Eating East of Eden

(Originally published on February 18th, 2021, in The Wheaton Record.)

According to the USDA, Americans aged 15 and older spend 153.5 minutes eating on an average day. Assuming you maintain this average for the next 63.7 years, you would end up spending almost 60,000 hours in mealtime before eternity. So let me ask you: have you thought about how you spend the time it takes you to eat? I suggest we submit these hours to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and use them as he has taught us in the Bible. Let’s consider how Scripture teaches us to eat.

Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners. He was willing to sit with the vilest of the vile. Yet how can we reconcile such meals with the New Testament warning about bad company? Jesus himself received such criticism from the Pharisees. “Those who are well have no need of a physician,” he replied, “but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” While this verse offers tremendous comfort to sin-sick souls, it also implicitly rebukes those who could not care less about the warning — “Bad company ruins good morals” — or the Great Commission.

When he ate with sinners, Christ was not merely wasting time, joining in with coarse joking or speaking in an unedifying manner. Rather, he was calling people to repentance. Jesus’s meal-time conversations were evangelistic. Do we need to share the gospel immediately, or throughout the entirety of each conversation? Does the first thing we say to a coworker over a meal need to be, “Do you know where you are going if you die suddenly?” Of course not. Yet we are not following Jesus’s example if we eat with unbelievers with no regard for calling them to repentance and faith in the Great Physician.

There are two other examples of eating with unbelievers which come to mind. In the Psalms, David praises God, saying, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” Do you have an emotionally abusive parent that you have no choice but to eat with at home? Does your father make jokes about you until you feel stupid? Does your job require you to work next to a coworker that hates you because you never flatter their inappropriate humor? I remember the hostility I felt when everybody else was laughing at impure jokes in the locker room while we got ready for highschool basketball practice. Take heart; as we bless our enemies by sharing the gospel with them, we can look them in the eyes with unwavering confidence in our God’s love for us.

The other type of meal with a unbeliever is one which is far more compromised. The first verse of the Psalter says, “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.” Time is short, hell is real and Jesus saves sinners. We cannot afford to allow our meals pull us away from Christ rather than pulling ourselves and others towards him.

Finally, intentional fellowship with the saints ought to be one of our sweetest joys in life. After the resurrection, Christ spent a morning with his beloved friends over a meal. Following his example, we must realize our meals, particularly with our brothers and sisters in Christ, are priceless. We should long for those sweet times with our spiritual family and cultivate a healthy attitude of thankfulness towards the food we enjoy with each other. The Lord has given us a particular meal, the Lord’s Supper, which should be especially treasured. At this table we come together and partake in communion, eating together with the body of Christ, reflecting on his body broken for us.