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verses.
    This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised. You are to undergo circumcision, and it will be the sign of the covenant between Me and you
(Genesis 17:10-11 NIV).
    This physical act of circumcision was an
outward
act that joined God’s people in a covenant relationship with Him. Today, as a New Testament Christian, you
do not
have to be physically circumcised to be in a right relationship with God. We see this clearly outlined for us in the New Testament, such as in the following verse:
    When you came to Christ, you were “circumcised,” but not by a physical procedure. Christ performed a circumcision—the cutting away of your sinful nature
(Colossians 2:11 NLT).
    When we receive Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior, the old sinful nature is “cut-off,” or circumcised by God, and we receive new life within our spirit. Through this example, can you see how God desires to place the emphasis on the
inward
heart of man, rather than the
outward
physical man? The same transition from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant regarding foods has also taken place. This is an area where many New Testament Christians continually try to get back under the Mosaic Law.
    I know Christians who would be shocked if they saw me eat a shrimp or a porkchop. In order not to offend them, I wouldn’t eat it in front of them because their understanding of these things is limited and it would offend their conscience. The Old Testament food groups that were classified as “unclean” were foods that were represented as types and shadows. God was endeavoring to speak symbolically to His people through these foods. The whole point God was trying to make was the importance of keeping yourself pure and clean to avoidsin. The unclean foods represented sin. (See Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14:3-21.)
    Under the New Covenant, you can eat pork if you want to. To me, it doesn’t taste that good, so I rarely eat it, but that’s a personal matter of taste and preference. Some teach that the “unclean” foods are unhealthy for you. While I would prefer to eat higher on the food chain, such as a piece of halibut over a piece of catfish, I am still free in Christ to eat catfish if I want to. A few years ago the oldest man in the world died. He lived in China and was 127 years old when he passed away, and was often featured in leading newspapers around the world. In one interview just before he died, he was asked his secret of longevity. His confident response was, “White rice and good pork!” This man ate white rice, which has hardly any nutritional value, and pork, which is very fattening, and eventually died as the world’s oldest man, verified by his authentic birth certificate. Consider the following Scriptures from the New Testament regarding food:
    They forbid people to marry and
order them to abstain from certain foods,
which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth
. For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving,
because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer
(1 Timothy 4:3-5 NIV).
    This was written by Paul the apostle and he was as Jewish as a person can be, yet he understood the truth about food. Stop and think about it for a moment. How can eating a piece of fresh,grilled Blue Marlin (a fish without scales) make you unclean? How can a piece of fish make you unclean in the eyes of God? Isn’t the blood of Jesus more powerful than a piece of fish? It’s the blood of Jesus and His grace that justifies you before God, not your eating habits. The following verses by Paul should settle the argument forever regarding food. Please remember that these verses are from the New Covenant where we are saved by grace through faith, and not by our keeping a system of rules and regulations that only serve to magnify a person’s