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Transcript 290A — Clean and Unclean Foods [Mk 7:19]
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Hello, Mr. Camping. I'm a bit confused about what the Word is telling me to do here. You're familiar with Leviticus 11, where God is telling Moses and Aaron about the unclean foods?
HC: Yes.
CALLER: Well, I and a friend of mine have been wondering about that. In Mark 7:19 it mentions that Jesus declared all foods clean.
HC: Yes, and this is particularly reiterated in I Timothy 4, where we read, "For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, if it is received with thanksgiving. For then it is consecrated by the Word of God and prayer."
Now if you go to Acts 9 or 10, you'll discover why God had the clean and unclean foods in the Old Testament. In Acts 9 or Acts 10 Peter has this vision, where this sheet comes down out of heaven, and upon it is all manner of food, or of animals. And they're unclean animals. And God tells Peter, "Rise, kill and eat" (Acts 10:13). And Peter said, "No, Lord. For I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean." So the implication is that these animals were unclean, and Peter recoils at this. "And the voice came to him again a second time, 'What God has cleansed you must not call common.' This happened three times, and the thing was taken up at once to Heaven."
Now Peter is being prepared to go to the Gentiles with the Gospel, to bring the Gospel to the Roman centurion, Cornelius. Up until this time the Gospel was mainly in the nation of Israel. And even when the disciples went out, they were told to go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. God was using the laws of unclean and clean animals to emphasize the separate relationship of Israel and the rest of the nations. And it was pointing to the separate relationship that the Kingdom of God has, of course, from the dominion of Satan.
But when Christ came, God set aside this ceremonial law. And it no longer was to be followed to emphasize the separation. The Gospel was to go to every nation.
CALLER: So He is saying that all foods are clean?
HC: Yes.
CALLER: That's the idea I got, too. But what confused me was, when Jesus said this in Mark 7, I thought, well, Peter must have been there. And if he got that message from Jesus then, why would he again say that he wouldn't touch anything that's unholy or unclean.
HC: Jesus told the disciples again and again that He was going to die, and that He would rise the third day. Did the disciples get the message? They didn't get it at all. Jesus said a lot of things, and the disciples didn't hear Him because their spiritual eyes were not opened for those truths as yet.
CALLER: Okay. I see. My mistake is that I had thought that by the time Acts was written, or by the time that all this had taken place, Peter and all the disciples had received all of Christ's messages. But I guess maybe not.
HC: They heard it, but there was a tremendous lot they did not understand at all. But afterwards God opened their ears, after the resurrection, and much of this came back to them as truth.
CALLER: Okay. Does this refer to meat with blood, or is that something completely different?
HC: That's a different question. The matter of blood is a moot question in the Bible. I'm not really certain how to handle that. I really don't know. In the Old Testament they were told not to eat anything with blood in it. That is, they were not to eat blood. The animals were to be killed and bled, which of course is the way that we eat meat today. We don't eat meat with blood in it. There's a little red juice in meat, but that isn't really like eating blood.
But in Acts 15, when the early church after Pentecost met to consider the problem (then it was a problem) of the fact that the Gentiles were being saved, they debated together as to what rules would be laid upon the Gentiles. And they finally concluded that, in verse 28 of Acts 15, "For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things, that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood, and from what is strangled and from unchastity."
Now I don't understand the implication of this statement. It certainly has some deep spiritual implication, but I don't really know what it is. To be on the safe side, I would not want to eat blood. I would feel that this is still prohibited, although, I must admit that it may not be prohibited, because the first phrase, "that you abstain from that which has been sacrificed to idols" was set aside by the language of I Corinthians 8, where God indicated that what was sacrificed doesn't mean anything in itself, unless someone was offended by it. And so does this mean also that abstaining from blood has been set aside? I really don't know. To be on the safe side, I would not want to eat bloodmeal or something that was just the blood of animals.
CALLER: Just the blood by itself?
HC: Yes. There are foods that are prepared just from blood, the blood of animals. There's sausage that has a very high content of blood in it, a certain kind of sausage.
CALLER: I never thought about that, the sausage.
HC: Not any kind of sausage. I'm saying there is, if I remember correctly, a sausage that's called blood sausage, and it is composed of a high content of animal blood.
CALLER: Okay. Well, that helps a lot.