God's warning about alcohol

Proverbs 23:29-35 (NLT)
29 Who has anguish? Who has sorrow? Who is always fighting? Who is always complaining? Who has unnecessary bruises? Who has bloodshot eyes? 30 It is the one who spends long hours in the taverns, trying out new drinks. 31 Don’t gaze at the wine, seeing how red it is, how it sparkles in the cup, how smoothly it goes down. 32 For in the end it bites like a poisonous snake; it stings like a viper. 33 You will see hallucinations, and you will say crazy things. 34 You will stagger like a sailor tossed at sea, clinging to a swaying mast. 35 And you will say, “They hit me, but I didn’t feel it. I didn’t even know it when they beat me up. When will I wake up so I can look for another drink?”

In these verses King Solomon lays out the consequences for those who consume too much alcohol. The people he refers to are most likely alcoholics since he describes them having hallucinations and saying things that don’t make sense. They are unable to manage themselves physically as they stagger around trying to hold onto something to steady them. They even fall prey to others; victimized because they are unable to defend themselves in their stupor. Even with the consequences they don’t learn as they wake up looking to consume another drink.


At the Sundance Festival in Park City, Utah, Robert Downey Jr. said: Oh, I can't drink these days. I'm allergic to alcohol and narcotics. If I use them, I break out in handcuffs.

A recent study ranked alcohol as the "most harmful" drug among a list of 20 other drugs. The study, released in a British medical journal, claimed that alcohol was even more dangerous than crack and heroin—when assessed for its potential harm to the "drug-taker" and those harmed by his drug-taking. Hardcore drugs like heroin, crack cocaine, and crystal meth are the deadliest drugs. But when researchers analyzed other important categories—the addictive nature of the drug, how it harms the body, the drug's role on society (such as tearing families apart)—alcohol far exceeded all the other drugs in terms of overall harm.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has also noted the harmfulness of alcohol abuse. This institute places a whopping price tag—nearly $235 billion—on the annual bill in the United States for the medical, social, and economic cost of alcohol abuse. That's almost 80 percent more than the related costs for all other addictive drugs combined. In the United States, alcohol also claims more than 80,000 lives every year, and is responsible for or involved in about one-third of all fatal car crashes, half of all homicides, one-third of all suicides and one-third of all hospital admissions. [Sources: Maria Cheng, "Study finds alcohol most dangerous drug," Post and Courier (11-1-2010); "The Party's Over," Nature (11-25-2010)]

God’s purpose in warning us about issues such as alcohol is to prevent us from falling into a trap such as addiction. God loves us and wants the best for us. He doesn’t want us to fear that we will wake up, beaten and find ourselves in handcuffs because we chose sin over His words of wisdom.