More Food Anyone?

More foodie insights from Doug Wilson's marvelous My Life For Yours: A Walk Through the Christian Home (Canon Press, Moscow ID, 2004) - which you really should get - good, quick, easy reading, well put, Biblical, insights on most pages, different from some of his other books (if basically saying the same thing!), a nice conceit.

God is clearly not a strict pragmatist or narrowly utilitarian. He has made lots of unnecessary things for the shear joy of it. Our cooking should be likewise. Many of the things God has made taste good sauted in butter.

We should not think of the dinning room as if it is a gas filling station. Eating is far more than topping up the tank.

We must avoid gluttony and idolatory as well as fussiness as the doctrine of demons ascetisism. Gluttony is not an extra roast potato or chocolate at Christmas: it is part of the disolute rioutous lifestyle that was a capital offence in ancient Israel. Dt 21:20 see also Prov 23:19-21; Lk 15:13

In the Bible fat is often a good thing. God likes the fat parts and gives us fat to eat. See Gen 27:28; 45:18; 49:20; Num 13:20; dt 31:20; 1 Chr 4:40; Ps 22:29; 36:8; 65:11; 92:12-14; Prov 11:25; 13:4; 28:25; Is 10:16; 25:6; 55:2; 58:11 esp. Neh 9:25 on the blessing of becoming fat. Wilson points out however that we must not eat to unhealthy excess: it is good to be able to tie one's own shoelaces.

Manners at the table are the liturgy of dinning. We must be careful to show good manners in correcting the manners of our children. Remeber that you live (wherever) rather than at the court of Louis XIV. If your son licks his knife, which I believe is not done in the better circles, remeber it is not done to climb down another's throat.

The Father should act as the moderator at the table so that all can eat and speak - but that doenst mean he has to be the talkative one or have the biggest helpings.

"Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit" is emphatically not an argument against smoking or for exercise or healty eating or not mainlining heroin or anything like that. Ironically, give the way so many evangelicals use the text, the context of 1 Cor 6:18-20 clearly shows that Paul is speaking specifically only of sexual sin. All the other sins listed above come from outside the body and nothing that goes into a man can make him unclean, as I believe the Lord Jesus Christ mentioned in Mark 7:18f.