Drinking Wine?

Paul’s counsel in his first letter to the church at Corinth deals with this very problem. Our context tends not to be the eating of meat offered to idols, but assorted other physical pleasures. The issue of drinking alcohol is perhaps the most common.

The pattern of the debate among brothers is almost always the same. We begin with exegetical arguments, that the Greek or Hebrew word for wine really means grape juice. When that argument collapses, and it always does, we turn to our “witness.” We are told that the only thing keeping a mass of unbelievers out of heaven is that they have witnessed Christians drinking and have concluded, “See, I’m as good as them. I’ll go to heaven without Christ.”

This argument too begs the question. There are all kinds of things which believers and unbelievers both do. Unless we are to assume that there is really something wrong with drinking alcohol the argument might just as well be, “Well, if an unbeliever sees me driving a car, just like he does, he might conclude that we’re no different and he doesn’t need Christ.”

What we usually end up with then is a truly sad story of a relative who abused alcohol. This is supposed to close the case, to end the argument. What we get is an experience, usually a terribly heartbreaking one, which trumps the biblical argument, which becomes the law of God. “The Bible must forbid alcohol because my uncle, brother, father, grandmother or I got into a lot of trouble because of it.”

If we are to love the gifts of God we would be wise to insist on loving His law. If we are to love His law we must refuse to dilute or distort it by reading it through our experience. Just as we cannot reject the law because the legalist distorts it, so we cannot reject God’s good gifts, even His gifts of physical pleasures because the hedonist abuses them. Our God, though He is spirit, saw fit to create a physical world, and to redeem a physical world. The Word does not say that the physical belongs to the devil, while God owns the spiritual. Ours is no Manichaen universe, nor a platonic prison house. Rather the earth is the Lord’s, and all its fullness. And so is the fruit of the vine.

The devil tempts not just by bidding us to eat of the fruit, he tempts too by forbidding. “Therefore, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). ■

R. C. Sproul Jr., “Weekend: The Earth Is the Lord’s,” Tabletalk Magazine, June 1996: Augustine of Hippo (Lake Mary, FL: Ligonier Ministries, 1996), 19.