If you work as a supervisor or manager in the food service industry you are often expected to take a class to become certified in Food Safety and Sanitation. It is in this class that you get to learn about all those food borne illnesses that can either make you sick or kill you. You learn about Botulism, Salmonella, E-coli and the ever prevalent Campylobacter (which is actually the most common form of food poisoning but nobody’s ever heard of it because it doesn’t make you all that sick). There is an interesting irony that occurs when you take a food sanitation class, and that is that it can make you paranoid about food. It’s ironic because food is the thing that sustains life; yet after hearing about all the various bacteria that are so prevalent in our food, you feel like you never want to eat again!
Now there are some golden rules for cleanliness in food preparation. The first rule is that there is a difference between being clean and being sanitary, and you have to understand the difference in order to understand the sanitation process. Clean is the removal of dirt; sanitary is the elimination of bacteria. In the food industry, you clean with soap and water and you sanitize with heat.
It is easy to recognize the spiritual metaphor. We are cleaned by the waters of baptism. Baptism is a symbol of our willingness to accept Jesus as our savior. So through baptism we are made clean, but that doesn’t make us sanitary. In scripture ‘sanitary’ relates to being pure or perfect. Now, we know that Jesus was clean because he did no sin. But we also know that he was not perfect, not naturally anyway, because the book of Hebrews tells us that he “…learned he obedience by the things which he suffered; And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him” (Heb 5:8-9). Likewise, even though we are made clean through baptism, there is still a purification process that needs to take place. Jesus, speaking to Nicodemus, explained the process this way: firstly “Verily, verily I say unto thee except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” and then “Verily, verily I say unto thee except a man be born of water and spirit he cannot enter in to the kingdom of God” (John 3:3,5). Jesus was showing that spiritual purification is a twofold process; just because someone is clean doesn’t mean that they are pure.
There is a second rule in the food preparation process which is: something cannot be sanitized until it is clean. You have to clean it first before you can sanitize it. So if you are working in a kitchen and you spray a dirty surface with only hot water; then that item is neither clean nor sanitary. It may look clean and because it’s hot you may think it’s sanitary but it’s neither. The bacteria actually hides beneath the dirt, the hot water may get rid of the visible dirt but it won’t get rid of the dirt you can’t see. You have to wash it first, then you can sanitize it. Likewise, Jesus says you have to be born of water first, and then the spirit, in order to enter into the kingdom of heaven. We are washed by the waters of baptism; then we are purified by the Holy Spirit. You have to be clean before you can be sanitized.
Likewise, sometimes we can appear to be clean when we are not. We can sometimes become so wrapped up in becoming sanitary (or pure) that we forget from where we were made clean. We forget that we were once dirty and repented of our sins, acknowledging through baptism that we are only made clean by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. When we forget this fundamental truth about ourselves, then we are no longer clean and we are incapable of being sanitized. In his letter to the church at Ephesus in Revelation, Jesus called this forgetting your ‘first love’ and reminds them to “Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent and do the first works, or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent” (Rev:2:5 NKJV).
Peter also reminds us never to forget how we were made clean with these words: “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed” (2Pet 2:24). We were once unclean, but now through Christ we are made clean so that we might be purified even as Christ was purified. Or as Jesus put it “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matt 5:48).
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One