I was once a part of a church fellowship that adopted a lifestyle similar to that of present day Jews. That is, we lived under the Mosaic Law, in as much as that would be possible without a physical Temple. I worshiped on the Sabbath, tithed and kept the seven annual Jewish Feast Days, as they are mentioned in Leviticus 23. It was a big deal, if someone put a plate of ham on the table or even flavored the salad dressing with ham sauce sprinkled with little cubes of ham. Certain food was unclean and could not be eaten, according to how we understood the word of God. We had adopted a lot of physical ‘sauce’ and poured it all over the spiritual New Covenant we supposedly embraced in Christ. Nevertheless, I was so far in Moses that there was very little of Christ that could be seen in my behavior.
With that in mind, I’m involved in an in-depth study of the nature of the Kingdom of God. From the point of view of Luke 17:20-21, it must be spiritual in nature, because it cannot be seen with our physical eyes, nor could someone discover it here or point to it over there. In a Kingdom that spiritual, how big a deal could a ham sandwich be?
I say this in order to point out, even in the context of my former fellowship, how foreign living under the Old Testament really was during the first century AD and in centuries before that. At one time the Lord gave Peter a vision of a sheet of all sorts of animals, insects and birds, supposedly clean and unclean, but Peter said: “Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean” (Acts 10:14). For Peter eating anything unclean was a really big deal. It identified who he was as a Jew. To be unclean meant one could not enter into the assembly of God until the beginning of the next day or after sundown (Leviticus 11:34-40).
Paul had to address the issue of clean and unclean foods wherever he preached the Gospel in the first century AD. There was hardly a city in the Roman Empire where Jews couldn’t be found, and all of Paul’s churches included both Jews and gentiles. Therefore, the issue of whether or not specific food was clean was one of the earliest controversies within the Church, wherever it was found. In Romans 14 Paul addressed the issue of food and again in 1Corinthians 10, although in the latter it concerned eating what was sacrificed to an idol.
These issues don’t come up in our worship services today, because our congregations are largely gentile, and those of us who are believing Jews for the most part worship together as Messianic Jews. As for idols, where is the idol in the marketplace today, and what butcher sells any meat that had first been sacrificed to an idol? So, these issues are moot in modern Christianity. Except to say this. Eating and drinking during the first century church was a physical matter, just as it is today. However, in today’s environment we are able to understand that physical matters such as these have not stood the test of time in the New Covenant. Even in parts of the New Testament scriptures we find that the issue of eating and drinking wouldn’t fit very well into a spiritual covenant with God. If for no other reason, we read about these issues that troubled the New Testament church only to discover that physical issues were temporary. They are not eternal. Love is spiritual and is eternal. Faith in Christ is spiritual and is eternal. The matter of eating and drinking was temporary.
Understanding this and the nature of the Kingdom of God, how, then would Jesus coming in a physical body, to sit on a physical throne in physical Jerusalem to reign over a physical Kingdom fit into the New Testament’s concept of eternal endurance of the spiritual and the temporariness of the physical?
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