Sermon: Fast or Famine

Lack of Nutrition - Different Outcomes
#1400
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 30-Sep-17; 79 minutes

Even though we fast at least once each year, we really do not know hunger. We feel the pangs of not having eaten for 24 hours and I guess that is bad enough and makes some of us weak, nauseated, and headachy. I am not trying to diminish how we feel after 24 hours of not eating because a few of us, due to chronic illness and certain metabolic conditions that they have, have a truly difficult time with fasting. Some of them, even after missing one meal, it becomes difficult. Some people have to take medications that they need to take on a full stomach or with food at least. And that makes things difficult.

The Day of Atonement can be a terribly stressful, even life threatening time for such people. It is all a matter according to their faith.

No, we do not know hunger. Not here in this Western world. Most of us, except for the Day of Atonement and our occasional fasts, have not missed a meal in our lives. We get our three squares every day, and we make sure we do. Our pantries, our refrigerators are full and we have markets and supermarkets, Walmart Supercenters, restaurants, whatever it is, we have got food just everywhere around us. On every block there seems to be some place where we can purchase food.

In terms of food, we have here in this country an embarrassment of riches. Our nation produces so much food that we not only export a fair amount of it to other countries, but we also feel free to waste a large percentage of it. Somewhere between 30-40% of the food produced in America each year is thrown away, equal to roughly $165 billion worth of produce. One Live Science article that I researched added, "Some 1400 calories worth of food is discarded per person each day, which adds up to 150 trillion calories a year."

Do you understand how much calorie intake a normal person has every day or should have every day? 1400 calories is basically a day's worth of food. A lot of us eat a lot more than that. If you go to McDonald's you are over the limit already. But that can keep a person alive, 1400 calories worth of food each day per person. How do we waste all this food? How does that happen?

You might think that you are pretty good at conserving food but evidently a lot of people are not very good at it. The Washington Post ran an article by a man named Brad Plumer. This was run on August 22, 2012, so the facts are a little bit dated by five years. But this article was called, "How the U.S. manages to waste $165 billion in food each year," because he lists seven major places or areas where food ends up being discarded. And these seven are:

1. At the farm. Seven percent of food grown in the U.S. is left to rot in the fields. And it is sometimes explainable. Sometimes they over-plant. Sometimes the food is not up to the standards of shape or color that are required. Sometimes it is food safety scares that shuts everything down and the food just rots. Or sometimes it is a lack of farm workers to go out and pick the stuff so it just sits there.

2. Where the food is packed. Farmers will cull the produce to make sure it meets minimum standards for size, color, and weight. One cucumber farmer estimated that less than half of his crop leaves his farm for this very reason, that it is not up to quality, not up to standard, or just fails to meet some sort of minimum requirement.

3. At processing and distribution centers. Malfunctions in machinery, food just sitting too long at improper temperatures, or the stores rejecting the shipments because of it being low quality or whatever the excuse happens to be. That food just gets thrown away.

4. At the grocery store. Supermarkets throw away about $15 billion worth of produce each year. That is about just a little bit under 10% of the total amount. And they do this because of overstocking. They just buy too much and they have to throw it out. Also because of those things we see stamped on our cartons and whatnot, the sell-by dates. And in fact, most stores do not let the produce stay out there to the sell-by date. They usually take it off the shelf two or three days before the sell by date. So it does not even get its full run.

5. In food service places and restaurants, that sort of thing. Restaurant kitchens are notoriously inefficient. They throw out food that is improperly cooked or improperly prepared. It is not fit to go out to the customer so it goes in a trash can. There is no place to put it otherwise. Fast food restaurants are notorious for this as well. McDonald's corporately mandates that fries are thrown out after seven minutes of being out of the oil. And so about 10% of fast food is thrown out in this manner. If it stays on the warmer too long, off it goes. In addition, it is not only the restaurateurs fault, it is also the patron's fault, the customers. They tend to leave about 17% of their food that they were served on their plates when they leave. That is close to 20%, one-fifth of the food that they are are given is thrown in the trash can because they cannot serve it to anybody else. Once it has hit the table, it either has to be eaten, taken home, or thrown away. So a lot of it gets thrown away, a little bit less than one-fifth.

6. American households. A lot of food gets thrown away in American households. Believe it or not, American families, maybe not your family, but on average American families throw out between 14% and 25% of the food and beverages that they buy, whether it is because the sell-by date runs out or it is something that they are trying and they decide they do not like or they just leave it in their pantry way too long and it just goes away or what have you. Or it is that last two pieces of pizza that nobody seems to want because it has gone stale. Anyway, they throw away a lot of food. This costs the American family between $1,365 a year and $2,275 a year. We could save a lot of money if we just did not throw out so much food, waste it.

7. Because of disposal. Not down the disposal in our kitchen, but because it is just simply thrown away for whatever reason, whether through oversupply or lack of storage space. The government does not have refrigerators enough or whatever to keep the cheese that is produced, so it just gets thrown away. A lot of milk and cheese, meats, fruits and vegetables end up in landfills because there just is no room for it. In all—notice these numbers, this is just mind boggling—52% of fruits and vegetables, 50% of seafood, 38% of grains, 22% of meat, and 20% of milk are lost due to being thrown away in this country.

That is tough to hear on a day in which we are not allowed to eat. We are thinking of all that food. "Boy, I could be sitting high on the hog here."

So once again, I say no, we do not know famine. We do not know hunger, not by any means, not in a country that will throw away about one-third of the food or more that it produces.

Any kind of famine—or even lack—has been rare in this country. I looked quite a bit to find an example of famine in this country and kept getting thrown to the Donner Party. But that was just because of poor decision making and stupidity. But the only substantial "American" famine that I could find occurred in 1878 to 1880 on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, far north in the Bering Sea. I had to look for it on a map, but it is way up there and way out there. It, and an epidemic that followed, killed about 1,000 Yupik Eskimos and they died because there had been some extreme weather and bad hunting conditions for the Yupik that lived on St. Lawrence Island.

Now why I kind of put this in quotes, calling it an "American" famine, is because this happened before any American presence on the island. And the only reason that we know about this two or three year famine is because the story has been passed down by Yupik elders over the last century and a half.

So we do not know famine due to this nation's blessings because of the faith of Abraham. We have got no experience with famine. The only real understanding of famine that we have is because we have maybe read some history about it or we have seen some media coverage of other nations' experiences like in East Africa or something where they have had some very hard times over the past generation or two.

But besides thinking that we are starving on the Day of Atonement, we are clueless regarding any kind of real starvation. But we do know fasting, at least a little bit. We are familiar with that. We are familiar with being without food for 24 hours because God commands it. To me, the two states, juxtaposed, fasting and famine, both a lack of food and nutrition, are very fascinating to think of, to see side by side and look at their commonalities and look at their differences. They are similar. But once you really get into it, they are very different.

Fasting and famine are quite different. One is voluntary, one is involuntary. One leads to humility and godly living while the other leads to deterioration and disease, and ultimately death. God uses the one to help perfect His saints and the other He uses as a sledgehammer to wake His people up.

Which would you rather have? Fasting or famine? What will it be a fast or a famine?

Let us go back to Leviticus 23 and get the command for this Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur in Hebrew. We will read verses 26 through 32 just to touch base here. But there is a phrase that I would like to get out of this.

Leviticus 23:26-32 And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: "Also the tenth day of the seventh month shall be the Day of Atonement. It shall be a holy convocation for you; you shall afflict your souls, and offer an offering made by fire to the Lord. And you shall do no work on that same day, for it is the Day of Atonement, to make atonement for you before the Lord your God. For any person who is not afflicted in soul on that same day shall be cut off from his people. And any person who does any work on that same day, that person I will destroy from among his people. You shall do no manner of work; it shall be a statute forever throughout your generations in all your dwellings. It shall be to you a Sabbath of solemn rest, and you shall afflict your souls; on the ninth day of the month at evening, from evening to evening [that is, from the end of the ninth to the end of the tenth], you shall celebrate your Sabbath."

God makes some major points here in giving His command for us to keep the Day of Atonement. Among the major points that He gives here about keeping it, of course, is it is a holy convocation, a very solemn day of the year. We are to do no work, we are to make an offering, of course. But one of the major ones, the one we feel most viscerally, is the afflicting of our souls. He says this three times: once in verse 27, once in verse 29, and once in verse 32. So we know the axiom about repeating. If God says it once it is important, if He repeats it again, it gains in importance and becomes very important. If He says it three times, well, He says this three times: we are to afflict our soul on this day.

Other translations render this afflicting your soul or afflict your soul this way: as either "deny yourselves" or "humble yourselves." And humble yourselves is actually a very literal translation. If you look at Young's Literal Translation of the Bible, you will find that he uses humble, you shall humble yourselves. The Hebrew word behind this is anah. It is Strong's number 6031 and it means to be afflicted, to be bowed down, be humbled, be meek.

But it can also have different senses rather than just the straight up definition. It can also have the sense of being oppressed, of being watched, of being emaciated (and I know that is how we all feel right now), of being crouched and hunched over, hunched up because of hunger, bent, submissive, or even just in general, that we are suffering. It often expresses harsh painful treatment, not just little pangs of hunger, but really sharp pangs, real hurtful and oppressive, hard-to-take kind of treatment.

Let us see a couple of these. Let us go to Psalm 35. We are looking at the word anah.

Psalm 35:13 But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth; I humbled myself with fasting; and my prayer would return to my own heart.

So here he is humbled.

Let us go to Isaiah 58, verse 3. It says there,

Isaiah 58:3 'Why have we fasted,' they say, 'and You have not seen? Why have we afflicted our souls, and You take no notice?'

Now I am going to these not just to show you the word anah, but I am also going here because some people say, well, afflicting your souls and fasting are not the same thing. But if you go to back to Psalm 35:13 and also here in Isaiah 58:3, we find that "afflict your souls" and "fasting" are used in parallel, especially easily seen in Isaiah 58:3, "Why have we fasted, they say," and then in the next section down in the verse, the next part of the couplet they say, "why have we afflicted our souls?" So it is the same question. Why are we doing this to ourselves? Why are we denying ourselves food and why are we treating ourselves so harshly? It is the same thing.

So when God tells us to afflict our souls, He is telling us to fast, to deny ourselves the sustenance that we need for life.

But the really important thing that we need to understand here in terms of both afflicting ourselves and fasting is that God wants us to do these sort of things to ourselves. It is self-inflicted, self-inflicted harsh treatment.

Let us get an idea of what this harsh treatment is like. Let us go back to Genesis 16. And this is a probably part of the record that Sarah would like expunged. But it is here in God's Word for us to learn from, so we are going to learn from it.

This is the Hagar and Sarah problem that cropped up because Abraham made his own dumb decision. But as we know the story, Hagar, once she was pregnant, was starting to be a little highfalutin around Sarah and thinking that she was something special even though she was still a servant.

Genesis 16:6 So Abram said to Sarai, "Indeed your maid is in your hand; do to her as you please." When Sarah dealt harshly with her, she fled from her presence.

So here we have a time where this affliction was not going inward but outward. This kind of harsh treatment was going not to Sarah, but to her handmaid Hagar. And so what Sarah was doing to Hagar was abusive enough that Hagar fled, she left, she wanted to get out of there because her life was so miserable. So it was not a very nice thing that she was doing. It was not like, Oh Hagar, stop. You know, it was something a lot more rough, enough that she felt that she was being persecuted and she had to leave.

Let us go to another one. This is in Psalm 105, verse 18. This is reviewing what happened to Joseph in Egypt. We just want the one verse. The Egyptians or the whoever it was that had him there, maybe the mid Midianites:

Psalm 105:18 They hurt his feet with fetters, he was laid in irons.

The word hurt there is anah. They afflicted him. They dealt harshly with him. They made him feel great pain with the fetters, with whatever it was that they were putting on his feet. So they used pain, painful practices to control him and the other prisoners that they had. They caused suffering with the way they treated him. They hobbled him painfully so that they could restrict his freedom.

These are the kinds of things that God wants us to get from this word anah. That it is not something that is just less nice. He is really talking about delivering a kind of pain or oppression, enough that it makes a difference in how we perceive things so that we will start to make a change, because we do not want to be under that suffering anymore.

Let us go back to the book of Deuteronomy. We will see how God does this, inflicts pain, deals harshly with people. Back in Deuteronomy 8. He does it for several different reasons. But evidently He finds it very effective and so He makes use of it in various different places and times and ways.

Deuteronomy 8:2 You shall remember that the Lord your God led you all the way these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you [that is the word anah] and test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not.

So God here is causing them to suffer, these Israelites out in the wilderness, to want, to be humbled, whatever it is. He gave them enough to keep them alive, but there were times when they had to suffer a little bit, He had to stretch them a little bit because, He said here, to test them, to know what was in their heart, to see how they would react.

Let us go to another one. I Kings 11. (I figure if I keep you going to lots of verses, the time will pass quickly and you will thank me later for helping you get through this fast. Just kidding. But I do have a lot of scriptures for some reason, more than normal.) Verse 39. This is as a result of the rebellion of Jeroboam and the splitting of Israel off from the house of David because of their sins.

I Kings 11:39 "I will afflict [there is the word anah] the descendants of David because of this, but not forever."

He had to give a punishment to the house of David for the way that they had done, through the end of Solomon's reign and in Rehoboam's reign, and some of the things David himself may have done, that He needed to kind of bring them up short and teach them a lesson.

By the way, I should mention in this context here that verse 33 tells us mostly that it is due to idolatry, the idolatry of the house of David. So in that case, it would not have meant David himself.

Let us go on to Psalm 90. This one is much more general. I stick Psalm 90 in as much as I can. It is one of my favorite psalms. The whole psalm here is a complaint, is a cry: "God help us, save us. Remember that we are so weak and we last only a few years and then we are gone. And boy, it seems like Your tests and Your trials upon us have been so long. How long do we have to do this?" And then Moses says,

Psalm 90:15 Make us glad according to the days in which You have afflicted us, the years in which we have seen evil.

The psalmist here, Moses, is saying that God is the one responsible for bringing this evil upon them. And he would really like it lifted so that they could see better days. And of course, he goes on to say, you know, that the beauty of the Lord be upon us and establish the work of our hands. He wanted good times to come, not all this anguish and persecution and problems and suffering that they were going through at the present time. But it was from God, and they needed to go to God in humility to ask that this be lifted because, frankly, Israel was full of sin. Israel had always been rebellious against God and He had had to send them quite a bit of affliction in order to try to get them to turn around.

It was well deserved, all of the affliction that God sent upon Israel. And God had warned them that it would happen this way, that He would have to send affliction on them. He had done this in the blessings and curses and we will go back there and look at this.

Now, just notice when we go back to Deuteronomy 28 just how much is of these curses have to do with starving them, keeping them from food, or doing stuff that is going to cause a lack of food. Let us just start out generally here with what He says when He begins the curses.

Deuteronomy 28:15 "But it shall come to pass, if you do not obey the voice of the Lord your God, to observe carefully all His commandments and His statutes which I command you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you."

Now, he is very clear here that the reason why these curses come is because they are not carefully obeying God's Word, what He says for them to do. It was a direct result. You sin, these curses are going to come upon you eventually. He does not give them a time after the first one. Usually He is very merciful and waits to see if we are going to turn. But He wants us to make sure we understand the correspondence between sin and affliction or sin and curse. It is in God's mind, and it should be in our mind, that these are directly related. We sin, we are going to get some sort of penalty for it unless we repent. And sometimes, even if we repent, the curses come on us because of just the natural processes of things. And so you have got to be careful! Better not to repent at all, not have to worry about these things.

Deuteronomy 28:16-18 "Cursed shall you be in the city ,and curse shall you be in the country. [Where is the food grown? In the country.] Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl [both of which have to do with food]. Cursed shall be the fruit of your body and the produce of your land, the increase of your cattle and the offspring of your flocks."

So He is hitting food pretty hard. I mean, that is pretty near and dear to us. He hits us right in the belly because He knows that that is going to get a reaction. If we do not have food, then we are going to cry out to God—we hope.

Let us go on to verse 23.

Deuteronomy 28:23-24 "And your heavens which are over your head shall be bronze, and the earth which is under you shall be iron. The Lord will change the rain of your land to powder and dust; from the heaven it shall come down on you until you are destroyed."

Now we are talking about weather. But it is weather that helps produce the crops that we need. And He said He will take away the good weather and our earth, our soil, the dirt that we grow things in will just dry up and it will be hard as iron.

Deuteronomy 28:31 "Your ox shall be slaughtered before your eyes, but you shall not eat of it; your donkey shall be violently taken away from before you, and shall not be restored to you; your sheep shall be given to your enemies, and you shall have no one to rescue them."

So marauders come over the borders and they take all your livestock and they take even your donkey which you used to pull your plow. You have nothing to farm with anymore.

Deuteronomy 28:33 "A nation whom you have not known shall eat the fruit of your land and the produce of your labor, and you shall be only oppressed and crushed continually."

This is kind of depressing.

Deuteronomy 28:38-40 "You shall carry much seed out to the field and gather but little in, for the locust shall consume it. [Now, we are talking insect invasions here and problems with that.] You shall plant vineyards and tend them, but you shall neither drink of the wine nor gather the grapes; for the worms shall eat them. You shall have olive trees throughout all your territory, but you shall not anoint yourself with the oil; for your olives shall drop off."

Deuteronomy 28:42 "Locusts shall consume all your trees and the produce of your land."

Deuteronomy 28:45-46 "Moreover all these curses shall come upon you and pursue and overtake you, until you are destroyed, because you did not obey the voice of the Lord your God, to keep His commandments and His statutes which He commanded you. And they shall be upon you for a sign and a wonder, and on your descendants forever."

Deuteronomy 28:48 "Therefore you shall serve your enemies, whom the Lord will send against you, in hunger, in thirst, in nakedness, and in need of all things; and He will put a yoke of iron on your neck until He has destroyed you."

Not a very nice chapter, especially the last two-thirds of it. But we find that famine and all these other curses can result from bad weather, drought, blight and mildew, locust plagues, worms, crop failure, invasion, and just general warfare. All of which are curses and afflictions in themselves. And famine is in most of these cases, just a result of all of that.

But by sending famine, God is saying, "Ok, since you've disdained or forgotten that I have given you all that you have, everything that grows up out of the soil, all your livestock, even your intelligence and your strength to do all of these things, then I'd like you to see what you do without all those things I've given you and just realize how much you owe Me, how much of what you have actually comes from Me."

And the answer of course is that when God does not provide, when He pulls back His hand, either in protection or in providing for us, all we can look forward to is depletion, deterioration, disease, and death. All those terrible "D" words. Nothing but down and out. And in a rational person, in a truly spiritual person and a person who is trying to think like God thinks, that should cause repentance. "Oh no, we've forsaken God! Let's get back to Him and He'll provide all these things that we need once again."

If we were smart, we would realize (pun intended) where our bread is buttered. Who is buttering our bread? But human nature is not that way. It does not want to give God His due. It does not make the connection between sin and God's affliction of them. It does not make any connection between God and what they have. They do not make the connection that it was God who gave them these things. That is just the way carnal nature works.

Let us go to I Kings, if you will, chapter 8. This is during the time of the reign of Solomon, early on when he is dedicating the Temple and he is giving us here, in his prayer, the proper response of the people that they should have once these curses come upon them.

I Kings 8:35-39 "When the heavens are shut up and there is no rain because they have sinned against You, when they pray toward this place and confess Your name, and turn from their sins because You afflict them, then hear in heaven, and forgive the sin of Your servants, Your people Israel, that You may teach them the good way in which they should walk; and give rain on Your land which You have given to Your people as an inheritance. When there is famine in the land, pestilence or blight or mildew, locusts or grasshoppers; when their enemy besieges them in the land of their cities; whatever plague or whatever sickness there is; whatever prayer, whatever supplication is made by anyone, or by all Your people Israel, when each one knows the plague of his own heart, and spreads out his hands toward this temple: then hear in heaven Your dwelling place, and forgive, and act, and give to everyone according to all his ways, whose heart You know (for You alone know the hearts of all the sons of men."

So if the people will do this sincerely, if they make the connection that their sins have caused this terrible affliction, and then they pray to God and humbly repent of their sins, then God will hear in heaven and He will forgive their sins and He will act in their behalf to lift the affliction that He sent upon them. He wants them to know in their heart of hearts that not only did He send the famine in the first place, but He also removed it as a result of their repentance and their humility before Him.

He wants them to see the connection and to know that how they act determines how He acts or reacts to them. He is always going to be provident. He is always going to give them what they need and sometimes what they need is not what they think they want. They think they need all these things, more and better. But oftentimes their attitudes show God that they need something else and it is affliction, it is humbling, it is some sort of oppression or persecution or whatever it is to get their minds back on that connection again, between Him and what He has given and all their blessings. And on the other side between Him and all their defeats and afflictions.

Because He is the Sovereign God. He is the other half of the covenant that they made with Him. And they need to keep their side of the bargain or those automatic penalties come into play.

And He knows. This is God we are talking about. He knows when the repentance is real versus when it is feigned, when it is sincere versus hypocritical. It says there right there in verse 39: "For you alone know the hearts of all the sons of men." He sees right in there and he knows whether it is real or not. So He is not going to be paid off, if you will, with any kind of lip service, any kind of false humility, any humble sounding words, or rending our garments, or putting dust on our heads, and all these physical acts that maybe other people will think are us afflicting our souls and being humbled before Him. But He sees through all that and knows when it is real and when it is not.

So that is how He is going to act. He is going to act or react according to the reality of the situation, the reality of the state of our hearts, the state of our obedience and humility before Him. And sometimes that is exactly what happens. He looks through His people, into their hearts, and He sees corruption. Let us go to Jeremiah 14, because sometimes it just goes too far. Sometimes He has to act most severely. We will read verses 11 through 18.

Jeremiah 14:11-18 [This is in the lead up to the fall of Jerusalem.] Then the Lord said to me [that is, Jeremiah] "Do not pray for this people, for their good. When they fast, I will not hear their cry; and when they offer burnt offering and grain offering, I will not accept them. But I will consume them by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence." Then I said, "Ah, Lord God! Behold, the prophets say to them, 'You shall not see the sword, nor shall you have famine, but I will give you assured peace in this place.'" And the Lord said to me, "The prophets prophesy lies in My name. I have not sent them, commanded them, nor spoken to them. They prophesy to you a false vision, divination, a worthless thing, and the deceit of their heart.

"Therefore thus says the Lord concerning the prophets who prophesy in My name, whom I did not send, and who say, 'Sword and famine shall not be in this land'—'By sword and famine those prophets shall be consumed! And the people to whom they prophesy shall be cast out in the streets of Jerusalem because of the famine and the sword; they will have no one to bury them—them nor their wives, their sons nor their daughters—for I will pour their wickedness on them.' Therefore you shall say this word to them: 'Let my eyes flow with tears night and day, and let them not cease; for the virgin daughter of my people has been broken with a mighty stroke, with a very severe blow. If I go out to the field, then behold, those slain with the sword! If I enter the city, then behold, those sick from famine! Yes, both prophet and priest go about in a land that they do not know [meaning they will be taken away into exile].'"

There comes a time, as I said, as in Judah before the Babylonian invasion, when God has simply had enough. He has enough of His people's sinfulness and their disloyalty. And so God must use things like famine as a severe punishment to bring about the penalty for sin, which is death. "The wages of sin is death." Romans 6 23, one of those memory scriptures that we should have all at the forefront of our mind to keep us from stepping off the ledge when those temptations come.

He does not want to do this. God would much rather act in mercy and in kindness. That is the kind of God He is. He is a God of love. He loves us so much. He wants to do everything He can short of these things. But we push Him, we push Him terribly! We do not stop our sins, we multiply them! We increase them, we increase the magnitude of them. We just cannot seem to get enough of sin. And so, at a certain point, His justice must be satisfied. He can give us time, forbearance, grace no longer. There has got to be a reckoning, the wages come due, and by that point we can say that it is really an act of love on His part to do these things, to afflict us, to bring an end to the immorality and the iniquity in His people's hearts, before they become completely seared, before they can no longer do good anymore because of the way that their minds and their hearts have turned from Him.

So you could say He must clear the decks and start over with an entirely new, much chastened, much diminished crew. He has got to sail out of port with ones that will work with Him and not fight against Him. And so, as in biblical terms, He leaves a remnant. A group of people who are humbled and are willing to do what God says because they have seen and understood the consequences of sin.

A lot of bad news there. What can we take from this in terms of the Day of Atonement?

God commands us on this day as a pointed example, we could say, of what we should be doing throughout the year, not just on this day. But we should be, He says, afflicting ourselves, afflicting our souls, denying ourselves. We should be daily dealing harshly with ourselves, not necessarily by fasting or those sorts of things, but being harsh with our carnal nature by whipping it into shape, by putting it down, by making it hurt, by denying it so that we can live in the Spirit rather than in the flesh.

And this Day of Atonement lets us know, not just by afflicting our souls, but in all the other things that we see on this day. The great sacrifice of Jesus Christ and His not only forgiving all of our sins through His blood, but also taking our sins completely away so that they are remembered no more, we could say. That God has done all these things for us and we need to shape up. Because God has done these things, we need to afflict our soul. We need to be humble. We need to submit to Him because of the great things, the graces, the kindnesses that have been done for us and all the blessings we receive. And of course, we have to deal harshly with ourselves to get that carnal nature into shape so that we will submit to Him and His way of life and walk hand in hand with Him.

And one of the unmentioned but understood addendums to all of this is that we should be afflicting ourselves so that we will make changes. It is not just affliction for affliction's sake. It is affliction so we will change ourselves so that God does not have to afflict us another way, either as a test, as a warning, or as punishment. We do not want the famine. And if we really do not want the famine, then we should fast, afflict our souls, do it ourselves where there is some control and make the changes that are necessary.

So what then are the purposes of fasting? What do the biblical examples teach us about fasting?

I would like to start in a place probably most of you would not think of. I did not think of it until the light bulb moment went off. Let us go to Genesis the second chapter. Maybe this has been preached before. I do not know. I hope it has, but it suddenly dawned on me. I want to read verses 15 through 17. And then we will jump into chapter 3. But notice this:

Genesis 2:15 Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it.

Now, what was the Garden of Eden? It was a luxurious place of fruit trees and nut trees and vegetation. It was a garden. It was a place to live. That is where God lived. That is where God put the man and the woman, and He put them in the midst of abundance. And what is His first command? "Okay people, you're in this great garden full of fruits and vegetables."

Genesis 2:16-17 The Lord God commanded the man, saying, "Of every tree in the garden you may freely eat [among these hundreds of varieties of trees that produce fruit, however many there were, you can eat as much as you want]; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."

"Okay people, Adam and Eve and all humanity in them. Look, I give you all of this wonderful abundance, all of this fruit, all of these vegetables, all of these good things to eat. And I'd like you to fast from one of them. Don't eat [that is fast, right?] of that one tree." So we could say that the first command in the entire Bible, in the entire world, is to fast from one thing. "Everything else is fair game. But there's one thing you must fast from forever. As long as you're in the Garden, as long as you have access to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, just fast from this one thing. That's all I ask. Just the one." They are to abstain from one particular food.

Genesis 3:1 Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, "Has God indeed said, 'You shall not eat of every tree of the garden'?"

You see how he flipped that? He made it seem like, "Oh man, God is denying you this one other tree. Isn't that horrible? You thought you were free to eat everything. But has God said that there is something you can't eat." So he gets Eve's mind working. "I'm being denied. I can't eat of one tree." And she answers fine. But all he needed to do was put the question in her mind and it started working that she was being denied something.

Genesis 3:6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. [She broke her fast.] She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate [he broke his fast with her].

How long did they maintain this fast? I do not know. It seems like from the flow of everything that it happened pretty quickly. They could not resist the one thing that had been denied them for very long. But the more important fact is that they failed by eating the fruit of the tree. Another way we could put it is that they lost their self-control, even if it was through deception in the case of Eve. But they ate, they could not control their urges. They could not control their mind, their flesh, to deny themselves that one fruit from the one tree that they could not eat, that they were told to fast from.

So the first sin, we could say, was that they broke God's command to fast. Even though it was only one thing, it was still a denial of something that they enjoyed. We enjoy food, do we not? It is not just sustenance for us. I think we enjoy food. They did not need the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil for sustenance. It was something that they desired. Looked good, looked tasty, there were going to enjoy it. And it had this aura of something that could make them wise. Obviously, it was God's food and He was denying it to them, something like that. Some sort of mystical mumbo-jumbo that Satan got them to start thinking about.

But in this way, in this thinking about what happened here in terms of fasting, fasting is first shown in Scripture to have two desirable qualities. 1) fasting demonstrates obedience to God. By eating of the fruit of the tree, they broke the fast, they disobeyed God. So fasting demonstrates obedience to God. And 2) it expresses self-control. When you fast, you are controlling those urges to eat, to fill your needs, to feed the flesh. You are exercising self-control.

So when a person fasts, if the fast is truly a spiritual one, the kind that God desires, he is in a condition, a state, in which he has wrested control of his flesh and carnal mind to obey the commands of God, to conduct himself in a godly way as God wants him to conduct himself. And in that particular time when God says to fast, the obedient thing to do is, of course, to fast. And a fasting person, using this example, is more likely to act like God, because when they took up the tree and broke their fast, they did exactly what God did not want them to do. A fasting person is more likely to demonstrate the character of God because he is in control. He is denying his flesh which wants to pull him in an ungodly direction most of the time.

Thinking that this is the first time that fasting or a denial of oneself is mentioned in Scripture, I have to think that this is the fundamental sense of fasting that God wants us to have. That we are being obedient to God and that we are exercising self-control.

Just as an aside, I am just going to throw this out there for your own contemplation. We can consider God's command forbidding us to eat unclean meats in the same light. We are obeying God and we are exercising self-control. To me, looking at it from this direction, eating only clean meats and not eating unclean meats is like the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in a small way. But the same principles are involved.

There are not a great many huge spiritual principles behind why we should not eat certain meats and why we can eat others. One of the big ones is God said that is what we are supposed to do. And so we express our obedience to God by doing exactly what He said and not eating those unclean things. And we are exercising self-control because, as many of us know from prior experience, a lot of those things that we once ate, which God calls unclean, our eyes think they are good for food. And that they are good for food, we think. We enjoyed them and we have to hold off those temptations and do what God said anyway. (That was supposed to be an aside and it took me two minutes to say that.)

Let us go to Exodus. 34. I just want to pick out this one verse because this is the first time that fasting itself is mentioned in Scripture.

Exodus 34:28 So he was there [Moses] with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he neither ate bread nor drank water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.

Here we have the first real mention of fasting, that it is not eating or drinking for that period of time. Here he did it 40 days. What is interesting is that this one, this particular fast of 40 days that Moses did was his second trip up Mount Sinai. And the first time up, he had also fasted 40 days and 40 nights. So this was his second fast of 40 days and 40 nights within about 81 or 82 days. I mean, it was very short time that he was down, you know, throwing the tablets on the golden calf and doing all that, and then up the mountain again to get another set of tablets.

But if we would go to Deuteronomy 9:18, it indicates that he had fasted, and it actually was not a short time between those two trips. Because Deuteronomy 9:18 shows that he had fasted another 40 days and 40 nights between the two trips up the mountain. So really what we have is he had done 120 days of fasting within not much more time than that. So there were three fasts in a row!

So let us just do it this way. He went up the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights, fasting. He came down the mountain, crashed the tablets on the the golden calf, then he fasted 40 days and 40 nights where he prayed before the Lord. And then up he goes, back up the mountain for another 40 days and 40 nights, fasting again.

I just gave you the clue here. This boggles the mind. You cannot imagine going 120 days, even if there are a couple of breaks in between, without food and water. Now, we could say it is hyperbole for emphasis. I do not think it is. I believe what God says. So God obviously sustained him for all of this time. Without reading all the details surrounding these fasts though, that Moses made, a primary common factor in them is that Moses was continually in God's presence. He was either up the mountain and God was writing out the Ten Commandments there on the stones, or he was down the mountain kneeling before God in His presence, or he was again up the mountain in God's presence where he was then doing the second set of tablets.

But he was communing with God either directly or through prayer. He was in some way before the Lord during all of this time. So clearly, the implication of fasting in this part is that not only does God sustain us during these fasts, but fasting draws us closer to Him, it does an additional whatever it is, it makes us additionally closer to Him. It draws us nearer to Him. There is some element of fasting that allows us to get closer to Him even more than prayer itself will do. That extra measure of humility, of oppression of ourselves, of afflicting our souls, allows us to get into His presence even more closely. I do not know how else to say it.

Obviously, God miraculously sustained Moses while he was in contact with Him. And these periods of time, this 120 days, these three separate fasts, provides the general impression that fasting enhances our communication with God. And while we are doing so, He provides spiritual sustenance that is more fulfilling than any physical food or drink.

At least that is how it worked with Moses. Humanly, it is impossible to do that; to go 40 days, maybe have a meal, go another 40 days, maybe have a meal or two, and then go another 40 days. That is impossible. But with God all things are possible and He nourished him somehow. He kept him together.

So another principle that we need to take from this and from fasting in general is that, using the example of Moses, while he was afflicting his soul and doing it properly and sincerely and coming closer to God, he was strengthened rather than weakened. That against all signs otherwise, we would think that fasting would weaken us. But in everything that matters, fasting strengthens us. And what matters is our relationship with God.

Let us look at another example in I Samuel 7. This is early in the life of Samuel. We will read verses 2 through 6. The ark has just come to Kirjath Jearim.

I Samuel 7:2-6 So it was that the ark remained in Kirjath Jearim a long time; it was there twenty years. And all the house of Israel lamented after the Lord. Then Samuel spoke to all the house of Israel, saying, "If you return to the Lord with all your hearts, then put away the foreign gods and the Ashtoreths from among you, and prepare your hearts for the Lord, and serve Him only; and He will deliver you from the hand of the Philistines." So the children of Israel put away the Baals and the Ashtoreths, and served the Lord only. And Samuel said, "Gather all Israel to Mizpah, and I will pray to the Lord for you." So they gathered together at Mizpah, drew water, and poured it out before the Lord. And they fasted that day, and said there, "We have sinned against the Lord." And Samuel judged the children of Israel at Mizpah.

So another element of fasting that pops up here is that it can demonstrate grief and mourning for disasters of one kind or another. But most importantly, it demonstrates grief and mourning for having sinned against God. That is the most important thing; that we are sorry that we have sinned against God. It is a visible and visceral act of contrition, putting oneself in a humbled weakened state to show God, in a physical way, the depth of our anguish for disobeying Him. And at the same time, while we are showing Him our anguish that we sinned, we are also showing Him that we are ready to repent, that we have reached the attitude where repentance can really take place to be genuine.

And we can see a poignant example of this in the next book in II Samuel chapter 12. We will start halfway through verse 15. That is where I have a new paragraph start here in my Bible. This is after the birth of the baby born of adultery to David and Bathsheba.

II Samuel 12:15-20 And the Lord struck the child that Uriah's wife bore to David, and it became very ill. David therefore pleaded with God for the child, and David fasted and went in and lay all night on the ground. So the elders of his house arose and went to him, to raise him up from the ground. But he would not, nor did he eat food with them. Then on the seventh day [he was a seven day fast, I guess] it came to pass that the child died. And the servants of David were afraid to tell him that the child was dead. For they said, "Indeed, while the child was still alive, we spoke to him, and he would not hear our voice. How can we tell him that the child is dead? He may do some harm [maybe to himself, maybe to some of us]!" When David saw that his servants were whispering, David perceived that the child was dead. Therefore David said to his servants, "Is the child dead?" And they said, "He is dead." So David arose from the ground, washed and anointed himself, and changed his clothes; and he went into the house of the Lord and worshiped. Then he went to his own house; and when he requested, they set food before him, and he ate.

I will not go to the rest of it. They asked him why he had done that.

II Samuel 12:22-23 And he said, "While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept; for I said, 'Who can tell whether the Lord will be gracious to me, that the child may live?' But now he is dead; why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me."

So David fasted for a week showing God his repentant heart and his deep grief at what he had done, not only with Bathsheba, but what he had done to Uriah, which we can see in Psalm 51 if we care to check it. And in addition, he was beseeching God for mercy on the child. But once the child died, David knew that that was God's answer; and that was God's answer! That was it. And so he broke his fast.

His reasons for fasting had accomplished what it was going to accomplish. God had forgiven him of his sin. His repentance was genuine. He was a changed man. But his decree regarding the child born of adultery was final and it was carried out, the child died. So here we see from a righteous man the way fasting works.

Let us finish in Isaiah 58. This is a chapter in the book of Isaiah that talks about fasting and it gives us a clue, it gives us an insight into good fasting and bad fasting, particularly bad fasting. But as we fast today and any other time we may fast, we need to keep the principles of this chapter firmly in mind.

Isaiah 58:1 "Cry aloud, spare not; lift up your voice like a trumpet; tell My people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins."

That is the opening salvo to a chapter in which He is going to do exactly that. Think about that as we go through here. He is telling His people their sins. He says,

Isaiah 58:2 "Yet they seek me daily, and delight to know My ways, as a nation that did righteousness, and did not forsake the ordinance of their God. They ask of Me the ordinance of justice; they take delight in approaching God."

They are very religious people. They love to come before God. They love doing all the religious things. They love thinking that they are the people of God. They loved God's justice, they say, and they want to know what is just from Him. And so they asked,

Isaiah 58:3 'Why have we fasted,' they say, 'and you have not seen? Why have we afflicted our souls, and You take no notice?'

"Hey, God, we are doing all this stuff that You said that we should do. We're fasting. Why have you not responded to us." And so He says,

Isaiah 58:4-5 "In fact, in the day of your fast you find pleasure, and exploit all your laborers. Indeed you fast for strife and debate, and to strike with the fist of wickedness. You will not fast as you do this day, to make your voice heard on high. [That is not the way it works.] Is it a fast that I have chosen, a day for a man to afflict his soul? Is it to bow down his head like a bulrush, and to spread out sackcloth and ashes? Would you call this a fast, and an acceptable day of the Lord?"

Were you going through all these motions and making everybody know that you are fasting? You know, wailing and putting on sackcloth and rending your clothes and putting dust and ashes on your head and making it a big show. Is that really the kind of fast that I want to see? Of course Jesus said later, "Hey, when you fast, put your nice clothes on, wash up, do not let anybody know you're fasting."

Isaiah 58:6-12 "Is this not the fast that I have chosen: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out; when you see the naked that you cover him, and not hide yourself from your own flesh? Then your light shall break forth like the morning, your healing shall spring forth speedily, and your righteousness shall go before you. The glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry, and He will say, 'Here I am.' If you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness, if you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in the darkness, and your darkness shall be as the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your soul in drought, and strengthen your bones; you shall be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail. Those from among you shall build the old waste places; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the Repairer of the Breach, the Restorer of Streets to Dwell In."

Let us think about this for a few minutes. The Jews addressed here God says, right away, were a sinful people and He tells His prophet to tell them their sins. But they were also a religious people. They loved to approach God. They loved all the religious things about His way of life, just the religion part of it, just all the acts and the rituals and things. They thought they were great. They enjoyed their religion and they expected God to respond to them because they were doing all these rituals and things that they were doing.

But God would not respond to them because something was terribly wrong and it was shown in the way that they fasted. Their problem, first off, was that their submission, their humility, their affliction of soul did not extend past their hypocritical simulation of godly fasting. They were not eating, but they were making a big show out of it and being hypocrites. We saw that the Jews later in Christ's time did the same thing.

They may have denied themselves food, but their fasting did not change their hearts. After their fasts, they were still the same. They were the same old mean, selfish, argumentative, greedy, violent, demanding, and disobedient people that they were before they fasted. Fasting made no difference in their lives, in their attitudes. In fact, we could say that their hypocrisy and their unwillingness to change, even after fasting, ultimately brought on famine—when God made them be afflicted. He sent a great punishment for breaking the covenant through their disobedience.

In verses 6 through 12, God says that the fasting that impresses Him is the kind that results in people changing their attitudes toward their fellow men and women in their life. Making the effort, making them willing, that is, to sacrifice for those people, for those others, to help fill their needs, to make their lives better. Fasting should give us a soft spot for our brethren.

A godly fast produces a change in character, producing righteousness, that is, doing the right things. And of course a closer relationship with God. This kind of fasting ultimately causes us to work together with God to build up, to restore what was broken down, to repair breaches, not in buildings but breaches in relationships, and to bring lasting blessings. Blessings that are not just upon us, but will also be bestowed on the generations to come.

So the choice is ours. We can fast by rote, hypocritically, selfishly, attempting to get something from God and to get ahead over others by some means. But you know, that kind, I should warn you, leads to disasters like famine.

Or on the other side, we can afflict our souls as God desires, humbling ourselves before Him, sincerely putting ourselves in God's service, repenting of our faults and sins. And you know where that leads? It leads to reaping the benefits of a closer relationship with God, as well as a closer relationship with each other. So think on that.

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