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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