Strange as it seems, God wants us to feed on Him! “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps 34:8).
After the initial warning against performing the rituals of the children of the devil when you are, in fact, “the children of the Lord your God” (v 1), Deuteronomy 14:3-21 then deals with types of food to eat. We addressed these laws concerning clean and unclean animals in our study of Leviticus 11. The Jews call these dietary rules kosher or kashrut, which comes from the Hebrew meaning “proper or correct.” We won’t go through the list again in detail, but notice how the section begins: “You shall not eat any detestable thing” (v 3), that is, what God finds morally disgusting. It wasn’t whether they liked shrimp cocktails or pork loin; what did the Lord want for them? Remember, this was how the whole human tragedy started. Eve saw a fruit she considered “good for food” (Gen 3:6) but of this particular tree God had said, “you shall not eat” (2:17). How often we hear today—and perhaps have said it ourselves—“Well, I don’t think it’s so bad.” There were so many good choices they could make, but just ONE tree was God’s alone. He would decide what was good and evil. Will we sit on our pompous little thrones and disagree with the God who knows everything? We noticed earlier that the rejection of animals without cloven hooves or didn’t chew the cud pointed to the spiritual need for a separated walk and a meditative life. But note here that from the sea they could only eat creatures “that have fins and scales” (Deut 14:9)—fins for direction and scales for protection. God has provided us both spiritual direction and protection as surely as He gave these creatures their scales and fins. You are what you eat, they say, and believers can do no better than to enjoy the Lord’s guidance and watchcare in our lives each day.