Dennis Tuuri

Scripture is found in the seventh chapter of the book of Zechariah. One of the minor prophets toward the end of the Old Testament. Zechariah chapter 7. Zechariah is the book immediately before Malachi, which is the last book of the Old Testament. I’m going to have you stand for the reading of God’s word, please. Please stand.

Zechariah chapter 7: “And it came to pass in the fourth year of King Darius that the word of the Lord came unto Zechariah in the fourth day of the ninth month, even in Chislev. When they had sent unto the house of God, Sharezer and Regemelech, and their men to pray before the Lord, and to speak unto the priests which were in the house of the Lord of hosts, and to the prophets, saying, Should I weep in the fifth month, separating myself, as I have done these so many years?

Then came the word of the Lord of hosts unto me, saying, Speak unto all the people of the land, and to the priests, saying, When ye fasted, and mourned in the fifth and seventh months, even those seventy years, did ye at all fast unto me, even to me? And when ye did eat, and when you did drink, did not you eat for yourselves, and drink for yourselves?

Should you not hear the words which the Lord hath cried by the former prophets, when Jerusalem was inhabited, and in prosperity, and the cities thereof round about her, when men inhabited the south, and the plain? And the word of the Lord came unto Zechariah, saying, Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, saying, Execute true judgment, and show mercy and compassions every man to his brother. And oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the poor. And let none of you imagine evil against his brother in your heart.

But they refused to hearken and pulled away the shoulder and stopped their ears that they would not hear. Yea, they made their hearts as adamant stone, lest they should hear the law, and the words which the Lord of hosts hath sent in his spirit by the former prophets. Therefore came a great wrath from the Lord of hosts. Therefore, it has come to pass that as he cried and they would not hear, so they cried, and I would not hear, sayeth the Lord of hosts. But I scattered them with a whirlwind among all the nations whom they knew not. Thus the land was desolate after them, that no man passed through, nor returned, for they laid the pleasant land desolate.”

This concludes the reading of God’s word.

And we continue. Now going through our series of sermons on the seven deadly sins. This is our fourth talk on the sin of gluttony, which in the historical list is the sixth of the seven deadly sins. And as I did last week, it might be useful to sort of sum up what we’ve been talking about. And essentially what we want to do today is take the last three sermons, sort of roll them together and look at what eating according to the scripture looks like.

Next week, we’ll spend one week, probably two weeks on fasting. And there’s a reason why I chose this particular portion from Zechariah 7 today. Even though we’re not going to spend a lot of time in that particular chapter, it’s kind of a jumping off place to consider an overview of the scriptures relative to principles of eating and in relationship to looking at the positive side of which gluttony is the negative side.

And so, it’s sort of summing it all up and hopefully what I want to do today is give you some models for eating in your home that you can then put into practice immediately and begin to teach your children how to avoid gluttony and more than that how to eat and drink to the glory of God. And so that’s the point of today’s talk is to sort of sum it all up as it were and give us a picture of godly eating and drinking.

Now I’m going to be quoting today and I’ll just mention it now. I’ll be quoting various probably five or six different quotes from Reverend William Jenkin, his exposition of the epistle of Jude, written in the 1600s. Jenkin was the lecturer of Christ Church in 1652 and became rector of Blackfriars in 1653. He succeeded Gouge, and you remember Gouge was the man whose commentary we used last week. One of the men we used was eventually appointed to be one of the Westminster Divines.

And so that’s the time frame of Jenkin, and his exposition on the epistle of Jude is an excellent resource. We’ll be quoting from it at several points in today’s talk. And remember just remembering what we’ve done so far. The first talk we gave on gluttony we talked about what it was and essentially we said that gluttony is a failure to apprehend the real meaning of food.

Gluttony, we said, is the result of seeking in food and/or drink what God provides only through what these gifts of his point us to, namely the value and desirability of four things we said and you should have those four things down by now. The word of God—that man doesn’t live by bread alone but by the word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. And then the word of God reveals to us the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Food reminds us of doing the will of the Father. It reminds us of peace, joy, and righteousness in the kingdom of the Holy Spirit. And instead of meat and drink, that’s not what the kingdom consists of, the scriptures tell us, but peace, joy, and righteousness in the Spirit.

And then the fourth thing that food is a picture to us of is the beautiful inethical riches of Jesus Christ, true man, that came down from heaven. Gluttony doesn’t see those things and instead gets hung up with idolatry, as it were, and perceiving the food as having ultimate value instead of what it’s supposed to connect us to and point us to and remind us of these things of God’s word and the three persons of the Trinity.

Gluttony, of course, when it gives way to that kind of thinking, becomes overindulging in food and in feeble men instead of giving them strength. We also said that gluttony is a serious sin. It’s connected to rebellion in Deuteronomy 21 and the case laws, and it was one of the things that our Savior was charged with, and it was a capital crime when connected with sins of drunkenness and rebellion against parents.

We then moved on to talk about gluttony as idolatry, and we talked about Philippians 3 where we have the description of some people whose god are their bellies, and we said that the glutton’s god is his belly. All he cares about are sensual pleasures and eating food, and then his whole life becomes rotated around that desire to eat food. And we said that a good way to assure ourselves that we are not having our god be our belly is to attend to the place, time, manner, and priority that we give to eating.

Do we eat at the proper place, at the proper time, in the proper manner, and in the proper priority? And we’re going to be talking about that a lot more this afternoon as we go through godly eating. And then we also said last week, very important, I think, that talk we gave last week from Hebrews the eleventh chapter about an undue attention or preoccupation with food and the dangers of that, the uselessness of it, and indeed the very danger of it.

And we said that although some people may not be gluttonous in the sense of eating too much, they may tend to the sin of having a preoccupation with food and as a result maybe diet all the time. For instance, one of you told me after the sermon that just that morning when they were in the afternoon when they were driving up for the sermon that they were talking about dieting and whether or not the person should go on a diet.

And the problem with the diet is this person said you spend all your time thinking about the food and then you’re unduly preoccupied with food and it’s just as bad as if you’re eating too much, maybe a little healthier, maybe not. But the point is an undue preoccupation with food is a bad thing. Food is mentioned throughout the scriptures, but it’s not mentioned as something that you really are encouraged to take a lot of time thinking through.

It’s usually mentioned in the context of problems of people who think too much about food. And we talked about that last week in what I think is a very important sermon. And if you missed it, I’d really encourage you to get a copy of the tape and listen to it. And now we’re going to go on from there and talk today about a proper eating and drinking.

And first we’re going to talk about the great need for eating and drinking properly. As I said, I plan to speak on fasting next week and the week after. Now that we’re in the context of food and the proper approaches to it, I think one of the purposes for fasting is to exercise dominion, as it were, over our bodies and return a sense of mastery to ourselves as we control our own bodies.

And I was struck as I was preparing for some of those sermons and this week’s sermon on this passage from Zechariah 7 that we just read, in verses 5 and 6 specifically. These people come to God and say, “Should we fast again?” And he says, “Well, for seventy years they’ve been in judgment.” Okay? They’ve been in captivity. And he says, “When you fasted and mourned, did you at all fast unto me, even unto me?”

And what he’s saying, of course, is a rhetorical question. The answer is no. They haven’t. They’ve fasted for themselves. And so fasting is not proper in and of itself. The motivation for it, why we’re doing it, and whether or not we’re going to let the word of God regulate it for us is all important.

But he went on to say in verse six to the people, the prophet did, speaking for God, “And when you did eat, and when you did drink, did you not eat for yourselves and drink for yourselves?” Even if you’re fasting supposedly for God and come forward during that special time to have your thoughts turned to God, he’s saying that if your eating and drinking is secularized, internalized, personalized, if you’re doing it for the sake of yourself, your normal eating and drinking. It’s not going to do any good for you to come to me two months out of the year and fast.

Now, Jeremiah 7, we’ve read that as an entrance to worship, as a call to worship a lot over the last few months. Very important passage. Don’t think you can come here and have your Sundays kind of formulated according to God’s word, but not have the rest of your lives regulated by God’s word and think it’s going to do any good.

He says, “Amend your ways throughout the week. Amend your ways.” Now, what I’m saying is there’s a great need today for the body of Christ to amend their ways relative to food. He was saying, “This is why you’re still in judgment.” And he says to him the very next verse, you should hear what I told your fathers if you’re going to be like that. Much of the judgment that fell upon them was because their worldview indicated by what they ate and what they drank was not regulated by the word of God.

And God was portioned off, cordoned off to a certain part of their lives on Sunday or whatever it was, Saturday, whatever day it was, the feast days, etc. And the fast days and God says, “Forget it. I’m not the God of just that day. I’m the God of all creation. And if I’m not the God of your food, then don’t come to me hoping that one day out of seven or two months out of twelve, you can somehow appease me. Forget it.”

He says, “It is vital. It is a crying need of the church today. If we recognize that we’re in judgment in America, and I think that all of us do in this church, that God’s judgments are upon the land, his judgments are primarily geared at purifying his people and causing them to come to repentance. And I think the church corporately and all of us individually probably have some repenting to do over the way we eat and food.

And it’s important because it becomes a model for what we do with the rest of our lives. And we’ll talk about that today. We hear a lot the passage 2 Chronicles 7:14. I’ve heard it I don’t know how many times in the last ten or fifteen years, “That my people which are called by my name shall humble themselves and pray, seek my face, turn from their wicked ways, them will I hear from heaven, forgive their sin, and heal their land.”

From Solomon’s prayer at the temple. It’s interesting to me that one of the first times I heard this here in Oregon, the pastor actually left off that phrase, “turn from your wicked ways,” which is amazing. You know, it’s just if you humble yourself enough, you don’t somehow forget about turning from your wicked ways. This verse is frequently used on days of prayer and fasting when we really turn to God.

And I think what God would have us remember when we think about this verse, which is an excellent verse and very appropriate to our times, what God would have us remember is that it’s not just days of prayer and fasting. You better amend your ways at your dinner table every day of the week. Teach yourself and teach your children to have a biblical worldview and life view, a biblical theology of how you eat.

And if I’m not at your dinner table, I’m not going to be at your communion table. Except I’ll be there to judge you.

1 Corinthians 10:31 goes right back to this verse from Zechariah. In 1 Corinthians 10:31, Paul says, “Whether therefore you eat, drink, whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” Colossians 3:17, “Whatsoever you do in word or deed in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, do it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, giving thanks to God of the Father by him. Whatsoever you do, do it heartily as unto the Lord and not unto men.”

And God wants us to remold and reform the way we eat according to his regulated principles found in the scriptures. Now, we have a danger in this country. A danger in this country. It’s interesting if you go through the scriptures and the warnings God gives to people that have plenty to eat for their bellies. Deuteronomy 32:15, “Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked. Thou art waxed fat. Thou art grown thick. Thou art covered with fatness. Then he forsook God, which made him.”

Now, before you start thinking negatively of fat, hold on. We’re going to talk about fat in a couple of minutes. The point is when Jeshurun was blessed by God with fatness, that’s when he rebelled and forgot God. Deuteronomy 6, God says, “Be careful when you go into the land and you have houses full of good things which thou filledst not. And wells are digged which thou diggest not. Vineyards and olive trees which thou plantedst not, then thou shalt have eaten and be full. Then beware lest thou forget the Lord.”

Proverbs 30:8, “Remove from me vanity and lies. Give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with food convenient for me, lest I be full and deny thee.” What’s the point of all that? The point is that in America, we’ve been full. Our bellies have been full. We’ve had prosperity because of God’s blessing. And that’s the nation that God warns specifically. And that’s the people, and we’re the people who can eat as much as we want at our dinner tables.

God says, “Be very careful that in that eating, blessed though it is from God on high, in that eating, do not forget him.” Jenkin in his commentary said, “It’s a rare thing to see religion flourish in a rich soil. Where the soil is richest, they’re commonly the inhabitants are most riotous.”

And what do we see in America today? Riotous behavior. And I think there’s a correlation, I’ll talk about it later, between drugs, gluttony, and drinking too much as well. So, we’ve got to be very careful. It’s a crying need in America, in the church of Jesus Christ, and in this church, and in our families to reshape the way we think about food to bring it under the regulated principle of God’s word.

Okay. So, there’s a great need for eating and drinking to God’s glory. And there’s a way spelled out of the scriptures that tells us how we should eat and drink and gives us some parameters and gives us some guidelines in terms of what our meal time should look like. We’re going to talk about that now.

First, we should eat with moderate preparation. Moderate preparation. We should choose food for strength. Strength being—find on my outline anyway—and I think in the word of God has having physical health certainly and having emotional joy.

Now this is sort of the flip side of what I said last week. Last week I said you shouldn’t put undue preparation into your food. And if you find yourself thinking a lot about diet and thinking a lot about additives and thinking a lot about this that and the other thing, you may well be overbalanced. You got to pull back from some of that stuff. On the other hand, if you find yourself not paying any attention at all to what you put before your children and before your family and what they eat and don’t consider the health ramifications at all, that’s bad the other way.

Eating is not just throwing some dried biscuits to some dogs in your household. Preparation has to be there, but it should be—the preparation should be moderate in its approach.

Ecclesiastes 10:17 says, “Blessed art thou, O land, when the king, the son of nobles, and thy princes eat in due season for strength, not for drunkenness.” So, our eating should have an element of it for strength. Our food should be healthy and we should take some time to make sure it is healthy. So in moderation of course that’s important.

Now what is health? What is healthy food? Well, I don’t think as with most things in our lives we want to look at the culture around us for a definition of what health is. I think we want to look at the scriptures again today.

I’ll read a quote here by Reverend R.J. Rushdoony out of the Encyclopedia of Christianity, 1972. A couple of paragraphs here under the heading of “Fat.” “Fat in scripture both literally and symbolically usually represented wealth. The pure fat of suet of an animal belonged to God as an offering. Leviticus 3. This requirement applied only to the pure fat not to the fat mixed with lean meat which was to be eaten with pleasure. Nehemiah 8:10.

Remember we said on the feast days, eat the fat, drink the sweet. And that refers to fat being mixed with lean meat. The fat belonging to God was to be burned on the altar as a sweet savor. Symbolically, Rushdoony writes, ‘Fat is almost as important as blood, which is the life of the flesh.’ Leviticus 17. In scripture, fat is the sign of healthiness and vigor, of prosperity.

In the active working society of ancient Israel, fat on the person was not normally thought of as a morbid development, but a mark of reserved strength and added vitality. Modern medicine gives us a one-sided view of fat. Expressions such as ‘the fat of the lamb,’ Genesis 45, ‘the fat of the mighty,’ meaning their power and strength in 2 Samuel 1, ‘the fat of the kidneys and wheat,’ Deuteronomy 32, ‘they shall be fat and flourishing,’ Psalm 92, and other passages, Proverbs 13:15, attest to the virtue and symbolic nature of fat.

However, morbid fat is referred to in Psalm 17:10. ‘They are enclosed in their own fat,’ so that scripture is aware of both aspects of the matter.”

Now, I’m trying to restore some balance here. We live in a culture that says that all fat is wrong and that promotes skin and bones, and the scriptures don’t give us that picture of health. Two visual pictures to teach your children about a proper view of fat and an improper way of fat are found in Daniel 1:15 and Judges 3:17.

Daniel 1:15, Daniel—and I don’t want to get into all the theology of this passage, it’s a fascinating one. Daniel refuses to eat the king’s meat and he instead insists on a diet of only vegetables. Now, that was not always Daniel’s method of eating, of course, because we read a couple of weeks ago, remember when he fasted, he said he didn’t eat the bread, the choice bread and flesh during his period of fasting.

He didn’t maintain the vegetable diet all his stay in that nation. But for a period of time, to separate himself from the jurisdiction of the king while he was going through a period of instruction and education, Daniel insisted on a separate diet. And the king actually requested that—very beneficent, very, uh, in a very good fashion from the king. The king let him do that and for ten days him and his companions ate their diet. Everybody else ate the great food the king had to offer up.

Verse 15 says, “At the end of the ten days, their countenance appeared fairer and fatter in flesh than all the children which did eat the portion of the king’s meat.” God’s blessing was upon Daniel, and it was evidenced by fatness in his flesh at the end of ten days, him and his companions. Now, that’s the same word used there, fat, for these references that Reverend Rushdoony was talking about.

It means more than health and good muscle tone. It means a degree, a layer of fat on Daniel. It’s the same word that’s used in Judges 3:17 to talk about Eglon, a wicked king who was killed by Ehud. Eglon, though, has another adjective applied to him. In verse 17 of Judges 3, we read that Eglon was king of Moab and Eglon was a very fat man. Very fat. That’s bad.

Fat in the sense of Daniel and his companions. That’s good. Reserve strength and vitality as Reverend Rushdoony says. That’s good. Eglon, too much fat. That’s bad. How do we know the difference? Well, there is no great rule. I don’t think the pinch and inch is going to work. You may remember, was stabbed by Ehud in his belly, and he was so fat that his flesh covered up the handle of the dagger or short sword that was used.

So, he was pretty fat because you couldn’t even see the knife sticking out of him. And so, I guess maybe it’s a pinch of foot or something. I don’t know what it would be. Eglon was too fat. And as Rushdoony pointed out in Psalm 17, some people are too fat when they’re enclosed in their own fat. But fat is not a bad thing in and of itself. The model we have in this culture is a weird skinny model and it isn’t good.

James B. Jordan in commenting on Rushdoony’s passage says the following, speaking of America. “Those who reject God, who reject his food, move in the direction of rejecting God’s good creation and all food. Thus, a society moving in a pagan direction not only comes to prize skinniness, but also finds itself plagued with self-serving, self-starving teenagers.” Let there be fat. Talking of anorexia, I was told last week by one of you that anorexia, people that are in the advanced condition of anorexia are characterized by an unhealthy preoccupation with diet and what they eat.

You see, they focus upon food as their god, and God, then they get no satisfaction, no nourishment out of it at all. So, it’s not good, the sort of skin and bones model of health today. Our health should not be determined by the weight charts of our pagan culture. Health should be determined by looking at the scriptures and discerning from it what’s moderate and what is not moderate. There’s a lot of room for disagreement in there.

We all agree that at two ends of the scale over here, a rejection of all fat is bad and over here an appreciation for all fat including fat Eglon is wrong too and the answer lies in between there sometime some place. The preparation of our food should be moderate. It should be choosing food that will produce strength. A reserve strength as it were and reserve vitality as Reverend Rushdoony pointed out.

Additionally, as I said there should be joy in eating as well. The scriptures are full of examples of godly men who feasted and that isn’t bad. Jesus Christ attended such feasts. Jesus Christ provided wine, lots of it, as his first miracle. These things are not wrong. We talked about that before. And more than just not being wrong, they’re important to recognize. They’re very appropriate to have joy as part of what we’re preparing to do at our meetings together.

There should be an aspect of joy. And so when you prepare the food, and if the wise mostly do that, and I think they probably would, you want to prepare your healthy food. Spend a moderate amount of time to do that. And you also want to prepare food so that it looks nice and looks somewhat appealing to people as well. And again, this is the counterbalance to the idea of spending undue amounts of time preparing food that looks sumptuous and everything to tickle the senses.

It should have an element of joy and pleasure to it. Remembering, of course, that the meal is focusing around the spiritual truths that the food represents to us, the Trinity and the word of God. Just like you can be angry and sin not, and there’s a proper jealousy as opposed to an improper envy and covetousness. Just as it’s good to have goals in terms of material things in our lives as long as those goals don’t become our God, and the material possessions are used for the glory of God. These are all counterbalances.

It’s good to value gold. God wants us to value gold but not see value ultimately in the gold but in his person behind it. In the same way, so it’s good to accept the joy that food and drink gives us. Jenkin again said that the whole earth is full of God’s goodness. It’s a well-furnished table. If we altogether fast, we show ourselves to be but sullen guests.

God has given us many blessings. Jenkin said, “We may warm ourselves in the sun without worshiping it.” And the same thing’s true of our food. We can enjoy the food that God gives us, remembering that it should remind us of the tastiness of his word and his will. But we don’t worship the food.

After all, Romans 14:17, remember that’s one of the verses we’re talking about here. The kingdom of God is not meat and drink. We’ve talked about this three weeks now. Kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. Food should be strength, but it should be joy to our meals as well. And our preparation should do that.

Secondly, our preparation should be moderate. And in underneath the concept of preparation being moderate, we should choose food for strength, physical health and joy. And we should also be moderate in using the resources that God gives us wisely. And again, let me remind you of time. As we said last week, the heart is not established by food, but by grace. So to pay too much attention to preparation of food in terms of time would be wrong.

And as I said before, there’s lots of references to food in the scriptures most times due to problems that people have with food by attending to it too much. How much time should you spend in the preparation of your meal? Well, it’s a relative thing again. But I think that on one hand, we’d all agree that it’s wrong to spend no time preparing the food. Just throw on there whatever happens to be in the cupboard.

And on the other hand, it’d be wrong to spend so much time in preparation for the physical feeding of your body and the meal you’re going to have that you end up neglecting the means of grace that God has given to us that do establish the heart that we talked about last week. It would be wrong to spend so much time preparing food that you neglect, for instance, the fellowship of the saints or that you neglect prayer.

Acts 2 says you have prayer, the apostles’ teaching, breaking of bread and the fellowship of the saints are the four things that God wants us to attend to as means of grace which he establishes us and strengthens us in the truth. And so if we spend undue amounts of time, a couple hours a day preparing our food and as a result have no time in our lives to meet with the saints or to attend prayer meetings that are scheduled, then we’re probably spending too much time in the preparation of food.

It’s interesting that Ecclesiastes 10:17, we just read that about the prince that eats in due season for strength and not for drunkenness. It says also there beginning of that verse in verse 16, it says, “Woe to thee, O land, when my king is a child and thy princes eat in the morning.” So he says, “It’s bad when your princes eat in the morning.” And then the next verse says, “It’s bad when your princes don’t eat in due season. Don’t eat for strength, but for drunkenness.”

Point there is that those two verses show us that there is a time consideration to our meals. And the preparation of our meals should aim at having those meals prepared for some time, not in the morning. Our main meal, I think according to these verses, shouldn’t be in the morning. We don’t want our whole day to rotate around our food. It’s why food and the main meal has been in the evening in Christian culture most of the last two thousand years.

Eating in due season. The morning is a time for certainly some refreshment, but it’s a time primarily for work and for attending to the calling that God has given to us. And then in the evening, we eat. The princes eat in due season. They don’t spend too much time at their food. They don’t spend too much time preparing it. And they also don’t spend the wrong time of the day in doing those things either.

The prince waits till the afternoon or evening for his meal, and he attends to work in the morning. It’s very interesting that those verses go on in Ecclesiastes 10, then to talk about verses 18 and following about the slothful one whose house falls in upon itself. Remember we talked about those verses a couple months ago and we talked about sloth. There’s a correlation between the prince who is gluttonous, who eats for pleasure and not for strength and as a result eats early in the morning and eats most of the day.

There’s a relationship between that and his kingdom falling in. Man, what it tells us is that we have to be diligent in our labors. And if we’re diligent in our labors, the food will sort of take care of itself most of the time. And if we attend to food too much, we become slothful through overeating or through an undue emphasis upon that food. So we should have moderation and using our resources wisely first time, and then also money.

Money—what proportion? You should think through what proportion of your budget do you spend on food? Jesus says that where your treasure is, that’s where your heart is. And if you spend a lot of your money on what you’re going to eat at the dinner table, you got an undue proportion going on there. We should be doing the preparation should be using money moderately. Philippians 3:19 talks about those whose god was their belly.

And if you spend a lot of money on your food and not much money on the education of your children or protection of your family or these sorts of things, your god may well be your belly. 2 Timothy 3:4 talks about those who are lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God. Well, how to determine that? Well, if you’re spending a lot of money on food, then you’re a lover of pleasure probably instead of a lover of God.

1 Corinthians 9:27, an important verse. “But I keep under my body and bring it under subjection, lest that by any means when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.” Paul said that he buffets his body. He keeps it under control and mastery. He brings it under subjection to himself. And why do I bring it up in the context of money?

If you spend your money on tasty, expensive food, then you may well be feeding the very thing that you want to have kept down and under your control. To keep our flesh under control, we should be very careful not to indulge it. Jenkin said that speaking of the flesh, we need not put weapons into his hands and send him ammunition. If we know that our flesh is going to wage war against us as it were and want to be our god, then the last thing you want to do is start feeding it all kinds of rich great food, you know, using lots of time to satisfy it.

That’s not the way to bring your body under subjection. Okay. Moderation time, money, and in preparation, and then secondly we should eat with community. So first we prepare our food with those things in mind according to the scriptures, and secondly the way of eating should be—we should eat with community. Normatively sometimes we’ll be by ourselves, but the scriptures point out that eating is a very covenantal aspect to it, and so the family should eat together as much as possible.

I think this I can’t stress this too much. We stress family devotions a lot in this church. That’s good. But I want to tell you that families you need to be sitting down for meals together on a regular basis because that binds you together. And the scriptures give us that principle of the body of Christ coming together on Sunday eating together and gives us the model for power to go into the week then and our families were supposed to be eating together, growing together around the table.

Remember we said that the restoration of child communion and a proper aspect of victory and communion if it doesn’t carry through to the family altar—which is what the old Puritans used to call it—it doesn’t do any good. The family altar is the family table. That’s what the altar was—a table. And so we should be sitting down eating food together as a family.

In addition to the family, however, we should have friends. It’s good to have friends over, and particularly those friends who are solitary. You know, the Old Testament, there’s a lot of promises about how he puts the solitary in households. Part of the new covenant blessings is bringing those who are off from families into families. Now, the Puritans get a bad rap because they made individuals, they made single people live in households. That’s one way to look at it.

But the other way to look at it is the single people were blessed by being included in a household. Now, maybe we can’t do that today, but we certainly should be sensitive at our family meals together to begin to invite the solitary in and picture there in that meal together the greater reality of the solitary being placed into the household of God and not being isolated anymore.

And then fourth, the poor, the destitute. In Luke 14:13 Jesus says, “When thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame and the blind.” So we should invite the poor into our household as well. Job 31, we talked about how to help the poor there. And Job said in verse 17 of the thirty-first chapter of the book of Job, he says, “If I’ve eaten my morsel by myself alone, and the fatherless have not eaten thereof,” then he says, “May God judge me.”

Job said that from his youth, the widow and the fatherless have been brought into his household, emblematic of bringing in the solitary and bringing in the poor into family meals with Job to share his food with him. And so show grace, because he recognized food as a time of grace acknowledging that God gives us grace through Jesus Christ that the food is a picture of.

So we should eat communally. We should eat together in groups. And I just can’t stress it hard enough: in your families, you should be having regular meals together around the table at set times.

And then third, we should eat with thanksgiving. Rather obvious. I’ve listed some passages there. For more on this, remember I talked about the relationship of communion to the family altar and thanksgiving last year and you might want to look at listen to those tapes again. But Jesus obviously gives us a model in Luke 22 and Luke 9 of thanking God for the food.

We read that the word of God that food is set apart, sanctified by the word of God in prayer. Prayer should attend our eating together, and that prayer should be a prayer of thanksgiving. It’s called grace. You know, we have grace at meal times. It’s acknowledging God’s grace to us to give us life in Jesus Christ, that the food is a picture to us, and God gives us graciously things to sustain and restore our body’s strength and health. And so that thanksgiving is an essential part of our eating.

Having prepared correctly and moderately, having come together as a group—as a family or with friends or with the single or with the poor—then we all, as we sit down to food together, give thanks. And that is a proper model for us to begin to place into our homes.

The prayer of thanksgiving, Jenkin said, should petition God that for a blessing—quote—”for a heart to be thankful for the receiving, holy in the using and fruitful in the improving of every gift.” To be thankful to God to receive the food, to be holy, consecrated to him in its use, and fruitful in the improving of every gift that God gives us.

And so our meal should be characterized by a prayer of thanksgiving, asking God to bless the food and to strengthen our bodies that we use it for his purposes. The pagan, of course, eats. He does not give thanksgiving. He eats for himself because God is his own belly, his own life, instead of God. And so he that gives thanks only to his own stomach.

And then fourth, we should eat with the word of spiritual understanding. Very important, I think, here that our meals should be characterized not simply by giving thanks at the beginning of the meal, but then by the inclusion of the word of God at our meal times together, particularly the formal meal that day, usually dinner in a family.

The reading of God’s word should accompany that food. Why is that? Gluttony is the failure to apprehend the meaning of what food is all about, the value in God and his scriptures to us. How do we set up a model for ourselves and for our children to avoid the sin of gluttony? We give them the word of God before we give them food.

We sit down together to eat and we help them to think through the fact that this eating is not the end. The end is understanding God’s word and rejoicing in it that the food pictures. And so the meal begins with the reading of God’s word and getting us in mind of these realities we’ve talked about for the last three weeks: the kingdom, the spirit, Jesus Christ, the will of the Father, the word of God, etc.

Now, it’s interesting that in Luke 17:7, our Savior said, he said, you know, if you’ve got a servant and he comes in, he says that, what does the master say to him? The master says to him, “Serve me till I have eaten and drunken, and afterwards thou shalt eat and drink.”

Well, I think that if we’re trying to say that we’re supposed to master our bodies the way that Paul did, that our bodies are to be a servant to us as it were and a servant to God, then we make our bodies wait until our spirits are refreshed with the word of God. And it is an element of mastery then that we build into our very eating itself to restrain our bodies, that they don’t exert undue influence over us.

It’s tough with little kids. They’re hungry. They want to eat real fast. But what better time to begin to teach them—and fathers, be moderate of this, of course, don’t tax them too long—what better time to begin to teach them to associate that hunger with the hunger for the word of God that we should have, and to teach them that the body waits for its nourishment until the spirit receives its nourishment from the word of God?

Very important principle. Proverbs 19:10 says that “Delight is not seemly for a fool, much less for a servant to have rule over princes.” It’s an unseemly thing for a servant to have rule over princes. And that’s what you do when you go to the dinner table and rush to start to eat your food before you even give thanks to God or normatively before you start reading his word.

You say the servant is beginning to exercise rule over the prince. Proverbs 30:21 says, “For three things the earth is disquieted, for which it cannot bear. First thing, when a servant, when he reigneth.” For a servant when he reigneth, and if your household is disquieted, it may well be the result of your servant reigning—your fleshly appetites of food and other things reigning in that household. That’s a bad deal and it’ll bring disquietude to the earth and to your home and your home won’t be able to bear it long term.

You’ll have judgment attached to it. God tells us in Deuteronomy 8 that he gave them manna. Why did he give them manna? He said that he did it that he might make known to thee that man doth not live by bread alone but by every word that receiveth out of the mouth of the Lord. He gave them the same diet for forty years essentially. Why? To remind them not to get hung up on that food stuff, not to get hung up on that, but to realize that man lives by every word that comes out of the mouth of God.

I’m telling you, if we’re going to reform our eating and so escape the curses that God has placed upon this culture for a failure to have a biblical worldview, the dinner table is a great place to teach our kids and ourselves to realize that man lives by the word that comes out of God’s mouth ultimately, not by the bread. You have a plain diet, don’t complain about it. You got the written word of God there in front of you that’s your feast.

They had manna so that they would learn that lesson. And of course, our Savior said in Matthew 4:4, in response to the temptation of the tempter, that man doesn’t live by bread alone, but every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Very important thing to teach our children.

Jenkin in this regard said that in our feast we should meditate—one, on God’s fullness and sufficiency, who with the opening of his hand fills every creature and is the great householder of the whole world. And two, he said we should meditate on his goodness and compassion to so many creatures to die for us, who deserve death most of all and are less than the least of all God’s mercies.

The animals aren’t responsible to death because of their sin. We are. They die because we fell. And yet God is so gracious to extend dead animals to us, dead plants to us, to eat that we might be sustained. And it’s a picture of his great love for us and the great mercy he shows to us. And these are things we should think about and more than that talk about and discuss with our families when we sit down to meal together to think about what these things are and what they mean.

Jenkin said that every meal has bread and salt in it. And so our discourse must be both nourishing as well as seasoning to others. It should be food and seasoning to others in our household. And so, Fathers, it’s your responsibility. If the wife brings the bread and the salt, you bring the nourishing to that family, the written word of God, and you bring the seasoning to help them apply that word to their lives.

Our meals should be characterized as being meals in which the word of God is heard first, and the preeminence then is created for the model for the rest of our lives.

And then fifth, we should eat with fear. Jude 1:12, we’ve talked about this before. Remember this is with the agape and these heretics were coming in, and in this epistle we read in verse 12, “They are spots in your feast of charity when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear. Clouds there are without water.”

The heretic feeds himself without fear. So what does that imply? It implies that if we’re going to eat, we should eat with fear. It’s interesting that Jenkin said that Job apparently was concerned that his children were eating without fear. In verse 5 of the book of Job, Job it says when the days of their feasting were gone about that Job sent and sanctified them and rose up early in the morning and offered burnt offerings according to the number of them.

For Job said, “It may be that my sons have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.” Thus did Job continually. Job wanted to make sure that God was honored in the eating of his children. He was only as in his approach itself. Fathers, if we’ve got children in our household, we should teach them from this example. We should be diligent the way Job was diligent to bring grace to that household and to teach our children to feast with fear as we come to the dinner table.

We should remember the end point. These are all things that have died that we’re now eating on. And we should remind them that we are eventually going to die as well. And so we’re headed someplace. We have a future orientation. We have an eternal city to which we travel. And that should bring a degree of fear into our lives and appropriate reverence for God at our dinner tables.

As Jenkin said, the godly man has a heavenly end in every earthly enjoyment. Now, this fear, I think, should be of two things, at least that I’ve thought through. First, there should be a fear of God’s judgment. And again, fathers, if Deuteronomy 21 says that one of the specifications to the charge of rebelling against parents is gluttony, then we’ve got to warn our children most strongly to avoid gluttony.

I don’t think—it would be interesting to me. I think that you could make a case for secularized, pleasure-oriented eating being the basis for a generation or so away of a drug-oriented culture. If you teach your children that food is the end in and of itself and that’s what they’re going to be satisfied by, and it doesn’t satisfy them, and they end up turning to drugs or to alcohol later on, it’s the same sin. It’s the same indulging of the flesh and attempt to get a spiritual high through what we put into our bodies.

There’s a correlation. How can we avoid that? We avoid that by teaching our children that food isn’t an end in and of itself. We should have the fear of God there—a fear of God who punishes gluttony, considers it a great sin against them.

In 1 Samuel 2, verses 12 and following, we have the story of Eli and his sons, the sons of Belial. The scriptures tell us they had no fear of God and they took more than their portion out of the pots that they weren’t supposed to be taking. They had a particular portion they were supposed to get. The sons of Eli were priests. And they went around and took out more than they were supposed to get. And they took out the food.

It was supposed to be boiled. They didn’t want it boiled. They wanted to fry it. So they said, “You fry it up for us or we’ll take it and fry it instead of taking it the way God wants to give it to us.” They had specific regulations governing their food that they ate of the sacrifices. They walked outside of those regulations for the sake of their own stomach. They had no fear of God in taking that food that was part of the sacrificial system.

As a result, they sinned against God most strenuously. And of course, the judgment of God came upon them. In verse 29, we read that they kicked at his sacrifices and at his offerings which he had commanded in his habitation. And Eli himself suffered the judgments of God about this. Eli honored the sons above God. To make yourselves—that is Eli and his sons—fat with the chiefest of all the offerings of Israel, my people.

Sin wasn’t fat. The sin was the way to that—his god, their gods were their belly. They didn’t eat with fear and so they took undue portions and they uphoured the offering of the Lord.

Amos 6:4 we read about people that lay upon beds of ivory and eat and drink lots, eat the lambs out of the flock, the calves out of the midst of the stall, that chant to the sound of the vial, that drink wine and bowls and anoint themselves with the chief ointments. But they are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph. In our eating together. We should be grieved for the affliction of God’s people in this world. We should be grieved acknowledging God’s judgments are in the land against his people who sin against him. And our eating should be a time to remind our children