Is it unhealthy to eat pork?

Scripture: Isaiah 66:15-17
Is it unhealthy to eat pork? Pork takes the longest to digest, it has a high salt content, and it has much disease. There is plenty of research on the problems with pork.
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Caller:  Hi.  I have a question.  I’m doing pork as a science project. 

Pastor Doug:  Uh-huh

Caller:  And I’ve been on the Internet and I’ve been looking up stuff on pork and I’ve basically found positive stuff.

Pastor Doug:  Uh-huh

Caller:  And so I’m trying to – what I’ve heard really is that um – they have gone and done tests on mummies, and stuff of that sort and I was wondering if there’s anything that you could give me information on that would help me to find things, you know, about disease, and that kind of stuff.

Pastor Doug:  Well now Joanna, the University of Manchester in England did a number of tests on mummies that had been retrieved from Egypt and they discovered that some of them had died from Trichinosis.

Caller:  Right.

Pastor Doug:  If you’re finding positive things about pork on the Internet, it’s probably because it’s coming from the meat industry itself.

Caller:  I think it is.

Pastor Doug:  But yeah, well that would be expected.  I mean there’s a big advertising campaign to try to get people to eat more pork because as a culture, Americans are starting to turn away from pork as they discover the problems with it.

Any doctor, no matter what his religious convictions are, will freely confess that, of the meats that you eat, pork is probably one of the most detrimental.  For one reason, it takes the longest to digest.  It has the highest salt content.  It is the most dangerous when it has to do with disease.

If you want to do a science project, here’s something that you’ll find very fascinating.

Caller:  Ok.

Pastor Doug:  You go to the market and buy a pork chop, right off the shelf.

Caller:  Uh-huh.

Pastor Doug:  Take a thin sample of that, put it on a slide for a microscope, and look at it.  You will see that it is swarming with living vermin – all kinds of creatures and critters and bacteria.

Caller:  Yoh!!

Pastor Doug:  Absolutely!  From the time a pig is slaughtered in the slaughterhouse until it gets to the market, nothing is done to clean or to sterilize or to kill the bacteria.

That’s why the U.S. Department of Agriculture does not grade pork the way they do beef.

Caller:  Right.  Right.  That’s what I heard.

Pastor Doug:  I used to sell beef and you could buy USDA Choice, Prime, Good, whatever the grades where.  You don’t usually buy Fair they turn that into hamburger.

But you can’t buy graded pork because the U.S. Department of Agriculture prints leaflets telling people if you’re going to eat it, you must cook it thoroughly to kill all of the trichina larvae.

Caller:  Right.

Pastor Doug:  So, when God says in His word that pigs are an abomination, they’re scavengers, they are not to be eaten, He knew what He was talking about.

Co-Host:  Um-hum.

Caller:  Right – yes.

Pastor Doug:  You know, I used to feed pigs and uh, they’ll eat anything.  They eat each other.  It’s the truth that mother sows, if their babies die, they will devour them.  They are scavengers.  God did not make them to be eaten.

Of course, He didn’t make any animal to be eaten but He said if you’re going to eat animals, eat the clean ones.  And God holds forth pigs as the prime example – specimen number one – of unclean creatures.

Have you read what it says in, I think it’s Isaiah 65, verse 17?  You know what I’m talking about? 

Caller:  No.

Pastor Doug:  Let me see if I’m going – it might even be Isaiah 66 – all of a sudden I’m having a lapse here.  Let me just double check.  I think it’s Isaiah 66 verse 17.  Let me grab that for you real quick.  Here it is.  Well let me read verse 16.

Write this down, Isaiah 66 verse 16 ah we’ll read verse 15 too:  “For behold, the Lord will come with fire, and with His chariots like a whirlwind, to render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire.” – Ok it’s talking about the Lord coming, right?

Caller:  Ok.

Pastor Doug:  “…For by fire and by his sword will the Lord plead with all flesh: and the slain of the Lord shall be many.  They that sanctify themselves, and purify themselves [these are people that are not sanctified by the Lord – they’re doing it themselves] in the gardens behind one tree in the midst, eating swine’s flesh, and the abomination, and the mouse, shall be consumed together, saith the Lord.” [King James Version].

That’s pretty powerful Scripture.  It says when the Lord comes, these people who are hiding eating mice – and it puts rats and mice and pigs in the same category – will be consumed together.

And then folks say, ‘Well God doesn’t care.’  Well I beg to respectfully disagree!  I think that the Lord does care, and He makes it very clear in His word.  Our bodies are the Temple of the Holy Spirit and we’re not to bring unclean animals into that Temple as an offering.  Ok?

Caller:  Ok thank you.

 

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