Eat Anything and Everything, or That Which God has Sanctified With Thanksgiving?

 Overview:

“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” Some Seventh-Day Adventists members are adamantly clinging to their found brittly hook to hang their disbelief in vegetarianism as a God given message part of health reform to His beloved last Church. Because God prescribes the beasts to be eaten in Leviticus 11, does it mean SDA members can freely choose to be vegetarians or not? Is God so particular about vegetarianism in his people now? If He is, surely His prophets cannot be silent on the subject.

God’s last messengers on Flesh Foods

And by a prophet the LORD brought Israel out of Egypt, and by a prophet was he preserved. Hosea 12:13

If God brought out Israel out bondage by a prophet and by the same preserving them, is He not so particular about modern Israel (SDA church) by the same token to bring them out and preserve them? Surely He is! For SDA Church is the apple of His eye (Zechariah 2:8).

Again and again I have been shown that God is trying to lead us back, step by step, to His original design,– that man should subsist upon the natural products of the earth. {Counsels on Diet and Foods, page. 380.1}

Are we not being restored to back to Eden?

Read Isaiah 11:6-12

• This will be the experience of God’s people on earth before the second coming of Jesus Christ. We dare not fail to prepare for it now whilst we have opportunity to do so.

Among those who are waiting for the coming of the Lord, meat eating will eventually be done away; flesh will cease to form a part of their diet. We should ever keep this end in view, and endeavor to work steadily toward it. I cannot think that in the practice of flesh eating we are in harmony with the light which God has been pleased to give us. All who are connected with our health institutions especially should be educating themselves to subsist on fruits, grains, and vegetables. If we move from principle in these things, if we as Christian reformers educate our own taste, and bring our diet to God’s plan, then we may exert an influence upon others in this matter, which will be pleasing to God. {Counsels on Diet and Foods, page. 380.4}

Will the people who are seeking to become holy, pure, refined, that they may be introduced into the society of heavenly angels, continue to take the life of God’s creatures, and enjoy their flesh as a luxury? From what the Lord has shown me, this order of things will be changed, and God’s peculiar people will exercise temperance in all things. {Counsels on Diet and Foods, page. 381.1}

It is for their own good that the Lord counsels the remnant church to discard the use of flesh meats, tea, and coffee, and other harmful foods. There are plenty of other things on which we can subsist that are wholesome and good. {Counsels on Diet and Foods, page. 381.3}

Vegetables, fruits, and grains should compose our diet. Not an ounce of flesh meat should enter our stomachs. The eating of flesh is unnatural. We are to return to God’s original purpose in the creation of man. {Counsels on Diet and Foods, page. 380.2}

Sister E G White puts it clear why we should discard flesh products:

• Preparation for translation
• Temperance and seizing from taking away life of God’s creatures
• Eating wholesome foods

Flesh foods are injurious to the physical well-being, and we should learn to do without them. Those who are in a position where it is possible to secure a vegetarian diet, but who choose to follow their own preferences in this matter, eating and drinking as they please, will gradually grow careless of the instruction the Lord has given regarding other phases of the present truth, and will lose their perception of what is truth; they will surely reap as they have sown. {Counsels on Diet and Foods, page. 402.5}

• Flesh foods injurious to well being

Seventh-day Adventists are handling momentous truths. More than forty years ago [WRITTEN IN 1909.] the Lord gave us special light on health reform, but how are we walking in that light?

How many have refused to live in harmony with the counsels of God! As a people we should make advancement proportionate to the light received. It is our duty to understand and respect the principles of health reform. On the subject of temperance we should be in advance of all other people; and yet there are among us well-instructed members of the church, and even ministers of the gospel, who have little respect for the light that God has given upon this subject. They eat as they please, and work as they please. . . . {Counsels on Diet and Foods, page. 404.1}

I have been instructed that flesh food has a tendency to animalize the nature, to rob men and women of that love and sympathy which they should feel for every one, and to give the lower passions control over the higher powers of the being. If meat eating were ever healthful, it is not safe now. Cancers, tumors, and pulmonary diseases are largely caused by meat eating. {Counsels on Diet and Foods, page. 404.2} Meat eating should not come into the prescription for any invalids from any physicians from among those who understand these things. Disease in cattle is making meat eating a dangerous matter. [Counsels on Diet and Foods, page. 411.2]

• Meat eating animalizing in nature and not healthy now.
• One may argue and say even vegetables are no longer natural BUT are we not able to grow them for ourselves in our gardens or backyards? Are we to continue to make excuses to gratify our appetite?

Why did God permit his people to eat flesh foods?

After the flood the people ate largely of animal food. God saw that the ways of man were corrupt, and that he was disposed to exalt himself proudly against his Creator and to follow the inclinations of his own heart. And He permitted that long-lived race to eat animal food to shorten their sinful lives. Soon after the flood the race began to rapidly decrease in size, and in length of years. {Counsels on Diet and Foods, page. 373.3} 

• If we want to prolong our lives, is it not logically to discard these flesh products?  And perhaps flesh food was allowed for God’s people to perform Ceremonial systems

A direct response to a question on 1 Timothy 4:3-5 by the last messenger to SDA Church, V T Houteff:

1 Tim. 4:3-5. – ”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.”

It is not Biblical to conclude from this scripture that we are at liberty to eat everything God has created, but rather that which “is sanctified by the Word of God.” Note carefully what the Spirit saith: “Commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received.” These words plainly tell that some, on their own responsibility, will command to abstain not from those meats which God has not sanctified but which He has created to be received with thanksgiving. That is, no man has the right to forbid another the things God has permitted us to eat, and which only could we receive with “thanksgiving,” for no one who knows the truth would dare give God thanks for eating the things which He has prohibited.

Nevertheless, God Himself reserves the right to take it away or give a special diet to His servants at any time when He sees fit. For instance, He forbade the use of flesh food to ancient Israel during the forty years of wilderness sojourning; the fruit of the vine to Samson; and to John the Baptist He prescribed “locusts and wild honey.” Though it was wrong for Samson and John to eat the fruit of the vine, it was right for others and Christ Himself made use of it. So it is today.

If God gives us a special diet, we should not rebel but rather be glad to abide by it. It can be proved by the Bible that God’s servants at this time, like the above mentioned examples, are to be vegetarians.

Thus far the only people known to us who perfectly fulfill this prophecy of 1 Tim.4:3,4 are the Roman and the Greek Catholics, especially the Roman, who forbid the priests and the nuns to marry and command to abstain from meats on Wednesday and Friday, and Lent days, which God has never commanded by His prophets.

True Sr. White advocates a vegetarian diet but she does not forbid marrying. Therefore, she does not fulfill the specifications of the prophecy. Moreover, the commandment to “abstain from meats” and the forbidding to “marry “ is not where the sin lies but rather in that they “shall depart from the faith [truth], giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron.” (verses 1, 2.) Our attention is called to the act of forbidding of “meats” and “to marry” to enable us to identify the people who have departed from the faith and that we should not affiliate ourselves with them though they may claim to be Christians. Vol 1, Symbolic Code No 15, p. 8

What Should a Flesh Eater Know?

No living being should overlook the fact that in the beginning God said to the man: “Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” Gen. 1:29.
Yes, even after Adam fell in sin and was driven out of the garden, after the earth brought forth thorns and thistles, his “meat” was still the herb,” no longer that which grew in Eden, of course, but that which grew in the open field (Gen. 3:18). It was after the flood that he was permitted to use flesh food, and although he made use of only “clean” animal flesh (Lev. 11) the average
length of life immediately dropped under the 200-year mark. Evidently flesh diet was permitted in order to shorten man’s life and thus the miseries brought upon him through increased sin, and also perhaps to make it possible for him to perform the typical ceremonial system. Now, though, that life is altogether too short and the sacrifices no longer operative, the use of the Edenic fleshless diet becomes to us, in our weakened condition, even more urgent. Being mindful of this light, Daniel refused to defile himself with the king’s meat. He requested that he and his companions be given “pulse” (legumes) for their daily food. And a ten-day trial proved their simple vegetable meals to be superior to the king’s meat (Dan. 1:8-20).

Since we have seen that in the beginning the diet created for man’s needs was flesh-free, we may with certainty conclude that health can be adequately built and far better maintained without the use of flesh. History records that when man thus lived, he was able to attain super health and vigor and to endure almost a thousand years; and rather than dying of disease, he died of good old age. In fact, even as late as Abram, so rare was the death of persons before the death of their parents that Inspiration takes occasion to record that “Haran died before his father Terah.” Gen. 11:28.

The ox, as we know, is able to maintain vigorous strength and perfect health on an average of 20% grain and 80% grass, without the use of flesh. The elephant on even less grain maintains good health, gains gigantic strength, and reaches great age. On the other hand, the dog, though carnivorous, cannot maintain good health on flesh alone. Merely by instinct he knows that he has to help himself to grain and to some grass, too, while the herbivorous animal never even tastes flesh, — facts which prove that a balanced vegetarian diet is complete in itself, but that flesh diet is never complete alone. The only animal that can get by fairly well on flesh, though not altogether, is the one which eats the whole — hide, hair, bones, hoofs, flesh, and all. (How painful the realization that through continued sin, man’s God-given intelligence concerning his body’s needs has degenerated lower than that of the dumb animal!)

Besides these considerations, looking in retrospection down through the ages we see that those who were given special work, work of great importance, were also given special diet, diets equal to their task. For instance, John the Baptist, the Elijah of his day (Matt. 17: 11-13, 11: 14), being given the greatest task of all the prophets before him — not to predict, but to prepare the way of the Lord, to make the crooked straight, and the rough places plain (Isa. 40:3, 4) — was a strict vegetarian, living on locust fruit and honey (Matt. 3:4; Luke 1:15).

Is it not even more essential, then, that we who bear the Elijah message of today, the message just before the great and dreadful day of the Lord, should be strict vegetarians as was John? Moreover, the diet of the Exodus Movement (the Movement which came into being to exemplify a second exodus — Isa. 11:16 — the one that is to come out of all the nations and to make up the Kingdom in the latter days — Mic. 4:1, 2), was strictly vegetarian to the very day it set foot in the promised land, forty years in all (Josh. 5:6). O, yes, they lusted after the flesh pots of Egypt, thinking that the restriction was due to adverse circumstances — that flesh, although very much essential, was not available in the desert. And it was then that to their surprise the great I AM brought the quails to them right in the camp, whereupon thousands of the people died even while the flesh of the fowl was yet between their teeth (Num. 11:33). What a rebuke! What an ensample to behold! Now, knowing full well that the Movement is a type of the one that is arising at this time, and that the failures of the former should be the stepping stones of the latter (1 Cor. 10:11), should we not be thankful and happy for having been given a better diet than that which angry beasts are still subsisting on?
And should we not gladly comply with this exemplified Divine request to abstain from flesh food, so that our strength and character be equal to our task? Only by so doing shall we be fitting ourselves for the work and for the Kingdom, where “the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” Isa 1 1:6-9.

Should we not now as intelligent human beings, Divinely enlightened candidates for the Kingdom, privileged to prepare the way for such a happy and perfect day, give up flesh food before the lions and the serpents do? Entering Wedge, page. 22-5

Conclusion
The call for vegetarianism is not just a mere message of choice for a Seventh-Day Adventists but a reformatory message that one has to take to be prepared and fitted for the soon coming Kingdom. The SDA Church has the last message of hope to this perishing world, are we not to be like John the Baptist who obeyed God’s health principles because he had a message to bear, what more we who have the last message of hope, the Elijah’s message? Every honest SDA comes face to face with this Truth and one has to make a choice whether to die feasting upon the flesh pots of Egypt or to reform and be better fitted for the soon coming Kingdom

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Tagged as: Ellen White, health reform, Seventh-day Adventists, translation, vegetarian diet