Redness of Eyes

Friends here in the Northern California wine country sometimes express disbelief upon hearing of Golden Gate Seminary’s alcohol ban, a prohibition I mentioned in a recent post. Coming from Tennessee, though, this rule didn’t strike me as even slightly odd. Back home, our pastor only departed from his normal subject matter—the need to accept Jesus Christ as personal Lord and Savior—for one reason. To denounce the evils of alcohol. No Bible-believing Christian, we were often reminded, had any business even shopping in a store that sold liquor, much less drinking the stuff themselves. When turning to this familiar theme, our pastor invariably preached from Proverbs 23:29-30, which says:

Who hath woe? Who hath sorrow? Who hath contentions? Who hath babbling? Who hath wounds without cause? Who hath redness of eyes? They that tarry long at the wine; they that go to seek mixed wine.

Hearing all this, I, for one, had to agree with the pastor. Even though I wasn’t entirely sure what “contentions” were, they didn’t sound like something I wanted to “hath” any more than I wanted to experience anything else in that list. Especially redness of eyes, which sounded kind of gross.

Now, I suppose some folks felt that these denouncements of alcohol were a bit overdone, given the fact that Jesus’ first known miracle was turning water into wine at a wedding in Cana. But the preacher, being more wily than he looked, was ready for that objection. When preaching his “red eye” sermon, he patiently explained that the wine available in Jesus’ time had no more alcohol in it than the Welch’s grape juice we drank during the Lord’s Supper. Jesus had, in reality, been concocting a healthy, refreshing drink for all the wedding guests and could in no way be viewed as contributing to insobriety.

Hearing that was always a load off my mind, and it made me grateful that by the time Jesus came on the scene, they had stopped making that Old Testament wine that Proverbs said you shouldn’t tarry over. I had missed that fact completely with my simple, literal reading of Scripture, so it was nice to have things explained so clearly.