Honoring Christ In The MealSample

Meals as Historical Turning Points Let’s give a short synopsis of how Scripture’s storyline and historical turning points are built around meals:

• God’s blessing began in the garden with a meal (Gen. 1:29).
• God gave Adam and Eve a choice to eat of blessing or curse, symbolized in the Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
• The curse, fall of mankind, and Satan’s temptation happened over a meal (Gen. 2:16–17).
• The first family struggle, over a food offering, resulted in murder. Cain and Abel (Gen. 4).
• In the Flood, God preserved animals and food for Noah’s family as blessing and destroyed everyone else as a sign of curse (Gen. 7:1–3).
• The first burnt offering & declaration of clean & unclean food (Gen. 9:3–4).
• The beginning fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham is made over a meal (Gen. 18:2).
• Jacob deceives Esau over food (Gen. 25).
• Joseph’s rise to power is during a famine, and Joseph’s wise reign leads to provision for all (Gen. 37–52).
• God’s work in freeing his people from the Egyptians is remembered in the Passover meal (Exod. 12).
• God provides manna for his people in wandering (Num.).
• Ruth, through whose lineage would come King David, was provided for, betrothed, and kept alive by Boaz through gleanings of wheat (Ruth).
• Daniel refused to eat from Nebuchadnezzar’s table and asked to continue in his freedom to eat as God had instructed (Dan. 1:8).
• God’s sovereign rule and the deliverance of the entire Jewish nation in the Book of Esther comes over a meal (Purim) (Esther).
• Jesus enters his ministry and is tempted with food (Luke 4).
• Jesus’ ministry is spent attending Jewish Feasts (John 2) and feeding people (Mark 6:30–44).
• When “all authority in heaven and earth is given to Jesus,” in his last moments before the cross, he chose to hold the Last Supper (Luke 22:7–23).
• The church begins, forms, and grows over meals (Acts 2:42).
• Meals are used to symbolize fake religion or true freedom (Col. 2:20–23).
• Weak and Strong faith is contrasted through the metaphor of eating (Rom. 14).
• Heaven on Earth (The Final kingdom) is portrayed as Table Fellowship, around a Tree of Life, at the Wedding Supper of the Lamb (Rev. 19:6–9).

Every time God initiates something in the timeline of history, it is done in and around a meal. The remaining days in this study will explore why.