Christian Living

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Does Jesus Forbid Wine Drinking?
By Patricia Backora, author of the book
Tough Love in Christ's Millennium
Which you can order online from: http://www.publishamerica.com

Religious tradition teaches that wine and beer are sins which will send you straight to hell, and even a tiny amount is utterly forbidden by God. But Jesus' very first recorded miracle was to turn water into wine (John 2:1-11). It was after Christ performed this "beginning of miracles" that His disciples believed on Him.

Even if, as some contend, Jesus never touched a drop Himself, then the fact remains that He did turn water into wine that was popular at a Jewish wedding. If wine is a sin, then is it any less of a sin to manufacture it for wedding guests than to drink it yourself? But it must not have been a sin, because Jesus was without sin (II Corinthians 5:21).

Some legalists get around this by claiming that the wine Jesus made was just like Welch's Grape Juice. But Scripture doesn't say that. The Jews knew what constituted good wine, and when the host tasted it, he said it was the best wine they'd had at the party. To make Welch's Grape Juice possible (one of my favorite beverages) the modern technique of vacuum sealing must be done to prevent the infiltration of air and all the microorganisms which cause fermentation. I doubt very much that the wineskins and clay jars used in ancient times to store grape juice could have prevented fermentation. Otherwise, Jesus would never have spoken of old wine skins bursting from the fermentation going on in those bags.

Jesus Himself said in Luke 7:33-34:

Verse 33: For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and ye say, he hath a devil.
Verse 34: The Son of Man is come eating and drinking, and ye say, Behold, a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!

One piece I read contended that Scripture never specifically says that Jesus ever drank wine, though He passed the cup around at the Last Supper. But the above verse substantiates that He did drink wine while on earth. Jesus came eating and drinking, and His own comment about Himself is immediately followed by a verse where He states that John the Baptist came "neither eating bread nor drinking wine". It just doesn’t make much sense to say that Jesus was not referring to wine drinking when He said that He came eating and drinking, when in the same breath He continues by saying that John came “neither eating bread nor drinking wine.” He did not deny that He Himself drank wine any more than He denied that He ate bread. What other drink could Christ be talking about? Milk? Water? Milk or water drinking wouldn't provide enough ammunition for Jesus' enemies to label Him as being a winebibber.

Jesus was accused of drinking too much, but He was also accused of eating too much. John the Baptist, in contrast to Jesus, did not come eating and drinking. People accused John of having a demon because he didn’t eat or drink what other people did (Luke 7:33). But they criticized Christ because He did eat and drink what they did. John did not “come eating and drinking”, but that does not mean John did not eat or drink anything at all. John did not eat "bread" (the staple food of Jesus’s society). But John did eat locusts and wild honey. He did not drink wine, but he did at least drink water. Both Jesus and John drank water and ate some kind of food. But Jesus consumed wine and normal food like barley bread while John went without those things.

Luke 22:30 promises that Christ's faithful ones will eat and drink with Him at His table in the Kingdom of Heaven. What will we be drinking? Cokes? Even mortals who live during the Millennial Reign of Christ will be cultivating vineyards and drinking the wine from them (Amos 9:14; Zechariah 9:17). God won't punish them for doing that, either, because He speaks of that wine being a blessing for them.

I looked up "winebibber" in my exhaustive dictionary, and it wasn't there, so I looked up "bibber". It means "one addicted to drinking". Many suppose that a winebibber is merely someone who swallows even a teaspoon of wine at a social function. But that doesn’t fit the dictionary definition of being addicted to alcohol. When you're addicted to anything under the sun, whether it be Coors Light, web surfing, or Hershey Bars, that thing has you and controls you, rather than you being the one in control of it.

One author I read contended that "new wine" in Bible times was always unfermented and could never cause drunkenness. If that is so, why were Jesus' disciples suspected of having indulged in new wine in Acts 2:13-15? They were filled with an exuberant joy they'd never known before, and they spoke in new tongues. This made people suspect that they might have hit the bottle, but Peter told them it was only nine in the morning, and they had just received the Promise of the Holy Spirit spoken of by the Prophet Joel.

Sometimes it's tricky to draw the line between moderate drinking and wine bibbing. Moderation and excess are sometimes relative. A 100-pound woman can tolerate much less wine than a 200-pound man, and moderation for him would be excess for her. The same principle applies to food intake. One plate of lasagna is a reasonable meal for most modern adults, but an Old West pioneer who chopped trees down all day might have needed two platefulls to meet his caloric needs.

My brother had a friend, Harvey, who was skinny as a snake. The two of them went to an all-you-can-eat chicken restaurant. Harvey ate plate after plate after plate, with all the trimmings. The manager finally got mad and threw Harvey out because they were losing money. Was Harvey guilty of gluttony, or did he just need more food than my brother?

Even if Harvey did cross that line between sufficiency and gluttony before the manager threw him out, that doesn’t mean Harvey should never again touch food. Christians don’t completely give up eating just because food can be addictive. That would be a faster way to get to heaven, no pun intended! All kidding aside, we can live without wine but we can't live without food. But must a blanket ban be put on wine because some people aren’t content with just a little?

Paul the apostle preaches against drunkenness in his epistles, but he never forbids Christians to make moderate use of wine. Nor did Jesus ever forbid His followers to drink wine, although He does caution His servants not to become abusive and drunken as they awaited His Return (Matt.24:48-51). If Christ had banned wine as a sinful thing, He would have been contradicting Himself by changing the water into wine at the wedding feast of Cana.

Even today in many countries the local water is unfit to drink. That's partially why people have drunk wine for centuries and it has become a part of their culture. When nine of us young people visited missionaries in Mexico back in 1970, we drank no water, but Coca-Cola and coffee. It was risky to even brush your teeth with the water in that part of Mexico. Eight of us got sick anyway. But there was a time when soft drinks and purified water wasn't available in places where the water is bad.

Wine was in widespread use in the days of Jesus and the apostles. If giving it up were such an important qualification for discipleship, the apostles would have made that clear from the very beginning, when they met in a council to decide whether or not to require Gentile believers to be circumcised and keep the Law of Moses. The apostles did not require those converts to come under Mosaic Law. And, interestingly, they did not draw up an alternative system of law to put those believers under. In Acts 15:28-29 only FOUR restrictions were placed upon the liberty of Christian believers:

Verse 28: For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things;
Verse 29: That ye abstain from:
1. Meats offered to idols
2. From blood
3. From things strangled
4. From fornication

End of verse: …from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well. Fare ye well.

If it were a sin to touch wine, then why wasn't wine included in that list of prohibitions?

The main issue at stake is not a can of Coors, but something infinitely more precious and worth standing your ground for, a principle Jesus shed His precious blood to win for us: liberty to walk in the Spirit instead of living under Law. Believers have been set free from the Law (Romans 6:14; 8:1-2). But legalists would enslave them to their own endless code of do's and don'ts to put them back under law. We are to be guided by the Holy Spirit in matters where New Testament teaching does not lay down hard and fast prohibitions. Drunkenness is expressly forbidden in I Corinthians 6:10, but not wine itself.

Colossians 2:16 says: Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of sabbath days;
Verse 20: Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances,
Verse 21: (Touch not, taste not, handle not;
Verse 22: Which all are to perish with the using;) AFTER THE COMMANDMENTS AND DOCTRINES OF MEN? (emphasis mine).

Beware of coming under bondage to the commandments and doctrines of men, those who try to make the Bible say what it doesn't say. If they forbid you to touch a drop of wine, and you comply with that order just because they ordered you to, it won't satisfy them. They'll lay down even more laws to keep you in your cage. You can't dance, you can't go to movies, you can’t play Nintendo, you can’t go to the fair, you can’t wear a beard, you can't play sports, you can't wear makeup, you can't wear a bathing suit, you can't cut your hair, you can't wear jewelry, ad nauseum. One website claims that when you get your ears pierced, you let in demons!

Legalists love the heady power of control they have over the enjoyments of God's people, and if Christians look like they're enjoying their Christian life too much, they'll be suspected of secret sin. Legalists count on you not reading your Bible for yourself to see what it really says. Legalists tend to be very selective in which laws they hang onto, modify, and enforce as God's requirements today. In the New Testament, the controversy of the day was whether or not to circumcise converts to Christ. Today, the big controversy is over tithing (a moneyfied version of the Old Law). Now, I know this sounds cynical, but I get the feeling that if preachers could make money out of circumcision, it would still be an issue in today's church!

One popular televangelist lambasted all other preachers and churches for keeping people under the Law. He had all his followers singing about how Christ has set them free from the Law, but he still said it was a sin not to tithe (or otherwise fail to pay him for his teaching). Setting his people completely free to be led of the Lord in sharing finances would have cramped his lavish life style.

Tithing and drinking meet together in Old Testament tithing law, believe it or not. I've never, ever heard this verse on proper tithing procedure preached from any pulpit or televised:

Deut.14:26: And thou shalt bestow that money (money gained from the sale of tithed produce) for whatsoever thy soul lusteth after, for oxen, or for sheep, or for WINE, or for STRONG DRINK, or for whatsoever thy soul desireth.

I didn't put that verse there, the Lord did! And not one sermon I've heard has ever given true Biblical instructions on how to tithe. The New Testament tithe, like forbidding believers to drink wine, is a tradition of man without early apostlic authority. About the only tithing Scripture that ever gets quoted is Malachi 3:8-10, the one legalists use to pry money out of Twenty-First-century Gentile Christians, who are not under the Law of Moses.

Incidentally, Scripture means strong drink wherever it says strong drink. Some preach that there was no such thing as fermented wine back in the Old Testament. In I Samuel 1:14, Hannah was told by Eli the High Priest to put away her wine. Eli said that because Hannah's lips moved silently and she appeared drunken to him. But she says in verse 15: "No, my lord, I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit. I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink…." Both wine and strong drink were capable of intoxicating a person, even in Old Testament times.

If wine is an abomination unto the Lord, then why did He command it to be offered to Him as a drink offering in Exodus 29:40? I'll cite just some of the other Scriptural references in which wine is offered unto the Lord: Numbers 15: verses 5 and 10 and Numbers 28:7, and in that particular verse STRONG wine is offered unto the Lord!

Can anyone explain away this verse?
Judges 9:13: And the vine said unto them, Should I leave my wine, which cheereth God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees?

Here is something which GOD is given credit for doing:
Psalms 104: 14 He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he (God) may bring forth food out of the earth;
VERSE 15: And WINE that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man's heart.

Now, why on earth would God be praised by the Psalmist (who spoke by the Holy Spirit) for bringing forth wine out of the earth, if God considers wine a sin? That sure doesn't make sense to me!

Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage (Galatians 5:1). Accept or reject things because you listen to God's Holy Spirit, not because you're under some man-made religious tradition.

The Kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost (Romans 15:17). If what you're doing conflicts with those three criteria, it's wrong. And, Whatsoever is not of faith is sin (Romans 14:23). Consider the setting you're in. Would it glorify God for you to say grace over a margarita in the presence of people whose lives have been destroyed by alcohol? Whatsoever we do, whether eating or drinking, ought to be done to the glory of God (I Cor.10:31).

The key consideration should be: What is our mission here on Planet Earth? We are here to try to influence others to come to Christ. All things are lawful, but all things are not expedient (I Cor. 6:12). What situation or cultural context do you find yourself in at the present time? Some people are genetically predisposed to have a very low tolerance for alcohol and should never touch it. People all over the world abuse alcohol, but cultural attitudes differ. It has been said that the French and Italians will converse for hours over a single glass of sherry and the social interaction is what counts with them. But Anglo-Saxon peoples seem to have a proclivity toward chugging down as huge an amount as possible, and the amount is what counts. In the USA and Britain, men will try to outdrink their buddies to prove how macho they are. Becoming drunk is a rite of passage into manhood for those who reach legal age. That is drinking out of peer pressure, not because anything wholesome is desired out of the experience. In various parts of the world, countless homes are made a living hell because money which might have gone to support families is wasted on booze. Women and children suffer unimaginable terror at the hands of drunken spouses and fathers. Let God's people soberly consider these things and make responsible decisions as mature Christians who listen to God's Spirit. But no issue, not even this one, should ever be used by religious leaders as an excuse to lord it over God's people with their own endless list of do's and don't's.

If you yourself live in the midst of a society plagued by problems associated with alcohol abuse, it would be a bad witness to visit your local liquor store. No one is required to drink booze of any kind, and you have the liberty to refuse it on grounds that you are seeking the edification of your weaker neighbor (Romans 15:2). In I Corinthians Chapter 8 Paul further expounds on how liberty must not take priority over the need to look after the welfare of others whose conscience is weaker. Paul said he would rather give up meat than offend someone who suspected that meat might have been offered up to idols first. The problem of idol-dedicated meat doesn't exist in my own society, but a few Christians believe that eating meat is wrong because animals must suffer and die to provide it for us. This is a slightly different case in that food, unlike alcohol, is actually a requirement for life. And once again, not every case is the same. People are made differently and some people can live just fine without meat. One man's meat might be another man's poison. My daughter went veggie for a year, and even though the most delectable vegetarian dishes were whipped up for her, she suffered health problems by going without meat. She had to go back to eating it. But whenever she eats with her vegetarian friend, no harm is done in giving up the meat part of her diet for just that one night.

Christian liberty is so important that Paul devoted a large portion of his writing to the subject. But when one principle conflicts with another, the more important principle must take priority. Jews were forbidden to work on the Sabbath, but they were also required to circumcise male babies on the eighth day of their life. If that eighth day happened to fall on the Sabbath, the Sabbath Day rest requirement was suspended in favor of circumcision (John 7:22-23). Jesus healed people on the Sabbath, too. Delivering satan's captives must take top priority in our lives. Whenever the choice must be made, the deliverance of those bound by the enemy must take priority over a believer's liberty to enjoy the occasional cup of wine.

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