reading between the vines

chapter one

an honest conversation

One more thing before we truly begin, and it is a hard thing, though I believe it is a true one. The modern American church has gone soft on biblical truth in a great many places, and the question of social drinking is, I am convinced, a clear case study of just how soft. Most Christians today hold their position on alcohol by cultural default. By family tradition. By emotional comfort. By what their friends do and what feels normal in the circles they move in. They did not arrive at their position by careful biblical reasoning; they arrived at it by drift. And when you ask them to defend that position from the text itself, the thinness of the ground shows plain very quickly.

They did not arrive at their position by careful biblical reasoning. They arrived at it by drift.

So we are not going to drift. We are going to think. We are going to open the Book. We are going to weigh the evidence honestly, and we are going to let the chips fall wherever the Lord lets them fall, and if that unsettles a comfortable position here or there along the way, well, that is what honest study does, and it has never once harmed a soul that was willing to be honest.

And I would ask one thing of you as we go. Set down, just for the length of this study, whatever position you walked in holding. I am not asking you to abandon it. I am asking you to hold it loosely enough that the text can actually speak to it. For a man who reads the Bible only to confirm what he already believes will find exactly what he came for and learn nothing at all, and that is a poor use of an open Book and a few quiet hours.

chapter two

what the bible actually calls wine

The first thing you need to know is a thing most Christians have never once been told. The English word wine in your Bible is doing a great deal of work, a great deal more work than it ever ought to be doing. Because the original languages do not have merely one word for the juice of the grape. They have several. And those several words mean genuinely different things.

Your English Bible flattens them all out into wine, and you read along never knowing the difference. But the original readers knew. And once you know, you cannot read these passages in quite the same way again.

Your English Bible flattens them all into one word, and you read along never knowing the difference.

Let me walk you through them gently. Yayin is the most common Hebrew word, appearing somewhere around one hundred and forty times in the Old Testament, and here is the catch: yayin is ambiguous. It can mean fermented wine, or it can mean unfermented juice. Context decides it. Sometimes it is the cup of blessing; sometimes it is the cup that wrecks a man. The word itself will not tell you which, and you have to look carefully at what is actually happening in the passage.¹

Tirosh is a sweeter word. It appears around thirty-eight times and refers to fresh or new wine, the juice as it comes straight from the press, and tirosh is almost always positive in Scripture. It is the blessing of the harvest. It is the goodness of the Lord poured out upon the land.²

Shekar is a word the modern reader badly needs to meet. It appears many times in the Old Testament, most often translated strong drink, and it means exactly that: an intoxicating drink, the kind that is meant to do a job on a man. Where you find shekar, you are almost never in happy company; it travels with warning. And here is the thing worth marking, that the Bible itself will often set yayin and shekar side by side in the very same sentence, distinguishing the one from the other, which tells you plainly that the biblical writers heard a difference between these words that our single English wine has gone completely deaf to.³

And when you cross into the New Testament, the Greek gives you oinos, appearing some thirty-three times, and oinos is every bit as context-dependent as yayin was. It is the general word for the product of the grape, and it can mean the fermented drink or the fresh juice depending entirely on the setting. So the whole vocabulary, in both Testaments, is far more careful and far more varied than the flat English word ever lets you see, and simply learning that these distinctions exist is enough to change the way you read every passage on the subject for the rest of your life.⁴

chapter three

the weight of the witness

I want us to do something simple, something most Christians have never once done in their whole lives. Let us actually tally up the Bible’s testimony on fermented wine and see honestly where the weight of it falls. Not by emotion. Not by tradition. By the text itself.

Let us start with the negative side of the ledger, and walk through it slowly, and let it land as it will.

Noah, the righteous man God preserved through the flood, plants a vineyard and gets so drunk that he lies uncovered in his tent, and a curse falls upon a generation as a result. Lot, dragged bodily out of Sodom by angels, ends up drunk in a cave and incestuously fathers two nations that would torment Israel for centuries afterward. Nabal, a man whose very name means fool, dies a fool’s death after a drunken feast. Ben-hadad, a foreign king, loses an entire battle because he was drinking himself drunk in his pavilion. Belshazzar, in the middle of a great drinking feast, sees the writing appear upon the wall, and that very night the kingdom is taken from him.⁵

And that is only the narrative portions. Now listen to what the wisdom literature has to say.

Read that one slowly. Wine mocks. Strong drink rages. And whoever is deceived by these things is not wise. The Holy Spirit is not pulling His punches in that verse.

And that whole passage in Proverbs twenty-three runs on for six more verses, painting a picture of the misery of the drunkard that ends with the man saying, I will seek it yet again. That is the picture of bondage, plain and undisguised.

Here is wisdom: those entrusted with responsibility, those who must think clearly and judge rightly and lead others, are warned away from wine. And are we not all of us, in some real sense, entrusted with responsibility? Are we not all called to think clearly, to judge rightly, to influence those God has set around us?

The prophets join the chorus. Isaiah pronounces woe upon those who rise up early to follow strong drink. Hosea says that whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart. Habakkuk pronounces woe upon him who gives his neighbor drink. And then we cross into the New Testament, and the chorus only grows louder.⁶

Drunkards are listed alongside the unrighteous who shall not inherit the kingdom of God. The works of the flesh in Galatians five include drunkenness and revellings and such like. Peter lists drinking parties among the works of the Gentiles that the believer has left behind him.⁷

Now let us look honestly at the other side of the ledger, the positive or neutral references, and here we must be scrupulously fair, because there are some. The Bible is not one hundred percent silent in the positive direction, and I will not pretend that it is.

Psalm one hundred and four says that wine makes glad the heart of man. Now that verse is debated even within its own context, because the same psalm is praising God for a great many things and the question of which kind of wine is in view there is not entirely settled. But fair is fair; the verse exists. Deuteronomy fourteen allows the Israelite to take his tithe in wine or strong drink and rejoice before the Lord at the central sanctuary. But mark something fascinating about that verse. The verse itself separates yayin from shekar, in the very same sentence. The biblical author is distinguishing them, not lumping them together. Even the strongest positive verse in this whole debate refuses to flatten the categories. The text itself does the very work the modern reader so often refuses to do.⁸

Then there are the drink offerings in the Levitical system, fermented wine, but poured out upon the altar and not consumed by anyone. And there is Paul telling Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach’s sake, which is plainly medicinal and plainly specific to Timothy’s own situation. And that, honestly, is just about all you have on the positive side. A debated psalm. A verse that distinguishes rather than approves. Ceremonial pouring out rather than drinking. And a medicinal prescription for one man with a sick stomach.

Now I want you to look at that tally honestly, and set the two columns side by side. On the one side: warning after warning after warning, and pronouncements of woe and apostolic commands. On the other side: a small handful of contested or carefully qualified references. The weight is not close.

The weight is clear, and it is not close. The biblical witness is overwhelmingly cautionary.

Now does that prove drinking is a sin? No, and I told you at the very beginning that this is not what I am here to prove. But it does prove something else, something a great many Christians have never stopped to consider: it proves that the burden of proof in this conversation does not lie at all where most modern believers assume it lies.

chapter four

where the burden of proof belongs

This next move is one of the most important in the whole study, and I want you to follow it carefully, because once you see it you will not be able to unsee it.

When the subject of alcohol comes up among Christians, the conversation is almost always framed the very same way. The abstainer is treated as the one who must defend his position. Why do you not drink? Show me where it says you cannot. The Bible does not forbid it outright, they say, so the abstainer is the odd one who must justify himself.

The burden of proof does not belong on the abstainer. It belongs on the one arguing against the trajectory of the whole text.

And that framing is exactly backward. After what we have just walked through together, after weighing what the Bible actually says across its whole sweep, the burden of proof does not belong upon the abstainer at all. It belongs upon the social drinker, because the trajectory of the entire biblical witness is cautionary. The default direction of the text is warning. And the man who wishes to argue for social drinking has to explain why two contested verses ought to outweigh the entire trajectory of biblical warning we have just walked through. That is no small task. That is a heavy load to pick up. And most Christians who drink have never even attempted to pick it up; they are coasting on cultural assumption rather than on biblical conviction.

Now let me set out the common defenses you will hear, and let us look at each one honestly and fairly. Jesus drank wine, they say. Well, did He? The Bible says oinos, and we have already seen that this word is context-dependent. And even granting that in some instances it was fermented, we shall have to ask what a single wedding miracle constitutes by way of a lifestyle endorsement for the modern American Christian.

Paul told Timothy to drink wine, they say. He told one specific man with one specific stomach problem to take a little for medicinal purposes. That is not a green light for the social glass after dinner. Reading Paul that way is rather like reading a doctor’s prescription written for someone else’s antibiotic and concluding it must therefore be safe for you to take recreationally.

The Bible only forbids drunkenness, not drinking, they say. And this is the most common defense of all, and on its face it sounds perfectly reasonable. But step back from it for a moment. The Bible says drunkenness is sin. The way drunkenness happens is by drinking. If you never drink, you never once get drunk. The man who walks ten miles away from the cliff never falls off it, and the wisdom literature is forever counseling us to walk well away from the edge rather than to see how near we can lean over it.

The man who walks ten miles away from the cliff never falls off it.

It was cultural, they say; they drank it because the water was not safe. And there is real truth in that. In the ancient Near East water sources were often contaminated, and even small amounts of fermented drink had a sanitizing effect. But notice that this argument actually proves my point rather than the modern drinker’s, because you do not have that problem. You have safe water running from a tap in your kitchen. The historical reason much of that wine was consumed simply does not apply to you tonight.⁹

And then there is the verse that always gets reached for the moment any of this grows uncomfortable. Judge not, that ye be not judged. Now mark this carefully, because the misuse of that verse is one of the great tragedies of modern American Christianity. When someone reaches for Matthew seven the moment this topic comes up, or any uncomfortable topic at all, it is almost always a tell that they are arguing from emotion rather than from the text. They have not engaged with the biblical material. They have simply reached for a shield.

That verse, from the very same Lord Jesus who said judge not, commands righteous judgment. The two passages are not in contradiction for a moment. Matthew seven forbids hypocritical judgment, the man with a beam in his own eye trying to pluck a speck out of his brother’s. The whole passage assumes you will make judgments; it simply tells you to get your own house in order first. To use Matthew seven as a conversation-ender on every difficult question is to misuse the Word of God, and the man who does it shows plainly that he is not really reasoning with the Bible at all. He is only trying to make the discomfort stop.¹⁰

Now hear me carefully once more. None of this proves the social drinker is in sin. What it proves is that the common defenses of social drinking are a great deal thinner than most Christians realize. The burden of proof has not been carried. And if you take the burden of proof seriously, the honest position for the believer who is genuinely unsure is the cautious one, and not the indulgent one.

chapter five

but what about cana

We must deal with Cana, because every conversation about this topic eventually lands there. Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding feast, and He even made the good stuff, and surely that settles it. Does it, though? Let us actually look at what the text says, and just as importantly, at what it does not say.

First, the text in John chapter two does not specify the level of fermentation at all. It says oinos, and we have already met the ambiguity of that word. The guests at the wedding were impressed by the quality of what the Lord made, but quality does not equal alcohol content. The freshest, sweetest, finest grape juice would also be highly praised at a wedding feast. The text simply does not settle the question one way or the other, however confidently either side may claim it does.

Second, and more important still, even if we grant for the sake of argument that the wine at Cana was fermented, what does a single wedding miracle actually tell us about a Christian’s ordinary lifestyle? The Lord also fed five thousand people with bread and fish. Is that a command to eat fish every day? He cursed a fig tree. Is that a command to be hostile toward vegetation? You cannot turn a one-time miracle into a normative lifestyle pattern. The miracle was about His glory being revealed, not about establishing a beverage policy for the church age.

And here is something else worth raising at Cana, even though most modern preachers will not touch it. The whole Passover system out of which the Lord Jesus instituted communion was carefully built around unleavened bread. Leaven, throughout the whole of Scripture, is a consistent symbol of sin and corruption. The Israelites were commanded to remove every last trace of leaven from their houses before Passover. And in the very meal where Christ took up the cup and gave it new meaning, the Scripture never once calls its contents wine. It calls it, carefully and repeatedly, the fruit of the vine. That is a curious thing for the text to do, if fermentation were of no consequence, and it is at the very least worth a thoughtful believer pausing over rather than rushing past.¹¹

chapter six

the real question underneath

One more honest observation before we come to the heart of it, and then we will turn the corner toward the real ground. The abstaining position has not been the odd little corner of history that the modern drinker often assumes it was. A great many of the Puritan divines and the early American pastors, and no small number of the great preachers and revivalists after them, came down firmly on the side of caution and abstinence. These were not weak men. These were not legalists. These were not men ignorant of the biblical material; they knew it cold, better than most of us ever shall. And they made their choice. Now this does not prove the position by itself, for history is not Scripture and never was. But it ought to make the modern drinker pause and ask whether the position he holds with such easy confidence is really quite as obvious as he has assumed. If men like that, with their grasp of the Word, came down where they did, perhaps the question is not so settled as it has been made out to be.¹²

Now, My Friend, we come to the heart of this little study. Everything up to this point has been clearing away the brush so that we could see the real ground underneath it. And the real ground is not at all what most Christians think it is.

Most believers, when this subject comes up, want to argue about whether it is allowed. Is it a sin? Is it not a sin? Where exactly is the line? And we keep circling that one question forever, because that question, taken by itself, is simply not the deepest question the Lord wants you to answer.

The deepest question is not “is this allowed?” It is “why am I doing this, and what is it doing to my life?”

So let us ask it honestly. If you drink, and you may or you may not, why do you do it? Sit with that question a moment. Do not run from it. Do not give the quick answer that comes first to hand. Let it sink down and find the bottom.

Most Christians, if they are truly honest with themselves, cannot give a biblical answer to that question. The real answers are usually these: everyone around me does it, my family always has, it is part of my social life, it helps me relax, it takes the edge off after a long day, I just enjoy it. Now hear me carefully. Not one of those answers is, by itself, a biblical argument. They describe something else entirely. They describe either cultural conformity or emotional dependence, and the Scripture speaks directly and pointedly to both of them.

Cultural conformity is one of the great enemies of the Christian life. Everyone around me does it is not the believer’s reasoning. The believer’s reasoning starts with the Word and works outward from there. The world’s reasoning starts with the crowd and works inward. We are called to the first, and we drift constantly into the second without ever noticing that we have drifted at all.

And emotional dependence, it helps me relax, it takes the edge off, is exactly what Philippians four says you ought to be bringing to the Lord rather than to the bottle. The peace the believer is promised is a peace that comes from God through prayer, and when a man finds himself reaching for a substance to do what only Christ was ever meant to do in your soul, something has gone out of order, however socially acceptable the substance may be.

So I want you to examine yourself. Put down your defenses just for a moment, and ask the Lord to search your heart on this. Here are the questions I would have you take to Him. Why am I actually doing this, not the surface answer but the real one? Is the Lord convicting me about something here, and am I quietly ignoring Him? Am I using this to cope with something I ought to be bringing to Christ instead? Am I leaning on this because life feels too hard right now? Am I finding a peace or a comfort here that I should be finding only in Christ?

And then examine the fruit, because the Lord Jesus said you would know a tree by its fruit, and that principle works upon every part of our own lives and not merely upon the lives of others. How is this affecting my walk with the Lord, honestly? How is it affecting my family, my relationships, the people who have to live with me and love me? How is it affecting my work, my finances, my witness to the lost? And if I asked the people closest to me, not the drinking companions but the ones who love me most and long to see me grow in Christ, would they say this is helping me grow or quietly hindering me? Those are the questions that matter. Those are the questions that go past the surface argument about whether a thing is allowed and get down to what the Spirit really wants you to answer.

chapter seven

a word for the conscience

I want to broaden the picture out one more notch before we close, because if you have read this whole thing thinking it was only about alcohol, you have not yet seen the deepest application of it. The heart question we have just walked through is not, at its root, only about alcohol at all. Alcohol is merely the case study. The principle underneath it is entirely universal, and it is this: anything we reach for to do what Christ alone was meant to do in our lives is the real problem.

It might be alcohol for some. For others it might be entertainment, the endless scroll, the streaming service that keeps the soul anesthetized from one episode to the next. For others it might be food, eating that has quietly stopped being about nourishment and become about comfort. For others, shopping. For others, social media. For others, work itself, the achievements and the busyness that fill a soul with the illusion of significance. For others, relationships used as emotional currency. For others, prescription medications taken not for healing but for numbness. For others still, more serious substances altogether.

Whatever you reach for to do what only Christ was meant to do in your soul is a functional idol, however culturally acceptable it may be.

And the principle is precisely the same in every single case. Whatever you reach for to do what only Christ was meant to do in your soul is operating as a functional idol in your life, no matter how culturally acceptable that thing may happen to be.

Mark that verse well. A thing can be technically lawful and still be doing real damage to your walk with Christ. Paul does not deny the lawfulness for a moment. He simply refuses to let lawfulness be the only question on the table. All things are lawful, but not all things edify; that is, not all things build up, not all things make you grow. And the mature believer learns to ask both questions rather than only the comfortable one. Not merely am I allowed, but also: is this building me up in Christ, or is it slowly hollowing me out?

Now let me say one more thing, and I want this to be the note we end upon. The point of this study has never once been to make anyone’s Christianity the issue. The point has been to make the practice the issue, to ask honest questions about an honest topic, and then to let the Spirit do His own work in His own people in His own time.

If you have read this and felt the Lord stirring something in your heart, do not run from that stirring. Lean into it. He is faithful. He convicts not to crush you but to grow you, and the very fact that He is speaking at all is proof that He loves you and is at work in you. And if you have read this and concluded before God that your conscience is clear and your practice is right, well, that is between you and the Lord, and I am not here to bind a conscience that He has not bound. I am here only to make certain the question has been asked honestly, the text has been weighed fairly, and the deeper question has actually been heard. So here is the closing word of it. The deepest question in this whole study is not is this allowed. The deepest question is why am I doing this, and is it drawing me closer to Christ or further from Him? Take that question to the Lord today. Take it honestly, and take it without the defenses up, and let Him answer it. He is faithful, and He is at work in His people.