I have heard a great number of Christians discussing the inherent sinfulness of consuming alcoholic beverages, tobacco products and drugs.
You base your theory on one verse, I Corinthians 6:19-20, that says that your bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit and since it is wrong to pollute the temple of God, it is therefore wrong to drink, smoke or do drugs.
This logic is flawed. While I find drinking, smoking and doing drugs pretty stupid, I do not find them inherently sinful. The first miracle that Jesus performed was at a wedding in a town called Cana where he changed water into wine, which by the way is an alcoholic beverage.
And by this way of thinking, eating a lot of fat is a sin, caffeine is a sin, salt is a sin, sugar is a sin and those people from whom I have heard the aforementioned aren’t the thinnest people in the world.
Also, Jesus himself drank, as you can look up in Matthew 11:18-20 and Luke 7:33-35. He drank wine, and if the wine was alcoholic, and drinking alcoholic beverages is a sin, then Jesus would have sinned, not been perfect and therefore could not have been the sacrifice for our sins.
I also do not buy the argument that the wine was not fermented. The wine was fermented because they had neither refrigeration nor any way to preserve food than to let it ferment.
Though I do not feel that drinking in and of itself is a sin, I do believe that being drunk is a sin. The sin of gluttony is the sin of excessive indulgence.
Being drunk falls under this category, as does being high.
You can also be gluttonous in the areas of sex, food and the pursuit of beauty.
While we have to eat to live, procreate to avoid extinction and copulate to secure the bond of marriage, engaging in too much of these things, and for the wrong reason, is a sin.
Since the Bible does not say, “Thou shalt not drink. Thus saith the Lord God of Israel” and since Jesus himself drank, it is not wrong to drink.
Now, I am not saying that this is a license to get drunk every weekend. I am just saying that if you want to have a glass of red wine with dinner, you won’t be damned eternally to hell. Just be careful not to have the whole bottle and not to have seconds more than once.
No Comment