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Newington Three Angels Church

Eric Walsh

Poisoning the Remnant

We're going to go to the book of Proverbs, chapter 23, Proverbs chapter 23, verses 1 through 3, which says, When thou sittest to eat with a ruler, consider diligently what is before you, and put a knife to your throat if you be a man given to appetite.

Be not desirous of his dainties, for they are deceitful meat.

Our message this Sabbath is entitled, Poisoning the Remnant.

Father God, we thank you for this opportunity to study a word, to go through these lessons around health that we'll talk about today.

Right now, Lord, I ask that you make me just a nail on the wall, a rusty, sorry nail, Lord.

Upon that nail, Lord, I ask that you hang a portrait of Jesus Christ.

Instead, we want to hear a word from the throne room of grace.

We're going to go to the book of Daniel, and we'll go through the story quickly.

You all know the story, and I won't get into it from a deep biblical analysis.

But just to set the stage for some of the other things that we are going to talk about, Daniel chapter 1, Nebuchadnezzar has now completed his first raid of Jerusalem and taken with him some of the young nobles and princes, including Daniel and the 3 Hebrew boys.

This was in the third year of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, that Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came into Jerusalem and besieged it.

The Lord gave Jehoiakim, king of Judah, into his hand with part of the vessels of the house of God, when he carried it into the land of Shinar, to the house of his God.

And he brought the vessels into the treasure house of his God.

The king spake unto Ash-Phanaz, the master of his eunuchs, that he should bring certain of the children of Israel and of the king's seed, and of the princes, children in whom was no blemish, but well favored, and skillful in all wisdom, and cunning in knowledge, and understanding science, and such as had ability in them to stand in the king's palace, and whom they might teach the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans.

I won't get too deep into this, but Nebuchadnezzar's approach to world domination was that he would take of the next generation of leaders, train them to be Chaldeans, Babylonians.

And once he did that, he could send them back to rule their own country as they served him.

This was his goal, at least in part, or his plan here.

He wanted them to learn to speak the language of the Babylonians, and as we'll see, to eat the food and learn the customs of the Babylonians.

Verse 5, and the king appointed them a daily provision of the king's meat and of the wine which he drank.

This is the actual food from off the quote unquote king's table.

And at the end thereof, they might stand before the king.

Now I would imagine that as this was going on, Daniel and the 3 Hebrew boys were quite stressed out.

We'll talk more about stress, and I won't get too deep into it here, but what stress does is stress causes our body to go into a serious reaction.

The key mediator of this is a hormone called cortisol, And of course, along with this comes adrenaline and the fight or flight response that we've all learned about.

But what happens inside the body is that this cortisol, as it acts on fat tissue, causes the fat cells to begin to break down and release free fatty acids.

This causes you to become resistant to insulin.

And if that term sounds familiar, it's because insulin resistance is the hallmark of diabetes.

It causes the protein in the muscles to get broken down, decreases insulin signaling, so there's less receptors to get the insulin to bring energy into the muscles, and so you get even further insulin resistance.

It causes the liver to make sugar for energy while at the same time as it does this it can actually cause more free fatty acids to be released.

So stress is literally the platform upon which diseases like diabetes, and 1 that you've also probably heard about, metabolic syndrome, rests.

This is why it is not enough to have a good diet.

You must also have that eighth law of health.

You must have trust in God, Because if you don't trust God, and you're always anxious and stressed, you'll still get sick.

In fact, what we say here is that stressed spelled backwards is desserts.

Not only will you get sick, but all of a sudden, the foods that seem to make you feel better, foods we now call comfort foods, you'll have less ability to avoid them because they will actually feel better in the reward pathways of your brain if you are stressed out, because it'll feel like you're getting the cheap calorie energy that you were in desperate need of at the time.

This is why Solomon warned, and I am sure Daniel and the 3 Hebrew boys were aware—this is why Solomon warned in Proverbs 23, 1-3— that when you sit with a ruler, like Nebuchadnezzar, consider diligently what is before you, and put a knife to your throat if you are a man given to appetite.

Do not be desirous of his dainties, for they are deceitful meat.

They'll make you feel better, think you're better, when actually you're worse off.

And the question is, does the king of Babylon do this today?

If we are living in the last days and we talk about spiritual Babylon, well, here's a billboard from McDonald's.

There's a desire to control your appetite for profit.

But in order to do this, as we'll talk about, the food that the Babylonian king of our day had to prepare has to be designed for you to get addicted.

Well, what else did the king of Babylon do?

Well, Since the 1950s till now, he's massively increased the portion size, serving size.

A hamburger in 1950 was only 3.9 ounces, it's 12 ounces now.

A soda was 7 ounces, soda's 42 ounces now and sometimes even bigger.

And you see French fries went from 2.4 to 6.7 ounces.

So 1 thing is there's a lot more food being served and consumed.

But the delicacies are based on the triad, this evil triad of salt, sugar, and fat.

And I won't have time to get deep into all of these this morning, but I want you to get that it is the way that these foods are designed and put together that causes the addictive nature of the standard American diet, 1 that is being exported around the world.

I see it in Jamaica, I've seen it in Africa, I've seen it in Asia.

These foods are being shipped all over the globe.

And the SAD, the Standard American Diet, the SAD is now causing the diseases of America and the West to be found in other parts of the world.

Because the New York Times says there is, they comment here in this article, the extraordinary science of addictive junk food.

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food.

Well, they study what is called the bliss point.

They find out exactly where the right amount of salt is, what this graph is, or sugar or whatever it is, so that you get the most pleasure at that point.

They can look at how the brain functions.

They can do some pretty impressive things.

But what they begin to do is even make food that has what they call vanishing caloric density, Like Cheetos, and Hot Cheetos, and Takis, and stuff like that.

You know, the food that crunches when you, stuff like Cheetos, you bite it and it crunches, or cheese doodles, you bite it and it crunches, and then it melts in your mouth.

So when it hits your stomach, your brain is saying, I heard a crunch like a cucumber or an apple, but where's all the nutrients?

The food is designed to be weapons of mass destruction.

Here, the tobacco industry got in trouble because the tobacco industry said, you know, our product is not addictive, it doesn't cause disease, and they busted them when they found all the secret papers that showed that it did.

But the food industry, much of which has been bought out over time or merged or mingled in with the tobacco industry, the food industry never hid the truth.

Food companies explore our biological preferences, the reward pathway in the brain under the guidance of a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which is the pleasure hormone in our brain, which is why cocaine makes people high.

It is released with food and can be manipulated to make some foods give you more pleasure than others.

The New York Times, again, in this 1, overconsumption of fast food triggers addiction-like neuroaddictive responses in the brain, making it harder to trigger the release of dopamine.

So they push so that you have to eat more and more and more and more to get the pleasure out of the food and it is very powerful.

Well, if you look at this, the food industry spends about 2000000000 dollars a year marketing to children.

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Poisoning the Remnant

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