We know that in the Garden of Eden, God told the animals “every green herb have I given you for meat”. In Eden, even the animals were vegetarians; But, I have to ask – how did God enforce that law? With Adam and Eve it is easy to see – God just told them and expected them to obey what He said. But the animals? How would God be able to enforce this rule? Did He put muzzles on the lions? Did He have angels running around behind them making sure they didn’t eat the deer or what?

Most people either never asked the question or else brushed it away with a trite statement like “oh, the Spirit of God made them so peaceful they didn’t want to kill…” but that’s just nonsense. I mean really, it feels kinda good but it says nothing. And if you read many of my articles, by now you’re familiar with the fact that I demand REAL answers, not meaningless catch-phrases. So let’s look into this. Because we know that at some point in the future God will again turn the animals back to being vegetarians, so the process is clearly reversible.

Isaiah 11:7 And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

So how will God do this? Just some magic-wand idea where He goes ZAP and the lions develop a taste for chewing the cud? I rather think not. So let’s see what it takes to make something a vegetarian….

Your body is made up of a rather complex set of ingredients. Most of the elements on the periodic chart are used in it, although some of them in very minute amounts. And those elements, combined in certain special ways, form amino acids, DNA, fats, tissue, bones, and your brain, among other things. And these elements perform various tasks in your body – some are resistors, some are absorbers, some form electrical fields, and among other things, some are conductors of electricity.

One of the best room temperature conductors known to man is gold. Gold is a noble metal, and is not easily corroded or oxidized. Your brain is designed to use tiny amounts of gold, often absorbed through the skin, to conduct the electric impulses across synapses between neurons in your brain to form thought and memory. And gold is very good at it’s job. However, today we have no access to gold – it isn’t in the soil, we don’t use it as money, and most people go their whole lives and never even see a piece of it, or at best they may have a piece of 14-karat gold-plated jewelry. But God designed your body well – if it can’t find gold, it will find the next best thing. If that isn’t there, it’ll find the next best thing to that.

An an example, aluminum is a fairly good conductor. However, it corrodes far worse than gold and can’t handle the load that gold can. And so the body picks up aluminum, which is available in our diet in abundance in the form of aluminum flouride (toothpaste and water supplies), aluminum cookware, aluminum chairs, rails, and many other ways. And when it does this, the brain uses it. Of course, when it does, it corrodes in the brain and functions poorly and so it causes Alzheimer’s when enough has accumulated.

Bear in mind that this is actually a good thing, and another testament to how “fearfully and wonderfully made” we are. Because if it weren’t for the body’s ability to pick up aluminum as an alternate choice, you would die as soon as your supply of gold ran out. Because it simply HAS to have something as a conductor or you die. Period.

Simply put, the body is made of certain ingredients. And it has to have those, somehow. It will settle for less, it will accept backup options, but it will function less efficiently in response. The body is desperate to keep your heart beating and your lungs pumping. If it requires calcium or magnesium to do that, it will suck it out of your teeth and bones to keep you alive. It isn’t happy about it, but it has no choice. Better to be alive with brittle bones than dead with strong teeth, is how God designed your body to work.

Today, we are blocked off from most sources of minerals. Our diet consists of mostly potatoes, corn, soybeans, and wheat that has been grown on the same soil for a hundred years, with each year the potato taking everything it can from the soil, then being hauled to the market, eaten, flushed into the septic system, from there into the river, and carried out to sea. And the farmer returns three elements – Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium, (called NPK) – and does nothing about the dozens of other elements that left his farm. And so gradually over the last hundred years we have had less and less access to these minerals. As that happened we have in exact ratio gotten sicker and sicker.

Most people never touch gold, don’t eat off of real silver or use it for money, don’t even know what ytterbium is, and so when their body wants those elements, it can’t find them. So what does the body do? It goes looking for someone or something that has. And yes, I am going to tie this back to the original question but first we need to follow a new chain of thought for a moment.

Freud was right about one thing – the world is designed around reproduction. Every gardener knows that the plant puts it’s life into putting on seeds. If the plant is sickly, it will sacrifice itself to try to put on fruit in a hurry before it dies. The fruit is sickly too, but at least it’s something. So when a flower blooms, the plant puts the best of its energy, the best of its minerals and health, into that flower. Just as a pregnant woman will rob magnesium and calcium from her own bones and teeth to build her baby.

And so when a bug comes along and eats the nectar of the flower, he is collecting the best that the plant has to offer in a few bug-sized bites. And the bug, busy as he is, might visit a thousand flowers in a day. Perhaps a hundred thousand in his lifetime. The bug processes the best that the flowers have to offer, and gets rid of the waste, consumes some of the energy, and puts the best usable portions into building his own eyes, skin, wings and tongue. Then a chicken eats him.

So when the chicken eats this bug, he is eating not just the bug – but the net value of a hundred thousand flowers is concentrated into the organs of that bug, which of course the chicken eats whole. So even if any one flower wasn’t particularly healthy and didn’t offer a particularly wide range of nutrients, the bug concentrated them, as his life’s work, into one small package for the chicken. Of course the chicken will eat many tens of thousands of bugs in its lifetime. And not just one kind – it will eat worms, beetles, grubs, bees, moths, even mice. Then you eat the chicken.

And when the chicken is set before you, you are not looking at just a chicken – you are looking at the net product of a workforce of literally millions of flowers and seeds, thousands and thousands of bugs and worms, all of whom concentrated the best that they were able to produce into that chicken. Who in turn used it to build his own liver, eyes, kidneys, bones, etc. And so when you eat that chicken, you can benefit from all of those billions of bughours of labor, and thousands of chickenhours, all into one tidy meal. And then eat thousands of chickens in your lifetime. Then you die and are used to push up daisies yourself, and the cycle is begun anew.

Of course, the chicken built his liver with certain parts of the nutrients he got from the bugs. So if you want those particular nutrients, you won’t find them in buffalo wings or in his drumsticks – you’ll find nutrients there too, but not the variety or concentration of them you’ll find in his liver. Similarly, if you want the nutrients that he used to build his bones, you’ll have to use them for soup or chew on them like a dog or grind them into powder to get access to them. And if you want the vitamins that he stored in his fat, you’ll have to cook that down or just “chew the fat” like many cultures around the world do. Only then can you truly benefit from all of his labor for you.

But now back up a bit; what if none of this had to happen? What if the ground was so healthy, that it didn’t need for its minerals to be concentrated. What if you could bend down and gnaw on a few strands of grass and have the exact same quality of concentration, the exact same health-building ability, as you would by eating the chicken’s liver? Right now of course you can’t do that. There aren’t enough nutrients in the grass in your yard to keep most rabbits alive without supplementation, much less you. Similarly, most fruit and vegetables grown today are so lifeless and stale that they couldn’t possibly support life on any long term basis. But what if they did?

If they did, theoretically, then you wouldn’t need the chicken’s work and could leave him do his own thing, and not serve you. The chicken, if the grass and seeds and fruits were as healthy as we know they can be, would not need to eat bugs to get his food. And would, if he tried to eat them, find the taste repulsive, just as you would find the taste of chicken repulsive if you were healthy. Everyone knows how pregnant women have strange food cravings. The body regulates those to try and get you to eat the foods it needs, but if it had all it needed from the fruits and green herbs God gave is in the garden, it wouldn’t need to direct your cravings towards a thick, juicy steak.

And now to recite one more example before I tie this all together…

Early in the 20^th century, lions were extremely valuable in zoos because for some reason they never reproduced in captivity. No matter what the keepers tried, they simply could not produce lion cubs, or any members of the cat family, unless the mothers were recently captured from the wild. Otherwise, even when the females got pregnant, they miscarried or the cubs died shortly after being born. So the London zoo commissioned a researcher to go to Africa and observe the lions. He watched a wild lion kill a zebra, rip it open and go straight for the liver, eat it and a few other select organs, and walk away leaving the kill for the other animals. Back in the zoo, upon supplementing the solely muscle-meat diet of the captive lions with organ meats and especially liver, the lions began breeding immediately and the price of lions plummeted like the proverbial stone. The addition of the liver – the most highly concentrated store of minerals an animal has, and the net product of it’s life’s work – to the lions diet was all that was necessary to give the lions health. Without that liver they were unable to live in health.

So it’s time to wrap this up. Back to the Garden of Eden.

Genesis 2:8-9 And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; …

Here we see that the Garden of Eden was planted by God, personally. We can assume that God is a good gardener. We can also assume that He knows how to fertilize things. We can further safely assume that a garden God planted, with food in it that He said was “good for food”, would be ideally healthy. So the grass in that Garden – the grass that God planted and fertilized Himself – would be healthy. More than healthy, it would not need the concentrating effect of millions of bugs and thousands of chickens to put the minerals in a form where you can eat assimilate enough of them to survive – instead it would all be right there in the grass where you could munch on all you needed. And it would taste delicious, as I think we are safe in assuming that all the “green herbs” and “fruits” in the garden did.

Surely you’ve experienced times when something like, say, lasagna really “hit the spot” – then at other times, looking at that lasagna makes you all but lose your lunch. Your tastes and your cravings are controlled largely by the body’s desire for certain minerals and vitamins. Ours is corrupted today by generations of being fed things that taste good but really aren’t – white donuts, Twinkies, Coca Cola, etc – and so we can’t blindly rely on our tastes… but Adam could have. His pet tiger could have. And if his pet tiger was able to eat grass – just as your cat can and often does – and be satisfied from it, and actually enjoy it, because it was sweet and healthy and all the minerals, gold, silver, yttrium, cobalt, zinc and the others were available in that grass, then he would find the taste of meat repulsive, exactly as you would if healthy.

However, following this logic to its conclusion, to try and artificially make your cat a vegetarian by simply depriving him of meat will be harmful his health, as evidenced by the lion’s inability to breed in captivity. The feeding of corn and soybeans to our animals instead of meat is one of the reasons domesticated carnivorous animals are often sickly.

On the other hand, when the food is grown on healthy soil, and when the diet, pollution, and lifestyle are as they should be, they will gradually not want meat, because they will not need meat, and their body only gives them cravings for what it thinks it needs. And vegetarianism will be the AUTOMATIC RESULT of obeying the commandments, among the first of which was:

Genesis 2:15 And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

And as soon as Adam sinned, and started down the road that leads to death, he didn’t obey the commands of God, as men haven’t ever since, and didn’t dress and keep the earth, but rather mined the soil and put nothing back, just as our farms do today. And as this happened, the lions grew unhealthy, and restless on their diet of grass and herbs, because it was lacking the necessary nutrients because Adam hadn’t been putting them back into it. And Adam’s pet tiger got testy, and no longer satisfied by the now-unhealthy green herbs – then one day he discovered he had a taste for blood, and his children have been carnivores ever since. For make no mistake, it was by Adam that death entered the world:

Romans 5:12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:

God made the lions with huge teeth, and He gave the crocodile it’s jaws. He made them good at killing, and being evil! But He didn’t make them BE evil! Just as He made man with the potential for sin, but didn’t FORCE him to sin! And he made some animals better able to kill than others – just as he made some men better at sinning than others.

Romans 9:21 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

Just as God made some animals to be moose and some to be lions, the potter makes one bowl for a salad dish and one bowl for a toilet. But even though he made it to be a toilet, it didn’t have to be used for that! After all, in prisons they clean out the toilet and use it to make make wine! So it CAN be used for good and not for evil! And God did not FORCE the animals to sin, any more than he FORCED Adam to sin – but he did give all of us the ability, and the POTENTIAL for sin!

Isaiah 11:6-9 The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.

And in that day yet in our future when this scripture is fulfilled, you will once again see the deserts blossom as the rose as man reclaims the earth from the ravages of sin, and when that happens God won’t need to muzzle the lions, or magically declaw and defang them – for as carnivorism and death is the automatic, unavoidable result of sin, vegetarianism is the automatic, unavoidable result of obeying the laws of God and dressing and keeping the Earth.