Sometimes I think about God's presence in our modern lives. I ask myself, "Did God create junk food?" or "If he created it, why is it so bad for us?" And I have trouble answering this question...
It's difficult for me to weigh the fact that we are broken as a society, which makes so many things we do motivated by our sinful desires, and the fact that we are very blessed by God. For example, think about the medical advancements we have made in the last century. Surely the fact that we have so many methods to diagnose and treat many illnesses, and so many brilliant, questioning minds pursuing these new methods is a blessing from God. I think our desire to make medical discoveries does not arise from our sinful nature, it arises from a Godly desire to find justice, dignity, life, and health for all.
However, I think our broken nature has caused us to twist some medical procedures for sinful things. For example, plastic surgery is a wonderful method to give people who have been maimed by accidents, illnesses, or congenital deformities a chance to have functional bodies that are more aligned to what our society considers normal. However, many doctors have capitalized on performing plastic surgery on men and women who simply want to be "perfect." These men and women are building their identities on their bodies or on how they look, and not on God, which is a sin. Or, another example, our knowledge of the human body as it creates another human being has significantly increased in the last century. We have discovered so many ways to visualize a fetus, diagnose possible illnesses a fetus may have, and even perform surgeries on fetuses. We have found how women can better care for their bodies while they carry a fetus, and have devised alternative ways to conceive for women who are having trouble getting pregnant. And all of this knowledge can be applied to women who (sometimes) sinfully wish to NOT be pregnant. In the controversial case of abortion, the knowledge we have about how our bodies create life is twisted into how we can get rid of it. We can visualize the fetus in amazing ways--but sinfully, this is done to determine how old a fetus is, so that we can know if it's ok to eradicate it, because, at some arbitrary point, the fetus goes from being something terminable to something sacred. Therefore, these amazing discoveries about pregnancy and prenatal care--blessings from God--have been turned upside-down by many people's sinful nature to be in control.
In another ironic twist, many of the medical advancements we have made are to prevent and treat illnesses like strokes, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity, which are caused most of the time by our worship of food and mindlessness when eating.
I think the advancements made in the food industry may be the same as the advancements we have seen in medical fields. Over time, we have discovered so many wonderful technologies to harvest foods efficiently, preserve foods to prevent waste, grow foods on a large scale, process foods to make them take different forms, prepare ingredients in different ways to make something healthy, sustaining, and delicious. I think these are God-given technological advancements. However, they are often twisted by our sinful desires. For example, we have the technology to create larger farms and harvest larger crops to feed a greater amount of people, but we have done so in ways that are not environmentally sustainable and are cruel to animals. We do this just so that people who don't need more can have more, cheaper. In this way, companies that own the farms are feeding their sinful desire to make a quick buck, and people who buy the products are sinfully taking it in excess without being informed consumers. In other ways, things are added to foods to make them tastier or to preserve, but make them much less healthy. This is sort of twisting the original purpose of the food into something that feeds our sinful nature for decadence and excess, and causes us to worship the food rather than the One who created it. So, in this way, while how the food industry is sometimes a blessing from God, I think that junk food is not necessarily a gift from God. I think our desire to make and consume junk food arises from sin, and the blessings we see within the food industry have been turned upside-down to feed our sinful nature.
Genesis 9:3 says, "Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything." As this article states, food is a tangible expression of God's love for us. God has given us land to tend, animals to use, and brilliant, questioning minds that have made new ways to process, store, and distribute foods. However, God intended for us to be good stewards of the Earth and of our bodies (Proverbs 21:20). The use of technological advancements in the food industry should not lead to destruction of ecosystems, environments, or the health of consumers. That is why I need to be more careful about understanding my food sources and ingredients in my food. I need to diligently check how often I am eating decadent foods that may be slowly causing me to become unhealthy. My sinful nature demands decadence, and the enemy distracts me and tempts me to eat and drink mindlessly with no cognizance of what I'm feeding my body. But my spiritual nature should command my physical body, and therefore I should be more disciplined, prayerful and thoughtful about my food consumption and exercise habits.
No comments:
Post a Comment