What Is Clean or Unclean? - Acts 10

 What Is Clean or Unclean?

I have heard many bad explanations of the meaning of the Old Testament dietary laws. Why does God forbid his people from eating the meat of animals that do not "part the hoof and are cloven-footed and chew the cud." (Leviticus 11:3).

Here are two of the claims I've heard most often:

1. This is proof that the Bible is not really the word of God. This is arbitrary and only unenlightened, ignorant people would obey this - we're more sophisticated today. Unfortunately for this argument, we know that one of these unenlightened, obedient people was Jesus - so I think we might have to seek a more serious answer.

2. This is a form of ancient FDA rules. Pork and pigs were more likely vectors for disease than sheep or cows, so banning their consumption helps keep people healthy. This probably isn't how the dietary laws are presented, but it might be right (I don't personally know anything about the relative safety of different meat products in pre-modern food systems), except that I doubt that the same risks hold true for pigs as for hares, lobster, sea gulls, camels, or any of the many other proscribed animals. There's something bigger than just health tips.

I believe that the dietary laws do something more than help people live their healthiest lives now (there's more to them than the Dr. Oz show), or pointless regulations to hassle people (they're not the mad ravings of a cult leader to his followers). Rather, they were part of an on-going effort throughout the time between the Exodus and Jesus' birth for God to set his people apart.

The Hebrew people were not chosen and loved because they were the largest people - they were the smallest. (Deuteronomy 7:7). But God intended them to be different from everyone else around them.

They only have one God, their rulers do not claim to be divine, they do not enslave each other, they do not work or make anyone work on the seventh day of the week, they do not wear mixed fabrics, they circumcise their sons, they do not self-flagellate when mourning for their dead, or make human sacrifices of their children, and they do not eat certain foods.

This was more of a difference than you might think. When Daniel is hauled off into exile, the only ritually clean foods his enslavers have available for him is vegetables (Daniel 1). When Jesus and the disciples travel across the sea of Galilee, it's immediately recognizable as Gentile (non-Jewish) country because there's a herd of pigs there (Luke 8:32).

God's people are different, set apart. They're reminded of that every time they choose a meal in the figurative ancient cafeteria. They recognize the authority of God to tell them what they can eat - it is first of all out of honoring God that people obeyed the dietary laws. The ritual distinctions they practice remind them of the moral distinctions they're also to practice. In both, they are to be different from others, and separate from others.

God keeps one, and ends the other. God ends the ritual law - fulfilled and finished in Christ - and keeps the moral law. God's people (now both Jews and Gentiles) are no longer separate from others, but they are still different.

As God's people once did not eat unclean foods out of honor for what God had ordered them, God's people since Peter's time honor God by acknowledging that he has removed that ban. 

What God calls unclean, you shouldn't call clean. Keep that in mind whenever you're tempted to justify yourself when you want to break one of the ten commandments.

But what God calls clean - even if he once had called it unclean - you shouldn't call unclean.

I remember an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Captain Picard tells a subordinate, "I changed my mind. Captain's prerogative." It's not that God has changed his mind, but God certainly has the prerogative to abrogate dietary and other ritual laws in a new, post-cross era.

God ends the dietary laws not by debunking them, but by letting them have been an important means of preparing a people (and through them, the world) for the utter purity and otherness of Jesus Christ. They, alongside circumcision and other ritual laws, are simply not necessary or relevant for God's people who are set apart now by what Jesus has done for them. By ending the ritual laws and the old separation, God sets up Peter and others to share the gospel with Gentiles and transform their lives, a task that's still assigned to believers today.