By Shafer Parker

As a lifelong consumer of news, I rarely see a headline I haven’t seen before. Only the names and dates seem to change, and sometimes not even the names. But my eyes bugged out this week when I read the following headline in the Western Standard: “UN now says meat, eggs and milk are ‘essential’ sources of nutrients.” “Really,” I thought, “the United Nations said that? The same UN that for a generation has hectored the world with warnings that meat production is the least efficient way for humans to feed themselves? The same UN that constantly says reserving land for grazing animals is the straightest road to global warming, or climate change, or whatever the expression is now?”

Frankly, I didn’t believe it. I had to look it up. But the WS got it right. On April 25 the Food and Agriculture Organization for the United Nations (FAO) released a report that tried to have it both ways, meat and climate, but ultimately came down on the side of common sense. Sometimes the facts just can’t be ignored. Based on “data and evidence from more than 500 scientific papers and some 250 policy documents” the official report suggested “Meat, eggs and milk offer crucial sources of much-needed nutrients which cannot easily be obtained from plant-based foods.” This, the report said, was an especially important message for children and nursing mothers in developing countries.

The report worried about deforestation, greenhouse-gas emissions, unsustainable water and land use, and disease (It wouldn’t be a UN report if it didn’t try to scare people), but the tsk-tsking only came at the end of the paper, after first exposing readers to a vigorous argument for the health advantages of a meat diet. Even more amazing, it suggested that a lot of the concern ginned up by over-zealous vegetarians against the supposed dangers of eating meat protein, i.e., colorectal cancer, coronary heart disease, strokes, etc., is not supported by data.

There’s more in the report (you can read it for yourself here), but this is an FBB blog written for FBB readers, and you are probably wondering what all this diet stuff has to do with a Christian worldview. I’ll tell you. It just goes to prove the Bible is never wrong, even on minor things like what human beings are supposed to eat. “Oh no,” some of you are thinking, “Shafer isn’t going to start arguing for an Old Testament diet regimen, is he?” No, he isn’t. In fact, just the opposite. He’s going to argue that ever since the flood, the Bible has allowed, if not commanded the eating of meat. You see, not everything taught in Scripture comes in the form of a command. Some things are given to us as open-ended possibilities that, in the end, prove helpful. I’ll say more about the helpful part later, but for now, let’s get straight to the point,

The Bible teaches that at the beginning of world history, every living thing was vegetarian, including Adam and Eve. Here is God speaking in Genesis 1, at the end of Creation week. “And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food” (Genesis 1:29-30).

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This passage is much beloved by militant vegetarians. They may not believe in God, and they probably don’t believe the Bible is the Word of God, but they never hesitate to seize upon this passage when trying to convert Bible believers to their lifestyle. If mankind wants to get back to the pristine purity of an Edenic environment, they say, then vegetarianism is the only option. Unfortunately for their argument, it was sin, not diet, that caused God to drive the first humans out of the Garden and away from His presence, and it is only through the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ that anyone is enabled to re-enter.

Moreover, the Bible emphatically states that vegetarianism ended with the flood. As God re-established the original creation mandate with Noah and his descendants, he tells them that some things have changed, including His dietary laws, “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you,” He says. “And as I gave you the green plants, I (now) give you everything” (Genesis 9:3). As much as some may wish to deny the facts, God’s permission for man to eat meat has never since been taken away.

Jesus explicitly echoes Genesis 9 when He preaches to a Jewish crowd, “Hear me, all of you, and understand: There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him” (Mark 7:14-15). And when the disciples didn’t get it, He added, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Mark 7:18-19). Then Mark, speaking for the benefit of his Gentile readers, adds the following, “Thus He (Jesus) declared all foods clean.”

The apostles took Jesus’ words seriously. When certain people called the Judaizers tried to insist that true Christians submit to Jewish dietary law, among other things, they were totally rejected. Here’s how the first-century church instructed Gentiles regarding diet: “For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well” (Acts 15:28-29). As you can see, no kind of meat was forbidden.

One more theological avenue should be explored before I bring this blog to a close. In his first letter to Timothy, Paul gives a warning: “Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth” (I Tim. 4:1-3, emphasis added).

Funny thing, this passage has proven prophetic, whether you believe Paul’s reference to “later times,” has in view the destruction of Jerusalem in a.d. 70, or the still “later times” of the 21st century. Certainly, we’ve seen a rise in the popularity of vegetarianism in my lifetime, and, more importantly, the attaching of a superior spirituality to the practice. That’s why the FAO report arguing for a return to the eating of meat, eggs and dairy came as such a pleasant surprise. Maybe this report is the equivalent of the blind hog who occasionally finds an acorn, but it gives me no end of joy to be able to say, “Guess what guys, this is what the Bible, and Bible believers, have been saying all along.”

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