The Bible has a lot to say about food and eating. Some of you are very appreciative of that fact. My wife thinks that food is next to godliness. You’ve heard the phrase, “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach?” Well, my wife thinks it should be “the way to God is through a man’s stomach.” She loves food and loves to cook. Her solution to all of life’s problems is to make a cake. When we were first married, she hadn’t been a Christian long. And so she was very disappointed to learn that in heaven there is no marriage. But the longer we have been married, the more she has come to appreciate that fact. However, she cheered up considerably when she discovered that the marriage supper of the Lamb is going to last 1000 years.

I’m just kidding, of course. But my wife does think that food plays an integral part in Christian fellowship. And I have to admit that she might be on to something. Jesus seemed to place a great deal of emphasis on food as well. His first miracle was done at a wedding feast, turning the water into wine. You will remember He fed the 5000 and then another time 3000 some bread and fish. He conducted the last supper. After His resurrection, He prepared fish and bread for his disciples for breakfast. He declared that His words were the manna or bread which had come down out of heaven. And there are many more examples of Jesus’s use of food or meals as an opportunity to minister or teach.

Today as well we are looking at three incidents concerning food that Jesus used to teach gospel doctrines. So in keeping with that theme, I have titled today’s message “The gospel in three courses.” I hope to use, as Jesus did, these three incidences concerning food to teach some important biblical principles.

The first incident is that of a dinner party held at a new disciple’s house. Matthew, the author of the Gospel of Matthew, was also called Levi before he was converted. Levi was a tax collector, or as some of your versions might read, a publican. These guys were some of the most hated people in Israel. In the case of a guy like Levi, who was obviously a Jew, he was considered a traitor to his country. And the reason was that tax collectors worked as agents for Rome, who bid for a territory, promising Rome a certain degree of taxes, and then adding their generous commissions on top of that by Rome’s permission. So they were generally very wealthy people, but hated by the Jewish population.

It’s interesting that in the previous study last week, we see Jesus healing, even touching the untouchable. A leper was considered so unclean that you would walk across the street to avoid them. And now in this passage, once again Jesus reaches out to someone that in Jewish culture was considered abhorrent.

Now the scene starts with Jesus teaching by the seashore. Today of course, we are teaching by the seashore. And we do it for the same reasons that Jesus did it. Not to be cool, or novel, but first of all out of necessity. We have no other place, no other building that we can use. And secondly, we do it because we want to reach people where they are with the gospel. I would love to have a building someday here in Bethany Beach that we can hold services in, but I am sure that we reach people on the beach that we will never reach inside.

And that’s the case with Jesus’s ministry. Matthew had his tax office near the seashore in Capernaum. Matthew must have heard enough of Jesus’s message that he became under conviction. And as Jesus passed by after the message, He said to Matthew, “Follow Me.” And the scripture says simply that Matthew got up and followed Him. In Luke’s gospel account of the same incident, Luke says that Matthew left all, and followed Him. He walked away from his lucrative business and followed Jesus.

I can imagine Matthew’s surprise not only when Jesus acknowledged him, a despised tax collector, but when Jesus invited Him to follow Him. Jesus obviously knew his heart, He knew that Matthew was convicted by His message and was desiring to become a disciple. But society would have prevented Matthew from even approaching a proper Jew, much less an esteemed Rabbi. But Jesus knew Matthew’s heart, knew that he was willing to leave everything in exchange for Christ, and so Jesus simply said to him, “Follow Me.” And Matthew left a thriving, successful business and never went back.

That’s what is required for salvation, folks. Not just a tacit acceptance of truth, or intellectual acknowledgment of Christ, but a willingness to forsake everything and follow Him, wherever He leads. To walk with the Lord, relinquishing your self control to His control.

Well, later that evening, Matthew’s gratitude was so great, that he decided to use whatever resources and opportunities that his job had provided to further the kingdom of God. Prior to that, his resources and opportunities had always been used for his own advantage. But in one final grand gesture, he invites all his friends and coworkers who were also outcasts from Jewish society, to come to his dinner party. And the guest of honor is Jesus. He wants to use what he had to introduce people to Jesus.

There is a good principle to be learned in that, as Jesus taught in a parable found in Luke 16:9, ”And I say to you, make friends for yourselves by means of the wealth of unrighteousness, so that when it fails, they will receive you into the eternal dwellings.” The principle being that your resources even of unrighteous things like money and wealth, should be used to bring people into the kingdom of God, and in so doing, you will store up treasure in heaven. Matthew might have taken the approach that he no longer had a job and so he needed to conserve whatever money he had left. But he willingly spent it on a lavish dinner so that he might bring others into the kingdom of God.

So Jesus attends this dinner party in His honor, at the house of a former despised tax collector, and all of Matthew’s friends from the wrong side of town are in attendance. Such events were commonly held in the courtyard and open spaces of wealthy homeowners. So it was evident to everyone in the community that there was a big event going on, and the Pharisees were standing nearby offering criticisms. And so they approached his disciples and asked, “Why is He eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners?” Let me explain the word sinners. It referred to people that openly lived in defiance of Judaic law. They were people who had received a scarlet letter so to speak, but unable or unwilling to make themselves acceptable in polite Jewish society, they had become outcasts and lived openly in rebellion to Judaism. So we can imagine the type of crowd that were in attendance. And of course, the self righteous Pharisees found the whole thing scandalous.

So they ask the disciples what is Jesus doing? They want to establish a rift between Jesus and His disciples. That’s why they don’t go to Him directly. But once again, Jesus hears their question, whether supernaturally or because the disciples ask Him, and He responds to the Pharisees, ““It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” Some commentators think that the first part of Jesus’s answer might have been a familiar proverb: “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick.” But whether that’s the case or not, it aptly describes Jesus’s purpose in attending the party.

The Pharisees had a point in that as people of God, we are called to separate ourselves from the world and not participate in the deeds of darkness. A lot of Christians today want to label every attempt at that sort of holiness as legalism. And yet I’m afraid that often in their rush to prove they have a right to do certain things as Christians, they are merely using it as a covering to serve lusts of the flesh. I can tell you that as a person who was saved out of the nightclubbing, partying lifestyle, it would be a mistake for me to start hanging out at the local clubs. 1Corinthians 10:23 says “All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable.” Jude speaks of our attitude being towards such people that walk with the ungodly that we should snatch them out of the fire, hating even the garment polluted by the flesh. There are places where Christians should not go lest we be enticed by the world and drawn into destructive practices.

But Jesus establishes by His answer that is not what He is doing. He isn’t just hanging out with some of the locals after a hard day of ministry, knocking back a few cold ones. Far from it. Rather, Jesus said “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick.” He is like a physician that is ministering to the sick. A doctor may need to visit the sick, but he does so to make them well, and he takes great care not to get contaminated himself.

So also Jesus teaches that it is not the self righteous that He had come to save, but the sick, the sinner, the one who knows that He is lost. Luke’s version adds that Jesus said, “ but to call sinners to repentance.” For that repentant person, that sees his sin as a deadly sickness, Jesus stands ready to forgive you and give you righteousness resulting in life as a gift from God.

Now let’s move on to the second course. And in this incident we don’t explicitly see anyone eating, but it is understood that the disciples were eating. We know that because it was evident that the disciples were not fasting. The only way you can know that is if someone sees you eating. So the disciples were eating, when the Pharisees were fasting. And they wanted to know why the disciples weren’t fasting like they were. They knew also that John the Baptist’s disciples fasted on occasion, and so again they wanted to know why Jesus’s disciples did not fast. There was a certain self righteous indignation on their part in asking the question, as if to question the legitimacy of Jesus’s ministry.

This was a serious question as far as Jesus was concerned, as is obvious from the extent of His answer. Jesus uses no less than three analogies to answer this question of fasting. The first one Jesus gives is the analogy of a bridegroom and his attendants at a wedding feast. Jesus says when the bridegroom is with the attendants, they cannot fast. A wedding is a celebration, a festival, a cause for rejoicing. It would be inconceivable to expect the attendants of the bridegroom to fast while the wedding festivities are going on.

The analogy is showing the parallel of Jesus’s ministry of the gospel, the good news, to that of a bridegroom taking his bride, which is the church. God has become man, and made it possible for man to be reconciled to God. He has chosen to shed abroad His love for man, to offer forgiveness of sins, and give eternal life. So Jesus is saying, in light of the fact that His ministry is a ministry of good news, it is to be celebrated, not mourned. But there will come a day, He says, when He is taken away, and in that day there will be cause for fasting.

The problem with fasting as it was practiced by the Pharisees, was that it was done to be seen of men. It wasn’t to be right with God. The Pharisees fasted twice a week, and rubbed ashes on their faces so that everyone knew that they were fasting. They fasted to be seen of men, and in Matthew 6, Jesus said that such received their reward; the applause of men. But not of God. God sees the heart. And God knows which fast is of repentance, and which is not. In the case of John’s disciples, they may have been fasting because their leader had been arrested. And so they paralleled Jesus’s statement concerning HImself, that when He was taken away there would be cause for fasting in that day. Such was the case for John’s disciples when he was taken away. So fasting is associated with mourning, but the gospel of Christ is a reason for rejoicing; that the Savior of the world had come and made it possible to become reconciled to God.

The other two analogies are very similar to one another. One is that of an unshrunk patch of new cloth put in an old garment. When it is washed, or gets wet and it shrinks, it will tear away from the garment making it worse. The other analogy is of new wine in old wineskins. An old, dried out wineskin would not expand with the fermentation of wine and so new wine would burst it, resulting in losing the wine. In both accounts, Jesus is saying His gospel is something new that cannot fit into the old paradigm. The old paradigm was the ceremonial aspects of worship, the rituals that were intended to be a picture of Jesus Christ. But now that the picture is fulfilled in Christ, the symbols are no longer necessary because the real is manifested. So Christ has enacted a new covenant, enacted on better promises, and the old symbols are no longer necessary. The gospel is such good news, that to try to put it in the old wineskin of the ceremonial law and rituals would be to constrain it so as to even ruin it. It would not be a covenant of grace, but of law. Christ came to establish a new covenant, a better covenant, through His sacrifice, and not on the basis of the blood of bulls and goats.

This principle of a new covenant of grace is spoken of to a great extent in Hebrews, but we will read just a few verses fro chapter 10:11-17 just to get a sense of it. Speaking of the old covenant based on the law it says, “Every priest stands daily ministering and offering time after time the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins; but He, having offered one sacrifice for sins for all time, SAT DOWN AT THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD, waiting from that time onward UNTIL HIS ENEMIES BE MADE A FOOTSTOOL FOR HIS FEET. For by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. 15 And the Holy Spirit also testifies to us; for after saying, “THIS IS THE COVENANT THAT I WILL MAKE WITH THEM AFTER THOSE DAYS, SAYS THE LORD: I WILL PUT MY LAWS UPON THEIR HEART, AND ON THEIR MIND I WILL WRITE THEM,” He then says, “AND THEIR SINS AND THEIR LAWLESS DEEDS I WILL REMEMBER NO MORE.”

And in Romans 8:2-4 we read that these two covenants are contrasted as flesh and Spirit. “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” So the old fleshly requirements of the law such as fasting and washing and rituals that could never make us righteous have been replaced by a new law of the Spirit, who is given to us that we might have new life in Christ. This is certainly good news worth celebrating.

Now let’s look at the final course. Again we see the disciples eating. This time however, they are eating on the run. This is the first century equivalent of a drive through fast food restaurant. They are walking through a grain field on a Sabbath day and pulling the grain off of the stalks and eating it. This was called gleaning and it was provided for under the law. It was legal, and it was a way that God provided for the poor or destitute so that they might have enough to eat.

But the Pharisees were also tagging along, trying to find something to criticize, some reason to find fault with Jesus’s teaching. And since it also happened to be the Sabbath, they thought they had found it. Because the Pharisees and their lawyers had so embellished the law that they had made a bunch of little laws to keep from breaking the big law. If God said to do no work on the Sabbath in the 10 commandments, then they established 39 other laws defining how to keep the Sabbath, or what constitutes work. The problem was, as Jesus said later on, they tied burdens impossible to bear on other men’s heads, but they refused to bear them themselves. They defined the law to the nth degree not because of a zealousness to keep the law, but so they might know how to manipulate it to their advantage.

For instance, they said that you could not bear a burden on your back, or carry it in your hand on the Sabbath, because that would be work. But you could carry it on your foot, or your elbow, or tie it to your hair. And so they had all these crazy ways worked out to get around the law. But for the uninformed, they gave the appearance of being strict and zealous for righteousness, when in fact they used it to restrict others but not themselves.

So now they tried to turn Jesus against His disciples. They said to Him, ““Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” They made the case that the disciples were harvesting grain, thus they were working and breaking the Sabbath. Jesus answers them by taking them back to the Old Testament, the source of the law, and says to them, “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he and his companions became hungry;
how he entered the house of God in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the consecrated bread, which is not lawful for anyone to eat except the priests, and he also gave it to those who were with him?”

Now in using this example, Jesus is showing that the high priest had no problem giving David what was considered unlawful for him to eat. The showbread on the altar was for the priests to eat, and it was unlawful for anyone else. It was holy to the Lord. But the high priest recognized that David and his men were starving, and in need of food, and so there was another law which took precedence over the ceremonial law. It was a law of mercy which triumphs over judgment. Jesus would say later on another occasion in Luke 14:5, if your ox fell into a well on the Sabbath, which of you would not take it out? There was a principle inherent in the scriptures, that the preservation of life takes precedence over ceremony.

So Jesus says in vs.27, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” By that statement Jesus shows the order of creation establishes the precedence of life over ceremony. Man was made before the Sabbath. Thus the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. The Sabbath was given that man might have rest from his labors.

In the new covenant that Jesus came to establish, Jesus fulfilled the symbolism of the Sabbath. He provides the Sabbath rest in that He did the work that we can rest in. In Hebrews 4:9-10 it says, “So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His.” Thus in the new covenant the Sabbath was changed from Saturday to Sunday, as Christ rose from the dead, so that we walk in newness of life and not labor in our dead works. We rest in HIs righteousness, and not ours. He is the Sabbath rest that we have entered into.

And Jesus confirms that in vs.28 saying, “So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” In other words, Jesus made the Sabbath. He is Lord of the Sabbath. He was not subject to the Sabbath. And as Lord of the Sabbath, He can use the Sabbath anyway He wants. And He has chosen to give us rest from our works, so that we might have rest in Him. Because He finished His work, we can rest from ours.

So in closing, I would just say that these three courses in the gospel represent salvation. First, Jesus came to save sinners. If you recognize you are a sinner, if you are sick of your sin, then Jesus is the Physician that has come to save you. Secondly, the good news is that it is not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to God’s mercy He saves us. God has come to man in Christ Jesus to reconcile us to God, so that we might have forgiveness and be invited to become the bride, or church, of God. The gospel is the good news, it is the source of joy, peace and life. And then thirdly, when you receive Jesus, when you follow Him as your Savior and Lord, then He will give you rest. You can rest in His righteousness and find rest for your souls.

Jesus said in Matthew11:28-30 “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. “Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS. “For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

Not only does the Lord want to give you forgiveness and rest, but He wants to have fellowship with you, to be with you as His bride forever. And there is verse in Revelation that speaks to that desire of Christ for His bride. And actually it’s in another reference to food. It’s an invitation to dinner. Jesus says in Revelation 3:20 ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me.” I hope you will answer the door.