Feasting & Fasting Part 1: The Introduction

Long before I took my first college course or got my first job, I was a dietitian. I have always loved food and started cooking and baking when I was just a kid. My grandfather also taught me about gardening, how to clean fish and allowed me to help as he milked cows and cared for the other farm animals. From a young age, I learned where food came from, how it was processed and how to make it pleasing to the palate. Becoming a dietitian deepened my understanding of the nutritional aspect of food, and later discovering my own food intolerance and allergy further broadened my education and gave me a personal understanding of living with food restrictions. God has truly integrated the various facets of my education to give me a diverse knowledge of food, and it’s role in our lives and in our bodies. My hope is to share a little of that wisdom in this series.

From the beginning God established food as essential for our human bodies, even telling Adam as he worked the garden that he could eat of any of the trees without limitation, except for that one forbidden tree (Genesis 2:16-17). At this point there’s no mention of eating anything beyond the fruits of the trees, and there is a theory that before sin entered the world we were all intended to be vegetarians. It makes sense considering the bloodshed involved in a carnivorous diet, the absence of death before the curse, and the possibility that the fruits in the garden may have been specifically designed to meet all of our nutritional needs, with no effort or understanding on the part of early man. A few hundred years later we see some confirmation of this when in the book of Exodus, Moses leads the Israelites out of Egyptian captivity to the promised land. Due to rebellion on behalf of the people, they spend an additional forty years wandering in the desert where God supernaturally provides manna from heaven to meet their nutritional needs. Aside from a couple of occasions where God provided supplemental quail, this bread from heaven appears to have been the dietary staple for four decades. Manna was either chock full of high quality nutrition or God miraculously allowed minimal nutrition to meet all of their nutritional needs.

In the book of Daniel (chapter 1), when Daniel and his friends were taken captive by the Babylonians, the king’s choice diet was provided to the captives in training, yet Daniel and his friends respectfully requested to be fed only vegetables and water to avoid defiling themselves on the king’s choice food and wine. Based on this passage some suggest Daniel and his friends were vegetarians, but I don’t believe that’s entirely true and it’s not the point of the passage. As good Hebrew boys they would have adhered to many dietary restrictions that had as much to do with the preparation of food, as the food itself, especially when it came to foods that may have been part of the daily sacrifices to the Babylonian gods. They chose to avoid the lavish foods of the king knowing much of it would not comply with their dietary restrictions, according to their faith. It doesn’t say how long Daniel and his friends maintained this vegetable diet, only that after ten days they had become the cream of the crop. Daniel and his friends were said to be thriving. I will suggest on this point alone that there was some supernatural provision for their faithfulness. God allowed the foods they consumed to meet their needs in a miraculous way, much as he had done for the Israelites in the desert. Ten days may be long enough to see their health wasn’t failing, but it wasn’t long enough to see such pronounced benefits apart from the hand of God upon them. This thought also falls in line with the underlying theme of the book, which is about God’s continued faithfulness to his people, despite allowing them to be taken into captivity.

Many refer to Daniel’s refusal to eat the king’s diet as “the Daniel fast” and will use it as an alternative to total fasting or for weight loss. Their interpretation is usually a diet of truly vegetables only, which could cause deficiencies over time if not managed properly. The truth is we don’t know exactly what classified as a vegetable in the text, though it was likely more extensive than just broccoli, carrots and green beans, and may have also included nuts, seeds, grains, beans, fruits and roots, which would have been diverse enough to meet their nutritional needs, yet still wouldn’t account for such a dramatic improvement in their health over their counterparts who did not remain steadfast to the dietary restrictions they followed prior to being hauled off to Babylon.

As we move into the New Testament, Matthew and Mark both record Jesus feeding thousands, upon two occasions. It wasn’t a heaven sent smorgasbord, but similar to the Israelites in the desert eating quail and manna, it was fish and bread with no vegetables. Just as God ordained it from the beginning, Jesus recognized food was essential, yet he wasn’t making any dietary recommendations. He was meeting a need specific to the human condition in a miraculous way. For all of us who aren’t living in hunger, God is meeting this need for us everyday, but the question is why? Why did God create us with this need to consume nutrients for survival? We’ll discuss this further in part 2.