Dennis Tuuri

standing to hear the command word of our King of Kings. The sermon scripture is found in Hebrews 13:1-9. Hebrews 13:1-9.

Let brotherly love continue. Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. And them which suffer adversity as being yourselves also in the body. Marriage is honorable in all and the bed undefiled, but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.

Let your conversation be without covetousness. Be content with such things as ye have for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee. So that we may boldly say, the Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do unto me. Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God whose faith follow considering the end of their conversation. Jesus Christ the same yesterday and today and forever be not carried about with diverse and strange doctrines.

For it is a good thing that the heart be established with grace, not with meats, which have not profited them that have been occupied therein. You may be seated.

He’s been trying to convince me to take my coat off, but I think it would be, one, a reminder to me of the heat that you probably are suffering more than I am. I’m being a little elevated, have a fan behind me, and two, it would be improper if I happen to go long to be up here very uncomfortable.

Having said that, we may well go to linen robes sometime this summer. Okay. We’re continuing this morning with our series of talks going through the seven deadly sins. Today we’re going to talk again about gluttony, although not so much about gluttony as about preoccupation with food from the text that we’ve just read from and many other texts in scripture.

Before we get into that, I want to just review what we did the last couple of weeks.

We began by looking at the sin of gluttony being a serious charge. Case law says it’s evidence of the rebellious son, older son who would be put to death if he was rebellious. It was a charge that our savior was charged with. It’s a serious matter. And its basic definition of course is to engage in eating excess amounts of food and/or drink. And it’s linked to drunkenness in the scriptures. Clearly to eat so much food that we get obese is a sin.

And certainly to eat excess food whether or not we are successful at dieting techniques or other sorts of chemical or medical things that would help us from gaining weight is also a sin. And there are other reasons why people might gain weight. Gain weight by itself is not a good indicator of whether or not a person is engaging in this sin.

Besides which, we went on to try to give a little broader definition of what gluttony is apart from just excess eating. And we said that gluttony is the result of seeking in food and/or drink what God provides only through what these great gifts of his that are to be rejoiced in and thanking him for these great gifts of his point us to a greater reality and to other things of more intrinsic ultimate value. Namely the desirability of—and we’ve listed four things—the written word of God which is compared in scripture to be a sweet thing we’re supposed to eat and compared to food in many places, so the written word of God. And that written word of God reveals the triune God to us: the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And when we eat food we should have some mental connections in our mind to the goodness of the written word which reveals the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Jesus said, “My meat, my food”—it’s the same Greek term that’s in verse 9 that we’re going to talk on today, same word for meat or food. “My food,” he said, “is to do the will of the Father.” And so when we eat food, we should remember the will of the Father. The Son, of course, is Jesus Christ, the manna come down from heaven. He’s the true spiritual food and the true spiritual drink. And was the manna, and so forth. All food really points to the life we receive in Jesus Christ. And of course, we remember that in a particular way when we take these elements of food, the bread and the wine, but we should also see that all food is a picture of that to us, the great gift of Jesus Christ and ultimate value in him.

And then third, the Holy Ghost. The Spirit—the scriptures tell us that the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking. It’s not food and drink. Rather, it’s joy and peace and righteousness in the Holy Spirit. We’re not to be filled with wine wherein is dissipation and emptiness really. We’re to be filled with the Holy Spirit. And so gluttony is failing to see these values and taking the value of the food and placing ultimate value in it.

And then we said last week that in addition to other people, the gluttonous people are those whose god is their belly. All they care about are sensual pleasures filling the stomach and what food they eat. They’re whose god is their belly in terms of being a source of comfort and joy to them. It’s where they place ultimate value.

Remember Jesus was talking about the gold of the temple as opposed to the temple itself. The Pharisees liked the gold and not the temple. They liked what was placed on the altar which they got to eat part of better than the altar itself. Our altar is Jesus Christ. And so it’s wrong to place ultimate value in what is given as a symbol of the ultimate value residing in the person of the three persons of the triune God.

And then third, the stomach is our god when it controls us and exercises mastery over us.

And last week we looked at a passage of scripture in Philippians 3 that says that those people whose god is their belly, their end is destruction. Temporal—in this world you suffer ill health effects. You suffer the condemnations of God’s law. And the gluttonous rebellious son was to suffer the condemnation of the death penalty and failing that of course excommunication from the church. So there’s temporal judgments and eternal judgments as well.

Their end is perdition. Philippians 3 tells us perdition meaning eternal damnation. Their doxology—they glory in their food and their worldview is earthly. They’re centered on things of earth instead of things of heaven. That’s not to be seen as a dualism, earth and heaven. We see our perspective should be heavenly. We come back to earth so that God’s will might be done on earth as it is in heaven. So heaven and earth join in that sense, but our perspective is heavenly.

We bring that perspective back to earth and we eat food then correctly, not seeing it totally earthly and earthbound but heavenly, heaven-given as a heavenly gift from God to point us to heavenly realities in the temple of the triune God. And we said last week too that those people whose god is their stomach, their enemy is the cross. That was the point of Philippians—that these people are enemies of the cross and people who are self-motivated, food-motivated soon break off communication or rather with other people.

We also gave you last week and I’ll just remind you real quickly in summation form some little clues to see whether or not you’re becoming gluttonous. We said that four things to remember in your own eating in your home: place, time, manner, and priority.

Do you wait until the food is in its proper place at the dinner table? Or do you try to snitch some food prior to getting there and so give in to the desires of your stomach as opposed to the desires of sitting down at a meal together with other people?

Very important that I mention that by the way. The place we choose to eat, the dinner table, it’s not just the place we choose to eat—we eat with other people. If we eat prior to that or if we eat after that apart from people we’ve broken community as it were with the members of our own household. And so God wants us to remember to eat in the proper place which is normatively the dinner table. That doesn’t mean it’s a sin to, you know, take some food as you’re preparing it, but I’m saying that these are good ways to help us think through: what are we giving into—the desires of our stomach and the desires of community and the value that God gives to orderliness and community?

Time is a proper time. And if we find ourselves snacking all day long and not being able to wait for dinner—”Oh, I’m hungry,” and immediately run off and get food. It’s like Oz Dennis used to tell the story of the natives who saw Americans down in the South Sea Islands and they’d look at their watch and they’d go run off and they said the watch must be their god. Well, some of us it’s that way with food.

We say, “Oh, a hunger pang. Let’s go meet it right now.” We run off in obedience to our god—our belly which has become our god in that sense. Rather than waiting for the proper time of meals.

The manner in which we eat—even if we wait for the proper time, we go to the proper place and then we shove food down our throat real fast, don’t use utensils, don’t pass food on other members of the family, for instance, the manner in which we eat can be an indicator to us that our belly is becoming our god.

And then finally, the priority of our eating. If food takes priority over all of the things in life, then we probably have a big problem in that area.

Now, just so you’ll know, I’m not trying to make you feel bad. Last night, I engaged in some behavior which is probably incorrect. We have in our family, in our household, we like to have a little something special on Sunday. Remember, it’s a rejoicing time. We have cinnamon rolls or some sort of pastry occasionally on Sundays. And my wife bought the proper number of cinnamon rolls to feed all of us and the kids that were over, etc. And I was working on my sermon again late, getting things ready for today, and everybody else had gone to bed. And so I took my cinnamon roll, which I was supposed to eat in the morning with everybody else, and I ate it last night.

Now, I did use a utensil and a plate. I did do that, but I but I didn’t wait for the proper time. And as a result, my rejoicing in that cinnamon roll occurred before the day of rejoicing that it was supposed to—that we’ve all agreed as sort of a picture to us of. And it occurred by myself isolated. I was in the kitchen. I was at a table. It was the right place to eat, but it was with no other people. I didn’t wait for the right time.

And so I broke community with my family as it were. Now, I’m not going to, you know, I’m not telling you this is the worst thing I could possibly do. But I want you to see this as an example of how to think through what we do. I could have said, “Yeah, I’m hungry. That cinnamon roll looks awful good. But I’ll wait till tomorrow because the greater value of that cinnamon roll to me is the rejoicing on the Lord’s day of rejoicing, the day of special rejoicing in the context of the family that God has given to me.

That’s a picture of what I tried to get you to think through last week.

Now, this week we’re going to do something a little bit different. And this week we’re going to talk about preoccupation with food. Couple of the books that I have on the seven deadly sins. One is by a man named Carl Olsen, a Lutheran, and he wrote the following about gluttony. He says, “I suspect, however, that the real sin we have in America is not gluffing”—and by that he meant stuffing it into our mouths real fast. He said, “It’s not quantity stuffed unceremoniously through the gullet. It is preoccupation. It’s undue concern with food.”

He said, “And we do concern ourselves.” He talks about going to restaurants and some people, you know, half their life is finding the best restaurants and passing those tips on and delighting in the culinary art of good restaurants. Good restaurants are a good thing, but if that becomes a preoccupation of our time, then probably we’ve gotten overbalanced.

Then he said, “We diet, not soundly because of health, but vainly. Here also the belly is God, albeit a shrunken divinity. Women carry a vogue image in their heads, a tall spelt mannequin with an unhappy face and a figure like a cardboard tube. Men think of the Jansen man, the tapered torso, all bronzed and beef.”

See, we have this preoccupation with physical appearances and with physical food, and that leads many of us into even being gluttonous or preoccupied with food in terms of our diet as well. It’s interesting, of course, because as I said there are temporal judgments that God puts on overeating. But our society is seeking more and more ways to avoid those judgments. Whether it’s the gaining of weight, whether it’s bad health effects, not through curing the root problem, which was, which is trying to get satisfaction from food which can’t satisfy, but rather saying you can have your cake and your waistline too, so to speak, you know.

And so the society is involved in all sorts of crash diets and you can kind of blow it up and come down and kind of moderate out. And these things are all giving into our sin as it were.

Another book written by Steven Schaemaker published by Broadman Press called “The Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome” on the seven deadly sins is interesting. He says that again one form of gluttony is a preoccupation with food. Do you eat to live or live to eat?

And of course we remember that Paul said neither the belly for the food nor food for the belly. Both are destined to perish with the using. There’s a greater value to all this. But in any event, Schaemaker says you can order your days around what to eat next. That would be wrong. And he’s correct. He says that he mentions that in the sixth century Gregory the Great spoke of another form of gluttony—fastidiousness.

Fastidiousness is the paying of undue attention to the planning and preparation of food. The food must be just so. It must be a certain brand or kind. It must be cooked just right. So health food fanatics may be as gluttonous as junk food junkies. Endless hours are spent selecting, mixing, blending. Even dieting can be gluttonous when it becomes obsessive. The desire may be a slimmer waist, but he or she is still trying, living to eat.

Planning proteins, counting calories, selecting starches, gobbling vitamins, calculating carbohydrates. Who has time for anything else? Still living to eat. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about this afternoon. Not so much gluttony in the sense of eating way too much food, but rather gluttony in the sense of an unhealthy preoccupation with food. An unhealthy preoccupation.

To accomplish this, we’re going to look first at our text and talk a little bit about what it means in its first sense and then we’re going to draw some applications out from it which are on your outline. So if you can open your Bibles—if you don’t have them open now—to Hebrews 13. We’re going to look specifically at verse 9 making a little bit of reference to the context as well, but primarily at verse 9 and then we’re going to look at the text first and then we’ll get to the five applications that are on your outline. Okay.

A summary of this text, and I’ll read it again just so you remember what we’re talking about: “Don’t be carried about with diverse and strange doctrines, for it is a good thing that the heart be established with grace, not with meats, which have not profited them that have been occupied therein.”

John Owen in summarizing this verse in his excellent large commentary on the book of Hebrews—five fat volumes—John Owen says, in a summary of this verse, I’m kind of paraphrasing what Owen said, but I got the idea from him. He says that this verse proposes an end. The end is the establishment of the heart. It then talks about two ways to establish the heart, and these two ways are then compared and contrasted. One way is grace and the other way is meat or food. The preference is given of course unto grace. And then he talks in the verse or God talks in the verse about meats and shows reasons why meats are insufficient to meet the end of the purpose.

Remember the end is to establish the heart. So we got the verses talk about how do you establish your heart: you can do it through grace or through food supposedly. Some people say grace, some people say food, and the ones that say food are wrong because the people that do that have received no value from it, is what the author of the book of Hebrews says.

So verse 9 in this chapter centers around the establishment of the heart. Now couple of words here I think are pretty important for catching the meaning of this verse. First it says don’t be carried about with these strange teachings. And then later on it talks about those who are preoccupied or who are occupied with food. Now the “occupied with food” word means to walk hither and thither. So people are occupied with food in that it’s taken up a lot of their activities. They’re walking around a lot. They’re not at a place of peace. They’re walking around. Their walk is characterized by food and what they eat.

But he goes but in the first part of the verse he says that he’s using this phrase to describe people who are carried about by diverse and strange doctrines. And that word means to be conveyed about in a broader in a faster sense, driven about as it were. Okay? And I think one thing that happens here is that people who are walking about occupied with food in reality are often times being driven into a position of being driven about by teachings, strange and varied teachings that drive them about in their activity. And so there’s this correlation between being carried about or conveyed about and those who are walking about spending undue amounts of time with their foods.

Now, this verse is obviously written in a historical context to a group of people and I don’t want to belabor the point like I did last week too long over who these guys are that he’s writing to. The question is open—the questions are there. The answer is not exactly agreed on by everybody. John Calvin says it’s really hard to figure out who he’s talking about here. You may not think it’s so hard, but I’ll explain in a couple minutes what it is.

It could be some Essene types—again, people that actually had some food they thought was holy food and would give them strength. That seems to be the point because remember he’s saying the heart can be established—by what? By foods. So it seems like in the first reference he’s not saying that the abstention from unhealthy foods or unclean foods rather is what’s being talked about. That’s what you’d first think of, isn’t it?

Jewish dietary laws. Don’t eat pork. But see, he’s talking about foods that somebody thinks can actually make them healthier, can establish the heart. You see, and so in its first reference, it seems to be talking about some kind of holy food. He goes on from there in verses 10 and following to talk about the Old Testament sacrificial system with its altar. And he says, “We have an altar that they can’t eat at. The guys who are still trying to sacrifice at the old altar, which is no longer in God’s purpose anymore, it’s been done away with. We have an altar they don’t get to eat at.”

That’s another reference, you see, to the food of the Old Testament system that was placed on the altar, sacrificed, and then they got to eat a portion of it. And so there were some Jews who completely contrary to God’s scripture saw the ingestion of food that had been sacrificed as somehow building them up spiritually and establishing their heart.

But the problem is that the word he uses in verse 9 for foods is not the word that’s used about holy food in the Septuagint or any other place in the New Testament. So he doesn’t seem to be talking in verse 9 specifically about Jewish holy food. And he’s not talking specifically about Jewish dietary laws.

Now, who is he talking about? Well, he could be talking about other groups altogether, diverse and strange teachings. Lots of different people saying lots of weird things and some of them saying you can be established by certain kinds of food. Okay? And we’ll get to the correlation there in a couple of minutes, but I’m trying to help you see it’s not an easy question to answer. It’s very important too, as a sidebar to what I’m going to say—I’m not talking about the dietary laws today, but I do want to make some points here about the dietary laws as we go through this.

Very important. John Owen said this: that he Owen thought that the term for food in verse 9 referred to the whole Jewish system including the dietary exclusion laws about pork and other things as well as eating holy food. And I want to—this is an important point to make. Owen said that the religious distinction of meats among the Jews was a distinction which he said had its origin in the altar.

I’m quoting from John Owen. He says, “And hence we may see the reason why the Jews laid so much weight on these meats.” Namely because the taking of them away, the distinction about them and the privilege of them—okay, distinction what you can and can’t eat, privilege being able to eat food that was sacrificed on the altar. The taking of those things away, he said, to declare that their altar which was the life and center of their religion was of no more use.

And then he cites some other verses. What’s Owen talking about? In Leviticus 11 in that vicinity there, the dietary laws relative to restrictions—you cannot eat pork and various unclean foods—occur immediately after the description in Leviticus 10 of the consecration of the priesthood. Later in the holiness code of Leviticus in chapters 18–19. Again, clean and unclean foods for normal eating are put in juxtaposition right alongside of temple descriptions: what happens on the altar and what you can place there.

Owen’s point, and a point which many of us probably haven’t thought about but which is obvious once you do, is that the dietary restrictions, the prohibitions, the prescriptions of pork, shrimp, all kinds of other food had its place primarily in reference to the altar. It was what you could or could not put on the altar before God that then became the model for what you as a culture in the Old Testament could eat in your home, linked see to what you do.

Same way we’ve talked about how communion on Sunday sets up a pattern and a way of going about your food the rest of the week. Remember Genesis said—Genesis 9:3 I believe—that everything that moves is food for you. But then later we find, uh well actually before that, when the ark itself is loaded, we find more clean animals loaded on. Why? Because they were going to be sacrificed. The original clean and unclean distinction has reference to the altar.

And so Owen and most Puritans, most Pilgrims, most commentators for the last 2,000 years has seen dietary restrictions as part of that altar system. And since what all those things portrayed on the altar has now come—Jesus Christ—and their altar is now gone, we have an altar to eat of. Paul says in verse 10 that they can’t eat from anymore—that the whole regulations in terms of proscriptions against certain foods are now done away with based on the connection, not to certain texts in the New Testament saying they’ve been cleaned, rather based upon the connection of unclean distinctions to the altar that altar system is now done away with. Jesus has come.

This has a lot of implications. This line of reasoning I’m giving you for the dietary law issue. I don’t want to address it directly. I’m not taking a position here in front of you. I’m trying to give you some stuff to think through as you think through that issue, and there’s a whole line of reasoning there in that sense that you have to work through, and these verses are part of that.

Now again it’s important as you evaluate some of these texts and think through them again in terms of the dietary law that you recognize that in the history of the church, the Puritans, the early church fathers, etc. all believed that those dietary restrictions were done away with based upon the connection to the altar. Okay?

Let’s see. Owen is saying that what the author of the epistle to the Hebrews then is saying is that it’s not just that your food restrictions no longer valid. It’s because your altar is no longer valid. And that’s why the Jews of the day fought so hard to maintain dietary laws. Why was it such a big deal when they went to the Christians and told them eat these foods? The reason was because they wanted value placed in their altar system, which is where the distinction between clean and unclean came from. Okay.

It’s also interesting to note in this context by the way that the rabbinic writings went far beyond the prescriptions given to food in the Old Testament. They went beyond the simple plain statement of what you could and couldn’t eat. They had all kinds of other factors in and all kinds of other considerations. And interestingly today and in the culture over the last 2,000 years certain groups that place emphasis on the dietary laws also frequently end up placing all kinds of other restrictions on foods which are extra-biblical. Okay, not all of them, not all of them, don’t get me wrong, but I’m saying a lot of them do and there’s an interesting correlation there.

Now, so that’s the what the verse is talking about—getting grace from food. I think that we have in our culture today the same sorts of ideas. There are people in our culture who believe that food is the way of eternal life and their actions are driven by it. They are not rabbinic Jews. They are secularists. But the secularist has his altar as well from which he then takes distinctions into what he eats and doesn’t eat.

What is his altar? His altar is chemical determinism. His altar is evolution. His altar is materialism. And so every decision he makes about food is tied to his altar, the god at which he worships as it were and obtains his instructions for life. And that altar says chemical determinism means that every last little iota of chemical that comes in your body is ultimately significant. You see, now there are all kinds of things being said about all kinds of foods and pesticides and all this other stuff that we’ve got to think through real well.

And that’s what I’m trying to get you to do this afternoon is think through the preoccupation of this culture and us in this culture with those sorts of things. And I want you to understand that there are people who are promoting many of these things who worship at another altar, and that’s why they believe what they do.

Now, having talked a little bit about the context of the verse and its specific meaning there, let’s draw some applications out of this verse for our life. We’re talking about a preoccupation with food. Somebody whose walk is characterized by a lot of thinking and a lot of preparation and a lot of worry about what they put into their body—whether it’s in the case of the secularist, whether it’s food, drink, smoke, whatever it is, industrial pollutants. People are worried about all these things. I’ve known people, you’ve known people who spend a good portion of their life worried about their chemical environment.

And you see, the secularist has a reason to worry about that ’cause that’s all there is for him. But that’s not all it is for us. Our heart is not established at these things. Our heart is established by grace. Okay.

Preoccupation with food. First, it’s dangerous because it is frequently accompanied by false teachings.

It’s no secret to most of you that I was involved in the counterculture movement of the late ’60s. I graduated in 1967 from high school. I spent time in San Francisco. I spent time in various communes. I was involved in rock music, etc., etc. I bring these things up to let you know that I at that time still read. Many people didn’t, but I was still reading. And I am amazed to think back 25 years ago and think through what I was reading in counterculture publications back then relative to diet and food and all kinds of other things.

And how much of them are standard fare and accepted orthodoxy in our world today. This stuff came out of, had its origins in that counterculture, rebellious, God-hating movement of the ’60s that I was involved with. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s bad. I mean, you look at the ungodly line of Cain, they produced musical instruments first, apparently, the guys who could play them, and God redeemed those things.

Doesn’t mean it’s bad. But I’m saying that a lot of the preoccupation with diet, natural foods, I could go through a whole litany here. I think I’ve got some things written down that I was thinking of last night: natural foods, vegetarianism, obsession with thinness, suspicion of the establishment, including the established medical orthodoxy, home birthing. All these things were very much a big part of the counterculture movement that I was involved with in the late ’60s.

Doesn’t make them wrong. Doesn’t make them wrong. But I’m saying that frequently preoccupation with some of these things is accompanied by religious perspectives, by false teachings, paisley shirts, long hair, the grammar, cool man, you know, the way we talk. It’s been influenced by the ’60s. They won. You know, we won. I was one of them then. They won. I don’t know.

Food and faith are inevitably intertwined in our world. Christian Reconstruction, okay, for whatever reason has found itself in many points of contact with various odd and cultic elements, strange and diverse teachings: Conspiracy theorists, hard-right conservatives, drug-legalizing libertarians, survivalists, any number of cult groups, Identity [Christian], British Israelites, etc. These are part of the environment in which we find ourselves these days.

Just as last week, I became aware of two new what might be called fringe groups. One group that says there’s a conspiracy underway to destroy American Christian history documents, including secret ceremonies at the Library of Congress with Gorbachev. Much of what might be true, as far as I know, could be true. Another group that Steve may be aware of through Cal Beisner’s recent commentary of a couple of years ago on the Psalms is something called “Moral Government Theology.”

It believes that God can choose to be either good or evil at any given point in time. His goodness, his grace that we rejoice in this day, is the establishment of our heart, doesn’t necessarily flow out of his person. Moral government theologians say rather he chooses good or evil and he can choose evil tomorrow for that matter and he doesn’t know anything about the future because he’s all kind of dependent upon us.

Now the point of all this of bringing this up is that in the area of food many of the perspectives that we are exposed to in diet have their origins in many of these odd groups, occultic groups, cultic groups, hippie movements, radical anti-establishment movements, etc. And as I said, it doesn’t invalidate these theories, but it does mean you’ve got to be very careful, very careful over the source and what you’re getting involved with in terms of dietary regulations.

In addition to these environmental causes of concern about preoccupation with food, the oddness of the world in which we live, God’s judgments are in the air, things are splintering, and those splinter groups often go off in odd directions. In addition to the environmental causes of concern that we should have, we get too cross about the food. There’s another thing that’s very important: our immaturity.

I believe it was C.S. Lewis who said using an analogy from King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table that when the round table is broken, everyone must follow either Galahad or Mordred. Middle things are gone. He said with God’s judgment today in our land, the good is becoming more obvious. The bad is becoming more obvious. Everybody’s got to decide which way we’re going to go. And so that’s good. But the problem is as we follow Galahad, who is the noblest and the purest of the knights, so to speak, and as we follow Jesus Christ, who I suppose you could see some analogy to there, the problem is that as we go that route, we’ve got to recognize that we have a lot of immaturity in us.

There was an interesting article by Howard Amenson in a “Chalcedon Report” of 1982. And I think again this is important to keep in mind that many of the things that we ponder about and think through in terms of Christian activism today—for instance, the proper use of civil disobedience—we’ve got to recognize again that some of this stuff again was being promoted by that counterculture of the ’60s.

We may be followers of Jesus, but we are in all too many cases very immature followers. We’ve all talked about and commiserated about the fact we have very few hoary heads in this church, for instance, very few wiser, older, more mature men who can give us guidance and direction. These verses in Hebrews were written to a group that also were immature, who should have been ready for meat. They weren’t. They could only have milk. And as a result, they were unstable, apt to be carried about by diverse doctrines. And I think the same thing is true of us.

I’m going to read a little bit of this quote from Howard Amenson’s article. Amenson wrote, “There are suggestions whispered that are even more shocking. A columnist commented in the Christian Legal Society Quarterly in the fall of 1981, quote, ‘Whatever happened to law and order. I’m intrigued by the relative disappearance of the advocacy of law and order within the conservative religious community. Perhaps laws do not have to be obeyed after all. Perhaps resistance is appropriate.’ How honestly goes on to write, ‘Some of the very forces which oppose the moral claims of war resistors as ground for disobeying government now find ample warrant for resistance in a state requirement to obtain licenses from private schools or report to children in attendance at such schools.

The shift in perspective is dramatic. Yes, for some the shock is great that even from the mountains of Switzerland, the evangelical wise man is whispering words—gasp—civil disobedience.’” A reference to Francis Schaeffer talking about the need for civil disobedience at some point in time. Amenson writes, “Déjà vu, it seems so familiar. The sudden overnight concern about justice and social righteousness, this new feisty rebellion against authority, even the new forthrightness about sex. Yes, in the Western world, these are characteristics of high school and college youth. The spiritual baby boom is growing up. It’s passing spiritual puberty and entering its adolescence. A new phenomena now appears before our eyes: the teenage church. Is there hope? Yes, there is. Somewhere beyond adolescence lies maturity.

I have no personal experience of what that is going to be like. Paul had an idea. Quote, ‘Then we’ll no longer be infants tossed back and forth by the waves and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men and their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will all in all things grow up into him who is the head, that is Jesus Christ.’” Now quoted from the Ephesians, “saints blown about carried about by every wind of doctrine.” That’s the phrase used in Hebrews 13:9. Blown about, carried about by diverse teachings, with a preoccupation of food.

What I’m saying is that one’s occupation or preoccupation, may be a better word, with food sometimes implies a walk dominated by food—the way that we talked about last week—a way of life in which food figures very prominently. When one finds oneself in such a lifestyle, seeing food decisions as pretty important in the scheme of things, watch out, beware, be cautious. One may well be walking about in enemy territory. Many of the food ideas, as I said, of the current counterculture, which is now becoming the dominant culture in America, find their roots in modern-day strange and varied doctrines that the author refers to in this epistle as carrying one about, driven about.

Now all this is to be expected. In 1 Timothy 4. We read that the Spirit speaks expressly that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils. Strong words—doctrines of devils—speaking lies and hypocrisy having their conscience seared as with a hot iron forbidding to marry and commanding to abstain from meats which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth.

For every creature of God is good and nothing to be refused if it be received with thanksgiving for it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.

I whenever I think of this verse I always think of a fellow who was in our church and left many years ago—eight kids, you know who I’m talking about now, most of you—and who when pressured by some people in our church to eat differently used to quote this verse a lot and say, “Hey, you know, I do my best. I work hard. I put food on the table for my family. I ask God to bless it. And he tells me in the scriptures he will.” And I think that’s a pretty good attitude by and large.

As I said, Genesis 9:3: “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you, even as the green herb that I’ve given you all these things.”

It is remarkable. Of course, I’ve talked about this before. There are people there have been people in the context of our own church who have told me about these things and actually advocated them who think that for instance to have a juice drink—what you want to do is you want to pick the fruit off the tree immediately. Throw it into the blender, zip it up in about 20 minutes, immediately pour it into a glass and drink it because otherwise some of the chemical stuff, what some might call life forces, begin to leave the juice. See?

Well, you know, it’s interesting that God tells the people back in the old covenant law—and they went out and hunted deer, for instance—they shot the deer. They couldn’t eat the deer until they did—well, they didn’t shoot it. Shot an arrow. Dating myself. Shot the deer with an arrow. They couldn’t eat it until they did something. They had to bleed it. They had to cut the throat and let the blood go onto the ground. Now, the scriptures say the life of the flesh is in the blood. The life principle, as it were. And I think one thing God was telling us there is you’re not to assume you can get life by eating creaturely life before it becomes dead.

That deer had to be stone cold dead, you know, before you were supposed to eat it. All the blood and warmth drained out of it. God gives us in his providence dead food. Food. I think it was Schmeiman who originally talked about this—food that is so dead in terms of meat that you’ve got to refrigerate it to keep it from rotting on you. It’s that dead. That’s the food that we put on our plate and ask God to bless.

Why? Because, folks, the heart is not established with food. The soul isn’t established with food. And your life isn’t a result of food. It’s a result of God’s blessing that he puts upon that dead food. He wants us to remember that he doesn’t want us to get close to sliding over to idolatry and hoping to get energy or life somehow out of food apart from his providence and his act of involvement. Okay.

Bad enough that preoccupation with food takes us away from recognizing that it’s God’s grace on dead food that gives us life and bad enough that a preoccupation with food puts us in the context of other people with very strange and diverse religious perspectives. We could go on a long time about that and as a result they end up with dietary laws that are real interesting and odd.

Bad enough that that happens to us. But there’s a diversion aspect in all of this as well. Bad enough that it gives us close proximity to those who we shouldn’t have close proximity to, but also this emphasis or preoccupation with food diverts us from grace.

And grace is the true source of satisfaction.

This phrase—the phrase “to have the heart established”—it means to have it at peace with God, to be content and to grow spiritually. But it’s also interesting that John Brown in his commentary pointed out that this is also a Jewish phrase not being used now in its Greek lexical sense but it was a Jewish phrase directly referring to the effect of food in producing refreshment and used as equivalent to obtain real satisfaction.

And so the heart doesn’t obtain real satisfaction. There is no satisfaction in food. He’s saying and to think that there is diverts us from grace which is the true source of satisfaction.

John Owen in his commentary said that grace here is the free grace of God in Christ Jesus for the justification and sanctification of the church as is revealed in the gospel. The revelation of it in the gospel is included. But it’s the grace of God himself that is principally intended. In brief, grace is here to be taken comprehensively for the grace, goodwill, and love of God towards men as it came by Jesus Christ, as it is revealed in the gospel as the cause of our justification and acceptance with God in opposition unto the works of the law and the observance of Mosaic rituals unto that end. It respects unto the expiation of our sins and the blood of Christ, Owen wrote, and the pardon of them therein revealed and tendered to us in the gospel.

This is that alone which doth, which can, which will establish the heart of a sinner at peace with God, which will keep it from being moved or tossed up and down with a sense of guilt or divine displeasure. God’s grace establishes our heart, gives us peace, gives us satisfaction, gives us positional holiness, justification, and gives us sanctification, growth, and grace as well. F.F. Bruce said that it is by divine grace, not by rules about food, that the heart—that is to say the spiritual life—is nourished.

So the term for establishment has the connotation of being settled, satisfied and at peace. It has reference to being at peace with God, but also of growing in grace, having a daily walk not characterized by the walking about that is used of those who are preoccupied with food, but rather a walk that is sound and peaceful.

Now, one frequently seeks, as we’ve said for the past two weeks, satisfaction and peace from food which it is wholly unable to provide. Food is given as a picture of what is able to satisfy us: that being the word of God, the will of the Father, the Son, who is the same Savior, Messiah, and King yesterday, today, and forever, and the peace, joy, and righteousness of the Holy Spirit. That alone is truly satisfying.

As we said, Romans 14:17 says, “The kingdom of God is not meat and drink, right? Righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. The Spirit fills us. Wine and food dissipates us. Gluttony enfebles us and makes us actually not only not established, but doesn’t make us healthy at all. It’s grace that gives us life day by day and eternally.

The food worshipper looks to the food for long life. And if you think that you can obtain long life by eating good food without the grace of God, you are sadly mistaken. There is no substantiation that I know of in the entire scriptures that correlate a proper diet with long life. The scriptures correlate obedience, ethical obedience to the law of God with long life and longevity. You know the fifth commandment: honor your father and your mother. Why? That your days be long on the earth. How do you get long days on the earth? You honor your father and your mother. Where does grace come in? Have you honored your father and your mother? Probably not. I know I haven’t honored my father and mother in all occasions. God gives grace to us. But that grace leads us to further obedience. And it is that obedience and the blessing of God upon such obedience which gives us longevity of life, not diet.

Now, that’s the biblical emphasis. And if you say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know all that, but it’s real important that we think through a lot about our diet and how to get long through our diet.” No, no, no. I know all about that. Okay. I know what you eat is important. I know it’s not good to eat razor blades, but I know that the scriptural focus, the scriptural walk is centered on understanding and obeying his law, not understanding and obeying amino acids. Okay? That stuff’s important for some. I’m not putting it down, but I’m saying it relatively. What we’ve got to be concerned with and preoccupied with is the written word of God—that food—and not the food that perishes.

Now, by the way, that fifth commandment reference I thought of it anew this last week in relation to the Deuteronomy 21 case law about the rebellious child who was gluttonous who was executed. He doesn’t get long life does he? Why? Because he was rebellious against his parents—fifth commandment. So maybe implied in the fifth commandment which we always think of as a promise—and the scriptures say it is a promise—maybe also there’s an implied threat to it. There’s a curse side to it as well. You don’t honor your parents and you are extremely dishonoring to them and you will be cut off. Okay.

So preoccupation with food diverts us from the grace which is alone able to satisfy us and establish us. John Calvin said that the observance of meats has no connection with our final salvation or true holiness. Obvious but something we need to hear occasionally.

It’s interesting—grace from above, grace from below. The grace that we’re talking about here is grace from above. And people who deny grace from above seek grace from below. They seek grace and extension of life and longevity from earth things and not from heavenly realities. Such should not characterize us. We should understand that grace comes from above. It comes from the temple of God. It comes from the very person of God being part of him who he is and extended to us and not from the created order or from food.

In addition to a preoccupation with food diverting us from true grace and putting us in the company of those who follow diverse and strange teachings, it is generally unprofitable. It is generally unprofitable to be overly occupied with food. The text here means it’s unprofitable for spiritual health, but a wider point is made in other scriptures which we’ll shortly reference.

Now it’s important here to note that the natural mind has a tendency to want to reduce spiritual realities to physical realities. A.W. Pink in his commentary on this passage says the following: “The principle expressed in this dissuasion is applicable to and is much needed by the saints of each succeeding generation as it was by those Hebrews. It’s one of the marks of the fall that man is fonder of that which is material in religion than he is of that which is spiritual. He is most prone as history universally and sadly shows to concentrate on trivialities rather than upon essentials. He is more concerned about the details of ordinances than he is in getting”—