Editorial: “Soup, Watermelon, & the Gospel”
A few years ago I came across a Facebook post where Adventists were discussing Ellen White’s instruction that you shouldn’t drink liquids with your meal. They took it very seriously.
Someone wrote, “Many soups have liquid in them. Are we allowed to eat soup?” After a bit of casting about, someone came up with the solution that only thick soups should be eaten, never brothy ones.
Watermelon was a harder question. A slice contains the equivalent of a glass of sugary liquid. Ellen White wouldn’t approve of drinking a glass of juice with a meal, so you shouldn’t eat watermelon with a meal either. But neither could you eat it an hour after a meal, someone noted, because that would be eating food between meals—which Ellen White also prohibited!
What a dilemma! Perhaps God never designed watermelon to be eaten at all!
Oh, my goodness gracious—what kind of Pharisaical foolishness have we fallen into? In a world of starving people, racked with wars and conflicts and disease, Adventists are fretting about watermelon and soup!
While you and I don’t worry about such insignificant matters, conversations like this keep recurring among Adventists. Sincere people get pulled into them like bathwater circling the plughole.
Yet there is nothing of God’s grace here. These are the kinds of concerns that characterize cults more than Jesus-followers. Do these dear people even know that they are saved by faith? How can they, when the president of the General Conference, after flying church leaders in from all over the world, spends an hour reading to them from Counsels on Diet and Foods!
This isn’t Christianity, and I’m tired of pretending like it has anything to do with the gospel. Read the Bible, people: “The kingdom of God is not food or drink, but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17).
Loren Seibold
Adventist Today Executive Editor
1 March 2025
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