Welcome to Verity. I'm your host, Felicia Masonheimer, an author, speaker, and Bible teacher.

This podcast will help you embrace the history and depth of the Christian faith,

ask questions, seek answers, and devote yourself to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ.

You don't have to settle for water down Christian teaching. And if you're ready to go deeper,

God is just as ready to take you there. This is Verity, where every woman is a theologian.

Well, hello friends. Welcome back to Verity podcast. And today we are talking about a topic that

I am asked every single Monday and ask anything Monday on Instagram. And it is a question about

alcohol. Is it a sin for Christians to drink alcohol? And if not, how do we engage with it in a

healthy way? How do we walk with our brothers and sisters who maybe come from families with a

history of alcoholism or have a history of alcoholism themselves? Lots of great questions

affiliated with this topic. And we're just going to do a pretty high level look at what scripture

says about it with a little dip of our toes into church history and Jewish history on the topic of

alcohol, specifically wine, which is what we see most often described in the scriptural narrative.

So we're going to start by looking at the symbolism of wine in scripture.

Wine is a symbol of rejoicing, especially in Jewish literature. And so that would be the whole

Old Testament for us. It's a symbol of rejoicing. In Ecclesiastes 9.7 it says go eat your food with

gladness drink your wine with a joyful heart for God has already approved what you do.

Such a beautiful verse. And it affiliates that rejoicing and that joyful heart with wine.

Another place we see this is in Psalm 104 14 through 15, which says he makes grass grow for the

cattle and plants for people to cultivate, bringing forth food from the earth, wine that

gladdens human hearts, oil to make their faces shine and bread that sustains their hearts.

So there's this association between wine and the gladdening of the heart. And I actually want

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