Romans 14:17 For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit
Too much is made of food and drinking today. My whole YouTube feed is how you can hack your way to health by eating 50 grams of protein a meal and drinking a gallon of water. I don’t click on these videos. They are there because I clicked on a retirement video, and they assume I want to live till I am 120 years old, so they flood my feed with these helpful insights. Click on one video about vitamins, and the next thing I know I am thrust into the middle of a debate on how much creatine I should be taking based on how much sleep I got.
The church in Rome was embroiled in a debate about food sacrificed to idols. There were some in the church who were buying meat from the pagan temples because it was cheaper than buying it from the market. The Pagan temples would sacrifice animals but only use a small portion of the meat and then sell the rest for cheaper than market rate. Some in the church had no problem buying this meat, but to the new converts who had just come out of pagan worship and the Messianic Jews, this was an abomination. Paul addresses this with the Corinthians, too, and tells them not to cause an immature believer to stumble.
I see a lot of Christians fall into this trap, and Paul is trying to prevent us from being distracted. We can’t make ourselves more or less holy by the foods we eat. A Kosher diet doesn’t elevate our spirituality, and eating too many carbs doesn’t mean we are any less worthy. Food is there to serve our needs. WE do get to enjoy it from time to time, but mainly it is there to give us nourishment and energy to do the Lord’s work.
The Kingdom of God is about the righteousness that Jesus deposits in us at Salvation, and the peace and joy the Holy Spirit brings us. As we walk with Jesus, that righteousness should become more apparent in our actions and words, and the peace and joy take a primary place in our hearts. If something like food takes our joy, then we need to put it in submission. You are right with God because of what Jesus did on the cross and the new covenant that God started in the upper room.
