Food is A Gift from God. Always Say Grace Before a Meal

Dear Captain Ronald Thomas, 

Thanks for your email encouragement what I wrote earlier on what Christians normally pray.

Just to add a few more thoughts why we need to give thanks to God for each day of life given to us, especially for the daily food we receive. Maybe you would like to share this also with your Christian friends.

We need to thank God each morning when we wake up, and each night before we retire. We thank Him for the breath of life He spared us each passing day.

We all live from day-to-day, and we should never take life for granted that there will be another tomorrow for us. We may not even wake up to see another day.

Appointments taken for granted:

Most of us make arrangements and appointments weeks, or even months ahead as if we will ‘sure to be there’  to meet these engagements?  We only assume we would always be alive to make future appointments for all eternity.

  

More importantly, we need to give grace – a short prayer of thanks to God for every meal we partake. This is because that food was given to us by Him. It is a gift of God given to all His living creatures, including you and I. This living gift is what money can never buy no matter how rich we are. I shall elaborate this later.

The Energy of Life:

Food can only come from something that was once living, namely, having life in it before we sacrificed that life (physically ‘kill’ it) so that that it can transfer its ‘vital force’ to us and to others in order to continue the chain of life for all who partake it.

Each life can only give one life to the next, but not Jesus who can transfer His life to as many as is needed because His life is unlimited. His Life is eternal, infinite and unlimited.

That is why Jesus is able to sacrifice His life just once, yet able to transfer His eternal life force to all humanity without limit so that everyone who believes in Him, too shall have life throughout all eternity.

We cannot buy life for certainty, no matter how rich we are. Food which must come from another living creature; be it from an animal or a plant. It must be sacrificed (die) first so that an energy field residing undetected within its physical body can leave the body and be transferred to another body to continue its life force there. This is a higher order of vital force, which is so different from the chemical energy derived from food nutritionist, biochemists, and food scientist talk about.

Without his ‘vital force’ being transferred continuously from one body to the next, all creatures shall surely die.

I am not talking about the usual chemical energies in food that powers the biochemical machinery in a living body. I take one or two steps beyond this to look at a higher order.

I am talking about another form of energy existing on another plane, one or several steps beyond what my scientific counterparts understand and normally talk about.

This ‘energy of life’ or ‘life-forces’ cannot be detected, let alone quantify using any scientific instrument or method.  It is present in all living creatures, but it escapes when an animal or a plant dies. This ‘life-energy’ is indestructible. It is always there in the cosmos. As it cannot be destroyed, it can only be transferred from one animal or plant to the next another animal or plant as it is eaten.

Conservation of Life:

Even if an animal is not eaten, and left to decompose in the open, bacteria will still act on it, and this life force is then transferred to the bacteria of decomposition. Even if a human corpse or an animal carcass is cremated, the ash (minerals) still remains to give life to plants if returned to the soil. It is always there.

What I mean is, life force is always there and can never be destroyed no matter what we do to a dead body as much as neither matter nor energy can be destroyed  as prescribed under the conservation of mass and energy. 

They are only interchangeable. They are like the conversion of mass into energy, and energy into mass. Likewise is the spirit transferred from one the body of the next along the line when one dies.

Man eat Food, Not Nutrients:

But some will argue that even if we don’t have natural food, we can still eat synthetic foods? The answer is no!

Since the 1960’s and 1970’s the USSR, has been experimenting extensively on artificial food proteins.

Around May 2013 food scientists have even produced the most expensive artificial hamburger in the world

The project was started by Dr Mark Post and his colleagues at Maastricht University. They used some 20,000 muscle fibres from cow’s fetuses and culture them till they get some grey-white protein from which they made an ‘artificial’ hamburger. 

The cells from organic cows were cultured into a nutrient solution to form muscle tissues which are then teased into thin strands of ‘meat’. 

Living Sources:

Other methods have also been developed to produce artificial caviar and artificial meat, potatoes, macaroni and others food products. However, all of them were made from the high-quality milk protein casein.  

An aqueous solution of casein (cow’s milk protein) is blended together with a texturizer such as gelatin, into chilled vegetable oil, resulting in the formation of particles resembling fish eggs.

 From there they are made to taste like meat, much the same way we have vegetarian mutton, vegetarian beef, and vegetarian fish made out of soya and mushrooms to make them taste like meat.

Unfortunately these artificial foods were still made from natural food materials in the first place. No artificial food has so far been made from non-living substances such as out of plastic, soil, sand, bricks and mud so far. If that can be done, only then can we call them artificial or synthetic foods.

All artificial foods begin from a living source, such as casein, soya, cultured muscle fibres, stem cells, etc. In short, they were actually derived from natural food sources which once have life in them until we change them into something else. 

Consumers Rejection:


However, even if food can be artificially synthesized, we do not know if anyone wants to eat an artificial meat? Even that we do not even know if such an artificial meat is toxic, let alone able to provide nourishment the normal way like natural foods that support life. 

Even if food scientist manage to synthesize artificial proteins using other methods other than through cultures of living tissues,  the complexity of producing high-molecular-weight compounds, which include food bio-polymers, especially proteins and polysaccharides (starch and cellulose), makes the fabrication of food products highly uneconomical and unworkable, let alone acceptable by ordinary people.   

The only ‘nutrients’ that can be produced in a factory are the low-molecular-weight compounds, such as vitamins and amino acids. But these are minor nutrients, not food. Unfortunately, man don’t eat nutrients, they eat food.  

Synthetic amino acids and combinations of them are only added to natural food products to increase their organoleptic (sensory) qualities. They may also be used in nutrition support therapy such as in the intravenous feeding of patients where normal swallowing is difficult or impossible. 

All foods synthetically produced must first be derived from living sources of natural foods through cultures. These living sources were created and given by God from the beginning. These were not created by scientists.

Man not the provider:

Hence there is no other way we can create food, let alone life.  Food is a free gift given to all of us only by God, not by agriculturists, food scientists, food manufactures, supermarkets and food sellers.

No man can create life and allow it to multiply to become food for all of us. The only person who was able to do this was Jesus Christ who was able to multiply five loaves and the two fish, broke them and fed 5000 people who (Luke 9:16; Matthew 14)

Christian laws about food:

 

In the Old Testament a command was given to the Israelites that some food are unclean and should not be eaten  (Leviticus 11 verses 1- 47;  Deuteronomy 14:9).             

 

This was because of certain diseases, example foot and mouth diseases among hoofed animals and poor food hygiene practices at that time.

 

God needed to give this command to His children (Moses, Aaron and the community of Israel) to avoid certain foods that may spread zoonotic diseases. Zoonotic diseases are diseases that are transmitted from animals into humans.

 

God did it right to prevent the spread of disease just as we will advise our own children on food hygiene. God is never wrong.

 

However, thousands of years later when these animal-to-human diseases probably were no longer a threat probably with much better food hygiene, food handling and practices,  Jesus then commanded that all foods are clean (Mark 7:19).

God gave the apostle Peter a vision in which He declared that formerly unclean animals could be eaten: 

“Do not call anything impure that God has made clean” (Acts 10:15).

When Jesus died on the cross, He fulfilled the Old Testament law (Romans 10:4; Galatians 3:24-26; Ephesians 2:15). This includes the laws regarding clean and unclean foods.

This much is the view point of Christians concerning ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ foods, disease and hygiene as given in the Old Testament. 

A Blessing to all Mankind:

All life created and given to us as food is a blessing from God to every living creature in this world so that we can all stay alive, and that our lives can be passed on to the next living creatures including bacteria and worms that consumes us when we die.

This is the carbon chain of life passed on from one life to the next. 

The Lamp of Life:

Life is like a lamp, like a whole body. A lamp has oil as fuel as is food to the body.  A wick is made up of fibres that resemble the cells, tissues, organs and system of a body.

A living body sucks up the nutrients from food so that it can feed and sustain the actual flame which is the flame of life that gives off heat and light. 

Even if the flame of the lamp resembling the life in a body is extinguished (dies), the oil, wick and lamp that are the physical body, remains, but the heat of the flame (energy of life) escapes into the atmosphere. 

But that heat is still there somewhere except it is ‘diluted’ in empty space.  Heat as energy cannot be destroyed as one of the laws in physics. It can only be converted into another form of energy. 

Similarly, life forces may have escapes, but it is still there even though it is no longer attached to a physical body.  In short, life cannot be destroyed.

The lamp needs a wick and oil (fuel or food) in order for it to continue to burning (to remain alive).

We can have the entire unlit lamp (body, wick and fuel). But not the flame (life)!  This first flame MUST come from somewhere outside the body to lit up the first lamp to give the first life on earth before it can spread on earth like wild fires. This is the handiwork of God as He promises Isaac:

“And I will make thy seed to multiply as the stars of heaven” (Genesis 26:4). Only God can do that!

God gave Life:

Remember God needed to blow into the nostrils of lifeless Adam to give him the first human life on this plane.

“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”. (Genesis 2:7). 

This is similar to resuscitation when we do CPR on someone who is no longer breathing. God performed the first CPR. 

God is the First Doctor:

God was also the first anesthesiologist (Genesis 2:21), and at the same time was also the first transplant surgeon (Genesis 2:22). Praise to God our Lord. 

So it looks like Genesis 2:7 clearly tells us our physical body does have a soul. I call this “the spirit or the flame of life residing inside a physical body”. This is my own thoughts.

My thinking is, it is not just a physical body powered by mere food and subsequent metabolic chemistry as myopic scientists think. 

It is this ‘energy of life’ as a higher order that commands the chemistry of life as the lower order to proceed in a biological system. It is this vital force that commands the regimented orders of biochemistry. 

But when this vital force leaves the body all biochemical reactions and body chemistry breaks down and returns to dust from here they came. There is no order anymore. 

Scientists are able to write volumes about biochemistry to fill up all national libraries, but not how and why biochemistry can only proceed as chemical law dictates only when a body is living. 

If life is mere chemistry and their reactions, why must it stop and breaks down when something else of a higher order is no longer there to command and instruct to continue?

Chemicals of Life still intact:

After all a body that has just died still have all the biological fluids, sugars, amino-acids, DNA, electrolytes, oxygen, etc in the body for them to continue as in life. But why do they go into reverse, and finally reduced to dust from where they first came. Astronomers tell us we are all made from star dusts. So does the Bible (Genesis 3:19).

It would be far too long for me to write my thoughts on this here. It may take weeks or months typing non-stop. A lecture series with slides is much, much faster. Even that may take hours or days. It is difficult to prove a hypothesis with experimental data, but a forest of unexplained questions based on logical thinking remains. 

So be very thankful and always to remember whenever we eat, a life has been sacrificed so that it can transfer its ‘life forces’ into our own body. Food is much more than just energy giving nutrients – the energy we know as joules or in calories.

Only nutritionists with blinkered eyes and training, think that food is just calories. He thinks that the powerhouse in biochemistry is generated via the (Hans) Kreb’s Cycle. There is no other source of energy or a higher  command than via the tricarboxylic acid cycle?

Life cannot be destroyed:

Do don’t think that when a flame (life) has been extinguished it is gone forever. Only myopic people and short of understanding people like Nicodemus in the Bible think that way. He thinks only in physical term – of a physical birth, not a spiritual one of being reborn again.

Once again, the flame (life) may be extinguished, but the heat (soul) has escaped into the environment. I have explained that.

Remember, in physics neither matter nor energy can be destroyed. They are still there in the enclosed entropy. They can only be interchanged (transferred) from one system to another somewhat like a thermodynamic equilibrium.

Always remember to give grace to God for every morsel of food we put into our mouths at every meal. Say grace before we eat. Be thankful for the food because a life has to be sacrificed. 

Money cannot buy life:

We can never create life or buy it. So is food which was life before being sacrificed.

We buy food from the market and put them into our mouth. But have we ever thought had not God created life in the first place to keep that “flame” going in a chain to spread it like a forest fire from an initial spark, none of us here will have anything to eat let alone buy it. So be thankful, and give grace before we eat. 

Do not think if we have money we can buy anything we like. Do not be arrogant. Be humble so that God can give us the wisdom and the vision.  

Even if we are atrociously rich and are able to buy the entire kingdoms on earth - land, properties, estates and everything else,  all these are non living materials made of rocks sand, bricks, cement, etc like buildings, land and real estates. None of them can be eaten. There is only one thing that can be eaten, that is food. That is the only thing we can never create and buy.

Food is Life:

We cannot even create a tiny grain of rice, or just a blade of grass for ourselves, let alone food aplenty for the entire humanity on earth. This is not about physical aspects of agriculture, food science, food technology or nutritional sciences. It is about the unseen Science of Life which scientists cannot understand let alone measure. 

Be humble, grateful, be thankful and adopt beautiful child-like qualities (not childish behaviour) as Jesus taught us.  Always remember to give thanks (grace) before we partake a meal.

A father gives food to his child, but a child does not understand where the food came from and how does food nourishes, gives him life, and helps him to grow. He merely receives food in good faith.

 But it was the good faith that kept a child alive because it was provided to him by his father. Likewise a heavenly Father provides for our every need.

Remember only Jesus is the Bread of Life who can give us life. He demonstrated  this in the Sermons of the Mount when he multiplied five small barley loaves of bread and two small fish (from living sources) and was able to feed 5000 people (Matthew 14:13-21, John 6:6 -59). He just blssed the barely and the fish and the food just multiplied.  

 

 

That happened 2000 years ago that no food scientists can mimic even this 21^st Century.  His was divine powers. 

 

That is why Christians give thanks and grace before a meal even though they may not actually know the reason behind except the faith being taught for their Christian practices.  I hope this explanation reaches out to the Christians. But it is okay if they still cannot understand. Just a simple thank to God like a child to his father will do. 

Likewise, it is only Jesus who has eternal life, a life that is infinite and unlimited who can easily transfer life unlimited to every single soul on this planet provided we believe in Him. His life is eternal (endless) so there is no end of Jesus giving life abundantly to anybody, to all the humanity as they multiply on earth, and as much as they want.

The physical food we eat can only give us temporary physical life provided we continue eating by sacrificing a physical life every day.  But having a physical and temporal life is not we want.

Life Eternal:

We need eternal life, and is only Lord Jesus who can transfuse and transfer this ‘eternal life force’ into us. 

The existence of life forces is not about biology, biochemistry, physiology, nutrition, medicine or anything like that taught in universities. It is far, beyond what science understands.

Pray for the sick:

In Christian prayers, it is also correct to pray for those who are sick, lame and blind, and ask God to heal and comfort them. You may also request to be healed if you are sick yourself. Jesus did that all the time with his miracles. He will answer that prayer. Just follow in His footsteps. 

Causes of Disease:

Disease is only partly caused by specific or non specific pathogens, or from multiple root causes (examples stress, dietary lifestyles, bad habits, smoking, aging, genetic, etc, etc).  The causes of physical illness are far too many to discuss here. It includes an understanding, anything from microbiology, nutrition, molecular medicine, cellular pathology to disorders of immunity right down to genetics.

We shall not discuss them. You name them; they are all described in standard textbooks on medicine.

These physical causes of illness are what researchers, doctors and medical scientists tell us all the time. I too was blinded in one eye by such training. I was led astray by my university professors for years.

But now I see.  Apart from specific physical pathogens which we have been brain-washed thoroughly, there are also unseen energy and un-measurable forces entering our bodies that alter our patho-physiology, body chemistries and bio-mechanisms.

Many of these entities cannot be detected, let only analyze and measured by Science. 

Beyond physical factors:

For instance, I have always wondered why some people are prone to certain diseases, others not? Scientists talk about risk factors. They talk about factors such as nutrition, pathogens, environment, age, gender, genetics, family history, smoking, obesity, lifestyle, stress levels, etc, etc down the long list. They tell us these are the confronting or causative risk factors.

Scientists and medical researchers know these too well. They understand medical statistic and causative factors. Repeating them is boring and unnecessary. 

Beyond Understanding: 

But what I have always asked myself is, why is it that monozygotic (identical) twins, doing everything exactly together - from staying in the same house, eating exactly the same food in quality and amount, wearing the same type of clothes too, having the same body weights…etc, etc.

They have exactly in the same traits, DNA make-up, characteristics, exposures, and chemistry, and yet, … years down the line, one of the twins develop a disease, whereas his / her identical half did not? Why?

Surely there is something far more than mere diet, nutrition, genetics, age, environment, lifestyle and other causative factors, etc that made them different, or  were their internal body chemistry so different. 

It is my personal belief that there is a spiritual entity far beyond Science and body bio-mechanism that commands and orders the chemistry of the body to take different patho-physiological pathways. That could be the cause of that difference?

Didn’t Jesus Himself tell us the same thing about unseen spirits and demons possessing our bodies to make us ill as given in Mark 5: 2 -43. He tells us that clearly. There is some kind of unseen and a  force beyond measure residing inside a living soul that controls the physiological and pathological chemistry other than all those physical risk factors I mentioned above.

 

 

 

Because of this unseen and un-measurable entity, that may explain why in a biological (life) system the laws of physics and chemistry cannot be strictly applied.

 

This is so different in non-living systems or in materials such as gasses, mass, volume, speed, pressure, force, etc that strictly obeys a set of physical laws.

 

 

 

Biological variations:

 

 

In a living system where some living force resides in a physical body, there would be so many biological variations; so much so biostatisticians need to analyze data of measurements from large populations in order to derive meaningful conclusions. 

 

 

This is so different from measurements taken from non-living materials in physics where the laws are so fixed and immovable. You may get a straight-line correlation (r = 1.00) between two variables in the physics of materials, but not in a biological system. We might get a scatter-gram instead.

 

 

Demons:

 

         

Jesus is never wrong when He cast out demons in those who were possessed.

 

Had Jesus practiced medicine according to “scientific” methods of “modern medicine” He could never have raise Lazarus from the dead, or instantly healed the lame, sick, paralyzed and the blind.

 

 

He can see and tells us things we do not know. He could detect measure or pump vital energy into our body to heal it.  Obviously when we are sick our vital energy is very low, and in death it becomes zero.

 

 

Jesus could even raise them from the grave. It is just too bewildering for us to understand fully except probably some vital life forces are being pumped back into a dead body to reverse all the previously broken down molecules and put them together again.  What a Divine power. Praise unto the Lord.

 

 

Absolutely no doctor today can perform any miraculous healing using mere physical or chemical (pharmacological) methods as Science teaches. Jesus saw life energies far beyond what Science understands. 

 

Dust-to Dust:

As I said earlier, when that vital force leaves the physical body upon death, all biochemistries crumble into pieces, and the molecules from which life was created crumbles back into dust. Isn’t that already foretold here?

 “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19).

This verse is comparable with the similarity about the carbon chain of life scientists tell us.

Another World:

 

 

Naturally, because Jesus came from another world (John 18:36) He was given divine powers by God, His Father.  No human in history was bestowed such stunning supernatural powers.

 

 

Many prophets before Jesus in biblical past have performed miracles, but not as divinely awesome as what Jesus did when He was able to raise dead people. Jesus was the only exception.

 

 

Moses for instance did a few miracles such as changing the rod into a serpent before Pharaoh, and striking the rock to gush out water in the desert (Exodus 7:9, Numbers 20:11). But they were much less impressive.

 

 

Jesus needed to come to this world in a human form so that we can be comfortable with Him and not treat Him as an alien from another world.

 

 

But He clearly said He was not from this world (John 18:36). But He has to live, move about and stay among us. He has divine powers, and yet He assumes such humble and child-like qualities.

 

 

Believing is Seeing:

 

 

If we believe in Him we will be given the same vision. It is to believe first before seeing, not the other way round.  I believe in Him absolutely in order now I am able to see.

All these need be added into a Christian prayer. Prayer is not about asking God for protection against made-made crimes and violence.

Neither will God protect us if we decide to commit suicide by jumping down from a height, etc.  Only Satan wants to lead us astray by convincing us that God will protect us if we want to do ungodly things (Luke 4:9).

Neither do Christians pray for wealth and power on Earth such as asking for winning lottery numbers. They only seek for peace, forgiveness of sins, and strength against ungodly temptations.

If we need physical protection against man-made violence, we need to employ bodyguards, not ask God to protect us.  Jesus provides us spiritual strength against temptations and against the work of Satan.

Yet He is fair to everyone, whether His children or to non-believers, whether in sunshine or against natural disasters.

“That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45).

Christians need to remember to thank the Lord in their daily prayers. They need to say grace before each meal for that gift of life no money in the world could buy.

We can be super rich, and can buy almost anything we want, but if God had not given us rain, no life can survive, and no food is available.

Do not be arrogant if we are rich and think we can buy food in abundance from hyper and supermarkets at anytime we like because we work for it, and have the money.

 I have explained if this gift of life is not given to every creature on Earth, there will be no food. Even with the wealth of all the kingdoms of this world, there will still be no food to buy. Remember that!

But I think most religions, and their followers, rich and poor are grateful and thankful – Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Baha'i, etc. They do give grace before their meals. That is good.

May God be with all of us!

Jb lim