It is Friday, let's talk about food.

Ever since a tablecloth filled with animals descended from heaven before Peter in a vision,

the kitchen doors have been flung wide open to all sorts of delicious dishes we have come

to love, including bacon and lobster and coconut shrimp and bluefin tuna sushi on and on

it goes.

But there's still a lingering question over whether veganism more closely maps on to

God's original dietary design for us and it's a question that comes to us from Scott

and Cincinnati.

Dear Pastor John, several of my friends are either vegans or vegetarians and while they

are mostly non-Christians, they occasionally challenge me theologically for eating meat.

I see in scripture that God provided quail for the Israelites and the wilderness he

demanded animal sacrifices, Jesus after the resurrection ate broiled fish.

Peter of course was given a vision of animals clean to eat, but before the fall they

point out that God gave man only seed yielding plants and the fruit from trees for food.

And in eternity instead of killing animals, the lion shall eat straw like the ox and

no further blood will be shed.

The more I think about this, I am unconvinced that eating meat is sinful.

It isn't veganism closer to God's original prefall and even postfall dietary design

for us.

What moves me in regard to eating patterns is that neither Jesus nor the apostles, though

they had many opportunities to do so, neither of them argued from a prefall eating pattern

forward or a future eschatological eating pattern backward to the way we should eat today.

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