1 Timothy 4:3 Commentary and Bible Study

One example of it is mentioned right here: ‘Forbidding to marry.’ By the 4th century AD the Church of Rome is beginning to tell their clergy that they mustn't be married. They could keep their wives if they were already married, but once they became, as they called it, priests, they couldn't marry. They must live apart from their wives. For years and years, many wings of the Roman Catholic Church ignored this, but then the hammer came down. It was one of their inventions: that the clergy should be celibate. That has come back in another form. Critical theory is generally against marriage. Is this not a modern form of ‘forbidding to marry’? Just cohabit while it suits you, but don't be tied; don't be bound. The idea is that men are essentially exploitative and cruel, and so if you make any bonds, you are subject to that, so the mood is against marriage. Just cohabit, just have arrangements. It is a fulfilment of this Scripture. Forbidding to marry would include modern society's antagonism to the concept of marriage, men and women, faithful to each other all their lives. ‘Commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth.’ They are of course all kinds of foodstuffs which it is not wise to eat. This verse doesn't suggest you can eat absolutely everything, but it says there is no religious reason why you should not eat something. ‘If I give up such and such a foodstuff, it will make me righteous before God.’ That is nonsense. There is no religious significance in food. There are poisons; you want to avoid them, but there is no religious reason. What about alcohol? Is it not much better and Scriptural to abstain from alcohol? Yes, but not for a religious reason. You abstain from alcohol because it is a poison. It affects your mood. Also it causes such unhappiness and disruption of families and misery, that Christians should want nothing to do with it. ‘Which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth.’ Eating food is not just a secular matter. Eating food is a spiritual matter, because, as a Christian, every time you eat food, you must give thanks for it, partly to register your dependence upon God and your gratitude to him, but also because every mouthful of food should remind you that there is another kind of food you need. ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’ (Matthew 4:4), quoted from Deuteronomy 8:3. Every time you eat a meal, you think, ‘I thank God for this meal, and have I fed spiritually?’ Your physical food is supposed to remind you of your dependence upon spiritual food. No foodstuffs are forbidden to Christian people. Certain foodstuffs were forbidden to the people of God in Old Testament times, because the Lord was teaching them to distinguish between what was permitted and what was not permitted. He was teaching them the difference between clean and unclean in the spiritual realm, by making that distinction in the material realm, and so there was written into their ceremonial law a prohibition of certain foodstuffs. But that does not apply in New Testament times, and should never be added to the message of salvation, as the apostle Paul makes clear. Those foodstuffs were forbidden under the law, not because they were intrinsically evil, but because God was teaching them to obey, and to make distinctions.