Mark 9: 43-44 “And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.” Matthew 13: 42 “And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.”
It may have been about 1990 that I had an intensive salt craving. Walking into a local grocery my first inclination was to indulge in a bag of very salty potato chips.
Having found the poison my yearning so desired, I found my way to the checkout line. In front of me was an elderly lady. She was moving slower than my hyperactive brain could stand and in order to kill the time it was taking her to write a check, which she could not find in her ten gallon purse, I began to read the label on the chip bag.
Going immediately into a state of dismay and panic, the words describing the ingredients of each very thin chip were mindboggling. Words I could not pronounce or spell and certainly had no idea what they meant sent my brain spinning.
Immediately the question emerged, “Do I really want to put this into my precious little body of which I only have one?” I exited the line, put the chips back on the shelf, and ran away like a scared rabbit.
Many of those hundreddollar words ended in “ite” or “ate” and even in my limited knowledge of chemistry, said to me “Never again.” qFurthermore, the ingredients of potatoes and salt were near the bottom of the list. What are we buying, eating and most important, feeding our children? Many of the ingredients are clearly chemicals that are about as healthy as eating barnyard dirt. Food producers are adding these components as preservatives, to enhance the taste and make the foods “prettier.” Do we really need to be eating all these materials which our bodies clearly were not designed to consume for nourishment? Have you had your butylated hydroxycoluene today? Many believe the additives are so designed to make the foods addictive. Production of food products is a capitalistic effort and the purpose is to sell the product and keep us coming back for more.
My dad lived to be seventyseven years old. He was healthy except for one body part; his lungs. How long would he have lived had he not smoked? In the early 1900’s when he began smoking, he smoked pure tobacco. Tobacco smoke today contains tar, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, hydrogen cyanide, benzene, cadmium, and nicotine. Sounds delicious, right?
Do our food consumption habits truly indicate our state of insanity? It would seem so. Read the warning and contents labels; obviously if we do, we do not heed those warnings. The government requires warning and ingredient labels but can’t make us read and heed them.
Consider the movements in our bodies. We are constantly in motion even when we sleep. We breathe oxygen into our lungs. Our blood circulates through our bodies every thirty to forty seconds and distributes the oxygen to our thirty trillion cells.
Similarly we consume food products and our blood circulating through the capillaries in our small intestine picks up the nutrients and distributes them through our bodies.
At this point we need to notice and realize those processes are also dispersing chemical additives and pollutants to those same cells in our blood, bones, flesh and all the other body parts we prefer to keep.
We may at this point ask ourselves, why would we deliberately poison ourselves? Would we eat drain cleaner or weed herbicides? Of course not! Then why do we continually eat the junk that destroys our bodies?
The Bible (God) tells us He created us in His own image (Genesis 1: 27). Of course this means spiritual image simply because we know we do not look like God! He is spirit, we are flesh.
Not specifically stated but implied is that we only are given one body and these bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. 1 Corinthians 6: 19-20 “Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.”
The Bible tells us in several places what foods God recommends for us and not one of them includes a single word that ends in “ite.”
Warning labels at times do not appear as such. Sometimes they are in the form of recommendations. Genesis 1: 29 “God said, 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.”
Considering our dietary priorities, it would be expedient to heed the words of the One that created us. Fruits, nuts and berries were provided by God to nourish our bodies.
Daniel 1: 8-14 provides us with yet another of God’s food preferences. Daniel was told to eat “the Kings meat and drink his wine.” Daniel told Nebuchadnezzar’s servant “he would not defile his body with such food and drink.”
Daniel and his friends were allowed to consume vegetables and drink water for ten days and their “countenance” was much better than the others that had eaten the meat and drank the wine.
The primary recommendations of God to the Jewish people came in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14.
Regardless of the subject in question, I’ve found that God/the Bible is always the best source of information.
He gives us eternal life through our faith based belief in Christ Jesus. Why would He not give us adequate warnings concerning the substances we put in our bodies? The fact is: He does! Van Yandell is a retired Industrial Arts teacher, an ordained gospel evangelist and commissioned missionary. His email: vmy2121@outlook.com