The Idea of It

The wine was never the problem. I want that said first, because this is not a temperance letter and I am not going to pretend the Bible is on the side of a rule it does not give. What was the problem was my idea of it, and my lack of moderation, and my using of it, and my lack of control once I did.

It was the idea of it

It always seemed like the classy thing. Courvoisier. Macallan 18. Names with a weight to them, and a colour in the glass, and a way of sitting in the hand that made an ordinary evening feel like it had been chosen rather than endured. That was the sell. Not the alcohol. The idea of the man holding it.

What Scripture actually warns about is not what people assume. The famous passage on drinking in Proverbs does not begin with the drunkenness. It begins with the look of the thing.

Proverbs 23:31 · KJV

Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright.

The colour. The way it moves. The warning is aimed at the glass before it is aimed at the man, and at the eye before the mouth. Whoever wrote that had watched somebody be sold the idea of it, and knew that the idea arrives first and does most of the work.

And it recruits its defenders

Then come the arguments, and they arrive exactly when they are needed. A study about the heart. A glass of red is good for you. The French, apparently. I believed all of it while I was doing the thing it excused, which should have told me something, because I have never once gone looking for research to defend something that was not costing me anything.

Scripture does have a health use for wine, and it is shaped quite differently: “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities” (1 Timothy 5:23). That is an old man writing to a sick young one he loves, telling him to take a little. It is care arriving from outside. It is not a man with a bottle in the cupboard reaching for a reason.

Lawful, and still holding the leash

Here is the verse this letter turns on, and it grants the whole first half of my sentence before it takes the second.

1 Corinthians 6:12 · KJV

All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.

Paul says lawful twice in one sentence. He does not argue about whether it is permitted. He argues about who is holding the leash. The Greek behind “brought under the power of” is exousiasthēsomai, a future passive: I will not be mastered. Passive, because in that sentence the thing is the one doing the mastering and the man is the one it happens to. Which is an accurate description of how it went.

And the opposite of being mastered is not abstinence. It is enkrateia, the word translated “temperance” in the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:23), and it means power within. Something grown, not clenched. Paul puts the swap plainly elsewhere: “be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18). Not be sober instead. Be filled with something else. The verse assumes a man is going to be filled with something.

The lie that it only hurt me

This was the one I held longest, and it is the one I would take off anybody else who is holding it.

Scripture denies it flatly, and does not bother to argue: “none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself” (Romans 14:7). That is not a moral claim. It is a claim about how persons work, and it means “it only hurts me” is not a defence that failed. It is a sentence that was never true.

Look at how the Bible tells it. Achan takes something he should not have, alone, in a tent, and the verse that reports it reads: “the children of Israel committed a trespass… for Achan… took” (Joshua 7:1). One man took. The sentence says Israel did it. Thirty-six men die at Ai who never touched the thing and never knew his name (Joshua 7:5).

David is told the shape of his damage in advance, and it is not about him: “the sword shall never depart from thine house” (2 Samuel 12:10). His house. And the reason given is that he “gave great occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme” (2 Samuel 12:14), which sends the harm out to people who will never meet him, in what they now think of God.

The mechanism is not mysterious. “A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump” (1 Corinthians 5:6): it does not sit still, it spreads, because spreading is what it is. And the reason it reaches the people around you is given a verse at a time in the same letter: “whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26).

Three men asleep in a storm

Some of it was sleep. That is the part people do not say out loud, because it sounds so reasonable: it helps me sleep. It quiets the thing that will not stop. And the trouble I was escaping did not go anywhere while I was under, which I knew, and drank anyway.

There are three men asleep in storms in the Bible, and between them they sort out which kind of sleep a man is having.

Jonah is running from God, and he is not on deck. “Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship; and he lay, and was fast asleep” (Jonah 1:5), while sailors who never heard of him throw their cargo into the sea to stay alive. A pagan captain has to come down and wake the prophet: “What meanest thou, O sleeper?” (Jonah 1:6). And when Jonah finally says the true thing, he says it exactly: “I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you” (Jonah 1:12). Not I am sorry. For my sake.

Elijah is asleep under a juniper tree having asked God to kill him, and God does not wake him with a rebuke. An angel touches him and tells him to eat, and he eats and lies back down, and the angel comes a second time (1 Kings 19:5-7). That sleep is exhaustion, and it is treated with food and rest and not one word of correction. (The whole of it is in The Noonday Demon.)

And Christ is asleep in the stern on a pillow, in a storm He did not cause, and they wake Him with the same accusation the sailors put to Jonah: “Master, carest thou not that we perish?” (Mark 4:38). He stands up and says, “Peace, be still” (Mark 4:39).

Three sleepers, three storms. One is hiding, one is spent, one is trusted. I was the first, telling myself I was the second.

And the promise underneath all of it is the part that finally embarrassed me. The thing I was buying is given away. “It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep” (Psalm 127:2). And: “I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety” (Psalm 4:8).

The escape made more of what I was escaping

Proverbs has the whole cycle, and it does not end where you expect. It opens with the question “who hath woe? who hath sorrow? who hath contentions? who hath babbling? who hath wounds without cause?” (Proverbs 23:29). Wounds without cause. The unnecessary ones. Not the troubles a life hands you, the extra ones you manufacture.

Then the picture of what it does to a man’s footing: “thou shalt be as he that lieth down in the midst of the sea, or as he that lieth upon the top of a mast” (Proverbs 23:34). The thing reached for to steady him is what has him asleep on a mast in a gale.

And then the last verse, which is the only place in Scripture that ends a warning by describing the relapse:

Proverbs 23:35 · KJV

They have stricken me, shalt thou say, and I was not sick; they have beaten me, and I felt it not: when shall I awake? I will seek it yet again.

It does not close on the hangover. It closes on the next one.

What actually turned it

I did not want to stop until I hated what it did to me and to the people around me.

That sounds like an ordinary sentence and it turns out to be the whole doctrine of repentance, in the order Paul puts it. He distinguishes two griefs that look identical from outside:

2 Corinthians 7:10 · KJV

For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death.

The world’s kind is being sorry it hurts, sorry you were seen, sorry you are in trouble. Paul says that one kills you, and anyone who has done this knows why: it is the grief that sends a man to the thing for comfort. It is being sorry about your drinking in a way that ends in a drink.

Then he lists what the other kind produced, and the third item is the one nobody quotes: “what carefulness it wrought in you, yea, what clearing of yourselves, yea, what indignation, yea, what fear, yea, what vehement desire, yea, what zeal” (2 Corinthians 7:11). The Greek is aganaktēsin: indignation. Anger at the thing itself.

So I cut it off

Not because it was evil. Because of where it was taking me. And there is a saying of Christ for exactly that, which is usually read as though it were about something wicked, and is not.

Matthew 5:30 · KJV

And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

He picks the hand, the eye, the foot. Three things God made, three things you need, not one of them sinful in itself. That is the point of choosing them. The saying only works if what is being cut off is good. He never tells anybody to cut off a tumour.

The verb under “offend” is skandalizei, causes you to stumble, and Paul uses the same word of a different man’s conscience: “if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth” (1 Corinthians 8:13). He has just spent a chapter proving the meat is lawful. He does not take it back. He simply says he is finished with it. And once, he names the drink: “It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth” (Romans 14:21).

So the same saying runs both directions, which is why this is not a rule for anybody else. Cut it off if it trips you. Cut it off if it trips them. And Mark does not soften what that costs: “it is better for thee to enter into life maimed” (Mark 9:43). Maimed. He does not pretend the loss is not a loss.

None of which touches what Scripture says about wine itself. Jesus made it, at a wedding, in quantity, and the Bible calls it a gift. That argument is worked through honestly at Did Jesus Make Wine, or Welch’s?, and nothing here is meant to reopen it. A man can cut off a good right hand. That is the whole reason the saying has any force.

Where this lands

My troubles did not go away. That was the advertised benefit and it was never delivered once. What went away were the unnecessary ones: the wounds without cause, the mornings, the things said, the storm that fell on people who had not asked to be on the boat.

Those are not welcome back. Not I would rather they did not return. Not welcome. That is the indignation, and as far as I can tell it is the only thing that ever held.

And the last of the three sleepers is the reason any of it is worth saying. One Man in the whole account could honestly have said this only touches me. He had no storm of His own. He was asleep in a boat He had not endangered, and He was woken by frightened men, and He did not tell them it was their own fault. He stood up in the weather they were in and said, Peace, be still.

The connection that carries the damage carries the other thing too. That is the entire hope in it.