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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