Fasting & Blood (Lent & Acts 15)

Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent (26 Feb. 2023)

God tells us in Leviticus 17:14:
“Since the life of every creature is its blood…You are not to eat the blood of any creature, because the life of every creature is its blood; whoever eats it must be cut off.”

When God is speaking of life in the blood, He is referring to the spirit – the animating life giving spirit that God breathed into animals and man at creation. In accordance with the ruling of the First Council in Jerusalem as recorded in Acts 15, and reconfirmed at the 4th and 7th Ecumenical Councils, the command for Christians to always abstain from eating blood is a moral and permanently binding precept.

Zechariah 9:7:
“I will remove the blood from their mouths and the abhorrent things from between their teeth. Then they too will become a remnant for our God; they will become like a clan in Judah”.