Caller:I was wondering about that diet in Genesis 1:29 where it says “bearing seed” is that like nuts that they’re talking about here?
Pastor Doug: Grain bears seed. It’s telling us about the herb that yields its seed on the face of the earth. That could be a broad spectrum of things, anything from grain to beans. Of course, the bean is the seed and the grain is the seed. Fruits have seed in them. I’m not a botanist but I do understand that a fruit is the product of the flower. It is the fruit of the plant and it contains usually the seed of the plant with the exception of bananas that only have the vestigial remnant of a seed, they claim. So this is a diet of fruits, grains, nuts, and legumes. The original diet.
Caller:The real question I want to ask you is Do you think that right now that diet is sufficient to sustain us in this day and age? and how does it all tie into the sanctuary?
Pastor Doug: These are two separate questions and I don’t know that I would immediately connect them, except that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and they were never to bring anything unclean into the Sanctuary. Now, in regard to the question about the best diet—the ideal diet, of course, is a vegetarian diet. It’s the original diet. It will be the diet in heaven.
Evidently, when man could no longer eat from the Tree of Life, God added to the fruits, grains, nuts, and beans, the vegetable because notice after sin He says “And you will eat the herb of the field”. That means eating part of the plant other than the fruitthe stalk, the leaves, the root—that’s vegetables. So a vegetarian diet, fruits, grains, nuts, beans, vegetables, a person can be very healthy on that diet.
You get all the protein and the calcium, everything you need from the proper combinations, and the human digestive system and chewing mechanism is very well suited for that. So, how that ties into the sanctuary—I would recommend that you look at the lesson we have on the sanctuary. In fact, my sermon on-line, you can listen on-line, I deal with some of the connections. Every cell of life is made up of these three primary parts of the nucleus—like the egg, you have the yolk, the white, and the shell. And the sanctuary had those same three elements.
Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. When you went into the sanctuary, the first thing that happened, there was an altar for consuming—we consume food the sanctuary stored food—our bodies store food the sanctuary had light—that’s our eyes there was cleansing—that’s our circulation. So there are some interesting comparisons. Hope that helps a little.