NOTES for Rom 14:14
In Yahwism, as in Judaism, the concepts of purity and impurity were key in religious life. At first glance it may seem that these are purely ritual restrictions, partly borrowed from the pagan world. But this is not quite so. The concepts of purity and impurity were connected with those ideas about life and the human being that belonged already to preexilic Yahwism and then became usual for Judaism as well. The Bible describes a human being as a twofold, spiritual-natural creature.
God "breathes" into the person's "nostrils," as the Hebrew text says, the breath of life that makes him human. Human life itself is a stream that includes both spiritual and natural components. God's breath of life comes into contact with nature in it, penetrating it and changing its quality. This stream of life is called by the Hebrew word usually translated into Russian as "soul."
Naturally, the intensity and quality of this life-stream can differ. In the world and in human life there is something that clogs its channel and slows its current; this is called impurity or defilement in biblical language. First of all, of course, the consequences of committed sin defile a person. But in pre-Christian times there were also other things in the world that could defile a person, lead to the shallowing and exhaustion of the stream of his life.
Everything connected with death, decay, entropy, all this reduced the measure of a person's fullness of life and lowered its quality. In such a state, meeting God became problematic for a person, or even impossible: to meet Him, to experience the reality of His presence in the place He Himself had chosen, one already needed to possess some minimum fullness and intensity of one's own existence.
In Sheol, in the realm of the dead, God is not praised because His presence does not reveal itself there: the existence led there by the dead is existence at a minimum, when the stream of life has almost completely dried up. Before Christ's coming all this had to be taken into account. But with Christ, the Kingdom entered the world with all its fullness of life, previously unseen and unknown.
Now everyone who lives this life need no longer fear that some processes in the untransformed world will prevent him from living the whole fullness of the life of the Kingdom. Now only a person's own sin can hinder him. And, of course, fear of impurity: fear often creates its own object. Whoever still fears the impurity of the fallen world will certainly encounter its effect on himself. Those who have chosen Christ and the Kingdom need not worry about this: the breath of the Kingdom is stronger than any destructive forces of this world.