Should we be Vegetarians? Bible reading for January 4

 Today we read from the One Year Bible in the following passages:

Genesis 8:1-10:32
Matthew 4:12-25
Psalm 4:1-8
Proverbs 1:20-23

And the part that jumped out at me is when God tells Noah what to eat. If you read carefully, you'll notice that God tells Adam and Eve to eat fruits and vegetables. He doesn't include meat in their diet. But when He talks to Noah, He tells him that all of the things that move are OK for him to eat now. If we think about this logically, it makes sense that God had provided for all of Adam and Eve's needs in the garden, giving them fruits and vegetables that provided the perfect nutrition that they needed without needing to kill animals. But Noah faced a flood-torn world where many of the plants and trees that previously fed them were dead. 

That tells us, if we take the verses at face value, that we were originally not designed to eat meat. We know that it's OK to do so, because God told Noah to eat meat, He gave Moses detailed instructions which meat to eat and which to avoid, and He told Peter that even the meat previously considered unclean was now OK, including pork. But we were designed to eat and be nourished without the need to kill.

In heaven, we will not NEED to eat in the sense that we'll die if we don't. But the eating that we do in heaven will not necessitate death, since there will be no death in heaven. Interesting things to ponder when it comes to our diet now. Yes, eating meat is fine. It's not sinful. Jesus ate fish. And most of us probably need to eat meat to get the nutrition that we need.

But if we want to live our lives today in a more ideal way, the way we were originally created, then finding a way to eat that does not require animals to die is a worthy goal. What do you think about the vegetarian ideal?

God, thanks for giving us delicious food and the senses to enjoy it.