(The following is an excerpt from chapter two of my book "To Eat Or Not To Eat? Examining Modern Nutrition Wisdom In The Light of Scripture." This book can be purchased for $10 from the sermon audio bookstore.)

On the subject of food, or any subject, the most important question is, “What does the Bible say?” The reason is obvious. God knows everything and is never wrong. Since God created all things, including humans and the food they eat, He should have a good idea about what we can eat or not eat. He is the authority on the subject. Furthermore, God is unchanging. What he wrote 2,000 years ago or 4,000 years ago is a revelation of His perfect wisdom. God does not learn new things. All things are known to God before any of them come to pass. There have been no discoveries in the 20th or 21st centuries which have enlightened God or corrected His understanding. God is not behind the times and His Word is not out of date. If we discover a “new” truth about the human body or about food, it is not a new truth to God. God knew it from the beginning and He knew it when He authored scripture.

If a “new truth” is discovered about the human body or about food which contradicts God’s Word, then it is not a new truth. It is a lie. Anything we discover that is contrary to God’s Word is merely the discovery of another falsehood. Since God is the source of truth and since He is unchanging and never learns anything new, we can trust scripture. The modern day discoveries of science concerning food and nutrition, therefore, must be consistent with what God has revealed in His Word, or else we can safely conclude that such scientific findings are incorrect.

Therefore, if God declares in His Word that certain foods are good, while a 21^st century scientist declares that this same food is bad for you, we are forced to one of the following conclusions: 1) God is wrong; 2) The scientist is wrong; 3) The food has been so altered by pesticides, preservatives, depleted soil and modern farming techniques that God’s declaration of the goodness of this food is no longer reliable or applicable. Option number one is obviously impossible. God is never wrong about anything. Option number two is not only possible, but frequently a reality. Option number three sounds plausible on the surface but has dangerous implications for the authority of God’s Word. I will deal with this more thoroughly in the coming pages. For now, let us consider what the Word of God says about food.

The covenant with Noah

What we find when looking at God’s Word is that He has prescribed different diets in different times of human history. We also find that such changes have nothing to do with any intrinsic change in the food itself and nothing to do with the nutritional value of food. In Genesis 1:29, God said to Adam and Eve, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you.” Adam and Eve were given vegetables, fruit and grains to eat. They were not permitted at this point to eat the meat of animals or any other creature. Some conclude that if God gave them this diet in a perfect world, we should still follow it in an imperfect world. And so they advocate vegetarianism.

The problem with this is that God changed this rule after the fall. If God had not spoken further about what we could eat, then we would have warrant for a vegetarian diet. But He has spoken further and He has prescribed something more than vegetarianism for those living in a fallen world. In Genesis 9:3-4, after the flood, God told Noah, "Every moving thing that is alive shall be food for you; I give all to you, as I gave the green plant. Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.”

God gave Noah and his descendants a much wider diet. He told them they could eat every moving thing that was alive, as long as the blood was not still in it. That is a broad license. People at that time could not eat road kill, but everything else was permissible. Some commentators believe that the permission to eat animals was actually granted immediately after the fall of Adam and Eve and only renewed in explicit language later to Noah. God apparently sacrificed an animal in order to provide Adam and Eve with animal skins to wear in place of their fig leaves. The sacrifice might have been eaten by Adam and Eve, as animal sacrifices often were. In any case, what is clear is that Noah was given permission to eat every living thing.

What is interesting about this declaration is that it was made during a time in which some animals were considered unclean (see Gen. 8:20-21). This means that Noah and his descendants were permitted to eat “unclean” animals that would later be off limits under the Mosaic Law. Noah was not told to avoid eating the unclean animals, but the Israelites later were. This should tell us something: God did not designate some animals to be unclean because they were nutritionally unhealthy to eat. If the reason God forbade the Israelites to eat unclean animals was because they were “bad for them,” then He would certainly have prohibited Noah from eating them as well. But He did not. He simply declared them unclean in a ceremonial way, which means they were not acceptable to Him for sacrificial offerings (Gen. 8:20).