Not the Destination

The first diet in the Bible is vegetarian. Before there is any clean or uncleanIn Leviticus, unclean (Hebrew tame') names a state of ritual impurity, not a moral fault — its usual causes are the body's own processes (birth, illness, discharge, contact with death), and it is never listed among the sins (Lev 16:16). Its remedy is washing and waiting — purification, not forgiveness (Lev 15:31). See also: What He Was Willing to Touch. More, any list of what may and may not be eaten, the first people are simply handed the plants: “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food” (Genesis 1:29). No meat at all — not clean meat, not unclean meat. None.

It is easy to read past. But if the line between clean and unclean food is a fixed thing — eternal, woven into creation, the same yesterday and forever — it is strange that the very first menu has no meat on it at all. The rules around food, it turns out, do not sit still. They move. And watching them move tells us something.

WatchIn plain English, to observe means to see attentively — to give careful, focused attention to something. This is precisely what the Hebrew shamar points at: watchful, protective attention toward something valued. In religious usage, particularly in the Church of God tradition, "observe" has been reduced to performing an external requirement. The original sense — attentive seeing that allows something to reveal itself — is what the feasts and sabbath are actually asking for. Synonyms: shamar, keep, watch, guard. More them move. By the time of the flood the clean and the unclean are there. Noah is told to bring the clean animals in greater number and the unclean as a single pair (Genesis 7:2), and the moment he steps off the ark we find out why: he builds an altar and offers some of every clean animal on it (Genesis 8:20). The clean were the ones you could give.

And the table, just then, has nothing held back from it. “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you,” God tells Noah. “And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything” (Genesis 9:3). Everything — the same word that had meant only plants now means every creature that moves. The only thing withheld is the blood (Genesis 9:4). Read straight through, and the menu has swung from one extreme to the other — from nothing but plants to every living thing — and not once, in all of it, has a “clean” or “unclean” been spoken over a meal. The line is real, and already here. It is simply drawn at the altar, not the table.

That word comes later, at Sinai. Only there, with a people just brought up out of Egypt and being made into something, does the list arrive: these you may eat, these you may not (Leviticus 11). The dietary line we tend to imagine as timeless turns out to have a date on it. It is not from the beginning. It is from the wilderness.

And here is where some may reach for the verse: but God does not change. “For I the LORD do not change” (Malachi 3:6) — so how could His rules move around like this?

It is worth reading the whole line. “For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.” He is not freezing a menu. He is promising mercy — the reason a faithless people is not destroyed is that His commitment to them does not waver. What does not change is who He is and what He is after, not the scaffolding He raises around a people while He does it. And if it were the scaffolding that never moved, we would still have to account for the plants, and the everything, and the wilderness list — the changes are already there in the text, written down long before we arrived to defend them.

So the question was never whether God changes. His aim does not change; the structures He builds to carry a people toward it do — one stage at a time, each fitted to where we are. The food laws were one of those structures. Not the destination. A stretch of the road to it.

And the road has an end, where we can finally see what the whole thing was reaching for. At the very last, the gates of a city stand open, and the word is that “nothing unclean will ever enter it” (Revelation 21:27). At first it sounds like the old line drawn one more time — the unclean shut outside. But look at who is inside: people, brought in, made new. Nothing unclean enters, not because the unclean were turned away at the door, but because what comes through the door has been changed. The line was not finally drawn hard enough to keep them out. It was dissolved by making them clean.

It is a comfort, yet an uncomfortable one — because we are the ones who like the line fixed. We reach for “God never changes” the way we reach for any solid thing: to stop the floor from moving, to settle a question so we can stop looking at it. The freezing feels like faithfulnessFaith (Greek pistis, Hebrew emunah) — trust and faithfulness, not mere belief or assent to doctrine. Scripture's own definition: faith is the substance of things hoped for (Hebrews 11:1) — the hypostasis, "that which stands under," giving the unseen its standing and reality. Synonyms: trust, faithfulness, assurance. More. But a living God, walking a people down a long road, keepsFrom the Hebrew shamar — to watch over, guard, protect, give attentive care to. A shepherd shamar the flock. The keeping the feasts and sabbath requires is the attentive, protective engagement that creates the conditions for seeing what they reveal — not external compliance with a schedule. Synonyms: shamar, observe, guard, watch over. More moving the scaffolding — and keeps asking us to look again, stage after stage, rather than nail one of them down and call it the destination. None of them was. It’s all part of the process — and a process is always moving toward one.

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