“Why should God care about what I eat?” It’s a question I get all the time, most recently from my brother, who had come up from Florida for the holidays to meet his new nephew. He went on to express the very common idea that forbidding Israel from eating pig and shellfish were just measures to prevent the spread of parasites and other diseases in a world thousands of years B.C. (Before Cold-storage). “So there’s no reason to follow that stuff anymore,” he concluded.
The Physical Aspect of Kosher
I have to admit that I was once of the same opinion. I was, after all, raised in the church rather than in the synagogue. I was given the same answer when I asked my Sunday school teacher why God said my mom’s delicious pork roast was bad. However, what I’ve come to realize is that while there are indeed many health benefits to eating kosher food, those are just the incidental benefits, not the main point of the commandment.
The main point, as with any ritual Scripture gives us, is for us to act out with our bodies what is supposed to be taking place in our hearts.
To understand the point of kosher, we have to look in the first place where animals were designated as “clean” and “unclean”–not at Mt. Sinai, but at Noah’s ark:
Then the LORD said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation. Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate, and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate, and seven pairs of the birds of the heavens also, male and female, to keep their offspring alive on the face of all the earth. For in seven days I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground” (Gen. 7:1-4, ESV).
God does not tell Noah which animals fall into which category, which implies that Noah already knew. And yet most scholars believe that mankind was vegetarian before the Flood (compare Gen. 1:29 to 9:3), so what possible difference did “clean” or “unclean” make to Noah?
The answer is that while Noah may not have eaten meat, he did offer sacrifices (Gen. 4:4 and 8:20). To Noah, “clean” (Hebrew taharah) meant “suitable to be sacrificed” and “suitable to be brought to holy ground” while “unclean” (tumah) meant “unsuitable to be brought on holy ground.” In other words, the terms have nothing to do with dirt, but with ritual suitability. In the same way, the point of kosher was not primarily about good health or hygiene, but about using a physical discipline to promote a far more important spiritual discipline. The Holy One was saying to His people, “Don’t bring into the temple of your body that which you would not bring into My Temple in Jerusalem.”
If I can learn to deny myself pork, which tastes good and (thanks to modern processing and refrigeration) is reasonably healthy for me, then perhaps I can also learn to deny myself other things which also feel good, but have no redeeming value: Anger, bitterness, immorality, pride, tearing down others, hypocrisy, or even entertaining movies and television that belittle the Most High. All such sins are “unclean,” yet they are allowed to linger in our personal temples every day and thereby brought into the temple of the body of believers (1Co. 3:16) every week!
The Spiritual Aspect of Kosher
Whether or not you take up the discipline of physical kosher, no disciple of Yeshua the Messiah (Jesus Christ) is allowed to ignore the discipline of spiritual kosher. Yeshua Himself said, “So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift” (Mat. 5:23-24, ESV). Likewise, Paul wrote, “Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?” (1Co. 6:18-19, ESV). Just as one could not bring a pig into the Temple, neither should we bring our sins into the prayer closet. As Paul also said, “Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1Co. 5:7-8, ESV).
In all things, Shalom.
