6 Now the Lord of armies will prepare a lavish banquet for all peoples on this mountain;
A banquet of aged wine, choice pieces with marrow,
And refined, aged wine.
7 And on this mountain He will destroy the covering which is over all peoples,
The veil which is stretched over all nations.
8 He will swallow up death for all time,
And the Lord God will wipe tears away from all faces,
And He will remove the disgrace of His people from all the earth;
For the Lord has spoken. Isaiah 25:6-8 NASB
In Acts 10, Peter is on the roof of the home of Simon the Tanner when he sees a vision of a sheet coming down from heaven. He sees animals in the sheet, and is told to eat them, but declines because they are unclean. The heavenly voice responds “What God has cleansed, no longer consider common.” Later after receiving the call to visit the home of a gentile, Corneleus, Peter will interpret this vision as follows, “I most certainly understand now that God is not one to show partiality, 35 but in every nation the one who fears Him and does what is right is acceptable to Him.”
Isaiah speaks also of a sheet that covers the nations that will be removed when God conquers death, wipes away tears, and removes disgrace. The removal of “disgrace” or shame is connected with impurity, those ways in which we have been defiled by our own impurity or by the impure acts of others. The operative phrase in Peter’s vision is “God has cleansed”. The operative phrase in Isaiah’s vision includes “the LORD God will wipe away” and “He will remove.”
The question has been posed to me recently whether the coming of Jesus has shown the laws of God concerning purity pointless, since “Jesus declared all food clean.”
Again, I argue, “No. Jesus did not come to overthrow ‘superstition’. He came to defeat the powers of death and defilement. By the blood of Jesus, peoples of the nations can be cleansed, their sorrows wiped away, and their shame removed. All this is because God, in Christ, has “swallowed death.”