1 Timothy 4:3

The verse names two things: those who "forbid marriage" and "require abstinence from foods." (The Roman Catholic Church forbids her priests to marry, and also commands her members to abstain from certain foods on certain days.) This harsh self-denial claimed to be superior godliness. People began to teach these false ideas even in the apostles' own day. Later they grew into systems like Gnosticism, and today occult movements such as theosophy teach the same ideas. They forbid what God has set up in creation, for marriage is something God has made holy.

In place of the truth, the one who abandons the faith puts on a religion of the flesh that claims the very highest holiness... In reality they have turned from the faith, so they deny God as our Saviour. By refusing marriage and foods, they deny God as the Creator. This means the loss of all true godliness that fears God, and it opens the door to loose and shameless living. These seducing spirits feed the pride of the flesh. They promise people the greatest holiness so as to lead them into the deepest corruption.

Strict self-denial is no more Christian than loose living, though it takes a prettier form. It is a showy attack on the Creator and Preserver of man. It sets up a higher holiness, and it ends in vileness against nature. Monasticism is war against God without knowing it.

Grace may call a servant of God, for special and worthy reasons, to a path that does not fit with marriage. The duties of marriage could not be carried out along with the aims of that path. So we see in the apostle Paul himself, as he lets us know in 1 Corinthians 7. But that same chapter upholds the ordinary rule of marriage... Only the call of God comes first, and the man so called never looks down on the ordinary rule because of his exception. Error seizes the exception (even error cannot survive without a scrap or show of truth) and turns it into a human rule. This is Satan taking the place and rights of the Lord. His aim is to bring God into contempt and to lead people, dazzled by the empty hope of higher holiness, into the depths of corruption.

So the same disrespect of God appears in telling men to abstain from foods. He created them to be received with thanksgiving. No doubt all people were meant to share the benefit, and they do so in their measure. But many eat like animals, without real thanksgiving and often without even the form of it... Satan lifts some to such a height of philosophic folly that they deny these gifts come from His hand — the hand of the One who reconciled them to Himself by the death of His Son. Next they imagine the gifts are temptations from an evil being. At last they conclude that there is no such thing as creation, and so no Creator. So the error, small at the start, becomes the start of a very great evil.

All that the Creator has provided must be received from Him with thanksgiving, and the acknowledgment of a dependence upon Him.

The Holy Spirit spoke plainly about the last days of the house of God... He was warning believers about the terrible conditions that would spread on earth, even inside the Christian testimony. The people we read of here are inside the Christian testimony. It says, "some will depart from the faith." The antidote to all this is the phrase "those who believe and know the truth." Where there are such people, there is no possibility of falling away or of listening to seducing spirits.