Why do many Christians eat pork when God says it's unclean?

[Vicomte13]

Jesus was very critical of the Pharisees for being hypocrites for making void the Word of God, so it is very problematic to interpret him as turning around and hypocritically making void the Word of God.

Jesus IS God. He is the lawgiver. He has the power to make law, and to change law. No other man did, or does. This is axiomatic.

You persist in the error of treating the Law of Moses as The Law for Mankind. It is not that on its very face. It TELLS you, and every reader, that it's not a Law for Mankind, but a Land Contract for Hebrews at Sinai and their lineal descendants. Those are the only people covered by it ON ITS OWN WORDS AND TERMS.

You extend your error by thinking that the Law of the Jews had anything whatever to do with life after death, eternal life, final judgment. It had nothing to do with any of those things, which were never revealed by God to the Hebrews at any point during their sojourn, and which is completely absent from the Law of the Jews. The sole promise God made to the Jews was: keep this land contract with me, and you get a secure farm in Israel in this life, and prosperity. Break it, and I will hammer it and drive you out.

It does not apply to every biological descendant of Jacob. The only promise is a farm in Israel. The Hebrew living in Norway in 1000 BC cannot make the pilgrimages and is thus cut off from the covenant. Nor could he enjoy a farm, not being there.

The Law of Jesus, under the New Covenant - THIS is what reveals life after death and eternal life, and the standards of judgment, and it does so very explicitly. Jesus says what you have to do to be acceptable, what you have to do to be forgiven.

The tragic error of the Judaizer is to take a land contract which had no revelation of eternal life nor any promise of it, and try to turn it into a General Law for Humanity, and thereby use ITS archaic, single-culture, single land, land-contract terms into an overarching moral rule - and thereby erase the ACTUAL Law of God for Mankind, which was given in its entirety by YHWH to Adam and Noah, and then by Jesus.

The Land Contract with Israel is not a Law for anybody but the Jews. The Law was given by YHWH to Noah (and is short), and was fully revealed by Jesus to anybody who would listen.

The Pharisees, and you, prefer the Land Contract of Sinai. So you call that The Law for Mankind. It isn't. It never was. Gentiles were never under it, before or after, and Jews never got eternal life out of it, for that was not on offer.

This is all quite obvious, really. Just go back and read the Torah. It TELLS you to whom it applies, and what is promised. Then read Jesus, he tells you to whom HIS precepts apply, and what HE promises.

The former is for the Hebrews at Sinai and their descendants, and it promises a farm in this life, in Israel, only for good behavior. The latter is for mankind, and it promises a successful final trial, and a room in the City of God. This is not hard to see, and you don't have to do backflips to try to make the Jewish Land Contract a general law for mankind. It is not, and it never ever was at any point in all of history.

 

[Vicomte13]

Again, this is strange coming from you when you've been hand waving all my objections to your interpretation and are expecting me to just accept it.

Your objections are particular to you. The Catholic Church, which is 75% of Christianity, and which has existed since Peter, has never believed what you believe. None of the Orthodox Churches have ever believed what you believe. The Lutheran Church, first of the Protestants, does not believe what you believe. Nor does the Baptist Church. Nor does the Presbyterian Church, nor the Methodist, nor the Episcopalian. Not one tenth of one percent of all of the Christians believe what you believe in this regard.

There has been no hand waving here. I'm just pointing at the words and the images: "Jesus made all foods clean". It is you who is saying that "foods" doesn't mean foods. Jesus said that "Nothing that goes into a man's mouth makes him unclean". You're disregarding this and saying that it doesn't mean what it says and what it obviously means. God lowers a sheet three times, and Peter refuses to eat three times, and God rebukes him three times. Every Christian who has read this for two thousand years sees the obvious meaning of that, and that is precisely why the entirety of the Christian Church - and even the Arian heretics and the Gnostics at the fringes - all understood this to mean Christians can eat anything. It's why we always have.

But you, on your own interpretation, have decided that everybody who has read these passages, all of these billions of Christians over all of these two millennia, have all gotten this wrong. And you say that your arguments are not addressed. No, they have been addressed, over and over again. You're just obstinate.

Let me ask you something: have you ever had a major healing miracle? Has God ever reached down and changed the outcome of an event in a major and obvious departure of the laws of physics? Has God ever spoken to you directly, out loud, shown you things? He has done these things for me. Do you think that God would have done that if he saw me covered in filth because of the morning bacon or the Passover Ham?

Has he done anything like that for you?

Is the reason you are obstinate about this is because God spoke to you directly, out loud from the air, and told you to preach this that you are preaching? Or is this the result of your own reasoning on the matter?

It is the latter, isn't it?

Obviously.

Now, I've said before and I will say it again: you do you. Nobody cares if you don't eat pork or oysters, really. People care that you teach others not to, because it is bad teaching, but if you feel compelled, then do so. But don't wonder so much why it is nobody engages you. They do, but you redefine all the words to suit you - "food", "clean", "all" and "do not". Red is blue to you, and nothing and no-one can bring you down off that pillar.

So be it. But did God tell you with his own voice that you must take this stand? Did open miracle on the subject drive you to it? Or is this just an intellectual opinion of yours? Obviously you have to live by what you believe. Obviously nobody can persuade you to do otherwise - I certainly do not care what you eat. It's no skin off my nose.

If you're happy following the dietary rules, if they make you feel closer to God, then do so. If you teach that it is necessary, and all of Christianity has been all wrong about this for 2000 years, don't expect people to agree with you. You're committed to your view, therefore carry on.

 

[Vicomte13]

We must be careful not to take something that was only against obeying man as being against obeying God, but Christians have systematically not been careful to do this.

You must be careful not to take a rule that a certain people in a certain place and time were told to obey, and generalize that to a law for mankind. The Sinai Covenant was a land deal for Hebrews, not a law for mankind that offers eternal life.

The implications of reading it wrong is No salvation for the Chinese (for they have to eat pork), and no salvation for the Arctic (for they can neither keep kosher nor keep the Sabbath).

 

[Vicomte13]

If certainly can't be done if you give up before you try.

I've tried. Many have. You are unpersuadable, as you always were. Can I give up now?

 

[Shempster]

Shellfish is also unclean under the same law: no oysters, clams, crab, lobster, shrimp. No eel. The shellfish cannot be extracted from seaweed with certainty either, so no seaweed.

And milk and meat must not be consumed together: no cheeseburgers.

Fortunately, Jesus knew that if those were the requirements to follow him, that most of the world would reject him and ignore him. China, for example - pork is the primary source of protein in half the country. China can never become Muslim on account of this alone: half the population would literally starve.

God's point was to get the Good News to everybody, which is why Jesus made it clear that there are absolutely no food restrictions whatever on Christians. All of the other religions in the world have food restrictions, which is simply idolatry or cultural stubbornness on their part, and which limits their ability to reach all men.

Consider some of my own ancestors, the Saami. We live in the far northern reaches of Scandinavia, Finland and Karelia, in the land of the Midnight Sun. God said to fill the whole land, and that includes the land north of the Arctic Circle. We did.

Now, there are a few features of the far North that bear on religion. The first is that agriculture is impossible. No farmable crops can be grown there. Tundra can be eaten, as tea and as a condiment, but it cannot sustain human life. 98% of the traditional diet for the Saami was, by the very nature of the place, animal-based. And a very limited range of animals too: seals, whales, shellfish some seabird eggs. More to the South, in the tundra, the meat and milk of reindeer.

With seals and whales, the primary source of nutrition is the fat. It is from animal fat that the Saami traditionally derived virtually all of the Vitamin C.

Moreover, when the Sun goes down a certain evening in winter, it does not rise again for over two months. The Polar Night is long. In the Summer, the midnight sun, likewise, makes a day that is over a month long.

A year of solar days in the extreme north Saamiland is only about 160 days long, because one day can be as long as 126 days, and the Polar Night is up to 77 days.

What this means is that nobody who follows the Law of Moses can ever live in Saamiland. God has designed Nature there to utterly exclude the possibility of Jewish habitation there. Animal fat, and the meat and fat of whales and seals is treif. Shellfish is treif. And of course, if the Polar Night or the Midnight Sun falls on a Friday, every Jew will starve and freeze to death for want of work long before that Saturday of 77 days, or of 160 days, ends.

Were the Law of Sinai really God's Law for all mankind, were Christians bound to it, then the Saami cannot ever be Christian, for God has made the Far North inaccessible to anybody who keeps kosher or who keeps the Sabbath according to the rules.

Of course God intended for mankind to fill all the land, including Saamiland. And he intended for the Saami to follow Jesus too. Which is why Jesus made animal fat clean, and why Sabbathkeeping is only a requirement under the Jewish law, not a requirement of Jesus.

Were it otherwise, then God did not send Jesus for all of mankind, for the Saami are excluded by the Law of Moses.

Truth is, the Law of Moses was just for the Hebrews, and was designed for the local conditions of Israel, not the whole world.

Truth is, Jesus made all foods clean so that all peoples could follow him. Truth is, Jesus did not require Sabbath-keeping, because otherwise the Saami and Inuit and all northern peoples would be excluded from his grace. And they're not.

I get where youre coming from but I was not trying to say that we must avoid pork (and all the shellfish too) to gain favor with God. I did not mean that at all.
What I said is that part of the law was most likely for health reasons. Its purpose was to keep their bodies free from the toxins in those meats.

 

[Vicomte13]

I get where youre coming from but I was not trying to say that we must avoid pork (and all the shellfish too) to gain favor with God. I did not mean that at all.
What I said is that part of the law was most likely meant so their bodies would not take in all of the toxins in its meat. Health-based.

You're certainly right about that, and YHWH even said so quite explicitly, to Moses, during the Exodus. It is written that God told Moses that if the Hebrews ate this way in the land he was giving them, that he would not afflict them with the diseases they experienced in Egypt. So, not only would the eating of kosher in Israel be prophylactic, obedience to the law would also please God, and reap the reward of God not sending disease to afflict the Israelites.

He never made a similar promise to anybody else.

Shellfish in the Eastern Mediterranean in the age before sewage treatment was a pretty filthy thing, and pigs raised there, in those hot and fetid conditions, was really parasite-ridden. Wild boar from the cold woods of Labrador is as clear of parasites as any deer meat, and the shellfish of the Norwagian fjords is cleaner of disease-causing elements than the cleanest cow in ancient Israel, but God wasn't leading the Hebrews out of Egypt into Labrador

 

[Soyeong]

No one has, and no one will. I certainly will not. I've told you what that language said. You have obstinately insisted that the language says what it does not say either in properly translated language or in Greek. You are insisting that people directly address your point.

I have talked about what the words mean, so the Greek supports my position.

Half of that is true: nobody has anything to say to you about it, because the fundamental premise upon which you base your belief is itself a fantasy. The language doesn't say what you say it says. It does not mean what you believe it means. Nobody can answer you, because nobody can get inside of your head to understand that when something says "blue", you see the word "red".

When I make a claim about what the words mean, and it is wrong, then it is not as difficult as you fantasize it will be to show that I am wrong. For example, I have claimed that the word translated as "clean" in Mark 7:19 is never used it the context of clean and unclean animals, so if I am wrong, then it should be rather easy to disprove that.

For my part, it's simple: if the rules of kosher and Sabbath are actually part of Christianity, and not merely limited to Jews, and expected by God, then God has rejected the Chinese - they cannot stop eating pork without about three hundred million deaths from starvation: it is a staple. And none of the traditonal people above the Artic Circle can ever be Christian. because it is physically impossible to live up there and keep kosher and keep Sabbath as written, unless one has a billion dollars and a house full of non-kosher Gentiles as support.

Nothing is forcing the Chinese to breed unclean animals for consumption rather than clean ones.

There were no clean animals in his vision.

It says that all kinds of animals were let down in his vision, so I do not see any grounds to limit this only to clean animals. If there were no unclean animals, then Peter would not have said that he had never eat any common animals or unclean animals, but would have simply said that he had never eaten anything unclean. Furthermore, if God would have rebuked him for referring to clean animals as unclean, not for referring to them as common.

The Greek words "koinos" and "akathartos" have distinct meanings and are not used interchangeably in the Bible, and God did not correct his use of the word "akathartos". "Akathartos refers to something that is unclean, but "koinos" is used only four times in the Septuagint as referring to things shared in common and is never used to refer to something that is unclean. In the NT, "koinos" is likewise used either to refer to things shared in common, but was also used to refer to things that are not part of God's Law, such in Mark 7:2 where the disciples were eating with common (koinos) hands and the Pharisees criticized them for not following their traditions, whereupon Jesus criticized the Pharisees for not following the command of God.

The purpose of the sheet being led down by four corners was that the animals were all in contact with each other at the center of the sheet, which according to Pharisaic traditions would mean that all of the clean animals had become common and unacceptable to eat, and by Peter saying that he had never eaten anything common, he was saying he had never violated this tradition. So the problem was this Pharisaic tradition and by extension the problem was the Pharisaic tradition that prohibited Jews from visiting or associating with Gentiles (Acts 10:28).

My ancestors could not have survived but for having a diet that was composed almost entirely of animal fat of unclean animals (whales and seals) for half the calendar year. There is categorically and absolutely NOTHING ELSE TO EAT in the cold season on the Arctic Ocean. You chew the fat, and are hale and hearty from doing so, or you die of starvation. You light a grease fire on the Saturday that lasts for two dark months, or you freeze to death. These things are so, hard-wired into the anatomy of the region.

There is no general prohibition of eating fat in the Mosaic Law.

Read the natural way, Jesus is all for these people, and there's no food rule or Sabbath rule that has anything to do with them. Follow Jesus and do as he said.

Read your way, Jesus is not for these people, because all of these specific rules for Jews are in fact for the whole world.

The followers of Jesus ought to follow his example, so it is between them and him how much they want to be his followers and how much they want to trust God about how they should live.

 

[Soyeong]

Throwing away pills might explain the anxiety over pork.

Imagine how much pork is on the average finger put into a mouth or almost anything that enters the mouth (or put on skin) for that matter. We should stop touching each other too I guess as no doubt the bacon is there also.

It's not about anxiety, but just the opposite, we don't have to be anxious about anything when we are trusting God to guide us in how to rightly live.

 

[eldios]

I understand that we are saved because of Jesus, and that it doesn't matter what type of food we put in our mouths, we are still saved... However, God says in the old testament that the pig is unclean and that we shouldn't eat it.

1 "The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, 2 “Say to the Israelites: ‘Of all the animals that live on land, these are the ones you may eat: 3 You may eat any animal that has a divided hoof and that chews the cud. 7 And the pig, because it parts the hoof and is cloven-footed but does not chew the cud, is unclean to you. 8 You shall not eat any of their flesh, and you shall not touch their carcasses; they are unclean to you.
-Leviticus 11​

16 For by fire will the Lord enter into judgment, and by his sword, with all flesh;
and those slain by the Lord shall be many.
17 “Those who sanctify and purify themselves to go into the gardens, following one in the midst, eating pig’s flesh and the abomination and mice, shall come to an end together, declares the Lord. – Isaiah 66
​

Not only that, but even the World Health Organization has now said that pork is a carcinogen... and there is plenty of information online about how pork is commonly contaminated with pathogenic bacteria (here's a good article) ...

So.... why do many Christians eat pork when God said it is unclean?

Update: after reading some wonderful and informative responses, I think my question really has to do with what "unclean" means. I was thinking it meant "not clean" and bad for health, and that God wanted his people to be healthy by not eating pigs and other animals that were bad for a persons health. This understanding of the word "unclean" may be incorrect. I'd appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

Everything we experience comes from the same exact source of Life called the Word of God. God uses the information called Satan and the beast to teach the visible human beings about the ways of the world and how to build false gods with their human hands. This is how God taught human beings how to clean their homes, take care of their bodies, eat good foods, etc. until He kills the flesh with disease, accidents, weather, earthquakes, lava flows, wars, murders, etc. during this temporary generation.

In the next generation, our bodies will never be killed by these things but we will be changing bodies from one dream to the next in our individual dreams. This way, we will learn that our bodies are not our true created existence.

 

[DrBubbaLove]

It's not about anxiety, but just the opposite, we don't have to be anxious about anything when we are trusting God to guide us in how to rightly live.

Am not the one here concerned about what goes into my mouth, other than volume which I need to control. Last we read of it in Scriptures only the Judaizers were worried about such things and the Apostles told people to chill out over it and if something offends another brother then do not do it in front of them. Am good with that and wouldn't serve bacon if you came to my house for a meal. I cannot guarantee you that touching something in my house might not get some part of the big in/on your body however.

 

[Another Lazarus]

Peter said his Hebrew ancestors could not even bear the Law, why would you, a gentile, even tried to do that. its absurd.

Acts 15:10 Now therefore why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?

28 For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things;

29 That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well. Fare ye well.



Jesus told us we cannot become holy by what we eat.

Matt 15:17 Do not you yet understand, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the toilet.



Jesus bless you all HaleluYAH

 

[Soyeong]

Peter said his Hebrew ancestors could not even bear the Law, why would you, a gentile, even tried to do that. its absurd.

Acts 15:10 Now therefore why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?

We must be careful not to take something that was only against obeying man as being against obeying God, so please show me where God's Law requires all Gentiles to become circumcised in order to become saved. God did not even require Jews to become circumcised for purpose of becoming saved, so if it was not required by God, then it is a man-made requirement, and by rejecting it the Jerusalem Council was upholding God's Law. On the other hand, if you can cite where God required all Gentiles to become circumcised in order to become saved, then please explain to me why should obey the Jerusalem Council on this matter rather than God.

The issue was that Isaiah 45:25 says that all Israel will be saved, so a number of Jews mistakenly thought this meant that Gentiles needed to become Jewish proselytes in order become saved, which involved circumcision, and which involved joining the group of people who agreed at Sinai to do everything that Moses said (Exodus 20:19, Deuteronomy 5:22-27). Moses had the authority to interpret the Law and by the 1st century those who had this authority passed down to them were referred to as sitting in Moses' seat and it had become a large body of Jewish oral laws, traditions, rulings, and fences which they taught were needed to be obeyed in order to become saved, and which Jesus referred to as placing a heavy burden on the people (Matthew 23:2-4). He certainly wasn't criticizing the Pharisees for instructing the people to do what God had commanded them. So by agreeing to become circumcised, Gentiles were becoming Jewish proselytes and agreeing to live as Jews according to all of their oral laws, and doing this all in order to become saved, and this is what the Jerusalem Council rejected, not the commands of the God that they followed.

In Matthew 15:2-3, Jesus was asked why his disciples broke the traditions of the elders and he responded by asking them why they broke the command of God for the sake of their tradition. He went on to say that for the sake of their tradition they made void the Word of God (Matthew 15:6), that they were worshiping God in vain because they taught as doctrines the commands of men (Matthew 15:8-9), and that they were hypocrites for setting aside the commands of God in order to establish their own traditions (Mark 7:6-9), so the role of these traditions was a major source of conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees, which continued between the followers of Jesus and the Pharisees, which came to a head in Acts 15 and Galatians. So the issue was not with God's Law, but with how the Pharisees were teaching to obey it.

According to Deuteronomy 30:11-14 and Romans 10:5-10, the commands of God are not too difficult and 1 John 5:3 confirms that the commands of God are not burdensome, so if the Jerusalem Council had been referring to God's Law rather than to Jewish oral laws, then they would have been directly contradicting God. On the contrary, the Psalms had nothing but extremely high praise for God's law, so the idea that they considered what God had was given for their own good to be a burden no one could bear is absurd. David said he delighted in God's Law, that he loved it, that he meditated on it day and night, that he walked about in freedom because of it, that those who obeyed it were blessed, etc., and Paul also said he delighted in obeying God's Law (Romans 7:22), so it is safe to say that he and other Jews were on the same page and in agreement with Scripture. God did not give His law to be a burden, but to be a delight, but the Pharisees had perverted it into a burden.

28 For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things;

29 That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well. Fare ye well.

There are 1,050 commands in the NT, so if this is an exhaustive list of all that would be required of Gentiles, then that would exclude over 99% of the commands in the NT, including those given by Jesus, so clearly this was not intended to be an exhaustive list for mature believers, but rather as stated it was a list mean for new believers coming to faith in order to not make it too difficult for them, which they excused by because they would continue to learn how to serve God and to walk in His ways by hearing Moses taught every Sabbath in the synagogues (Acts 15:19-21).

Jesus told us we cannot become holy by what we eat.

The OT Law does not say that we can become holy by what we eat, but rather that we should have a holy conduct because we have been made holy. In Leviticus 11:44-45, God said to be holy for He is holy, so keeping God's dietary laws is about acting according to the eternal and unchanging holiness of our God. To suggest that refraining from eating unclean animals is no longer acting in accordance with God's holiness is to say that God's unchanging holiness has changed.

Matt 15:17 Do not you yet understand, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the toilet.



Jesus bless you all HaleluYAH

Jesus was arguing against those who were saying that you could become common by eating with common hands and saying that you could not become common by what you eat, so he was simply sticking to the topic of conversation, not sinning by speaking against God's commands.[/quote]

 

[prodromos]

There is no general prohibition of eating fat in the Mosaic Law

That's awesome to know 'cos pork fat rules.

 

[Vicomte13]

You do you, Soyeong, you do you

 

[Soyeong]

That's awesome to know 'cos pork fat rules.

While there is no general prohibition against eating fat, there are specific prohibitions, such as eating fat from certain areas of offerings and eating unclean animals, but generally it is permitted to eat the fat of clean animals that are not offerings.

 

[Radrook]

Now let's see what the Bible has to say about that.

In Galatians 3:25 Paul tells us that neither Jews nor Christians are under the Mosaic Law. That it included the dietary laws is illustrated by the vision that was sent to the Apostle Peter.

The Apostle Peter was having certain trouble accepting Gentiles as Christians. To help him God sent a vision which illustrated how the dietary laws which tagged certain food as unclean were no longer binding:

Peter's Vision
(Leviticus 11:1-47; Deuteronomy 14:1-21)
Acts 10:
9The next day at about the sixth hour, as the men were approaching the city on their journey, Peter went up on the roof to pray. 10He became hungry and wanted something to eat, but while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance.

11He saw heaven open and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. 12It contained all kinds of four-footed animals and reptiles of the earth, as well as birds of the air. 13Then a voice spoke to him: “Get up, Peter, kill and eat!”

14“No, Lord!” Peter answered, “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”

15The voice spoke to him a second time: “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”

16This happened three times, and all at once the sheet was taken back up into heaven.

This is further made clear by the following verses:

1 Corinthians 10:25
Eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience,

The only reason to refrain is if it stumbles someone else.

Romans 14:20
Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to let his eating be a stumbling block.

 

[Vicomte13]

There is no general prohibition of eating fat in the Mosaic Law.

There is a prohibition in the Torah against eating the meat of seals and whales, and shellfish, without which the population by humans in all of the lands north of the Arctic Circle was impossible. But God commanded us to fill the land and subdue her.

There is the requirement in the Torah to keep the sundown to sundown Sabbath. This too renders all areas north of the Arctic Circle uninhabitable.

That's what happens when a land contract for a specific people in geographic Israel is misinterpreted as a general law for humanity.

If the Chinese stop eating pork, there will be mass starvation.

 

[Soyeong]

Now let's see what the Bible has to say about that.

In Galatians 3:25 Paul tells us that neither Jews nor Christians are under the Mosaic Law. That it included the dietary laws is illustrated by the vision that was sent to the Apostle Peter.

Having no more need for a tutor is not at all the same as having no more no more need for what they taught you. For someone to reach the point where they no longer needs a tutor and then disregard everything they were taught would completely miss the point of a tutor. Now that Christ has come, we have a superior teacher, but the subject matter is still the same, namely to teach us how to walk in God's ways and to reflect to the world His attributes/fruits of the Spirit. Jesus did this by teaching us how to obey the Mosaic law both by word and by example, and the Spirit also has the role of teaching us to obey the Law (Ezekiel 36:26-27).

The Apostle Peter was having certain trouble accepting Gentiles as Christians. To help him God sent a vision which illustrated how the dietary laws which tagged certain food as unclean were no longer binding:

According to Leviticus 11:44-45 and 1 Peter 1:13-16, refraining from eating unclean animals is a that we can walk according to God's holiness, but if that now is no longer the case, then God's holiness has changed, but God's holiness is eternal and unchanging.

Acts 10:14-15 But Peter said, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.” 15 And the voice came to him again a second time, “What God has made clean, do not call common.”

In Peter's vision it said that all kinds of animals were let down, so key to correctly understanding it is the issue of why Peter objected to simply eating one of the clean animals and understanding the distinction between the word for "common" and for "unclean". The Bible does not use the words interchangeably and Peter was only rebuked for his use of the word "common", not "unclean", so he was only using the word "common" incorrectly and was correctly refusing to eat animals that were unclean.

This is further made clear by the following verses:

The only reason to refrain is if it stumbles someone else.

There is a theme throughout the Bible that we must obey God rather than man, so it is important to not to mistake something that was only against obeying men as being against obeying God. In Romans 14:1, the issue was how to handle disputes of man's opinion, not whether followers of God should follow His commands.

 

[Radrook]

I guess we will have to agree to disagree.
God bless!

BTW
Many things that you claim that I said I didn't say. I also had prepared an extended reply to all the points you mentioned, realized that you had already been familiarized with the biblical points I intended to mentionj and decided that it would be timewasting and redundant to provide you with a repetition.

 

[toLiJC]

I understand that we are saved because of Jesus, and that it doesn't matter what type of food we put in our mouths, we are still saved... However, God says in the old testament that the pig is unclean and that we shouldn't eat it.

1 "The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, 2 “Say to the Israelites: ‘Of all the animals that live on land, these are the ones you may eat: 3 You may eat any animal that has a divided hoof and that chews the cud. 7 And the pig, because it parts the hoof and is cloven-footed but does not chew the cud, is unclean to you. 8 You shall not eat any of their flesh, and you shall not touch their carcasses; they are unclean to you.
-Leviticus 11​

16 For by fire will the Lord enter into judgment, and by his sword, with all flesh;
and those slain by the Lord shall be many.
17 “Those who sanctify and purify themselves to go into the gardens, following one in the midst, eating pig’s flesh and the abomination and mice, shall come to an end together, declares the Lord. – Isaiah 66
​

Not only that, but even the World Health Organization has now said that pork is a carcinogen... and there is plenty of information online about how pork is commonly contaminated with pathogenic bacteria (here's a good article) ...

So.... why do many Christians eat pork when God said it is unclean?

Update: after reading some wonderful and informative responses, I think my question really has to do with what "unclean" means. I was thinking it meant "not clean" and bad for health, and that God wanted his people to be healthy by not eating pigs and other animals that were bad for a persons health. This understanding of the word "unclean" may be incorrect. I'd appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

first of all, these biblical words against "eating" certain "animals (flesh)" have special spiritual meaning, for example the "swine" emblematize spiritual impurity as in Matthew 7:6, secondly, the swine are animals eating all kinds of food from the ground, which made them potentially dangerous as a food even for righteous worshipers in the time(s) before the establishment of the New Covenant, because they were thus a potential source of infections and toxins, now the same is not so valid for the true worshipers of the true Lord God because the Holy Spirit protects them from all kinds of contaminations (as it is said in Mark 16:17-18)

Blessings