To Eat, or Not to Eat Pork?

5/11/2019 Christianity 10 Comments

Is it an abomination to eat pork? This is a common question of people who had been misled and had been made to believe that the law of Moses is still in effect despite the fact that we are already in the Christian dispensation.

Indeed, the Israelites had been prohibited from eating certain meats, and one of which is pork.

LEVITICUS 11:2-8 says,


If you are going to look closely at the verses, you will realize that the Lord instructed Moses to speak to and teach the children of Israel His commandments. In other words, the commandments that God gave to Moses were meant for the Israelites, and not for all people.

During the time of Noah, they were also given a commandment concerning what they should eat.

GENESIS 9:3 says,


God did not make any exclusion to the meat that Noah could eat. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you, He told Noah. So, he could eat pork.

The only prohibition given to Noah was not to eat blood. So, if he was to slaughter a beast for his food, he must let the blood of that beast be poured on the ground. The same thing was true during the time of Adam and Eve.

 GENESIS 1:28-30 says,


Adam and Eve, and their descendants, had been told by God that every living thing that creeps upon the earth was given to be meat for them.

But when God had chosen the Israelites as His people, when He brought them out of their slavery in Egypt, there were specific commandments that God gave them. And one of those commandments was a prohibition from eating pork.

We must remember that the Israelites lived in Egypt for 430 years without the law of God. They were used to eating the kinds of food that the Egyptians ate, like pork, for instance. But when they had been liberated from the tyrant pharaoh, upon reaching the Holy Land, certain prohibitions concerning what they could eat and what they should not eat were pronounced by God for them to observe. And the eating of pork, or the flesh of swine, was one of the prohibitions given to them.

But according to the Apostle Paul, those commandments given to the Israelites were only temporal commandments they were not meant to last until forever, or even until our dispensation. They were considered temporal commandments for their efficacy had limitations.

HEBREWS 9:10 says,


The prohibitions on meats, drinks, divers washings, and carnal ordinances were imposed on them only until the time of reformation.

There was an appointed time that those commandments would be reformed. By whom? By no less than the Lord Jesus Christ, Himself. When the Lord Jesus Christ came, He cleansed all those that had been regarded as abomination and unclean during the time of the Israelites — which means that the prohibition from eating pork had ceased to take effect.

As written by the Apostle Paul in 1 TIMOTHY 4:4-5, it says,


To determine the efficacy of a particular commandment, it is important that we consider the time element. It is true that eating pork was an abomination among the Israelites during the time of Moses. However, the dispensation of the Israelites is over; we are now in the Christian dispensation. The commandments and teachings that are now in effect are those of the Lord Jesus Christ.

COLOSSIANS 2:16 says,


The time of Moses is over. ACTS 13:39 says,


Justification will not come from the law of Moses, but from the law of our Lord Jesus Christ. That is why we regard the law of Moses now as obsolete because it had been replaced by the law of Christ.

The law had been changed when the priesthood was changed.

HEBREWS 7:12 says,


Let me reiterate that the law concerning the prohibition of meats and drinks, and divers washings, and carnal ordinances, was imposed only until the time of reformation, which refers to the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. And it was the Lord Jesus Christ who changed the law.