"You are doubtless aware that it is forbidden for a Jew to be intimate with a foreigner, or even to enter his house; and yet God has shown me that I ought not to call any man 'defiled' or 'unclean.'
But we should write to them to abstain from food that has been polluted by being sacrificed to idols, from impurity, from eating the flesh of strangled animals, and from blood.
That you abstain from food offered to idols, from blood, from eating the flesh of strangled animals, and from impurity. If you guard yourselves against such things, it will be well with you. Farewell.'
Through my union with the Lord Jesus, I know and am persuaded that nothing is 'defiling in itself.' A thing is 'defiling' only to him who holds it to be so.
Do not undo God's work for the sake of what you eat. Though everything is 'clean,' yet, if a man eats so as to put a stumbling- block in the way of others, he does wrong.
Everything is pure to the pure-minded, but to those whose minds are polluted and who are unbelievers nothing is pure. Their minds and consciences are alike polluted.
The 'grapes were trodden in the press' outside the city; and blood came out of the press, rising as high as the bridles of the horses for a distance of two hundred miles.