Why the Biblical Food Laws Still Matter, And What They Reveal About God’s Character. Questions about the biblical food laws tend to generate more heat than light. Someone mentions that they keep kosher — that they follow the dietary distinctions laid out in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 — and the conversation goes sideways fast. Isn’t that Old Testament? Didn’t Jesus fulfill the law? Didn’t Peter’s vision in Acts 10 change all of that? Keith Hoeck has been working through these questions in depth. Not because he wants to argue about what’s on your plate, but because the food laws are a window into something much larger: the way God uses ordinary, daily practices to form His people into something that reflects His character. That’s the thesis. And it’s worth following all the way through.
The Foundation That Predates Moses
The first reason the food laws cannot be dismissed as a Mosaic invention is that they appear in Genesis, before Moses was born. After the flood, God speaks to Noah in Genesis 9:3–4: “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you… but you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.” There is no covenant of Sinai here. No tabernacle, no priesthood, no sacrificial system. Just God, Noah, and the first family emerging from the ark. And God draws a distinction: blood is not to be consumed. Life, in the theological understanding He’s been building from creation, belongs to God. The dietary laws do not begin at Sinai. They are grounded in a principle that is as old as the relationship between God and humanity.
Blood, Life, and Atonement
Leviticus 17:11 makes the logic explicit: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement for the soul.” This is why the prohibition on blood is not a random health rule. Blood carries life, and life belongs to God. The blood on the altar was not just a ritual, it was a theological statement, enacted in physical form, about the cost of sin and the mechanism of atonement. Life given in place of life. The sacrifice pointing forward, through generations of practice, to the blood of Christ. The dietary distinctions between clean and unclean animals sit within this framework. They are not arbitrary. They are part of a broader curriculum designed to keep a people aware of the difference between what is sacred and what is common. Between what belongs to God and what doesn’t.
What Jesus Actually Said in Mark 7
Keith returned to the passage that gets used most often to argue for dietary freedom: Mark 7, where Jesus responds to the Pharisees’ complaint that His disciples eat with unwashed hands. The Pharisees were not upset about food. They were upset about a ritual hand-washing tradition, a human addition to the Law that had taken on the weight of divine command. Jesus’s response was an indictment of that tradition-over-Word posture: “You have let go of the commandments of God and are holding on to human traditions.” He then explained the real source of defilement: “From within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a man.” This is a statement about moral purity, about the inner condition of the human heart, not dietary reform. If Jesus had been announcing that pork was now acceptable, the Pharisees would have erupted. The disciples would have had questions. Someone would have reacted. No one did, because that isn’t what was said.
Peter’s Vision: The Correct Interpretation
Acts 10 brings the same conversation into the New Testament era. Peter sees a sheet descend from heaven with clean and unclean animals. A voice says, kill and eat. Peter refuses three times. And then, Cornelius knocks at the gate. Peter’s own interpretation in Acts 10:28: “God has shown me that I should not call any man common or unclean.” He doesn’t say: God showed me that I can eat anything. He says: God showed me that no human being should be considered outside the reach of the gospel. The vision was about Gentile inclusion. The animals were a symbol for people. And note: Peter had walked with Jesus through every teaching, every miracle, every conversation. If Jesus had revised the food laws, if the resurrection had changed what was clean and what was unclean, Peter would have known. His immediate refusal to eat unclean food tells us what he understood Jesus to have taught. Which is that nothing in that area had changed.
What the Laws Are Actually Doing
Here is Keith’s central point, and it’s the one that tends to be missed in these debates: the biblical food laws are not primarily about health outcomes or cultural identity. They are a daily practice of distinction. Leviticus 10:10, spoken directly to the priesthood: “You are to distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean.” Distinguish. Every day. In real choices. About real things. So that the habit of distinguishing between what God has called holy and what is merely common becomes part of how you move through the world. You are, as 1 Peter 2:9 puts it, a royal priesthood. Which means the assignment belongs to you. Not just to remember it in theory. To practice it, daily, in the specific choices your life presents.
The God Whose Character These Laws Reflect
Keith’s conclusion went beyond the debate and into something worth carrying: the food laws reveal something true about the character of God. He is a God who makes distinctions. Who says some things are holy and others are common. Who asks His people to see the world through that lens — to let their choices, their practices, their daily rhythms reflect the reality that they are set apart for a purpose. Be ye holy, for I am holy. That command is not a burden. It is a description. It’s telling you who you are and what you’ve been called to reflect. The food laws are one of the practices through which that description becomes a daily reality, not a belief held in the abstract, but a life lived in a particular direction.
The question is not whether you agree with them. The question is whether you’re willing to let them do what they were designed to do: form you, day by day, into someone whose life looks like it belongs to God. Greater Phoenix Church of God meets every Saturday at 10:30 AM at 4300 N. 82nd Street, Scottsdale, AZ. All are welcome.