a word before we begin

There are rooms in the modern American church that most folks would rather not walk into, My Friend, and this little booklet means to walk into one of them. The lights are dim in this particular room. The conversation grows uncomfortable in a hurry. And the moment anyone brings up the subject, someone always reaches for the same verse and holds it up like a shield to stop the conversation before it has fairly begun.

The subject is alcohol, and I want to be entirely plain with you at the outset, because a great deal depends on our understanding one another before we go a single step further.

This booklet does not declare drinking alcohol a sin. I want you to hear that plainly, because if you walk away from this study thinking that was the point, you will have missed the point altogether. I am not here to bind your conscience where the Scripture itself does not bind it, and I am not here to call lost what God has not called lost, and I am not here to attack anyone who drinks, and I am not here to pretend the Bible is one hundred percent clear on every last question that touches this topic, because it is not.

But this booklet does mean to do some things. It honestly examines the Hebrew and Greek vocabulary the Bible actually uses for wine, a vocabulary most believers have never once been shown. It tallies what Scripture says positively and what Scripture says negatively, and lets the weight fall wherever it honestly falls. It identifies where the burden of proof in this conversation truly belongs. It exposes cultural conformity dressed up in the clothing of biblical conviction. And then, and this is where we are really headed, it shifts the whole question off the shallow ground the church usually fights on and onto the deeper ground the Lord actually wants you to wrestle with, which is why am I doing this, and what is it doing to my life.

If you can take that journey with me with an honest heart, you will be the better for it whether you ever drink another drop or not. That is my prayer for this study.

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.

what the bible actually calls wine

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sources & notes

  1. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words (Old Testament section), entry “Wine,” on yayin as the most common Hebrew term (roughly 140 occurrences), able to denote the fermented drink or, by context, the fresh juice of the grape. Cf. Genesis 9:20–21 (Noah) for the intoxicating sense and the general lexical treatments in M. G. Easton, Easton’s Bible Dictionary, “Wine.”
  2. Tirosh (about 38 occurrences), rendered “new wine” or “sweet wine,” the fresh juice or vintage, generally appearing among the harvest blessings (e.g. Deuteronomy 33:28; Proverbs 3:10; Isaiah 65:8). See W. E. Vine, entry “Wine”; and Easton, “Wine,” on the derivation from the sense of the pressed-out juice.
  3. Shekar, usually translated “strong drink,” a generic term for intoxicating liquor (Easton, Easton’s Bible Dictionary, “Wine,” no. 9). Scripture repeatedly sets yayin and shekar side by side as distinct terms: e.g. Leviticus 10:9; Numbers 6:3; Deuteronomy 14:26; Judges 13:4; Isaiah 28:7. The pairing shows the biblical writers distinguished categories the single English word “wine” obscures.
  4. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entry “Wine,” on Greek oinos (about 33 New Testament occurrences), the general word for the product of the vine, used both of the fermented drink (Ephesians 5:18) and, in the Septuagint, to render both yayin and tirosh without differentiation, so that context governs its sense.
  5. The narrative episodes: Noah (Genesis 9:20–27); Lot (Genesis 19:30–38); Nabal, whose name is linked to nabal, “fool” (1 Samuel 25:25, 36–38); Ben-hadad drinking himself drunk before defeat (1 Kings 20:16–21); Belshazzar’s feast and the handwriting on the wall (Daniel 5). Cf. J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, on these passages.
  6. The prophetic warnings: Isaiah 5:11 (“woe unto them that rise up early… that they may follow strong drink”); Hosea 4:11 (“whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart”); Habakkuk 2:15 (woe to him who gives his neighbor drink). On the wisdom passages, Proverbs 20:1; 23:29–35; 31:4–5.
  7. The New Testament lists: drunkards excluded from the kingdom (1 Corinthians 6:9–10); drunkenness and revellings among the works of the flesh (Galatians 5:19–21); “excess of wine, revellings, banquetings” among the abandoned works of the Gentiles (1 Peter 4:3). Cf. Warren W. Wiersbe on these Epistles.
  8. Psalm 104:15 (“wine that maketh glad the heart of man”), within a psalm cataloguing God’s provision; and Deuteronomy 14:26, which in the same clause names both yayin and shekar, distinguishing the terms rather than blending them. On the drink offerings poured out (not drunk), Numbers 28:7; and on the medicinal counsel to Timothy, 1 Timothy 5:23.
  9. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, “Wine,” and the classical sources it draws on, attest the ancient practice of diluting wine (often two or three parts water to one of wine) and its use where water was unsafe. The point drawn here is that the historical rationale does not transfer to a modern setting with safe drinking water.
  10. Matthew 7:1–5 (“Judge not,” with the beam and the mote) read together with John 7:24 (“judge righteous judgment”), on hypocritical judgment as the thing forbidden rather than all moral discernment. Cf. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on Matthew 7.
  11. Exodus 12:15, 19 (leaven purged before Passover), Matthew 16:6, 12, and 1 Corinthians 5:6–8 (“a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump”), on leaven as a consistent biblical symbol of sin and corruption. The Gospels describe the communion cup as “the fruit of the vine” (Matthew 26:29; Mark 14:25; Luke 22:18) rather than by the word oinos. The point is offered as a consideration worth weighing, not as a proof.
  12. The Anglo-American temperance movement, especially in the Wesleyan and revival traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, carried a strong strand of abstinence conviction, though moderate use was long common among Protestants. The argument here is explicitly that history informs but does not settle the question, Scripture being the final authority.
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