Deuteronomy 14:8

Chapter 14 forbids the people, as children of the living God, to copy the unholy customs of the idolaters. Those customs showed how devoted the idolaters were to the impure beings they worshipped. God had chosen Israel for Himself. Nor were they to defile themselves by eating abominable things. They were a holy people.

In the same way, the divided hoof was not enough if it was not joined to the chewing of the cud... The inward life and the outward walk must go together. A man may claim to love and feed on the Word of God, the pasture of the soul — to study it and turn it over in his mind. But if his footprints along the path of life are not what the Word calls for, he is not clean. And on the other hand, a man may seem to walk with faultless correctness. But if his walk does not come from the hidden life, it is worse than worthless. There must be the divine principle within, feeding on and digesting the rich pasture of God's Word, or the mark of the footstep counts for nothing.

We have been told that animals which chew the cud have two stomachs. When they eat, the food goes into the first stomach. After a time it comes back up to the mouth and is chewed a second time, with care. Then it goes down into the second stomach, where the animal absorbs it. Chewing the cud stands for full assimilation... there is a lesson to be learned here. If we are to please the Lord, we must not only read the Word of God. We must meditate on it, make it our own, absorb it, take it into our spiritual being.

The last animal here is very different from the rest, and is the very type of uncleanness. In the swine there was no pretence of chewing the cud, but there was the cloven foot. Look only at the foot, and the swine would seem clean. Surely they picture those who openly disregard faith and the Word of God, and plead their good conduct instead. "He can't be wrong whose life is in the right." In fact, the life is not right. The swine loves the mud and roots up the ground; it is a picture of a destroyer. God does not judge as man judges, but His judgment alone is true.

The things that were unclean to Israel were not only forbidden as food. Anyone who touched the dead carcass of any of them became unclean. He had to wash his clothes and stay unclean until the evening. Again, we must insist that there was no moral uncleanness in the dead body itself. It stood for the uncleanness that believers today may pick up by associating with what is morally or spiritually unclean. In other words, we must take time to know a person before we identify ourselves with him.

Avoiding the forbidden things would no doubt be good for their bodies, and would help to mark them off from other peoples. Many centuries later... these restrictions gave rise to the disputes over opinions that Romans 14 speaks of. In that chapter the Spirit of God does not legislate. He leaves every man to settle in his own mind what he should do. We may usefully transfer the thought to what we may mentally read and inwardly digest. Let us take care that we do not feed mentally on what is impure.