Last Sunday at church, we had a service of blessing for a new marriage. Afterwards, we enjoyed the standard meal: meat, sugar beans and mealies, and potato salad, washed down with Coca-Cola. After that, one of the servers set down at our table a plate of uncooked, red cow livers.
"Can we eat it like this?" the pastor said. "No, I think we must braai [cook over the fire/barbecue] this."
He continued, "Some of our people eat it just like this. They just sprinkle a little salt on it."
"Do you ever eat it raw?" our guest visiting from North America chimed in, asking the pastor.
"I used to," he said, "before I got saved. After I got saved, I read in the Bible that we are not supposed to eat meat with the blood still in it, because it says that the life is in the blood" (Lev. 17:10ff).
The pastor's comments illustrate how the Old Testament, from which the above reference is drawn, can be good news--gospel--to people from traditional cultures. Set against many of his culture's practices, the Old Testament's dietary laws and admonitions against consulting the spirits of the dead, for example, constitute an alternative way of living in the world--one that leads away from death and towards life (Deut 30:19).
Consequently, although the pastor "got saved" in the name of Jesus, the central figure of the New Testament, he experiences the Old also as Jesus' story.
-Joe
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