Esthier,

So we shouldn’t wear clothing made out of two different types of cloth and we shouldn’t eat shellfish or pig?

Have you noticed the context where these restrictions were given? They were explicitly given to the nation of Israel as their civil laws. They were not stated as general principles for everyone to follow. They were part of Israel’s old covenant with God, a covenant which has been superseded.

“Behold, days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,” declares the LORD.
(Jeremiah 31:31-32 NAS95S)

At the Last Supper, Jesus refers to this passage when He tells the disciples that His execution and resurrection will establish the new covenant:

And in the same way He took the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in My blood.
(Luke 22:20 NAS95S)

So laws which were part of the old covenant and not restated for as part of the new covenant are not ones we are required to obey:

When He said, “A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. But whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to disappear.
(Hebrews 8:13 NAS95S)

In fact, God gave Peter an explicit demonstration of this change:

But Peter began speaking and proceeded to explain to them in orderly sequence, saying, “I was in the city of Joppa praying; and in a trance I saw a vision, an object coming down like a great sheet lowered by four corners from the sky; and it came right down to me, and when I had fixed my gaze on it and was observing it I saw the four-footed animals of the earth and the wild beasts and the crawling creatures and the birds of the air. I also heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ But I said, ‘By no means, Lord, for nothing unholy or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ But a voice from heaven answered a second time, ‘What God has cleansed, no longer consider unholy.’”
(Acts 11:4-9 NAS95S)

Yet even though God had showed Peter that the old covenant proscriptions were no longer in force, Peter still messed up and slipped back into his old ways.

When Peter came to Antioch, I [Paul] opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray.

When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, “You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?
(Galatians 2:11-14 NIV)

Put simply, Paul opposed Peter here because Peter was reverting to obeying those old Jewish laws which God had given only to Israel under the old covenant, and by doing so, he was messing others up.

Here’s another Jewish law you missed: circumcision. It’s also an explicit example of old covenant laws given only to Israel, and clearly not required of Christians:

Those who desire to make a good showing in the flesh try to compel you to be circumcised, simply so that they will not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. For those who are circumcised do not even keep the Law themselves, but they desire to have you circumcised so that they may boast in your flesh. But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.
(Galatians 6:12-15 NAS95S)

On the other hand, the Bible does restate many of the same commands in the New Testament. For example:

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators [sex between two unmarried people], nor idolaters, nor adulterers [someone married having sex with someone other than their spouse], nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.
(1Corinthians 6:9-10 NAS95S)

So even though the old covenant laws given to Israel do not bind Christians, some commands such as this example, are given again in the New Testament showing that God still considers them to be sins we are to avoid.

The word translated as “homosexual” in this verse is “arsenokoites” (αρσενοκοιτης). It comes from two words, “arsen” (αρσεν) which means “man”, and “koite” (κοιτη) which means “bed”. It literally means “one who lies with a male as with a female, a sodomite.” (From Thayer’s Greek Lexicon).

BTW… Do you have any idea what the FDA regulations are on handling shellfish? Look them up sometime. They’re pretty extreme. It seems that shellfish tends to go bad fairly quickly and gets easily contaminated if not handled properly. If you eat bad shellfish, you can get very, very sick in a hurry.

It’s no wonder that God told a nation living in a hot climate, with no ice or other refrigeration available to avoid the stuff. In their circumstances, it would have been a major health hazard!

As for pig and other similar animals, they tend to have parasites which can only be killed by proper cooking. Again, it’s far easier for a nation in their circumstances to simply avoid meat likely to contain parasites than to require more advanced technologies for storage which they hadn’t figured out yet.

EWTHeckman on December 10, 2008 at 4:03 PM