As promised, I’m going to share some of what I gleaned from researching the history of fasting in the Bible, with the notable help of Kent Berghuis’ and Jentezen Franklin’s posted writings on the topic.

The words used for fasting occur about 47 times in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament).  As we know, a leader would often ‘call’ or ‘proclaim’ or ‘sanctify’ a corporate fast among the Israelites, in semantic terms related to the concepts of weeping, mourning, donning of sackcloth and ashes, doing no work, and most importantly – ‘afflicting’ or humbling one’s soul. Humbling one’s soul is sometimes rendered ‘denying oneself’ (of routine attention and pleasures). So fasting in the Old Testament seems most often associated with grief or mourning, repentance and seeking of God’s forgiveness. In my experience however, among New Covenant believers there is more focus on fasting as an aid to prayer, seeking God for His manifest presence, intervention, direction, or empowerment for ministry.

Did you know that the experience of Adam and Eve with the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden could be regarded as something of a failed fast? God commanded the first ‘food prohibition’ on the sixth day of creation. He said, in effect, “You may eat from every tree in the Garden except this one. From the food produced by this tree you must abstain – you must fast!”  Never before have I related that command (or our foreparents’ disbedience) to the context of fasting. Wow … God was the One ‘calling’ that partial fast in Eden, just as His Holy Spirit is still the One who motivates us today to embark on personal fasting for various reasons.

Berghuis makes the point that “The first sin in the Bible was a violation of a dietary restriction.” He quotes Nahum Sarna: “Man is called upon by God to exercise restraint and self-discipline in the gratification of his apetite.” Adam and Eve sinned and came short of God’s glorious intention when they yielded to Satan’s temptation and fully indulged their appetite rather than obeying God’s command to abstain from that one fruit. I believe we have all committed similar sins at various times.

Now let your mind go the Matthew 4 and Luke 4 scenario of “The Last Adam” – not in the lush Garden of Eden but in the arid wilderness of Judea. In that fruitless landscape, Yeshua could still have eaten locusts as His cousin John did. Yet, even knowing Yeshua’s power to create food out of nothing as Elohim had at the beginning, God the Father called for a fast (Matt. 4:1). This time, it was The Last Adam who was to be tempted, and He was in all points tempted as the first Adam was, yet He resisted every temptation. He first established that human beings must not try to sustain their lives by physical food alone, but by “every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4 quoting Deuteronomy 8:3).

Food was only one of the ‘words’ that had come from the mouth of God (see Genesis 1:20-25 where He spoke food into existence.) Yeshua was reminding us of the spiritual words as well – those instructions, the do’s and don’ts that pertain to life and Godliness – that God had spoken to mankind, starting with Adam. Yeshua had not forgotten or undervalued even that tiny half-verse from Deuteronomy, but pulled it out as a swift sword against satan’s food-related temptation.

It was after Yeshua had fasted for 40 days and nights (Matt. 4:2) that He could move on from victory over that simple food-related temptation to victory over the greater temptations: the temptation to glorify Himself at God’s expense based on a scripture that satan deviously quoted out of context, and to accept ‘gifts’ from satan, a thief offering stolen goods (Psalm 24:1) in exchange for worship. Again Yeshua resisted with words from the mouth of God – first quoting Deuteronomy 6:16, “You shall not tempt the Lord your God” and then rendering Deuteronomy 6:13 as “You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only shall you serve!”  At Yeshua’s final rebuke on that occasion, “Go away satan!” the devil fled (as promised in James 4:7) and Yeshua’s mortal body received the angelic ministry that was much needed by then.

Have I strayed from my ‘fasting’ topic? Not really. My belief is that Yeshua, in order to accomplish His Redeemer assignment while in His temporary mortal body, had to first complete that long fast (resisting that food temptation for 40 days and nights) which enabled Him to resist the other temptations by which satan tried to subvert the launch of His absolutely crucial mission. That premise brings me to the comparison between fasting as practised in the Old Testament and fasting with New Testament objectives such as Yeshua and His disciples demonstrated.

Yeshua’s 40-day-40-night fast was not connected with mourning, or with repentance since He had nothing of which to repent. Neither was his long fast simply a test that He had to pass. It was instead connected with the activation of divine empowerment (as Luke 4:1 and 4:14 indicate) to fulfill a divine commission (Luke 3:21-23). Later, in Yeshua’s mentoring of His disciples to carry on His ministry, this empowerment objective was evidenced (Matthew 17:21) and in their own commissioning of co-labourers for that ministry, they followed suit (Acts 13:3). In the next post, I will continue to compare Old Testament and New Testament examples of fasting, to share from them all the answers I have found to address my own question, “How then, should we believers fast, and with what expectations?”

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What does the average person normally do three times per day? You guessed it – eat a meal. Breakfast, lunch and dinner (or supper). For many people this goes on day in, day out, 365 days per year; and this routine is generally viewed as necessary for good health. Yet many in our world go hungry at these mealtimes, some to the point of starvation. That’s not Godly fasting. When activists press their agendas by playing on public sympathies through ‘hunger strikes’, that’s not Godly fasting either. When Muslims are mandated to abstain from food during the daytime but allowed to eat at night during their month of Ramadan, it is called a fast; yet they have simply inverted the normal schedule of eating in the day and fasting at night, which is what the rest of us routinely do. There is no Biblical precedent for calling that a fast either.

With the best-practice guidance of Isaiah 58 and the dictionary definition of the word ‘fast’, I would describe Godly fasting as the voluntary abstinence from food for periods inclusive of and extending beyond mealtimes, for purposes that align with God’s will, in the context of obedience to God’s greatest commandments – loving him with all the love we can muster (Deut 6:5) and loving our neighbours as much as we love ourselves (Lev. 19:18, Matt. 22:39).  In the Artscroll Jewish Bible, Isaiah 58:6-7, 9-10 reads: “Surely this is the fast I (God) chose: to break open the shackles of wickedness, to undo the bonds of injustice, and to let the oppressed go free, and to annul all perversion (and that ye break every yoke – KJV). Surely you should break your bread for the hungry, and bring the moaning poor to your home; when you see a naked person, clothe him; and do not hide yourself from your kin … remove from your midst perversion, finger-pointing and evil speech, and offer your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul.”

Why did God spell out all of that? Verses 2-5 and 13 answer that question – because His people had been fasting in ways that God had not ‘chosen’, and they were grumbling that despite their fasting God was not responding to them as they thought He should. The Omniscient One described their practices thus: “They pretend to seek Me every day and desire to know My ways, like a nation that acts righteously and has not forsaken the justice of its God; they inquire of Me about the laws of justice, as if they desire the nearness of God, asking, ‘Why did we fast and You did not see? Why did we afflict our souls and You did not know?’ Behold, on the day of your fast you seek out personal gain and you extort all your debts. Because you fast for grievance and strife, to strike each other with a wicked fist, you do not fast as befits this day, to make your voice heard above … (you do not) restrain your foot because it is the Sabbath (or) refrain from accomplishing your own needs on My holy day; (you do not) proclaim the Sabbath ‘a delight’ and the holy day of HaShem ‘honoured’; you (dishonour it by) engaging in your own affairs (and by) seeking your own needs or discussing the forbidden (speaking thine own words – KJV).”

As I noted toward the end of my last post, the basic concept of combining prayer with fasting was nothing new to the Israelites, and as we can tell from the testimony above, their attempts to maximize personal benefit from fasting was nothing new to God’s all-seeing eye either. I have reviewed many scriptures since my last post, seeking to understand the Israelites’ motivations to fast, their expectations in fasting, and the effects of their fasting – with a view to comparing that with how we as New Covenant believers should approach fasting and with what expectations. One of the resources that I found very helpful was Kent Berghuis’ Fasting in the Old Testament and Ancient Judaism.  My next post will share with you some gleanings from that.

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