“Consider the following:”
Yes, lets.
- Christ’s first public miracle was creating wine for the more inebriated end of a party.
- Christ, and Scripture in general, frequently uses wine and the production thereof as positive analogies/metaphors for spirituality.
- The prescribed sacrament of Communion has wine as a central element. (Having grown up with grape juice as an element, and switched to real wine as element shortly after giving up being a teetotaler, I can assure you there is an objective difference in the experience of partaking.)
- As weak as the wine in question allegedly was, it was still wine; being a critical source of disease-free water, consumption surely was at volumes that more than made up for the low alcohol ratio.
- On that note, as weak as daily wine may have been, that produced in the miracle was surely “high octane stuff” - otherwise those imbibing it would not have expressed such positive reviews thereof.
We get it.
Don’t get drunk - that leads to sin.
But in downplaying the value of alcoholic beverages, don’t be so darned cherry-picking about it: Scripture is loaded with analogies, metaphors, parables, and outright recommendation & expectation of consuming alcohol in moderation (to wit 1-3 oz ethanol per day). Don’t get carried away with bashing that which God Himself made for us to enjoy.
Eat, drink and be merry, but don’t fall into excess and a drunken stupor wherein temptation will get the better of many in such a state, that’s what the Bible appears to state as far as I’m able to tell from my own readings. Sorry, Baptists, it was not possible to have just plain grape juice in that era, it would have rapidly become a sickening swill filled with bacteria. It was shelf stable at room temperature, and it wasn’t vinegar. Therefore it had alcohol in it sufficient to be antimicrobial.
Well said.