I watched with that strange mixture of fascination and disgust, as the nature documentary showed footage of a cheetah stalking, chasing, and taking down a young antelope. It’s hard not to marvel at the speed and agility of these mighty cats of the African plains. But there was also that instinctive reaction of sorrow for the little antelope, a wishing he could have gotten away, lived another day. No matter how many times we hear “The Circle of Life” we still feel the wrongness of predation. Though we’ve had millennia of nature being “red in tooth and claw” we still can’t get over the shock of one animal killing and eating another.
And we are no different. Sure, we don’t hide in the bushes and stalk our prey. We simply stop by the local grocery and pick up a few pounds of steak for dinner. And I love steak! I love the flavor, I love the texture. I love everything about it. So it was with some consternation that recently the thought entered my mind that there would be no meat in the new heavens and the new earth. How could the perfection of all things not include a steak dinner!?
But you may be asking, “What leads you to this conclusion in the first place? Why do you think there will be no eating of meat in heaven?” I will readily admit there are no verses that state this explicitly. Rather, I believe it is clearly inferred. To begin with, I believe that animal death and predation are the results of the Fall and not an original design. In Genesis 1:29 – 30, the Lord clearly lays out His dietary provision for both man and animals – plants!
“Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.”
Now, this does not say that meat may not be eaten, so how do I come to that conclusion? Because death came with the Fall. In order for meat to be eaten, there must first be the death of the animal. Plants propagate themselves through a death-like shedding. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24). This is not true of animals and humans; dying, our line comes to an end. Before Adam and Eve fell there was no death, not the death of those things that have “the breath of life” anyway. God had warned Adam that in the day he ate of the forbidden tree he would surely die. And after the deed was done God said, “… you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Gen. 3:19) The steady pull of the grave had begun. Death had entered the world.
And yet, no sooner had Man fallen than God clothed their nakedness with the skin of a slaughtered animal. What must it have been like to see the dead beast lying on the ground in a pool of its own blood? And yet they knew their nakedness and now knew they needed to be clothed. The fig leaves they had sewn would soon wither and fall away. They needed a covering that would last. As a harbinger of the ultimate “clothing” God would provide, He covered them through the death of another.
We don’t read about food again until the 9th chapter of Genesis, after the floodwaters had subsided. Now the Lord ordains the eating of animals for food. “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.” (Gen. 9:3) Killing and eating animals for food was officially sanctioned by God. At this seminal moment in the history of redemption, the Lord specifically ordains the eating of meat. Why? I believe He intended the eating of meat as a sort of primer for how this “last enemy” – death, would ultimately be consumed itself with the death of Another.
Later the Lord would codify animal death into the very ethos of Israel’s understanding of redemption, with the sacrificial system. And as the smoke from a thousand bovines wafted into the air – a smoke so different from the pagan, human sacrifices all around them – the law was reminding them continually that another must die for their sins. Death, forgiveness, death, provision, death, redemption.
But even in the midst of this God-ordained pattern of death and destruction, a prophet speaks of a coming day, when the Offspring of Jesse would come to reign and death would be no more. The slaying of one animal to satisfy another would cease to be.
“The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” Isaiah 11:6-7
So even as I savor the flavor of steak, and am nourished by it, I can’t help thinking that God intends it to remind me of the death of His Son, Who gave Himself up for His church that He might “nourish and cherish” her (Eph. 5:25-29), that there is eschatology wrapped up in this NY Strip, and that the death that made this meat possible is to remind me of that greater death that provided eternal life for me.
