The Cause of Physical Death

EAT MEAT AND DIE

What a strange title this must appear to be. But it may not be as strange as it seems. At first sight you might think that we are going to discuss vegetarianism, but that is not quite so. What we are going to look at, is the possibility that eating certain meat was not part of God's original will, and the eating of certain meat is what causes our physical bodies to age and die. One of the most puzzling diseases in the medical community is cancer. Cancer takes thousands of lives every year, but our medical professionals still don't know what causes it or how to completely cure or prevent it. But I believe that all living humans have cancer in one form or another, which I believe is what causes a person's body to age and die, and it is caused by man eating something that God never intended for him to eat, and that is described as red meat. I believe that the eating of red meat by our ancestors, thousands of years ago, has affected our genetic makeup in such a way, that because of it we all eventually die of old age in just a few short years. I intend to attempt to prove the possibility of this by the study of the Bible and see if disbelieving God's Word in the time of the origin of man may have set this death march in motion.

When God created the first people, Adam and Eve, and set them in the Garden of Eden, He had absolutely no intent for them to die. God gave Adam and Eve perfect bodies that He intended to last forever and I believe they would have, if they would have conformed to the commandments He gave them to live by. But Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate something that He commanded them not to eat. For He told them, in the day they would eat of it, they would surely die, and they did.

Now I'll be the first to admit that Adam and Eve died because they disobeyed God, for they committed the first sin of disbelief of God's Word. But I also entertain the possibility that the physical reason that death set in on their bodies was because of specifically what they ate. Unlike some biblical teachers that say they ate some kind of fruit off one of the trees in the garden, or the original sin was of a sexual nature, I am inclined to believe that the possibility exists that what they actually ate was the meat of one of the animals in the garden and because of this a deadly disease set in on their bodies which eventually caused them to die. And not only them, but all of the generations of their offspring down through the ages.

Now the Bible tells us that Adam didn't die right away, he lived for hundreds of years after being expelled from the garden. In like manner did the generations of men after him live to be seven, eight or even over nine hundred years old before they died. But you see, this is understandable, for because of the nature and condition of their bodies, since God originally made them to last forever, it took this genetic mutation a long time to wear their bodies out. But as the generations would pass, less and less time would be needed for this cancer to eat away their bodies, and eventually man's life would be very short because of it. God, knowing that the multiplication of this cancer in man's body, would eventually cause man to die, even before he would reach a mature age, intervened and limited the effect of this disease, setting the normal life of man to be one hundred and twenty years.

As we proceed into the scriptures, knowing that my theory can not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, I intend only to raise the possibility that man's physical existence on this Earth is limited because of the eating of red meat by our earliest ancestors, and that was the means that God used to limit the physical existence of sinful mankind. The scriptures clearly indicate that when Adam was created, God commanded that man and beast should eat certain foods and abstain from others. Man's disobedience of the commandment of God, leading to the disbelief of God's Word, was the original sin committed by man, and brought on a spiritual death, but I believe that the possibility exists that the forbidden fruit was in fact certain meat that brought on the eventual physical death of man's body.

In the Bible, Genesis chapter one verse twenty nine, it says that God gave man "every herb bearing seed" and "every tree in which the fruit bears its own seed" for food. It goes on to say in verse thirty that this same food source was to be for all the other living creatures on Earth also. God said absolutely nothing about man or the other living creatures on the Earth to eat each other. He had supplied them with all they needed to sustain their life by providing them with the fruit of the ground.

God did not create the animals to be a food source for mankind. As Genesis chapter two verses eighteen thru twenty tell us, God created the animals to keep the man company so he would not be alone, to be a helper for him and not a part of his diet. But it turned out that the animals did not provide the companionship that man needed, so God then created a woman to provide for man what the animals could not do.

Then the Bible tells us that one of the Beasts in the garden, called the serpent, came to Eve and convinced her that the fruit of the forbidden tree was good for food, and what God said about them dying if they ate it, was not true. So Eve ate of the fruit and since she didn't die, Adam ate also. Well eventually they both did die, and as I previously stated, since their bodies were created to last forever, it took several hundred years to die of what they ate.

I believe that it is possible, that what they ate was the meat of one of the animals of the garden that was brought to them by the serpent. Why it was called a tree, I do not know. Maybe the word tree was a general term given to describe a number of living things at that time. I also offer that this animal was of a kind with red meat, or meat that the animal's blood was mixed in with it. As we go along examining other scriptures, you'll see why I offer this as an explanation of this being red meat. As to why, in part, I offer this as being one of the animals of the garden, lets look at what the fourteenth verse of the third chapter says.

God told the serpent that he was to be cursed above all the other animals on Earth, because of what he did. Then God changed his makeup, and modified his body so he would have to crawl on his belly from then on. You see, I think that the serpent killed one or more of the other animals and brought the meat to Adam and Eve to eat. Then God, in order to prevent him from ever doing that again, made him physically incapable of it, changed his body into one that could never again subdue a larger animal, to kill and eat it. Then as a final act, before expelling the man and woman from the garden, God made them clothes out of animal skins. It's possible that God used the skins of the animal, or animals, that they ate the meat of.

Some teach that God killed some animals and made them coats from the animal skins. And in doing so, provided an atonement for their sins with the shed blood of those animals. Well I have two problems with accepting that theory. First, if an atonement had been provided for them, why then didn't God forgive them and impose no other punishment for their wrong doing? God had put a punishment upon the woman in child bearing and upon the man in raising crops from the ground. Then secondly, I don't believe that God would have killed some innocent animals to provide clothes for the man and woman. It’s possible that God used the skins of the animals that the serpent killed because they were readily available, and if they had not been available, a God who had created all things could have provided clothing from some other source, or simply created some covering for them. But yet, another theory could be considered. Since the shedding of innocent blood was a part of the first sin being committed, if you accept the eating of meat theory, then God could have also shed the blood of an innocent animal to atone for the sin committed by them.

Another incident that occurred that could be used to support the eating of meat theory was the narrative of Cain and Abel and the offering which they brought to the Lord. Genesis chapter four and verses three thru five say, that Cain brought an offering of the fruit of the ground, but Abel brought of the firstborn of his flock, again thru the shedding of innocent blood. But in this case, the shedding of innocent blood was accepted by God, but the offering of the fruit of the ground was not. Since it is commonly understood that the same spirit that was in the serpent was also in Cain, in order to avoid additional curses from God, because of the first slaying of an animal, the spirit led Cain to bring what he thought God deemed acceptable food, the fruit of the ground. But what he didn't consider, that Abel did realize, was that this offering was for atonement for their sins and needed to be the same as God had demonstrated to them previously, the shedding of innocent blood.

So there is the possibility that could be considered. The forbidden fruit that Adam and Eve ate could have been the meat of one of the animals of the garden. This meat was brought to Eve and the serpent demonstrated to Eve that it was good for food, so she tried it, even though God had told them that the fruit of the ground, which bore its own seed, was to be their food. God told Adam that he would die if he ate of the forbidden fruit, and he did die. The results of this act was passed down through all of the generations after Adam and caused the curse of death to fall on everyone after him unless they did what was needed to, once again, obtain eternal life. Ironically, the first sin could have been caused by the shedding of innocent blood, and so was the atonement for that sin.

One additional event that occurred, offering evidence that God did not intend for man to include meat in his diet, is covered in the narrative of Noah as he prepared the Ark for its journey. In chapter six of Genesis, God instructed Noah to take all of the animals into the Ark, and told him to also take of the "food that is eaten". And Said that this food was to be for Noah and his family and for all of the animals. Once again God intended for Noah and his family to eat only of the fruit of the ground and not the meat of the animals. Just like when God put Adam in the garden and gave him the fruit of the ground for food, He intended for Noah to observe the same thing. God said nothing to Noah about using those animals to supplement his diet, He intended for Noah to eat only what He had provided for Adam and Eve in the beginning.

The next thing that we will consider as a possibility, is the reason that the eating of that certain meat caused the physical death then and has continued in subsequent generations. In the fourth verse of the ninth chapter of Genesis, God said that man was not to eat flesh that has life and blood. I believe that when the translators of the Bible came to verses three and four of this chapter, this being the very first scripture plainly dealing with the eating of living creatures, they encountered a dilemma which the general populous of the church world, in that period of time, would not accept. For there is no question that verse four forbids the eating of the flesh of living animals and of humans. In verse three, it was translated that: "every moving thing that lives shall be meat for you". This was completely inconsistent with everything that God had said about food up until that time. So I challenge the translation of this particular scripture based upon the consistency of God's Word.

The translators very heavily added words to the translation of this verse, as I believe, to cause it to say what they wanted it to say. Without the added words, a word to word translation of this verse could be saying that: Every moving thing that lives is not food for you, only the green herbs have I wholly given to you. This would then fit in with exactly what the next verse says about the eating of living flesh. This is without a doubt one of those occasions when the translators translated the scripture to conform to the way the Church Fathers of that day interpreted it. For if they would have translated the scriptures for King James and his royalty back in 1611 and said that the eating of meat was against God's will, they would have been thrown into the prison.

Take for an example, when the children of Israel were on their journey out of the land of Egypt. When they became hungry and pleaded with Moses for something to eat, God sent them Manna from Heaven, which was actually bread and not meat. This bread gave them everything they needed to sustain their life and strengthen them. But after that, they complained that they were tired of the bread and wanted meat like they had back in Egypt. So God sent them meat and when they ate it, they died. The bread brought life and the meat brought death.

The book of Leviticus tells how God warned Israel about killing one of their animals for some other purpose than to offer it as a sacrifice to Him. It is obvious that God did not intend for them to use any living animals to be their food source. He specifically warned them about eating red meat, that meat which had blood mingled with it. For in verse ten and eleven of the seventeenth chapter of Leviticus He said: whoever eats any manner of blood will be cut off from his people, saying that the life of a living animal is in the blood. Oh but you say that is not what God said? You think that all He was talking about was the drinking of blood? God didn't use the word drink, He said eat. If you eat red meat, the red part of it is the blood. God said what He meant, to not eat or consume blood in any manner. The original Hebrew used the word "akal" which means to eat and not to drink. If God would have said to not drink, they would have used the Hebrew word "shathah" which means to drink. So don't interpret it some other way besides what it actually says. It should be obvious that God forbid them to eat the meat that had blood in it, because the life of all living flesh is in the blood.

So it is obvious that God intended for man to eat the kind of food that comes from the ground, as He told Adam and as He demonstrated to Israel when He sent them bread from Heaven. But if any man ate any manner of blood, he would be cut off from the people. And that's what happened to Adam and Eve and all the many generations since them, we are all cut off from our people by the death of our physical bodies.

So is it possible that the forbidden food in the garden was the meat of one of the animals? Were the words used for tree and fruit symbolic and actually referred to an animal and its meat? Could the consuming of blood into our bodies be the cause of the eventual deterioration and physical death? Why else would God have forbidden the people to eat blood? Did God originally intend for Adam and Eve to live forever in the bodies that He created for them?

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