My Goose Is Cooked
“Meat is murder. Tasty, tasty murder.”
Finally received my hard copy of God’s Kitchen: Theology You Can Eat & Drink.
“The Old Testament is a violent, bloody book, but the more we modern Christians neglect it, the more our gospel loses its teeth. This little book will call you out, cut you up, lift you up, and set you on fire. It begins where all spiritual meat does: not at the dinner table, not in the kitchen, nor even at the market. It begins in the abattoir. The God of the Old Testament is a butcher only because the Christ of the New Testament is a chef.”
Here’s what’s on the menu:
The best cuts 1
Ingredients and Method
The knife drawer 11
1 Cooking as eschatology 29
The eschatological feast is the one where the intimacy prefigured by marriage is actually between every member of the body, and thus, not in this life. It is a festal variety beyond our current capacity.
2 Postmillennial suffering 37
The suffering of the saints is not the mark of an irredeemable world, but the very means of its transformation.
3 The whole bloody Bible 45
The “last days” are only ever the last days of the old order.
4 Love in the abstract 51
As we become living sacrifices, the Sacraments take on flesh.
5 Eat local and die 55
If we insist on a policy of “Eat Local,” and confuse the Lord’s Table with the Love Feast, the Gentiles eventually come, not as guests, but as scavengers.
6 Knowing as we are known 65
The child questions the command with “But why?” The father replies, “Because I am your father.” Adam’s sin was relational.
7 Knowledge and wisdom 73
In some profound way, knowledge is singular but wisdom is plural.
8 Omega males 77
What men really desire is to follow other men…
9 True gravity 81
If we endure faithfully, we bring gravity with us out of the grave.
10 The expendables 87
As my grandfather said, “The trials of life will make you bitter or better.” Either way, you are food.
11 Behind closed doors 95
Doctor Jesus’ X-rays can be a midlife crisis or a call to martyrdom.
12 Fasting as sacrament 101
Baptism and the Lord’s table come from the body of Jesus. Fasting is a sacrament we can give from our own bodies…
13 Jacob’s hollow 107
Unlike Adam, Jacob realized that every serpentine challenge came from the hand of God. He crushed them through crafty obedience and gained great wisdom.
14 Joints and marrow 117
Fighting sin and resting in Christ are two edges of the same blade.
15 Upon this rock 121
It was the bloody rock of priesthood that gave Jesus the keys to death and Sheol to set the captives free.
16 Binding and loosing 125
True apostolic succession is a willingness to be a living sacrifice.
17 Silence of the Lamb 129
Someone carries the curse so that history can move on freely. Someone is bound so that somebody else may be loosed.
18 Creation and Communion 135
God’s creative process is sacrificial. He is a butcher who tears things apart. It is also culinary. He is a chef who puts things together in new ways.
19 Deus ex machina 143
As a “human shield,” a firmament of flesh, the office of Mediator is a position of passivity towards God, and activity towards Creation.
20 Revivals and farming 151
The societal fruits of the great revivals were exactly the kinds of things the (non-revivalist) proponents of dominion theology crave to see in our time.
21 A cast of thousands 157
Could it take anything less than a cast of thousands—or millions—to picture the work of Christ? And perhaps we are still in the early days.
22 The glory are we 165
What’s on the table is not what’s glorious. It’s just a memorial, a token, the foundation plaque on the living house.
23 Eye and tooth 169
An Adam governed by God’s Law is an Adam fit to govern.
24 Horns of Moses 173
What was Moses reflecting? The great white throne of Greater Solomon, of course, the brilliant legal glory of Yahweh. Solomon’s throne was covered in ivory.
25 Bone and flesh 179
Touching a bone made an Israelite unclean. Burning bones upon Jeroboam’s altars defiled them. This was not because bones were unholy but because they were already holy.
26 Skin for skin 187
As in Eden, atonement was an unfair barter, an unequal exchange, in which God was happy to be ripped off.
27 Birds and beasts 197
The blessing for obedience to the Covenant was dominion over the beasts… The Covenant curse, however, was to be eaten by them.
28 The greatest consumer 203
Under the New Covenant, the Church Herself becomes the greatest “scavenger” of all time.
29 Spat out at Jesus’ table 209
Jesus desires His new people to be fire and water, coming out of Egypt.
30 Kids in the kitchen: Passover in the motherland 215
Molech was simply another dragon hijacking the offspring of the woman with an offer of certain food.
31 Seed, flesh and skin 223
In this shedding of immaturity, in obedience to the Covenant, Man is to outdo both tree and serpent.
32 Half the blood 231
Jesus’ blood covered the believers, but we must never forget that His blood was also avenged upon those who refused to believe.
33 Recipe for disaster 237
Israel worked in God’s Garden and served in God’s kitchen, at the gate of the heavenly court. Consequently, hers is a long history of meat and vegetables, Abels and Cains.
34 No more spoon-feeding 241
Every believer is now expected to learn to feed himself. This is a glorious, albeit at times messy, process.
35 Counterfeit virtue 247
In the toolbox of Creation, alcohol is a powersaw.
36 Incantation and incarnation 257
Pharaoh will feed divine meals to his gods, and then flay the Hebrews. Caesar will cut goats’ gizzards, and then torch Christians. This is power religion. The faces of these gods are permanently hidden.
37 The sun of righteousness 265
Samson prefigures not so much the crucifixion of Christ, but the sufferings of Christ “filled up” in the Firstfruits Church.
38 The forbidden feast 269
We are bidden to the forbidden feast, a table where bread and wine are not only served to us as priest-kings, but irretrievably mixed together inside us, nourishment and shalom united at last.
39 Do not harm the oil and the wine 275
Animals can survive on food alone. Men also require a steady diet of truth.
40 Being Cornucopia 281
The horn of plenty marries the curse upon Adam and the curse upon Eve and unites them as a blessing.
41 Out of the eater 289
God is breaking wineskins that we hoped would last forever.
42 Breakfast at dawn 301
In Peter’s recommission, and in ours, there is a call to sacrificial life. There is a transfixing redness to the New Covenant dawn.
43 The hidden power of Groundhog Day 305
Godly conversations around the dinner table with your kids end up toppling godless empires.
44 Corpus Christi 311
Even the most mundane chore is the history of the world hidden in a riddle.
45 Eschatology as cooking 321
We want quick judgments from the prophets, but instead He invites us to take our time and swill the delicate flavors of every single variety of grape in the Vineyard of Wrath.
46 Figures transfigured 329
In one sense, we get our wings in the same way as The Very Hungry Caterpillar did.
