M
Mintaka
Guest
Re: meat
“Meat” in Old, Middle, and Early Modern English means “food”. You’ve all seen the saying “One man’s meat is another man’s poison”; this is a perfect example.
The older way to talk about meat was “flesh”. You’d go out to a (theoretical) medieval steakhouse to eat cow flesh; the salad, carrots, frumenty, cherry tarts, and bread would all be meat.
You see the same sort of progressive change of meaning in “dogge” (once only meaning a hound, not any other kind of dog), “hound” (once meaning any kind of dog), and “deer” (once meaning any kind of animal or beast).
Going forward to the larger point, we don’t live in the Garden of Eden, and we don’t have Adam and Eve’s original uncorrupted bodies. Animals don’t live together peacefully in a fallen world, and we also can’t eat every plant we feel like with impunity. All this is part of the legacy of Adam and Eve’s sin.
The Earth was not cursed because they ate a piece of fruit. Adam and Eve’s sin was that they disobeyed God. They were smarter than us, had more gifts than us, and lived in a perfect world of happiness and beauty which belonged to them to do with as they liked. All they had to do was to obey one simple rule, and leave that one tree of God’s alone. Instead, with all their smarts and wisdom, and all they owed to God, they chose a snake’s words over God’s, and a fruit over love and happiness. They already lived like gods, and yet they were greedy for more. They plotted; they snuck around; they stole. They loved one piece of fruit more than the One who made it, and all the rest of Creation.
Yeah, they sinned.
You will notice that a large chunk of salvation history throughout the Old Testament consists of God telling His people what sorts of food they should or should not eat or sacrifice. He was transforming their disordered understanding of food which came from falling through food (the forbidden fruit). Finally, Jesus came and absolutely commanded His people to eat Him, becoming a sort of bidden fruit, if you will. The kosher laws were set aside for us; we began to live as if in a new Eden; but we are still constrained by the fact that we live in a fallen world, in bodies which can’t eat everything they please.
When Jesus returns and transforms Creation to its glorified state, and our bodies rise from the grave and are glorified after the Judgment, no doubt we will be able to eat whatever we like again. But that’s obviously the least of our concerns about the New Jerusalem.
Still, even in a fallen world, “there is no destructive drug” anywhere in Creation. It is we fallen humans who use these things in a destructive way. Arsenic is a perfectly nice element of the periodic table, and it’s not its fault that people insist on putting it in other people’s food. The same is true of hemp; if all people were smarter than to burn it or eat it, it would be as useful to us as it was to our ancestors. But since so many insist on misusing it, a useful plant is lost to everyone.
“Meat” in Old, Middle, and Early Modern English means “food”. You’ve all seen the saying “One man’s meat is another man’s poison”; this is a perfect example.
The older way to talk about meat was “flesh”. You’d go out to a (theoretical) medieval steakhouse to eat cow flesh; the salad, carrots, frumenty, cherry tarts, and bread would all be meat.
You see the same sort of progressive change of meaning in “dogge” (once only meaning a hound, not any other kind of dog), “hound” (once meaning any kind of dog), and “deer” (once meaning any kind of animal or beast).
Going forward to the larger point, we don’t live in the Garden of Eden, and we don’t have Adam and Eve’s original uncorrupted bodies. Animals don’t live together peacefully in a fallen world, and we also can’t eat every plant we feel like with impunity. All this is part of the legacy of Adam and Eve’s sin.
The Earth was not cursed because they ate a piece of fruit. Adam and Eve’s sin was that they disobeyed God. They were smarter than us, had more gifts than us, and lived in a perfect world of happiness and beauty which belonged to them to do with as they liked. All they had to do was to obey one simple rule, and leave that one tree of God’s alone. Instead, with all their smarts and wisdom, and all they owed to God, they chose a snake’s words over God’s, and a fruit over love and happiness. They already lived like gods, and yet they were greedy for more. They plotted; they snuck around; they stole. They loved one piece of fruit more than the One who made it, and all the rest of Creation.
Yeah, they sinned.
You will notice that a large chunk of salvation history throughout the Old Testament consists of God telling His people what sorts of food they should or should not eat or sacrifice. He was transforming their disordered understanding of food which came from falling through food (the forbidden fruit). Finally, Jesus came and absolutely commanded His people to eat Him, becoming a sort of bidden fruit, if you will. The kosher laws were set aside for us; we began to live as if in a new Eden; but we are still constrained by the fact that we live in a fallen world, in bodies which can’t eat everything they please.
When Jesus returns and transforms Creation to its glorified state, and our bodies rise from the grave and are glorified after the Judgment, no doubt we will be able to eat whatever we like again. But that’s obviously the least of our concerns about the New Jerusalem.
Still, even in a fallen world, “there is no destructive drug” anywhere in Creation. It is we fallen humans who use these things in a destructive way. Arsenic is a perfectly nice element of the periodic table, and it’s not its fault that people insist on putting it in other people’s food. The same is true of hemp; if all people were smarter than to burn it or eat it, it would be as useful to us as it was to our ancestors. But since so many insist on misusing it, a useful plant is lost to everyone.
