I’ve run into several pastors and church leaders who treat drinking as off-limits for any serious believer, even while admitting Scripture doesn’t forbid it outright.
In Matthew 11:19 and Luke 7:34, Jesus is accused of being a drunkard and a glutton, and He responds by pointing out the hypocrisy of people who criticized John the Baptist for doing the opposite. To me, those verses seem to assume Jesus did drink wine, so I have a hard time seeing alcohol itself as sinful.
I don’t drink at all. I don’t want to risk getting drunk, and it doesn’t help my health or training. I used to think abstaining made me holier, but that was mostly pride dressed up as devotion.
My goal here is to hear how others read those passages. Did Jesus drink?
Yes, Jesus drank wine. The accusation in Matthew 11:19 only makes sense if He was drinking. Nobody calls a teetotaler a drunkard. Then there’s Cana, where He made 120 gallons of wine for a wedding. And the Last Supper, where He shared the cup with His disciples.
One line from the original post stuck with me, the part about abstaining as “pride dressed up as devotion.” I’ve done the same thing with other issues, congratulating myself for avoiding something Scripture never actually condemned. Are Tattoos and Piercings a Sin? The Pharisees built whole systems out of that impulse, adding fences around the law until the fences became the law.
Choosing not to drink for personal reasons is fine. Health, family history, whatever. Romans 14 gives room to partake or abstain and warns against judging each other either way.
Yes, Jesus drank wine. Matthew 11:19 doesn’t prove it, since it’s an accusation and his opponents made other false charges. But the accusation worked because of a real contrast: John abstained, while Jesus ate and drank in ordinary social settings. And in that culture ‘wine’ normally meant fermented wine, often diluted.
Scripture draws the line at drunkenness, not drinking. Abstaining can be a wise choice for health reasons or to help someone struggling with addiction. Craig Keener’s IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament is helpful on the cultural setting.
Yes, Jesus drank wine. “The Son of Man came eating and drinking” is his own description of himself, which carries more weight than anything his critics said.
The “glutton and a drunkard” charge was a smear. That pairing comes from the rebellious-son accusation in Deuteronomy 21:20, and it was meant to brand him, not to prove he’d gotten drunk.
C. S. Lewis put his finger on the confusion behind a lot of church rules when he wrote that temperance “meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further.”
‘Wisdom vindicated by her deeds.’ Never caught how loaded that closing line was. His works answer the smear, and I would’ve missed that without the Deuteronomy connection you pointed out.
That line about the fences becoming the law landed with me. When someone abstains out of self-congratulation, there’s a tightness around them. Like the heart has contracted around the rule instead of staying open to the people the rule was supposedly about. The Pharisees Jesus confronted strike me as exactly that.
And then there’s Cana. Making that much wine for a wedding is generous, rooted in joy and community. Where it comes from matters more than whether someone drinks or abstains. Romans 14 reads like an instruction to keep your own energy clean and stop projecting judgment onto everyone else. Pride disguised as devotion feels good in the body in a way humility usually doesn’t.
A false charge usually has to be built on something true or nobody would believe it, and calling Jesus a drunkard would have fallen flat if He never touched wine. His critics stretched the truth, but they were stretching something real.
I also liked how you framed abstaining as a wise choice. Someone close to our family struggled with drinking for years, so we stopped keeping alcohol in the house for their sake.
The grape juice argument never made sense to me. In that climate, fresh juice would ferment within days. The water was often unsafe, so wine was what people drank to stay healthy.
The idea that alcohol is evil came from temperance movements much later, not from Scripture itself. That context makes the Cana miracle feel more ordinary and less scandalous than some churches treat it.
The distinction between drinking and drunkenness goes back at least to early church fathers like Clement of Alexandria, who gave guidelines for moderate wine consumption at meals. Excess was the problem.
And if alcohol were inherently sinful, Jesus would be a sinner. That’s a theological impossibility.
From Genesis through Revelation the pattern is consistent. Drunkenness gets targeted, never responsible drinking.
We should be careful mapping ancient table wine onto modern drinking culture. Wine was often diluted and tied to meals, which is pretty different from knocking back high-proof liquor for the buzz.
Jesus likely drank wine. But that doesn’t baptize every way alcohol gets used today.
I wouldn’t write off your choice as pride. Your motive was off for a season, but that doesn’t change the validity of the decision itself.
Scripture honors both paths, and your abstaining has good company. John never touched wine from birth (Luke 1:15), and in Jeremiah 35 God holds up the Rechabites because they faithfully kept their family’s no-wine vow.
Cana settles this for me. If drinking were inherently sinful, Jesus wouldn’t have made actual wine, because that would make him complicit in sin. Some people assume wine in Scripture always means grape juice. That reading doesn’t hold up.
Scripture draws the line at drunkenness. Romans 14 reminds us to be thoughtful about others, and if someone struggles with alcohol or holds convictions against it, love means not putting that in front of them.