Free from the Law, and Still Amazed by It

If the bible says not to eat pork, why do we still eat it?

Somewhere along the way most Bible readers notice something odd. The Old Testament told Israel not to eat pork, and pork really does carry parasites if it is not cooked right. It told them to put sick people outside the camp for a week and check on them again, and that is quarantine, plain and simple. It told an army on the march to dig a latrine away from the tents and cover it, and that one rule still saves lives in refugee camps today. So a fair question comes up: if those laws were that good for people, are we supposed to be keeping them? Should we drop bacon and shellfish? Is Saturday the real day of rest? Some teachers say yes. Here is why the answer is no, and why the question still leads somewhere wonderful.

First things first: we are not under that Law

Before we talk about health, we have to get the doctrine settled, because the order protects us. The New Testament could not be plainer that the Law of Moses, as a covenant, does not govern the Christian.

Paul says it straight out: "you are not under law but under grace" (Romans 6:14). He explains the Law's job with a picture from everyday life in his world: the Law "was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian" (Galatians 3:24-25). That word "guardian" meant the household servant who walked a child to school every morning. Once the child arrives, the guardian's job is over. The Law walked Israel to Christ. It was never meant to walk us home again.

When the question came up in the early church, whether Gentile believers had to keep the Law of Moses, the apostles met in Jerusalem and answered it. Peter asked why anyone would put "a yoke on the neck of the disciples that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear," and then gave the gospel answer: "we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will" (Acts 15:10-11). The council's letter did not put the Gentile churches under the dietary code (Acts 15:28-29).

Paul told the Colossians: "let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ" (Colossians 2:16-17). Jesus Himself settled the food question. When He taught that what goes into a man cannot defile his heart, Mark adds the verdict: "Thus he declared all foods clean" (Mark 7:19). And Paul warned that in later times some would require "abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving," and answered them: "everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer" (1 Timothy 4:3-5).

So let us say it plainly: bacon is not a sin. A Saturday is not holier than a Sunday. Nobody is more saved, or more sanctified, for eating kosher. That is fixed, and everything below has to be read inside that fence.

But Moses said the statutes were "for our good"

Now the honest other half. When Moses looked back over the whole Law, he said this: "the LORD commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the LORD our God, for our good always" (Deuteronomy 6:24, and again in 10:12-13). For our good. And the God who gave those statutes is the same God who "knitted me together in my mother's womb" (Psalm 139:13). He designed the body. So it should not surprise us one bit that when He wrote rules for the people He loved, the rules fit the body He made.

Here is the key that keeps everything straight: the purpose of those laws was never health. It was holiness. "You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy" (Leviticus 19:2). The clean and unclean lines were a fence that kept Israel visibly different from the nations around her, and the whole system was the guardian walking her toward Christ. The health benefits are real, but they are the icing on the cake, not the cake. They are wisdom we can learn from, not a covenant we must keep.

What actually holds up

It is worth being honest about which of the famous claims are solid and which are oversold, because one oversold claim can make a person doubt all the solid ones.

These hold up well. Undercooked pork really does carry trichinosis and the pork tapeworm, and in the ancient world, with no refrigeration and no meat inspection, pork was genuinely one of the more dangerous meats (Leviticus 11:7). Shellfish like clams, oysters, and mussels feed by filtering large amounts of water, which concentrates whatever is in that water, bacteria, viruses, and the toxins behind red tide; shellfish are still one of the most common causes of seafood illness today (Leviticus 11:9-12). Leviticus 13 and 14 read like a public health manual: inspect the sore, isolate the person outside the camp, wait a set number of days, inspect again, wash everything before they come back. That is contagion control, written thousands of years before anyone knew germs existed. The camp latrine rule (Deuteronomy 23:12-14) would still prevent cholera and dysentery outbreaks anywhere on earth. The purity laws called for washing in "fresh water," literally living water, which means flowing water that carries contamination away (Leviticus 15:13). Compare that to Europe in the 1840s, where doctors went straight from handling corpses to delivering babies without washing, and mothers died by the ward-full until one stubborn physician proved that simple hand-washing stopped the dying. Moses had the principle three thousand years earlier. And the command not to eat blood (Leviticus 17) has a real side benefit, since blood is the perfect carrier for disease, though the Bible's own reason for that law is the altar, not the kitchen: "the life of the flesh is in the blood... to make atonement" (Leviticus 17:11).

These are real but not as tidy. Circumcision does track with real health data: certain cancers are far rarer among circumcised men, and major health organizations have endorsed it in some parts of the world as one tool against the spread of certain infections. But the data is tangled up with behavior and hygiene, and Scripture gives it as a covenant sign (Genesis 17:11), not a medical procedure. Faithful, lifelong marriage is, as a plain matter of disease, the most effective protection against the whole family of sexually transmitted infections, though the Bible never needed a laboratory to commend it (Genesis 2:24, Proverbs 5). A weekly day of rest agrees with everything we are learning about sleep, stress, and burnout, though that research is soft, and the day itself is not binding on us (Colossians 2:16-17).

And one to hold loosely. There is a beloved claim that God chose the eighth day for circumcision (Genesis 17:12) because a newborn's blood-clotting ability supposedly peaks exactly then. It gets repeated in a lot of Bible teaching. The kernel is true, newborn clotting factors really are low at first, which is why hospitals give newborns a vitamin K shot. But the tidy version, with the peak landing precisely on day eight, rests on thin and dated numbers. Treat it as an interesting illustration, not a proof. The same goes for sweeping claims that every kosher rule has a hidden health secret. Some unclean animals, like the camel, have no known health angle at all, and they do not need one. The list was about holiness and separation first (Leviticus 20:25-26). Forcing a health reason onto every line turns a theological fence into a nutrition chart.

Two ditches to stay out of

There are two ways to get this wrong, and they sit on opposite sides of the road.

The first ditch is turning the wisdom back into a yoke. It usually starts with a good instinct: these laws are wise, so we should keep them. But "we should" quietly becomes "we must," and now the medicine has become a covenant again. Paul treats that as deadly serious: "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery... You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace" (Galatians 5:1, 4). Cook your pork thoroughly because trichinosis is real. Do not avoid it because you think Leviticus binds you. Those are two different worlds.

The second ditch is the shrug: "all things are lawful, so who cares what I do with my body." Paul quoted that very slogan and fenced it in the same breath: "All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful... do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you...? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body" (1 Corinthians 6:12, 19-20). Liberty frees us from the Law as covenant. It does not free us from wisdom, and it is not a license to wreck the temple the Spirit lives in.

The narrow road runs between the ditches: free from the Law, and wise enough to learn from it.

The part worth keeping

Here is the thing to walk away with. God never explained microbes to Israel. Not once. No bacteria, no viruses, no parasites; none of it would be discovered for about three thousand years. He simply said: wash. Bury it. Put the sick one outside the camp and check him in seven days. Drain the blood. Do not eat that. And Israel's only reason to obey was that God said so.

They could not have proven a word of the reasoning. The reasons arrived thirty centuries late, and when they arrived, they vindicated every one of those strange old commands. That is what it looks like to trust a wise Father: doing what He says before we can see why, because we know He is good, and we know He made the thing He is giving instructions about.

So no, we are not under the Law. Christ has set us free, and no one may judge us in food or drink or days. But the Lawgiver has not changed. He still knows how we are built better than we do, and He is still worth obeying before the reasons show up. The old statutes turn out to be a three-thousand-year-old lesson in exactly that, and that lesson, unlike the food laws, was never repealed.