Baptist Kids Learn Exciting Account Of Jesus Turning Water Into Grape Juice
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He laughs but I have yet to hear a solid counterargument to the following:
- Inebriation is forbidden in Scripture (and yes, buzzed socializing is drunk socializing)
- An inebriating substance in a beverage is a defect
- Yes, wine in NT times usually had this defect (except when it was fresh out of the press—which is also called “wine,” by the way… which is grape juice, by the way)
- Jesus would not have any need to create a defective beverage
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Is a weight gaining substance in food a defect? Is a cholesterol inducing substance in food a defect? Isn’t calling an inebriating substance in a beverage a defect an assertion which is highly contestable? Isn’t the overuse of food and alcohol the “defect,” not the moderate use? (Spoken by one who voluntarily chooses to abstain from alcohol.)
G. N. Barkman
There goes blue cheese, sour cream, kimchi, and vinegar.
"Some things are of that nature as to make one's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache." John Bunyan
Aaron Blumer,
You’ve made some very good points.
Another view on the subject of Jesus turning water to wine.
http://gulfcoastpastor.blogspot.com/2013/04/jesus-turned-water-to-wine-…
David R. Brumbelow
The Bible says Jesus made wine, it does not say Jesus made alcohol.
The Bible refers to alcoholic wine, as well as nonalcoholic wine (grape juice), with the same word, “wine.”
In the same verse (Matthew 9:17) Jesus called both unfermented wine and fermented wine by the same name - “wine (oinos).” Scripture often calls unfermented wine / grape juice by the name, wine (Proverbs 3:10; Isaiah 16:10; 65:8; Joel 2:24).
The Bible says Jesus made wine. If you believe that wine was intoxicating, that is your interpretation, not you just taking the Bible for what it says.
David R. Brumbelow
….makes very clear the Hebrew (and Greek) preference for a beverage that would stretch wineskins, and got better as it got older. Good luck making that case with a yeastless grape juice. Verse 10 moreover clearly establishes that the wine they’d been drinking would dull the senses.
Keep trying to torture the historical data, David, but it’s not going to confess.
Regarding “buzzed” vs. “drunk”, it seems to me that the Old Testament does use the term (in the KJV) “merry” to describe a place where the person was sociable with wine, but not necessarily drunk as defined in Proverbs 23. Think Boaz in Ruth 3:7. I think it’s often “good heart” or something like that in Hebrew. Keep in mind that to get to the symptoms described in Proverbs 23, you’re really talking about an amount of wine (especially if mixed) that will quickly have someone “standing against the wall”, to paraphrase the Hebrew/KJV idiom. So I don’t think we can view alcohol as an inherent defect that way. If we did, bread is defective, too.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
Jim, Bert,
You believe it is permissible to use a recreational, mind-altering drug (alcohol) in moderation.
Do you also believe it is permissible to use another recreational, mind-altering drug (marijuana) in moderation, in the states where it is legal?
David R. Brumbelow
It’s worth noting, to build on Aaron’s point, that fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K), many minerals, and commonly used intoxicants like caffeine and sudafed become poisonous in excess. I know of a case where drinking too much water killed a girl—she was at a rave and thought she’d sweated a lot more than she had. But since many of these substances are necessary to life or are a huge blessing to enjoyment of life, I cannot call them bad substances. They are just, like a lot of things, harmful in excess.
Plus, Scripture tells us to give wine to the perishing so they can forget their trouble—this appears to be almost an endorsement of drunkenness in certain contexts. So the long and short of my response to David is that at least in certain cases—cancer, concussions—I don’t fault the person who smokes a bit of dope to cope with chemo or deal with concussions. My own mother took Marinol during chemo (which includes synthetic THC), and had a morphine drip on her deathbed—I actually calculated the flow rate to make sure it wouldn’t run out, since I’d seen how she suffered when it merely ran low. That’s Biblical in my view.
The point where the use of any substance becomes sinful is really when (a) you’re using it just to get drunk/stoned and (b) you don’t have an issue like “perishing” that would make it legitimate, Biblically speaking. We’ve tried prohibitionism in churches the same way we’ve tried prohibitionism in government, and all it leads to at the church level is the old joke:
Protestants don’t recognize the Pope, Jews don’t recognize the New Testament, Catholics don’t recognize the Westminster Confession, and Baptists don’t recognize each other at the liquor store.
It’s time to try a better, more Biblical way.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
Bert,
I was not asking about the medicinal use of marijuana.
You and Jim have justified the recreational use of alcohol.
So, do you also justify the recreational use of marijuana, in states where it is legal?
David R. Brumbelow
[David R. Brumbelow]Bert,
I was not asking about the medicinal use of marijuana.
You and Jim have justified the recreational use of alcohol.
So, do you also justify the recreational use of marijuana, in states where it is legal?
David R. Brumbelow
I do not advocate the “recreational use of alcohol”. I do not subscribe to your view that moderate consumption of beverages with alcohol “alters the mind”.
My view is that:
- There are passages that speak of beverages with some alcohol positively
- The Bible does not prohibit moderate consumption of beverages with some alcohol
- It is a tertiary issue
- Probably best for the majority of Christians to abstain
- No one who moderately consumes should use their liberty in a way to cause another to stumble
- While you like to link marijuana with this issue, I do not
I am not advocating sitting around in bars getting buzzed or getting buzzed after a hard day of work!
The Craig Muri view earlier in this thread [on the other thread] comes close to my view
12:12 pm, third paragraph. Use of any substance is a sin if the practice is intoxication and there are no extenuating circumstances. Like Jim, I don’t view the drinking of a couple glasses of wine, or the drinking of a few cups of coffee, as drunkenness.
So for dope, the question is simply whether a person can use it recreationally for a purpose besides getting stoned. This article suggests that smoking one joint with “typical” dope will get one to about 4x the legal limit for driving, and here’s a video of people smoking and driving—in a controlled course. The officer is saying that they’d be pulled over when they hit about 10x the legal limit on a rainy day. Sure didn’t take much for them to get there. For comparison’s sake, DUI arrests are made at an average of about .17% BAC, a bit over twice the legal limit in most states.
So unless they’re sharing one joint with a bunch of their friends, their chances of remaining legally and ethically sober are remote.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
[David R. Brumbelow]Jim, Bert,
You believe it is permissible to use a recreational, mind-altering drug (alcohol) in moderation.
Do you also believe it is permissible to use another recreational, mind-altering drug (marijuana) in moderation, in the states where it is legal?
David R. Brumbelow
I know this was addressed to Jim and Bert for whatever they are advocating. I just wanted to say that whenever the marijuana argument is introduced it appears to show up when the arguments for total abstinence seem weak. I have to confess that BC (forty years ago) I smoked a lot of weed and now work with ex-cons in drug therapy (mostly for opiates) among whom are many weed smokers. I think it’s safe to say that when someone smokes a joint recreationally it is for one reason - to get high (or buzzed). I don’t know that I’ve ever met anyone who smoked for any other reason. Now of course one can get buzzed wih drinking wine although it’s less likely in moderation (a typical glass) with food and depending on one’s metabolism. Most people I know who drink wine do not do it to get buzzed (with some exceptions). This should not be taken as an encouragement for anyone to drink wine who doesn’t. Neither is it condemnation to those who do (in moderation of course).
BTW, I’m not sure when “recreational” began being attached to drinking wine in moderation. If in the sense of enjoyment then yes pairing a red wine with red meat for an enjoyable meal might be called recreational.
In my early years, I taught and defended “the Bible teaches abstinence from alcohol” position, just as I was taught it growing up. It seemed to make sense, and it seemed the safest position to avoid abusing alcohol. Like many of my early positions, this one began to unravel as I continued to study the Bible. It just does not hold up to careful exegesis. If one takes the abstinence position (or prohibitionist) as a starting point, and filters all Biblical evidence through that lens, you can almost convince yourself that this is truly what the Bible teaches.
That is, until you begin to notice the passages that do not fit into this mold. If you goal is to understand accurately what the Bible actually says, instead of forcing it to say what you think it ought to say, you will eventually discover that the abstinence position cannot be honestly supported by Biblical teaching. Then you will realize that it fits into the category of things indifferent, about which Christians have liberty to take differing positions. It also allows you to forcefully prohibit what the Bible actually prohibits, namely drunkenness.
G. N. Barkman
It strikes me that if we are going to speak against all “recreational drug use”, we not only need to start cracking down on coffee, tea, and soda, but as foods also interact with the brain, we then need to talk about the uses of “recreational foods”. More or less, any meal that you don’t just eat, but rather also enjoy, is “recreational food use”. Sorry, folks, chocolate is right out, and if you eat meat, you’d better boil it instead of grilling or barbecuing it. We might have something of an outlet for “social eating” where the enjoyment of good foods can be done only when in the company of others who will stop you before you enjoy it too much and get fat. Maybe.
Reality here is that speaking of “recreational” drug use is just plain silly. Doesn’t God tell us in Ecclesiastes 9:7 to eat our bread and drink our wine with joy? Wouldn’t that be a form of recreation—re-creation and being made new? Why would we take a Biblical concept like recreation and make it into a bad thing?
Let’s get back to brass tacks. Gluttony and drunkenness are bad. Recreation within Biblical norms is good. Let’s not confuse them.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
Suppose your teenage daughter is driving down a dark lonely two lane road after dark.
A car is coming toward her.
Would you rather that driver coming toward your daughter had just finished a chocolate bar, or a bottle of alcohol?
David R. Brumbelow
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