of God’s will, direct will, to bring suffering into creation. God does not get pleasure out of watching us suffer. That is the wrong picture; if you’ve got that picture of God you’d better straighten it out fast, that’s the wrong picture of God. God hates suffering, and if you want to see how God’s attitude toward suffering is, look at Jesus Christ and how He responded here. He was angry. Suffering makes Him angry. The second thing, I think He was mad at the believers. He was mad at the believers for failure to appropriate the promises of God and this is why He says look, didn’t I tell you, didn’t I tell you again and again that if you believed Me you would see the glory. And here is what He is trying to get is the believer to believe and trust the promise; take God at His Word. And this makes Jesus angry. So we have one of the most illuminating sections in the Gospels, showing God’s real attitude toward suffering; He hates it! Not only does He hate suffering in your life and mine as His children, but He hates it when we don’t respond to that suffering by believing God and His Word.

This is the same attitude found in Deut. 14. The New Testament isn’t really new; the New Testament is just a continuation of the attitudes of the Old Testament and in the Old Testament God didn’t like suffering either, and this is why He told the people look, when a person dies I don’t want you to cut yourself, I don’t want to put you through all this horror and all this grief, it’s not what I want you to do, to suffer, this is not My will for you. By the way, what is Satan’s attack? What did he say to Eve? Do you remember what the big lie was to Eve? Eve, why has God told you not to eat of the fruit of the tree, isn’t it because He wants to withhold some good thing from you. Satan always loves to do this, he impugns the character of God and if you aren’t careful as a believer, he’s going to do it to you. He does it to me regularly, trying to get me to see God as a meany, and I have to constantly go back to the Word of God and say no, God is not a meany, God loves me and He hates suffering.

In verse 2 he tells why, “For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God, and the LORD hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto Himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth.” The word “peculiar people” here is a word which in the Hebrew meant treasured possession. When a great king would have many, many treasures, he treasures some more than others and if you went into his trophy room, he would have certain trophies that he valued above all trophies. He’d say I’m really proud of that, and you’ve been in people’s homes and they see that painting, I’m really proud of that one, my child did one or something; see this diploma, I’m proud of that. It’s a particular possession and this is the meaning and force of this word, God says you are a holy people unto Me, you are, of all the people as I look down at the Gentiles, you people are My treasured possession, and this is why God does not want them to suffer. Positional truth—“you are peculiar people unto Myself, above all the nations that are upon the earth.”

There are two applications for us as believers. The first one is the attitude of the Old Testament and secondly the attitude of the New Testament toward death. Whenever I have an opportunity to preach at a funeral I always examine the doctrine of death because inevitably at a funeral people never have had preparation for this. You’ll reach unbelievers; you’ll reach believers who are completely destabilized by this thing; Christians who never thought of death and yet Christians have a radical view of death.

First let’s look at the attitude of the Old Testament saint. What did he have to look forward to when he died? When the Old Testament saint died he looked upon his life as terminated and he would go into a place called Sheol and Sheol to him was a limbo of nothing because David says in the Psalms, Lord don’t take my life because in Sheol who is going to praise You, there’s nothing going on down there, I want to be where the action is David said. So this was looked upon as a limbo but the hope of the Old Testament saint was found in the resurrection, and this was their hope. This was what Job expressed in Job 19:25-26, “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. Though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I will see God.” You have there one of the greatest confessions of the hope of an Old Testament saint for death. It is this reason why Martha said, Yes Lord, I know, they will all be raised at the resurrection. She was applying this truth; God will care for the Old Testament saint.

In the New Testament we have something else. To see this turn to 1 Thess. 4:13; this is a hard doctrine because you will never know how you will trust in this doctrine when it hits you, when there’s the death of a loved one in your family, that will be the test, and how you respond. So this is a hard doctrine because it’s very hard to tell in advance how we are going to respond unless first we have taken in habitually the Word of God. In 1 Thess. 4:13 we have a dogmatic statement made for the New Testament saint. We’re now looking at the New Testament saint, what is our hope? “But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them who are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others who have no hope.” What is that command saying? There should be something different about the Christian’s attitude toward death. It does not mean you sit there with a silly smile on your face; you’ve lost someone that means a lot to you, true; but there should be a qualitative difference in your grief compared to the grief of an unbeliever who has no hope of ever seeing this person again.

If that person is a believer and you are a believer, this separation is but temporary and that is the thing that Paul says “I don’t want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who are asleep,” that’s the Christian word for death. And there in the New Testament it’s very interesting, that when Jesus Christ is mentioned in connection with death, there’s a strange word and we don’t exactly know the meaning of this except that “sleep” can be a passive or a middle voice. What that means is that they are put to sleep, or they put themselves to sleep. You can’t tell from the Greek but I suspect from the doctrine that what God is saying is that why He uses sleep to refer to Christian death is that He puts the believer to sleep, it’s a passive voice, when those who have been put to sleep…. Why is it that the early church adapted this terminology for death?

Remember, these people weren’t people living in a society like you are; these people saw battle death, the people that this was written to in Thessalonica knew what it was to have the Roman soldiers come smashing in your house and knife the nearest person because they suspected he might be treasonous to the Roman Empire. These people saw violent death. The early Christians faced the lions in the coliseum, and there would be a whole group of Christians and lions would come charging in to men, women and children, and parents would see their child crushed and torn, this is the violent death known to the New Testament church. Why is it that the New Testament church turned around and called this “God is putting them to sleep?” Because it shows you the fact that they had fantastic confidence in the fact that the Lord cares for their every need. Somehow God supernaturally helps a person through the valley of death. This is one of the great areas of grace that is presently overlooked.

But in 1 Thess. 4 we have a command; we have a command here, “For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them who sleep in Jesus will God boring with Him,” and then he refers to the rapture. Now he’s talking about this: here’s the New Testament saint. The New Testament saint dies but he doesn’t go to Sheol and then is resurrected; the New Testament saint is different from that. When you die, if you are a believer, this is what’s going to happen to you. You’ll come to that point, it may be an automobile accident, it may be some disease but you’re going to die and you will go immediately into the presence of the Lord. That’s taught in 2 Cor. 5, “to be absent from the body is to be face to face with the Lord.” So instead of going to Sheol as the Old Testament saint, you’re going to go to heaven. You do not receive your body in heaven; your body will be received at the rapture of the Church, then you soul will be reunited. But when we die, we have not to look forward to Sheol, a fathomless pit of nothing, but we will be face to face with the Lord Jesus Christ. If you have examined some of the death bed testimonies that I have I think this has been proved time and time again by the testimony of believers who as they die and as their soul leaves the body, they give testimony after testimony that I can see Jesus Christ. This is one of the most famous death bed testimony evidence that you can find, that Christians, when they die, they frequently give testimony that they actually see Jesus Christ. They actually see heaven as their soul is being yanked out of the body. We see this in Acts 8, with Stephen, for example. We see it in Paul, so evidently it’s part of dying grace.

But to show you the impact that this made on the ancient world, you have to think of the fact that the Romans, the Jews, in the New Testament times didn’t know anything about what happened after you die. There were a few believers and mostly they were pagans and they would go around and they would have all these tremendous funerals, they wouldn’t know what had happened to the people, and there would be a time of great sorrow. And yet we can examine archeological evidence to show just what did the early believers did. Do we have archeological proof that the early church wept on their gravestones? Yes we do. In a little discussed piece of evidence, which is very crucial, a Jewish professor by the name of [not sure of name, sounds like: Sick en ook] in 1945 was moving into sealed tombs near Jerusalem; this is where Jesus Christ was buried in a sealed tomb. You’d go into this tomb and on the inside there’d be many caskets, there would be a hollowed out area. He broke into one of these that had never been broken into before, just to learn the archeological data from it. He found the sealed tomb and inside there were five [can’t understand word] caskets and Professor Sickenook [sp?] found that by dating the coins, for example, you look at the coins because they usually left things, mementos, etc. and you find the last date of the coin and this is how you date these graves. So he found that the last coin was 50 AD.

This is exciting; this is only 20 years after Jesus Christ rose from the dead, we now have a tomb that actually exists in Jerusalem, that you can see today, and this tomb has the strange words on one casket. On one casket it says Jesus helped me, and on the other one, Jesus left this one alive. And it shows you that as early as 50 AD Christians took advantage of the doctrine of death. We have archeological proof. We have proof in Rome as you go into the catacombs of a much later date that these Christians, it’s amazing, you go to one unbelieving grave and you have a mourning piece, that this was my beloved child and I lost him, and all hope is gone. Then you go to the next grave and it’s a Christian and you find, Praise the Lord, this is just the beginning. So the Christians of the first century showed this testimony by the very gravestones they had. We know this by archeology. So this is a challenge to us in our day, do we really produce a marked difference between the attitude of the unbeliever and the attitude of the believer towards death.

I hope you see that the attitude of Jesus shown in John 11 is not something new; Jesus didn’t improve the Old Testament, Jesus continued the Old Testament. Jesus did not contradict the Old Testament; Jesus brought it to its logical conclusion. And here in Deut. 14, if you want proof someday when someone comes up to you and says the God of the Old Testament is a boogey man, the God of the Old Testament hates people, just point them to Deut. 14:1-2.

Now we come to the second section, no corrupt food shall be eaten, verses 3-21 and here we have a short list of dietary laws. What are these and what aren’t these? In verse 3 it says “Thou shalt not eat any abominable thing.” An “abominable thing” consists of two things. These are two reasons why the Jews were not permitted to eat things. First, and I think this is the most important; the second I’ll give to you and I’m sure you’ve heard it again and again, but the first one is the most important. The first one says that as a result of the curse, you have distorted forms of plants and animals. For example, in Gen. 3 what did God say to Adam? In the sweat of thou brow thou shalt bring forth things. Anybody who is a farmer in this part of the country during hail storms knows what Gen. 3 is talking about. But it’s interesting that Gen. 3 also goes on to say why, because there will be weeds. And I’ll cause all these things to grow up. Weeds were not part of the original creation. Weeds are a mutant form.

So then we find distorted forms of plants and animals that have come into existence since the curse, and these, not that they are bad in themselves but they are reminders of the curse. And since the Jews were a topological people whose testimony was physical, they were not to share these forms, these distorted forms, they were not to take these upon themselves since these were memorials of the curse. And the second reason is that many were actually poison, they were poisonous. This is not true of all of them but there were two basic reasons: one, they are just reminders of the curse and a pure people are not supposed to eat corrupt things.

Verse 4, “These are the beasts which ye shall eat: the ox, the sheep and the goat.” But other passages of Scripture tell us that not only are you to eat these but when you cook them you’re supposed to take the animal fat and throw it away. You’re only supposed to eat the lean meat, not the fat. Why? I believe that is reason number two, because animal fat has now been found to have high cholesterol content and here God, in the ancient days was warning His people, don’t eat this, don’t eat this corrupt animal fat. You can eat some animal lean meat but don’t eat the fat. These are found in detail in Leviticus, etc.

Verse 5, these are some others that you are to eat, “The stag,” the “hart” is the stag, “and the roebuck” that’s an antelope, “the fallow dear, and the wild goat, and the pygarg, and the wild ox, and the chamois” is another mountain goat.” We don’t know what these mean but evidently it shows you that they had a lot of hunting in the early days and this, to me, is one of the proofs that Deuteronomy is an early book. The liberals like to say that Deuteronomy was written back during the Kings or the time when the nation was great. I don’t believe so, because at the time the nation was great they didn’t have this kind of hunting. These animals had all been hunted and become extinct for you remember when Nathan came to David, what did he say? There was a man David, and there was a guest that came to his house, and the man had a thousand sheep but he went and he got the sheep from his one hand. What is the meaning of that except to show that that even the sheep were scarce in that day as dietary sources? So we have the fact that I think this is proof that Deuteronomy was written when the Lord says it was written, very early when all of these animals were hunted by the early Israelites.

Now in verse 7 we have a rule, “Nevertheless these ye shall not eat of them that chew the cud, or of them that divide the cloven hoof,” now why are the people given this rule? This rule is an approximate rule based on the appearance of an animal. Those of you who are real sharp will look down there and say well preacher, I look down the text and I see a hare there, and hare’s don’t chew their cuds, and that’s true, but if you look at a hare, the jaw is going a mile a minute so the point is that this rule is phenomenal, it’s not saying it literally has to be a cud in the biological sense, it just has to be these animals move their jaws. And they divide the hoof. This was given as a convenient rule of thumb. This is not an all inclusive rule but you might say this is just a rule of thumb so the people in selecting their diet would have some criteria to use. […the camel, and the hare, and the coney [rock badger]; for they chew the cud, but divide not the hoof; therefore they are unclean unto you.”

Let’s look at the camel and see if we can find some things wrong with these animals. Nothing is now known wrong as the present state of medical science with camel meat except it’s tough. If you like eating the soles off your own shoe you would enjoy eating camel meat. But other than that there is no poisonous element known from camel meat. However the hare here, which is actually the hare and the coney, the hare and the badger, these in the ancient world carried something called tularemia and it was a kind of disease that was caused by bacteria [one of the most infectious bacteria known]. When these people would skin the animal if they had a cut or a wound on the animal the cut or wound would pollute the meat and it was a frequent source of disease in the ancient world. So it’s very clear that God is saying just stay away from these kinds of animals.

In verse 8, “And the swine, because it divideth the hoof, yet cheweth not the cut, it is unclean unto you; ye shall not eat of their flesh, nor touch their dead carcasses.” Here we have the problem of trichinosis. So we have here at least some reason why these animals were eliminated on medical grounds. They were eliminated on other grounds.

In verses 9-10 we have fish, they had laws that would control fish. Verse 9, “These ye shall eat of all that are in the waters: all that have fins and scales shall ye eat. [10] And whatsoever hath not fins and scales ye may not eat; it is unclean unto you.” What are some fish-like animals that haven’t got scales and fins? You’d have eels and animals like this and it’s found now by archeological study of the Nile River that these eels and others would inhabit the banks of the Nile, the real muddy banks and they would be polluted and they would carry parasites on them, and so there’s a medical reason underlying this, that eels and such animals tended to act as hosts to parasites. It’s well known that many Egyptians were deathly sick of this and it got to be a joke in the ancient world, when you came down to Egypt you’d better get hep on eels because the Egyptians over the generations had eaten eels and eels and they evidently could take it. They used to go to Egypt, get down there and eat one of these eels and they’d come down with a horrible sickness and it was just horrible for other people coming into the Egyptian territory. So this was known in the ancient world as a source of pollution.

Verse 11, “Of all clean birds ye shall eat. [12] But these are they of which ye shall not eat: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the osprey,” etc, the good old King James listing. [13, “And the buzzard, and the falcon, and the kite after its kind, [14] And every raven after its kind, [15] And the ostrich, and the night hawk, and the sea gull, and the hawk after its kind, [16] The screech owl, and the great owl, and the swan, [17] And the pelican, and the carrion vulture, and the Cormorant, [18] And the stork, and the heron after its kind, and the hoopoe, and the bat.”

These are basically distinguished because these are birds of prey, these are scavengers and once again this kind of bird would be likely to have parasites, be hosts to parasites, be host to infection.

Verse 19, “And every creeping thing that flieth is unclean unto you; they shall not be eaten.” This is amplified in Lev. 11. What it means is that you couldn’t eat certain kinds of insects. How you could eat any kind of insects I don’t know, but they were allowed to eat locusts and a few other things. But in Lev. 11 they rule out eating locusts. But nevertheless, basically as a rule they were not allowed to eat insects and you can see why. Verse 20, “But of all clean fowls ye may eat.” And once again an exhortation to this.

It’s very interesting that in verse 21, and this shows you why it’s not just medical, they could pawn this stuff off on the foreigner. “Ye shall not eat of anything that dies of itself; you shalt give it to the stranger who is in thy gates, that he may eat it, or thou may sell it unto an alien; [for thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God.]” now the stranger that was within thy gates is ger, that’s the word which means a person has voluntarily become a citizen of the nation; he doesn’t have any economic rights, he can’t hold title to property, but nevertheless he’s allowed to exist in the nation. The other person was a nekar; the nekar was a man who was a touring businessman, just dropped through for the weekend. They could sell to the traveling businessman, but they would have to give it to the ger, or the person who lived with them. This again shows you that it is not just hygienic, it’s topological, in other words, it’s a topological reason. Many of these animals are a memorial to the curse and while they are medically acceptable to be eaten, still the natural Jew would not eat them because he did not want to be identified in the act of eating with these memorials of the curse.

But Professor Albright, one of the leading archeologists of our day has said a very interesting thing about this chapter. You may read through this chapter and say how boring. “And yet this chapter is the first known time in history we have a generalized classification of complex zoological phenomena according to observed criteria and you don’t get this again until you get into modern science.” Isn’t that interesting, that the Jews in the Old Testament thought categorically. Albright continues, “Thanks to the dietetic and hygienic regulations of the Mosaic Law subsequent history has been marked by a tremendous advantage in this respect, held by Jews over all other comparable ethnic and religious groups. It is only in our times that advances in medicine have made it possible to replace rule of thumb regulations of former times by medical and hygienic practices which shall attain similar results by scientific methods.”

So you see, this is important; it shows that God gave them categories, organized the plant and animal kingdom and it shows you that they were given as a way of life. In verse 21 at the end we have a most interesting and in many ways pathetic statement. Some time if I’m ever asked to speak before the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, I’ve got three verses that I’m going to state my talk on. One is found here, “Thou shalt not seethe [boil] a kid in its mother’s milk. We know from Ugaritic in Gordon’s text 52 that these Canaanites used to do this; at their great feasts they’d kill the mother cow and they’d take her milk that was intended to be the life giving element for that kid and then pour it out and seethe the kid, boil it alive in its own mother’s milk. There’s an aspect of cruelty to this and this is not what God wants. For example, in one of these quotes, we have “by the fire, seven times the hero, cook a kid in milk, and a lamb in butter.” The point there is the Canaanites were adopting this practice but in the Bible God says no, animals suffer too, Rom. 8, don’t increase their suffering. For example, the muzzle of the ox, this rule is found in the Word of God, again demonstrating God’s care and concern for the animal.

Just for those of you who are curious, I’ll show you the other two verses in God’s word that has to do with the subject. One is found in Jonah 4:11, here’s where God is chewing out Jonah. Jonah was one of the most fantastic evangelists of all time. This guy could evangelize a city without trying. God said look Jonah, I’ve got a mission for you. Jonah, here’s what I want you to do; I want you to go over here to Nineveh and witness to that city. Nineveh at that time was one of the greatest cities in the ancient world. Jonah says fine Lord, so he went to Joppa and got a ticket and went to Spain. This was 180 degrees out of phase and you know what happened, the Lord had His submarine come up there and capture Jonah and bring him back to shore. So Jonah came back and later on he grudgingly went over to Nineveh, walked through the town and all of a sudden, much to his chagrin, they trust the Lord. Now Lord, this isn’t supposed to happen; he didn’t want that to happen because he wanted to see God’s judgment to come down, I hate this city, can’t stand it, I don’t want anything to do with it, judge it God. So he goes and preaches the gospel and the trust the Lord.

Then he goes out after these people have trusted the Lord and says Lord, you did dirty to me, I came over here hoping I could bring a message of judgment and they accepted my message, now what do I do? God, in the last chapter, very tenderly deals with Jonah. In the last verse, 4:11, He makes this statement: “And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right and their left hand; and also much cattle?” You see animals are a focus of God’s attention in some way. They become involved in judgment too, because when God judges a city He also orders the extinction of the animal life. So animals in a way not yet understood to us do share in the human predicament before God.

One other verse is found in Matt. 6:23-26 and it says a sparrow shall not fall to the ground except the Father knows it. It shows that God’s attention is riveted on the animals. If you want a nice heart-throbbing sermon to give sometime to the local SPCA there are three points.

Deut. 14, let’s summarize. In verses 1-2 we have the doctrine of death; in verses 3-21 we have the doctrine of diet; in both cases what is God’s point? I don’t like suffering; I don’t want My children to suffer. Applications to the believer: When God tells you that you are to “be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication let your requests be made known unto God,” etc. and gives you all these promises, “casting your care upon the Lord for He cares for you,” these are commands. And guess why they are given? Not only does God want you to be a testimony but He doesn’t want you to suffer. I find many believers are suffering unnecessarily; they don’t have to suffer. They are worried, worry, worry, worry, worry. Why worry? What are you doing with the promises? I know what’s happening. For two minutes you claim a promise and then you sit down and you get to thinking about this, well, I think I can do it better Lord and so you take it back, and then for two hours you’ve got the problem. And then later on Lord, this is hopeless, I’m going to leave it on you, and so you try it again. This time you might get two and a half hours when you trust the Lord this time. Then you bring it back, etc. A friend calls this operation yo-yo, because you go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth and believers suffer this way. Why? Because it’s God’s will? No, it’s their own stupidity. Now the Jew goes out and cuts himself when he has a funeral. He’s suffering; is it God’s fault or not. God says no, I don’t want you to suffer this way. A Christian goes to a funeral and has a nervous breakdown. Why? Does God want them to? No, God gave them specific promises to deal with that situation. The Old Testament saint goes and eats one of these things, goes down and has a good fat Egyptian eel for Thanksgiving and he gets sick on this thing and what is God going to say? You fathead, didn’t you read Deut. 14, I clarified it there. So believers are upset, etc. be sure it’s not because you just simply haven’t followed directions.