Jesus and Alcohol

I often see people of various Christian professions - fundamentalist, Mormon, Jehovah's Witness, etc. - who claim that drinking alcohol is an absolute sin. Even my own church, which does not hold to that doctrine, serves grape juice for communion, in order not to offend teetotalers, in spite of the explicit biblical instruction that it is to be wine!

I have dealt with this question before. However, this time, I am going to take a different tack.

In Luke 7:33-34, we have the words of Jesus: "John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!'"

Do you see His complaint? The Pharisees had seen John the Baptist, not drinking wine, and criticized him for it. Now, they see Jesus, drinking wine, and they still criticize in the opposite direction. His point is that the Pharisees were more about criticizing than they were about consistency or real morality.

Yet, we must not gloss over His own words indicating that He drank wine! 

Thus, my question to those who claim that drinking alcohol is always a sin is this: Are you not putting yourself in the same place as those Pharisees, for which Jesus rebuked them? And, furthermore, do you believe that your standard of holiness is higher than that of Jesus?

Proverbs 31:6-7, No Christian Drinks Alcohol, Right?

"Give strong drink to the one who is perishing, and wine to those in bitter distress; let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more."

We all know the church activists who work to oppose referenda on selling alcohol. And most of us experience that shiver in the gut when we see Christians with a beer or glass of wine or beer, because we know they aren't supposed to do that.

But that intestinal shiver comes from tradition, not the Bible. In fact, as we see above, we are commanded to offer an alcoholic beverage to him who is suffering emotionally. Evidently, God hasn't read the temperance brochure.