Received with Gratitude

The claim runs like this. “Paul told Timothy that ‘everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude.’ God created the pig. So the pig is good, and a believer who gives thanks may eat it. The people Paul warns about are the ones who say otherwise: those who ‘advocate abstaining from foods.’”

That is the argument in its strongest form, and it sounds conclusive. But a sentence can be read fairly only from its beginning to its end. Here is Paul’s whole sentence, with the two verses that lead into it.

1 Timothy 4:1-5 But the pneuma πνεῦμα pnyoo'-mah(spirit) explicitly says that in later kairoi(appointed-times) some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful pneumata(spirits) and teachings of daimonia(demons), by means of the hypocrisy of liars seared in their own conscience as with a branding iron, men who forbid marriage and advocate abstaining from foods which God has created to be gratefully shared in by those who believe and know the aletheia ἀλήθεια al-ay'-thi-a(truth). For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude; for it is sanctified by means of the logos λόγος log'-os(word) of God and prayer.

Who Paul Was Warning

Begin with the people, whom Paul describes carefully. They “fall away from the faith” and pay attention to “deceitful pneumata(spirits) and teachings of daimonia(demons).” They are liars “seared in their own conscience.” And they are known by two teachings: they “forbid marriage,” and they “advocate abstaining from foods.”

The Torah does not forbid marriage, so these teachers were not passing on the Torah. They were ascetics, men who forbade what God had given, both marriage and foods. Paul is defending what God created against their prohibitions. He is not answering believers who kept what God had said. A man who eats lamb at Passover and stays married to his wife is not the man of 1 Timothy 4:3.

Two Limits in One Sentence

Now look at the foods. Paul does not speak of abstaining from anything at all that can be eaten. He speaks of “abstaining from foods which God has created to be gratefully shared in by those who believe and know the aletheia(truth).”

Here is the first limit. The word for foods is bromata βρώματα bro'-mah, the same word as in Mark 7:19, and to a Jewish apostle bromata are what Scripture calls food. These foods, moreover, were created for “those who believe and know the aletheia(truth).” It is those who know, and Yeshua said, “we worship what we know” (John 4:22). God had told His people in writing what food was.

The second limit comes at the end: “it is sanctified by means of the logos(word) of God and prayer.” The verb is hagiazo ἁγιάζω hag-ee-ad'-zo, to sanctify, to set apart. Something is set apart as food first by the word of God, and then it is received with prayer.

Which word of God, then, sets apart what may be eaten? Leviticus 11 does exactly that, and Moses repeats it in Deuteronomy 14. Leviticus 11 states its purpose in its last verse: “to make a difference between the unclean and the clean, and between the living thing (chai חַי khah'-ee) that may be eaten and the living thing (chai) that may not be eaten” (Leviticus 11:47). That is the word of God that sanctifies food. Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 are the logos of 1 Timothy 4:5.

Grace Over a Meal

Think of a family saying grace before dinner. They thank God for the bread and the stew, and they mean it, but nobody at the table imagines that the prayer has turned the salt into sugar. The prayer gives thanks for what is already on the table. It does not change what it is.

Prayer does not turn a pig into a lamb. What God’s word has set apart as food, the believer receives with thanks, and no prayer will make food of what God’s word has said is not food. Paul put the word of God first in the sentence and the prayer second.

Three Shorter Verses

Three shorter verses are usually quoted with this one. The first is Colossians 2:16-17, which we read closely in Book 1.

Colossians 2:16-17 Therefore no one is to krino κρίνω kree'-no(judge) you in regard to food or drink or in respect to heortes(festival) or new moon or sabbatons(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23); things which are a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Messiah.

As we saw there, these were believers who kept God’s feasts and food, and others were judging them for it. Paul tells them not to let anyone judge them. The foods and feasts are “a shadow of what is to come,” and a shadow is cast by something that is still coming. The verse defends the keepers. It does not tell anyone to stop.

The second and third come from Hebrews. We read the first of them, Hebrews 9:9-10, in Chapter 9. Its “foods and drinks and various washings” belong to the “doron δῶρον do'-ron(offerings, gifts) and sacrifices” of the earthly sanctuary, the meals and drink offerings that went with the altar. Hebrews says that those offerings “cannot perfect the worshiper in terms of conscience.” It says nothing about which animals are food.

Hebrews 13:9 Do not be led away by varied and strange teachings, for it is good for the kardia καρδία kar-dee'-ah(heart, soul-domain) to be strengthened by charis χάρις khar'-ece(grace), not by foods, which have not benefited those who walk in them.

“Varied and strange teachings” about foods were going around, and the writer says that the heart is strengthened by charis(grace), “not by foods.” That is true of every food law ever kept. No one has ever been made right with God by what he ate, and this book has never said otherwise. But a sentence that says the heart is not strengthened by foods is not a command to eat what God said is not food.

The Sum

We have now examined every verse that is quoted to say a believer may eat anything. Here they are together.

Read in their own settings, not one of these verses tells a believer to eat what God said is not food. Mark 7 is about hands. Acts 10 is about people. Galatians 2 is about who sat at the table. Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8 and 10 are about meat that may have touched an idol. 1 Timothy 4 is about ascetics who forbade what God created to be received. The line God drew in Leviticus 11 is never moved, not by Yeshua and not by any apostle.

The pig, too, is still where the Torah left it. Yeshua walked in the temple at Hanukkah, the feast that remembers the cleansing of God’s house after swine had been offered on its altar (John 10:22-23). And Isaiah, writing of the last days, still says of “those who … eat the flesh (basar בָּשָׂר baw-sawr') of swine and the detestable thing and the mouse,” that “together they shall come to an end, declares the LORD” (Isaiah 66:17).

Every verse used to say “eat anything,” then, says something else in its place. Scripture also shows us what it looks like when a young man takes the line between food and not-food seriously in a hostile land. The first thing the book of Daniel tells us about him has to do with a plate of food.