To be honest, so am I. If someone wishes to forgo fish on Fridays or ham, it doesn't make any difference to me. I'm just interested in the motivation and the reasoning behind such behavior-for which there doesn't seem to be a clear answer.
It's important to recognize that dietary law was one of the largest area of contention within the early church of which the apostles had a great deal to say at the very first Council. It isn't a triffling matter to simply sweep it under the carpet. The Jerusalem Council could have reached a "compromised" and simply say, "Well, each to their own." They didn't.
Tithing and fasting are not sacrifices in my mind. There isn't anything that we have that has not been given to us so we can't be "sacrificing" something. All these things belong to God. Giving back the things of God is one way in which we acknowledge that they belong to God. Besides, God is far more interested in our obedient than He is in our sacrifices.
I agree, and I think Scripture supports that view.
Life is short and we only have so much time and effort and energy. By God's grace, Christ was born and died on the cross as the ONLY sacrifice that matters. It really seems to demean Christ's single and perfect sacrifice to say ANY further sacrifices are necessary, or even commendable. Protestants never viewed "sacrifices" as anything other than misdirection, like the RC practice of no-meat on Friday or self-flaggelation.
We tithe not as a sacrifice, but in order to help our fellow man. It is charity, not penance.
And fasting is not a sacrifice. Fasting, according to much in the New Testament, helps us to meditate and pray more effectively for OUR OWN welfare. It is for OUR benefit, not for the benefit of God.
Christ is a positive, not a negative. He is progress, not regression. He is fulfillment, not withdrawal.
I think the Puritans got it right. EVERYTHING needs to be focused on Christ alone. His sacrifice, His resurrection, His atonement, His justification of fallen sinners who are utterly incapable of doing anything to redeem themselves.
Jesus Himself tells us that a new world has been ushered in by with His ministry which fulfills all prophecy, leaving the old ways moot. The old ways have fulfilled their purpose, and now the only purpose is Christ.
And no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish. But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both are preserved. No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better." -- Luke 5:36-39"And he spake also a parable unto them; No man putteth a piece of a new garment upon an old; if otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the piece that was taken out of the new agreeth not with the old.
So Christ tells us not to repair the old cloth, but to discard it in favor of the new cloth. And Christ tells us we are to put the new wine of Christ into a new bottle because clearly, the old is NOT better.
"And the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom." -- Mark 15:38 "And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst." -- Luke 23:45"And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom" -- Matthew 27:51
Christ has ripped the world apart into two entities -- the redeemed and the unredeemed.
"In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away." -- Hebrews 8:13
Not precisely, no. However, they did leave room for grace without throwing out the Torah.
There's a dynamic going on in that debate that I don't think we're very sensitive to as a result to a major cultural difference: We in the West admire and aspire to rugged individualism. The culture of the Bible, both Jewish and Greek, was very collectivist. Everyone belonged to and derived their identity and protection from the groups they belonged to; there were no universal rights or protections.
As examples:
- A subject could be beaten at the whim of the Roman officials, but a citizen could not be scourged before a trial, a fact which Sha'ul employed to his advantage twice.Now consider the plight of a new Gentile Christian coming from a pagan background. He has to give up all idolatry, which most likely loses him his guild status, his family, and may mark him as an enemy of the Empire when he refuses to call Caesar Lord. He has no Constitutionally-guarunteed right to dissent or freedom of religion; the only protections he has is if he is brought under the protection of the Jewish umbrella, so to speak.- A person identified as a Jew received special exemptions from Roman Law, such as being allowed not to burn incense to idols of the emperor, being granted their special feastdays off from service (including Sabbath) and not being expected to join in the pagan rites.
It's frankly hard to be a Jewish proselyte, and there are darn few who can turn their lives on their heads overnight, but until they do, keeping not only the written Torah but the traditions of one of the major Jewish sects, they are not given the protection of a community. The potential convert is pretty much out in the cold unless they happen to be blessed with the resources to weather the storm during the transition. It's like joining a fraternity: Until you've jumped through all the hoops and gone through initiation, you don't get to live in the fraternity house or get any of the other benefits ofthe brotherhood. The difference is that one can survive college without a fraternity; most ancients couldn't survive life without a community to protect them.
The reason for making new converts jump through the hoops is to preserve the integrety, character, and mission of the group. This wasn't unique to the Jews; guilds and mystery religions had their own initiation rites, always involving subjecting the potential member to their rules and their gods. The difference was that joining a guild or a mystery religion didn't require you to abjure all other gods or to risk being called a traitor for not worshipping the emperor. Being a "God-fearer" did.
So in the face of this situation, what do the Apostles do? Those who wanted new converts to become circumcised within the Church wanted to preserve its character and integrity; the motiviations of those who were not believers in the Messiah were less noble (Gal. 6:12-13).
What they did was show a radical kind of love. They saw that the Spirit was coming to the Gentiles, and they trusted God to finish what He had started. Therefore, they accepted the new Gentile members only on the condition that they separate themselves from the pagan temples and feasts (which are what the strictures given in Acts 15 were designed to do) and proclaim that Yeshua the Messiah is Lord--that is, is YHVH. They opened their arms and offered the protection of the community, the ekklesia, freely, just as the Lord had offered His protection and community freely.
Did they expect them to stop at simply not participating in idolatry? Clearly not! The exortation of the Apostles was always to live holy lives, and yes, even to observe the Feastdays of YHVH (1 Cor. 5:8). In Acts 15, we see the expectation that the new believers would enter the synagogue and learn about the Torah there (v. 21). The four commands given were clearly meant as a beginning, a minimum requirement for fellowship, not an end to the person's growth.
Does that growth necessarily include keeping kosher? No. But I do believe it includes sacrifice, giving things up to, or back to (as you are quite correct that God gave them to us and owns them to begin with--just as He owned the lambs that were sacrificed on Passover), God. This may be pleasures that we come to see as sinful. This may be our freedom, should we be arrested or otherwise persecuted for our witness. This may be property, lost in persection or given up as an offering to further the Lord's work. One's leisure time has a way of evaporating quickly when one is doing his Master's work; that too is a sacrifice of praise.
If you truly have never known the Lord to call upon you to sacrifice something of value to you, then you should probably wonder what's wrong with your walk. If He has, then you should have no problem understanding why another might make a sacrifice of what they eat.