To Fast or Not to Fast? That is Not the Question

Fasting is an interesting topic for the Christian. I think this is for two reasons: first, it’s not often taught about as a practice but rather as a thing people did in Biblical times. The most talked about passage for fasting comes from Jesus’s time in the wilderness. Second, when it is taught, we’re not overly clear on what the focus of the fast is. Many times, I see people preach fasting as an action to take before making a big decision or to hear God’s voice, and while I think those are valid positions to take, I believe they take away from what fasting truly is.

What Should Fasting Not Be?

It’s easier to define what we shouldn’t make fasting out to be than what we should, as I believe is typical when it comes to biblical commands and practices. Fasting should not be a way to force God to do something. In other words, we can’t say to God, “I am going to fast until you answer me.” I tend to believe this falls under the statement “Do not test the Lord your God” from Deuteronomy 6:16. Trying to make the omniscient God of the universe do what we want on our timeline is a futile effort. Trust me. I’ve experienced the frustration of these efforts.

Furthermore, fasting should not just be a physical experience. Fasting is not merely denying the body of something it craves, or at least it shouldn’t be; it should also reach to the mind. Even more, it should reach to our souls. When God makes a command of His people, He does not ask us to do these things in part, just as He does not expect us to do these in part. In a similar manner to the description of the Church Body Paul makes in various epistles, God expects us to act in concert with all parts of ourselves. His command to “’Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” in Matthew 22:37 speaks to the totality with which God expects us to do things.

And just in case you doubt, let me point you to Paul’s letter to the Colossians. In Chapter 2:16-19, Paul writes, “Therefore, don’t let anyone judge you in regard to food and drink or in the matter of a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of what was to come; the substance is Christ. Let no one condemn you by delighting in ascetic practices and the worship of angels, claiming access to a visionary realm. Such people are inflated by empty notions of their unspiritual mind. They don’t hold on to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and tendons, grows with growth from God.”

Obviously, Paul is not talking about fasting here, but he is talking about the substance of it, which is Christ. In the Old Testament, we’re told of the many festivals and events the Israelites are to remember for what God has done for them. Some of those involve feasts, and some of them involve fasts. These are all meant to point to God, to Christ, in celebration, mourning, and remembrance what God did and what Jesus would eventually do. What Paul is confronting here is a message that invoked these festivals, and other actions besides, that were meant to harm the body in order to reach an enlightenment not reached by those who did not participate. This is an “ascetic practice,” an action taken that causes the body pain in order to deny it and self for a higher purpose.

This is not the goal of fasting. The goal of fasting is not to destroy the temple God gave us to care for. Fasting is not truly about what is being emptied or denied at all. What we see here is something we can see in the Church now where some claim access to a higher visionary realm, a closer relationship with God that gives them special knowledge. Paul somewhat laughs at this statement, claiming it’s an inflation by empty notions and an unspiritual mind. If he were writing another letter, he would have said, “empty notions of a mind not transformed and renewed by Christ” a la Romans 12:2. If you want my opinion on these things, suffice it to say that every major heresy that had its roots in Christianity began with someone who claimed access to a visionary realm or spiritual awakening not achievable by other Christians.

What, Then, is Fasting?

Paul gets to the idea in verse 19 of Colossians 2. Fasting is a holding on to the head, to Christ. Earlier I said that fasting was not about what is being emptied or denied. Rather, it is about what we are filling the opened space with. In the same way we partake of the Lord’s Supper, doing so in remembrance of Christ (Luke 19:22), we partake in fasting in order to remember God, to focus on Him. This is why Paul denies ascetic practices; their only goal is to deny the body, to beat it and break it, to say that it doesn’t matter. Fasting, denying the body of food and/or water (or other things) is not about separating mind from body and beating one into submission but about aligning both with the head, Christ, to be nourished and held together by Him, to gain growth from God. Fasting is about saying that your body needs something but it needs God more.

When Jesus is in the wilderness, He says what fasting is all about, “’It is written: Man must not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God,’” Matthew 4:4. It is not about denying needs but what truly satisfies our needs, what can actually do good work in us. I find Psalm 115 to be more than adequate to touch on why this is the case. When it comes right down to it, our goal is to avoid idolizing things, to make sure our growth comes from God, not things He’s made or given us. If we idolize these things, we make gods that can do nothing as Psalm 115 says. But our God is in heaven and does whatever He pleases. This is the focus.

How, Then, Should We Fast?

The effort, as I’ve said, is not merely to deny ourselves, for our bodies are temples, not the “flesh” that the Scriptures say we are to deny. It’s not about hurting or inconveniencing ourselves in order to look good. In fact, when we fast, the Bible is clear no one should know (Matthew 6:16-18). It is also not about what we are giving up. The things we are giving up are vehicles to clear space for us to seek God.

Fasting, then, should be fairly simple: find the things that get in the way of you seeking God. Sometimes it’s food and water; in this case, make it your goal to pray and read the Bible when you would otherwise eat and drink. In other cases, it’s the Internet, TV, sports, or a variety of other things. But don’t just give these things up because you’ll fill that space with something. Instead, use the times you would be pursuing these fasted things to pursue God. That is how we should fast. It’s not about pain or inconvenience but about trying to know God more deeply, to remember what He’s done, and to discover what He is doing.

Oh, and just to answer the question I posed at the beginning—even though it should be obvious from the last sentence of the previous paragraph—yes, we should be fasting. It should be a consistent part of our Christian lives.

When God Prepared a Way for Foreigners Centuries in Advance

As we all know, this is releasing almost a month after the Christmas festivities, but that’s okay. While God is able to work well ahead of the time He wants things to be finished, I work much later and pretend I’m early for next year. Point in fact, God does work things out for good, but sometimes He starts His good works years earlier than He needs them finished. One of the clearest cases is Joseph, who was sold into slavery and ended up saving God’s people, his own family, by working his way into Pharaoh’s good graces through the blessings of God.

Today, however, we’ll explore a case that is not near so clear. Matthew 2:1-12 tells us the story of the wise men, the magi from the east, who came to present gifts to Jesus, who they knew as king of the Jews (v. 2). When we listen to the Christmas story as often told in churches, we’re presented with this idea that the magi were practically Jewish tangential, as though they were coming to worship Jesus in full awareness that He was the Messiah, so perhaps we’ve never questioned the story. But as I was listening this Christmas season, something struck me: How did the wise men know?

Who Were the Magi and Where Did They Come From?

The wise men, unlike the stories we often hear from church, were not Gentiles who knew who God was. They weren’t coming to worship Jesus because they knew exactly who He was. These wise men most likely followed the ancient Iranian religion of Zoroastrianism, which focuses on mystical, shamanistic aspects of rituals in worship to Zoroaster. So believers they were not. In addition, they practiced astrology and witchcraft, likely in a similar manner to the Egyptian magicians mentioned during the ten plagues in Exodus. In fact, the word used to describe the magi here in the Greek is only used in one other passage in the New Testament, and it’s in Acts 13 when Paul describes a sorcerer.

The Bible describes the wise men as having come from the east. There’s no telling exactly where in the east, but we have some ideas. Church tradition indicates Persia, India, or Arabia and also that there were three, but Scripture does not give us an exact number. Based on the evidence of Scripture, it is my thought that they came from Babylonia or Assyria because what I actually questioned as this Scripture was preached is how they knew the words of the Prophet Micah.

How Did Micah’s Prophecy End up in the East?

In verse 6 of Matthew 2, the wise men say to Herod, “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah: Because out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.” This is from Micah 5:2, which reads, “Bethlehem Ephrathah, you are small among the clans of Judah; one will come from you to be ruler over Israel for me. His origin is from antiquity of times.” This question, then, sent me into a furor of searching through the Bible to find out how a scroll of Micah’s words ended up in one of the most pagan places on earth, the heart of enemy territory for a Jewish person.

First, we have to learn of when Micah lived in order to know when he spoke those words. Micah’s ministry work occurred from around 740 to 670 BC. Interestingly, this puts him as alive and working at the same time as another of the most quoted Messianic prophets: Isaiah (739 to 681 BC). But that doesn’t really help much unless we know where Israel was at the time—or who was ruling one of the two kingdoms. For that, we have to go to Jeremiah.

Jeremiah 26:17-18 says, “Some of the elders of the land stood up and said to all the assembled people, ‘Micah the Moreshite prophesied in the days of King Hezekiah of Judah and said to all the people of Judah, “This is what the Lord of Armies says: Zion will be plowed like a field, Jerusalem will become ruins, and the temple’s mountains will be a high thicket.”’” Hezekiah’s reign is documented in 2 Kings 18-20, and while Isaiah is mentioned as speaking to the king, Micah is not. Still, we have established the two were alive and working at the same time.

From here, we can determine how Micah’s words ended up in Babylon from Isaiah’s prophecy to Hezekiah in 2 Kings 20:17-18, “’Look, the days are coming when everything in your palace and all that your predecessors have stored up until today will be carried off to Babylon; nothing will be left,’ says the Lord. ‘Some of your descendants—who come from you, whom you father—will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.’”

This eventually came to pass in 2 Kings 24:13, “He also carried off from there all the treasures of the king’s palace, and he cut into pieces all the gold articles that King Solomon of Israel had made for the Lord’s sanctuary, just as the Lord had predicted.” It was then completed in 2 Kings 25 when Nebuchadnezzar ransacked Jerusalem and took not only the valuables of the temple that remained but also the chief priest and his second-in-command.

And just in case there’s any doubt that enough time had passed to record Micah’s words and have them stored in the temple or the palace or anywhere else, at minimum, 86 years passed between Isaiah’s prophecy and Jerusalem’s destruction.

Prophecy to Pagans, a Timeline of God’s Hand, Even in Destruction

To bring this back around to the beginning, let’s put together the whole timeline. In 715 BC, Hezekiah became king, and he died in 686 BC. Around the end of his reign, both Micah and Isaiah prophesized about Jesus, and Isaiah prophesized about Babylon’s invasion. Babylon invaded Judah between 597 and 587 BC, around 100 years post-prophecy. And then around 580 years later, Jesus was born, the wise men followed the stars to Bethlehem, and they spoke the words of an Israelite prophet from 700 years earlier.

Now I made the point of the wise men being pagans really strongly early on, and that was for good reason because this entire thing reveals the majesty of God’s hand that he worked a good thing out of a bad thing not just on a small scale but on the scale of more than half a century. In this simple revelation, we can see not only God’s plan to provide for His Son as the child of a carpenter and a yet-to-be-married mother but also His desire to bring Gentiles into His people, as Paul writes about later in Ephesians 2 and 3.

He used not only the prophecies of Micah and Isaiah but also the Babylon’s pagan conquests and the pagan astrology of the wise men to draw them hundreds of miles from their home to tiny Bethlehem and tiny Jesus who would eventually open up the way for them to forgo their pagan ways and come to the Way, the Truth, and the Life. God used Israel’s wickedness and disobedience to make not His people His people (Hosea 2:23) by captivity in Babylon, which not only drew His people back to Him at the time but also opened up the way for even Gentiles to show the love of Christ after the resurrection.

So if you ever doubt, like I have been doing recently, that Romans 8:28 is true, that God is really always doing good things for His people, that destruction and captivity aren’t the end, and things put in place now might have outcomes years, decades, centuries in the future—and even that things centuries, decades, and years in the past are having their outcomes now—then don’t. Look at what God did in this case and remind yourself that He truly does work all things for good, even if they’re painful and destructive. Trust Him.