Something I found interesting a while ago while studying Jewish history made me look at the Word of Wisdom in a different light. Jews are still a people today against all odds. What I mean by that is that there are no more Romans, no Assyrians, none of the large empires which you would think would out survive a small insular group, and Jews have survived this way despite spreading all over the world. In fact today there are fewer Jews than members of the Church and yet they remain a distinct people and retain beliefs. The reason for this happens to be that across history, they have been asked to follow practices which kept them socially distinct.
The thing is that they wear distinct clothes (often garment tops not super unlike our own), they have a diet which prohibits specifically several of the foods which became the staples of large empires like pork. When you look back in history you find that many of the practices had a “Sanctifying “ power, which means it set them apart from the rest of the world cultures. One of the stranger ones is the practice of circumcision, which I always kind of wondered why that would have been a thing. In multiple points in Jewish history it has marked them as others in a rather visible way.
When Alexander the Great conquered across the empires, he and his culture became rather popular in much of the areas he conquered. Most of the Middle East changed their cultures rather drastically as Greeks came in and built libraries and gymnasiums, they brought their food and their philosophical belief systems (which was not their pagan pantheon but a pretty monotheistic belief system). Their beliefs were popular enough that Sadducee’s dominated Jewish religious thought and basically taught Greek religion mixed with traditional Jewish traditions. The Pharisees were a counter culture that sprang up in response to them only a couple of generations before Christ came.
So consider what it would have been like to be a Jew under the new Greek rule. You didn’t really resent them the way you did other conquering rulers, in fact in general you find them to be pretty great. In order to now fit in with high society you had to adhere to a few customs. A major one was that you had to work out in the Gymnasium to be considered a “real man” a “gentleman” so to speak, and this is where much socialization and often business was conducted. The word Gymnasium actually means the place of nakedness, and of course the exercises were done that way. It was only immodest and scandalous if a certain small part of the male anatomy were to show, the rest was A OK to them. Well guess who could not work out with the cool guys like them? Jews had a practice that forced all the males to stand out in a way that was impossible to overcome and were forced to wear little coverings, making them be different (set apart or sanctified) from the Greeks. Guess what the Greeks served at all the feasts? Pork was practically a must, so in that social situation they stood out again, set apart, sanctified.
This pattern repeats through history, and somehow despite multiple attempts to genocide them, expelled from areas over 200 times, Jews remain an influential group to this day while all other cultures mostly disappeared.
So now ask yourself if you were to make a short list of every substance across every culture on earth today that is central to socialization, what would they be? In other words, go to a social gathering in the USA, in China, in India, in Germany etc etc what will everyone be consuming socially? In the USA, Alcohol and Coffee. In the UK, Alcohol and tea, in China Alcohol and tobacco, Germany Alcohol and the list goes on, but remains pretty well universal that to be in a social gathering nearly anywhere in the world today, one or more of the following: Alcohol, tea, coffee, tobacco and harder drugs like opium and cocaine will almost certainly be present. In fact our word of Wisdom is one of the most defining characteristics that people know about us. We can live all over the world in any country but we will always stand out in social gatherings. We will always be set apart or sanctified if we follow the Word of Wisdom. Garments are more hidden and yet they do the same.
So One of the reasons for some of our practices is to set us apart from the word in ways that are not negative, in fact we can point to positive things about them, but it preserves a people to the Lord. Ultimately if he has asked us to do or not do something, he has good reasons. We can rely on this fact and have faith in them.
