After services yesterday, I was asked a good question about my series on food. Do I believe that there was a miracle when Daniel and his three friends refused the king’s meat and wine, and came out of a ten day test healthier than the stable-fed Babylonians?
The first response was the one I offered in the discussion after church. I believe that this was a matter of Daniel and his friends being faithful to follow the dietary restrictions of the law of Moses. Because they were faithful, God honored their obedience. There are two things I don’t believe about this. First, I don’t believe that if we could only find out the menu of what they ate back then that we would then have the ultimate “Bible health food.” God blesses obedience. When He told the Jews to stay away from certain foods, and they did so with a faithful heart, He blessed them. When He tells the Gentiles that all foods are available to us, He honors obedience here just as much. But secondly, I don’t believe that honoring obedience needs to involve intervening miracles. The world is a personal place, one which God governs through covenantal and providential means. The world is not a machine, where a Gentile in 500 A.D. could get exactly the same results as a Jew eating certain foods in 500 B.C. Nevertheless God governs the world in such a way that His blessings are visible.
The second point has to do with the food involved, and the way the Bible describes the results of the competition. For the sake of discussion, let us assume that this really is a creational thing, and that certain foods are health foods in a biblical and spiritual sense. If we were to embark on an investigation to discover what those foods were, we ought to look for the same results that the Babylonian steward saw in the four faithful Hebrew men.
“And at the end of ten days their countenances appeared fairer and fatter in flesh than all the children which did eat the portion of the king’s meat” (Dan. 1:15).
Their complexions were ruddy and robust, and they had put on a pleasing amount of weight. They won the competition because they were fatter. This, in sharp contrast to the current ideal of sallow and scrawny.
One last comment. Suppose someone were to ask why I appear to be so against “healthy eating.” First, I have no objection to faithful stewardship when it comes to food, and I do not believe that all foods are equal when it comes to a healthy diet. A steady diet of deep fat fried Twinkies is probably not the way to go. If your doctor tells you to knock off the coffee, Ho Ho’s and cigars for breakfast, then go ahead and listen to him. But this is a spiritual issue only in terms of stewardship and general wisdom. It is not a case of spiritual defilement. People who react to an offered Dorito the way a rabbi would respond to a slice of pork roast are sinning. And secondly, as a practical observation, some of the sickliest people I know got that way through an obsessive interest in what they call healthy eating, but which obviously isn’t. If they were to show up at Melzar’s exam after ten days, he would slap them back on the Babylonian diet so fast it wouldn’t be funny.
Daniel and his friends were willing to put it to the test. Let’s take three groups of kids, and let’s look closely at what they eat for ten days. One group watches television constantly, one hand on the remote and the other in a bag of Cheetos. The second group is languishing on a diet of tofu and rice. The last group is fed on what we might call a common sense American mom suburban diet — Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast, PB&J’s for lunch, a couple of cookies after school, and a well-rounded dinner (meat, potatoes, veggies), with a little ice cream for dessert. On the eleventh day, let’s have them all run around the block.