What the Bible Says About Alcohol

Take your Bibles with me tonight and turn to Proverbs. Proverbs 20. Let’s read verse 1:

Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.

Ok, keep that in mind and turn to Proverbs 23 and lets read verses 29-35:

[Pro 23:29-35 KJV] 29 Who hath woe? who hath sorrow? who hath contentions? who hath babbling? who hath wounds without cause? who hath redness of eyes? 30 They that tarry long at the wine; they that go to seek mixed wine. 31 Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, [when] it moveth itself aright. 32 At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder. 33 Thine eyes shall behold strange women, and thine heart shall utter perverse things. 34 Yea, thou shalt be as he that lieth down in the midst of the sea, or as he that lieth upon the top of a mast. 35 They have stricken me, [shalt thou say, and] I was not sick; they have beaten me, [and] I felt [it] not: when shall I awake? I will seek it yet again.

While I was on vacation, my best friend Bob, who is a missionary in Germany, sent me a message and said can you call me. Of course I said sure. We jumped on a FaceTime call and I immediately knew this wasn’t going to be a normal call. Bob looked really, really down.

When I talked to him he told me he was in trouble. He told me that pastoring in Germany had make him rethink his position on beer and alcohol. The germans have this stuff called Radler which is 50% beer and 50% soda. Which makes it about 2% alcohol. You’d have to drink about a whole twelve pack of them in a short period of time to get drunk. Bob started drinking this stuff.

Well, somehow, the word got out and 90% of Bob’s supporting churches canceled his support. Which puts my best friend in the position of being thousands of miles away from the United States, and having no way to support himself. He asked me for help.

About that same time I’m spending time with a few of my brothers - who drink and see nothing wrong with it. And I’m visiting unsaved family members - all of whom drink and drink regularly.

And in the middle of all of this I picked up a little booklet by Pastor Jim Delaney, who is my Mom and Stepdads pastor about Christians and drinking and I thought it was very, very well written. Most of what I’m going to teach you tonight and next week comes out of that book by Pastor Delaney.

Before I go any further - let’s let the air out a little bit. My position on alcohol hasn’t changed at all. Actually, it’s gotten stronger. But I do think it’s a timely thing to talk about.

I’ve never drunk alcohol. Maybe when I was five or something and had a sip of my dad’s beer - but never anything beyond that. So I cannot talk about alcohol from the perspective of someone who has been a drinker.

But I can tell you that for much of my life, alcohol was all around me. My dad used to have keg parties all the time when I was over his house on the weekends. He had a bar in his house and as a teenager I was often expected to serve. I don’t know how many times in my whole life I’ve had a meal with my dad or stepmom where they weren’t drinking. Nearly every wall of their house is decorated with some kind of liquor memorabilia. Before my mom and stepdad got saved, they would take me to bars. I remember that.

Drinking is more popular than ever. It seems like every t-shirt they sell in the ladies boutiques is about wine. The gift stores are full of wine memorabilia. Wine is really popular right now.

And then you have someone like me who has the audacity to say Christians shouldn’t drink. And you say “Pastor, does the Bible really teach that??” Pastor, why do so many of my Christian friends see nothing wrong with drinking?

So I want to teach for a few weeks on what the Bible actually says about drinking.

And before I go any further I want to make three important admissions that I’ve never heard a preacher say before:

1. too often, this topic is preached on very shallowly and sometimes absolutely false statements are made.

That’s what I think my friend Bob was dealing with. He’d heard lots of messages about drinking. But most of them were really shallow and selective.

For instance, turn to Habakkuk 2:15:

Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also, that thou mayest look on their nakedness!

Now, I’ve heard more than one sermon before that says outright, it is a sin for a person to serve alchohol. There is a nationally known evangelist who loves to preach a message from this verse about how the water Jesus turned to wine couldn’t possibly be alcoholic wine because that would make Jesus a sinner.

Now read that verse again - is it a positive verse on drinking? No. Of course not.

But notice, it doesn’t say it’s a sin to give a man a drink, it says it’s a sin to give someone a drink “that thou mayest look on their nakedness.” If I use this verse to preach against alcohol in general and don’t point that out - I’m guilty of being deceitful with the word of God.

So too much preaching is like this. It’s shallow, sometimes deceptive and it’s easy to dismantle.

That’s the first admission.

The second admission is this:

2. There are verses in the Bible that seem to take a positive view of alcohol.

Turn with me to Zechariah 9:17.

For how great is his goodness, and how great is his beauty! corn shall make the young men cheerful, and new wine the maids.

Let me read a couple other verses:

And the vine said unto them, Should I leave my wine, which cheereth God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees? (Judges 9:13)

And wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man's heart. (Psalm 104:15)

Now, can’t we agree that those verses seem to take a positive view of drinking?

Listen, if I preach to you that you shouldn’t drink, and I ignore these verses and I pretend they aren’t in the Bible, and one of our young people sees these verses in a blog post what are they going to think? They are going to think “my pastor had an agenda - he wasn’t being fair with the Bible - he was trying to trick me.”

So we have to deal with this. I promise I’ll get to these verses and what they mean later. But for now I’m just admitting they are there.

Here is a third admission:

3. There is no single verse that outright commands against the consumption of alcohol.

We are going to see that there are many, many verses like the ones we just read that warn about alcohol and there are verses that warn about strong drink - but there isn’t a verse that says “thou shalt not drink alcohol.” So if you are looking for that - it’s a bit more complicated than that. I’m sorry.

Now, with those three admissions, I still want to make this point:

If you are a Christian, you shouldn’t drink.

I think the Bible is actually pretty plain about this. Yes, there are verses that seem to take a positive view of drinking, but each has a pretty simple explanation. Yes there are confusing verses about wine, but there is a really simple explanation for that.

What is obvious is that there are dozens of verses that warn about alcohol and what’s also obvious is that we live in a day in age when there is no good reason to drink or use alcoholic beverages.

So I want to teach on this this week and next. Tonight, I want to talk about drinking in the Bible and look at three things that most Christians don’t understand when they read what the Bible has to say about alcohol. Those three things are:

• the words the Bible uses for wine
• the context of the Bible around wine
• the customs of history that have to do with wine.

So words, context and customs.

We are going to go pretty deep here - but I think you’ll see that it’s helpful.

1. The words

The word “wine” is found in our English Bible in some form of fashion about 250 times. About 190 times in the Old Testament and about 60 times in the New Testament. It comes up A LOT.

But it’s important that we understand that even thought there is only one word “wine” in English that in the Hebrew there are actually 6 words that the King James translates “wine.” And in the greek there are four words that the King James translates wine.

And here is what you have to understand, there are ten words for wine for a reason - because they each mean something different.

Some people are going to say “Hey, wine means wine.” Like, debate over buddy. I’ve got you. The Bible says some nice things about wine. I mean Jesus made wine for the wedding at Cana. And wine is wine. So be quiet old school preacher man and pass me my chardoney.

But what I want you to see is that no - wine does not just mean wine - not in the sense that we understand it.

In the Bible, there are five different substances that are sometimes called wine:

• One is freshly squeezed grape juice.
• One is grape juice that is just starting to ferment.
• One is wine that if fully fermented.
• One is a mixture of water and fermented wine (usually about twenty parts water to wine).
• One is strong wine or vinegar which was used solely for medicine.

Each of these substances has different words in the original languages.

So for instance, you have the Hebrew word yayin which is one of the most common words for wine in the Old Testament. It’s found in the Bible about 140 times. This word talks about fully alcoholic wine like we would know today.

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But there is also the word tiyrowsh which is the second most common word for wine. tiyrowsh means “freshly pressed wine” or grape juice that hasn’t fermented yet.

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Both of these words are just translated “wine” in the Old Testament. But they mean two totally different things. We would drink tiyrowsh wine in church, but we would never drink yayin wine. They aren’t the same thing.

IN the New Testament the most common word for wine is oinos which can mean either fresh wine or alcoholic wine depending on the context. Most of the time it refers to alcoholic wine.

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But there is another word gleukos which always means new, non-alcoholic wine or grape juice.

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Now, this new wine could turn alcoholic. It could ferment. They hadn’t figured out how to stop that yet. But it was just starting to and would have very low alcohol content you would have to drink a TON of it to get a buzz.

Look at Acts 2:13

Others mocking said, These men are full of new wine.

When the disciples were full of the spirit at pentecost people said they are drunk with new wine. So you could get drunk on new wine, but the apostles answer was “they aren’t drunk, it’s just the third hour of the day.” In other words, the alcohol content was so low in this wine that you couldn’t possibly drink enough of it by that time to get drunk.

So the point I want you to see here is just this - just because you see the word “wine” in the Bible, don’t automatically assume that it’s talking about the thing you’d get in the grocery store today - because it’s not always the same. Sometimes it refers to grape juice and sometimes it refers to full on wine and sometimes it’s something in the middle or some mix of wine and water.

Which brings me to the second point - we’ve talked about the words, now let’s talk about

2. The Context.

What do people use wine for today? It’s really only one thing. They use it as a drink they enjoy and get a buzz from. It helps them take the edge off in social settings. That’s what we think of for wine. We don’t really use alcoholic wine for anything but those things, right?

But it wasn’t that way during Bible times. In Bible times they needed alcoholic wine for four reasons:

First, they used it as a disinfectant. They would pour it in open wounds to help heal people. You see this in Luke during the story of the Good Samaritan, he dressed the man’s wombs with wine. So they used wine the same way we use rubbing alcohol today - they let the alcohol in the wine disinfect things.

You have to understand see that distillery - the modern way we make things like rubbing alcohol and whiskey that are very high in alcohol content - those things didn’t exist in Bible times. Their was no hard liquor in Bible times. When they talked about “strong drink” they weren’t talking about vodka or bourbon. The strongest thing they had was wine. So they used wine to disinfect.

A second use they had for wine was as a pain reliever. They didn’t have aspirin or aleve in Bible times. Some form of wine was the best pain reliever they could find. That’s what they tried to give Jesus on the cross - vinegar was a form of really strong wine that they used as a pain reliever. This is why Solomon said “give strong drink to them that perisheth” in Proverbs 31:6.

A third use, and by far the most common use of wine in the Old Testament was as a water purifier. Ancient people did not have easy access to clean water like we do today. Very often, especially if you lived in a city, you were drinking stale nasty water. So to purify the water and to make it drinkable, they would put a little bit of wine into their water - about 20 parts water to 1 part wine. The alcohol in the wine would kill the bad stuff in the water and the water would dilute the alcohol so you were in no danger of getting drunk.

So when Paul told Timothy “take a little wine for thy stomachs sake” this is what I think he was talking about. Timothy, for testimonies sake was drinking bad water with no wine in it and Paul said “don’t do that. Put a little wine in the water to clean it up.”

Now, look, do we need wine today to disinfect stuff? No, we have much better disinfectants. Do we need wine as a pain reliever? No. We have much better pain relievers. Do we need it to purify our water? No, we can just pick up a bottle of spring water at the grocery store or even drink from the tap. So do we need wine the same way they needed wine in the Bible? No.

Doesn’t that help us to make sense of why there is no verse that says “wine is bad, full stop.” They needed wine. But we don’t need it the same way today. So we have to take that into account when we consider verses about wine and drinking.

So I’ve talked about the words, I’ve talked about the context. Let me give you one more point and I’ll be done for the night:

3. The Customs.

So one last thing to discuss is how ancient people viewed wine. Remember, they didn’t have what we call “hard liquor” or “spirits” that wasn’t invented until like the 1400s, they just had wine and beer.

Wine is about 12% alcohol by itself. Beer is about 5% alcohol.

But spirits and liquors can be 50% alcohol or more. You have to drink quite a bit of beer to get drunk and you have to drink a good amount of wine to get drunk. But it doesn’t take much hard liquor to get drunk.

Here is the thing I want you to understand: When the Bible talks about strong drink, it isn’t talking about vodka or whiskey - it’s talking about unmixed beer or wine.

What do you mean “unmixed” - well - like I said earlier the custom was to mix beer and wine with water.

There is a lot of stuff in ancient history that attests to this. Homer wrote in the Odyssey that the standard was 20 parts water to 1 part wine. Athenauus wrote a book in 200 AD and said the mixture was 3 to 1. Water to wine. Plutarch wrote a book and said this:

in daily intercourse, to those who drink it moderately it gives good cheer; but if you overstep the bounds it brings violence. Mix it half and half and you get madness; unmixed - bodily collapse.”

He also said that if you drink unmixed wine you are a barbarian.

What’s the point - the point is that in the ancient world, when they talked about wine - they were mostly drinking water. It wasn’t like it is today.

Now, I’m going to come back to this next week and look at some more scriptural warnings about wine but let me just say this - people in Bible times didn’t have clean water, they didn’t have Pepsi and sprite. They didn’t have a Keurig machine that would put out coffee in one minute. They didn’t have iced tea and lemonade and all of the stuff we take for granted and can have easily.

We don’t need to drink wine people. So let me wrap up by reading our text from the start. Proverbs 20:1

Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.