God planted the first vineyard, and God engineered the first grape. He knew precisely what would happen when that little unassuming ball was harvested, crushed, fermented, stirred, and pressed. He knew how it would make man feel — glad (Psalm 104:14–15). He knew he would serve it — not water, not milk, not just juice — in the church’s most important meals together (Matthew 26:27).

Before sounding the warnings, it’s good to remember that God loves good wine and still pours it for his children to enjoy, but his love is not young and naïve. His prophet warns, “Wine is a traitor” — notice, not excessive wine, but wine, the everyday alcohol of the day — “Wine is a traitor, an arrogant man who is never at rest. His greed is as wide as Sheol; like death he has never enough. He gathers for himself all nations and collects as his own all peoples” (Habakkuk 2:5). As arrogant and ruthless as Hitler and as greedy as death, have we reckoned with the tyrant many of us thoughtlessly sip between bites?

Who Suffers Without Cause?

While it’s harder than we might expect to find encouragement toward alcohol in Scripture, it’s not at all hard to find warnings about its abuses.

Moses once describes it as “the poison of serpents and the cruel venom of asps” (Deuteronomy 32:33). In Psalm 75, it’s a picture of God’s wrath (Psalm 75:8). Those who bow to their next drink will never see the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9–10; Galatians 5:21). And if anyone claims to be a brother while abusing alcohol without repentance, he’s to be cut off from the church — for the sake of his soul. “I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is [a] drunkard . . . not even to eat with such a one” (1 Corinthians 5:11). The warnings are as serious as they are numerous.

One passage in particular, Proverbs 23:29–35, not only warns about the judgment that will fall on drunkenness, but about the spiritual dangers of this kind of drinking.

Who has woe? Who has sorrow?     Who has strife? Who has complaining?Who has wounds without cause?     Who has redness of eyes?Those who tarry long over wine;     those who go to try mixed wine. (Proverbs 23:29–30)

The wise man goes on to explain his woes and sorrows, his wounds and miseries. A healthy, godly use of alcohol remains vigilant against at least these five great dangers of alcohol (all results of excessive drinking): confusion, perversion, instability, paralysis, and futility.

Confusion

Your eyes will see strange things. . . . (Proverbs 23:33)

The first hazard of drunkenness is confusion. Abusing alcohol will make you see strange things, robbing you of the ability to perceive reality. You will see things that are not there, or you’ll see things that are there but not as they are. Like the man on the side of the road, you won’t be able to walk straight, much less in a manner worthy of God (Colossians 1:10).

“Drunkenness blurs life-and-death distinctions and muddies the precious promises and commands of God.”

We see this danger when God says to Aaron and the priests, “Drink no wine or strong drink, you or your sons with you, when you go into the tent of meeting, lest you die. It shall be a statute forever throughout your generations” (Leviticus 10:8–9). Why would God forbid the priests from drinking alcohol? Because they, more than anyone else, needed to see reality clearly enough to guard the people against danger, especially spiritual danger, and lead them to what’s true, beautiful, and holy. “You are to distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean, and you are to teach the people of Israel all the statutes that the Lord has spoken to them by Moses” (Leviticus 10:10–11).

Drunkenness, then and now, blurs life-and-death distinctions and muddies the precious promises and commands of God.

Perversion

Your eyes will see strange things, and your heart utter perverse things. (Proverbs 23:33)

Scripture repeatedly ties drunkenness to immorality, especially sexual immorality (see Hosea 4:10–11; Joel 3:2–3). In the verses immediately before ours, the wise father says,

My son, give me your heart,     and let your eyes observe my ways.For a prostitute is a deep pit;     an adulteress is a narrow well.She lies in wait like a robber     and increases the traitors among mankind.Who has woe? Who has sorrow? . . . (Proverbs 23:26–29)

Why move so quickly, and without any transition, from prostitutes to wine glasses? Because the latter so often leads to the former. Excessive alcohol exaggerates the pleasures of sin and obscures its costs and consequences. Drunkenness makes a deadly pit look like a well, a bloodthirsty thief like a trustworthy friend, a forbidden woman like a secret stream of delight.

So what’s the warning? Alcohol draws perversity out of a man. He says things he never would have said sober. He does things he never would have done otherwise. Drunkenness undid righteous Noah after God delivered him through the flood: “He drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent” (Genesis 9:21). Alcohol fooled Lot into incest (Genesis 19:32). When Nabal rejected David and left his men hungry, what fueled his foolishness? “Nabal’s heart was merry within him, for he was very drunk” (1 Samuel 25:36). Alcohol does not spark perversion where it is not (Matthew 15:11), but it can stoke secret sin into a raging, devastating flame.

Instability

You will be like one who lies down in the midst of the sea, like one who lies on the top of a mast. (Proverbs 23:34)

The image here comes close to the confusion of verse 33, but carries a unique warning. If the former was the inability to discern holy from unholy, real from unreal, this picture emphasizes incapacitation. Alcohol leaves a man asleep while he lies in grave peril, in situations where his alertness really matters. He even falls asleep in the crow’s nest, where the winds and waves would be felt most. He’s utterly, dreadfully unaware of danger.

In this way, alcohol is not only a danger to a man, but to everyone who depends on him. While he sleeps in the storms at sea, he imperils everyone else in the boat — and he leaves anything he might have done to someone else. When he’s needed most, he’s unavailable. Bottle after bottle, he makes himself a burden to those for whom he’s called to protect and provide.

Worse than that, alcohol often makes a man a terror to those he loves. Another proverb says, “Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler, and whoever is led astray by it is not wise” (Proverbs 20:1). This is the very antithesis of Jesus, who calmed the seas for those he loved. When the storm comes, this man creates even more chaos. He creates storms where there was none. Instead of a stable refuge, he becomes volatile, unpredictable.

Paralysis

“They struck me,” you will say, “but I was not hurt; they beat me, but I did not feel it.” (Proverbs 23:35)

Of the five, this may be the most frightening. Drunkenness numbs a man to reality, and specifically to all that threatens him. His senses have been so dulled that he cannot even feel when someone beats him. He’s hurt but cannot feel hurt, which means he cannot detect danger anymore.

That’s what pain does — it alerts us to some threat and calls us to act. If we’re drunk, we sleep through the alarm. “Watch yourselves,” Jesus warns, “lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a trap” (Luke 21:34). He teaches the lesson with far more horrifying pictures. He says that when the wicked servant drinks with drunkards,

the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know and will cut him in pieces and put him with the hypocrites. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. (Matthew 24:50–51)

The horror is in how quickly they’ll fall from the comforts of drunkenness into the agony of judgment. If proverbs will not sober them, the weeping will.

Futility

“When shall I awake? I must have another drink.” (Proverbs 23:35)

Does any single picture better portray the futility and insanity of drunkenness? The drunk person looks for satisfaction in his glass, but searches and searches and never finds the bottom. No matter how much he drinks, his thirst is never quenched. Consumption consumes him.

“The drunk person looks for satisfaction in his glass, but searches and searches and never finds the bottom.”

The Preacher of Ecclesiastes was well-acquainted with strong drink. “I searched with my heart how to cheer my body with wine. . . . Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 2:3–11). No amount of alcohol could quench the craving inside of him. And yet millions keep pouring, keep binging, keep striving after wind.

The prophet Isaiah had seen alcohol ruin souls. He says of Israel’s leaders, “They are shepherds who have no understanding; they have all turned to their own way, each to his own gain, one and all. ‘Come,’ they say, ‘let me get wine; let us fill ourselves with strong drink; and tomorrow will be like this day, great beyond measure’” (Isaiah 56:11–12). They ask life of wine because they’re fools, because they stubbornly drink at dry wells. And they’re parched souls burned any who followed them. Drunkenness is a well without water, a marathon without a finish line, a curse that will not lift.

Drinking on Empty

None of this, of course, negates the profound and spiritual goodness of wine. Again, the Lord’s Supper teaches us that this is not a drink for the shadows, but for the rooftops. Like so many of the best gifts of God, though, wine is all the more dangerous for having been infused with so much potential for good.

And, as is also true about the best gifts, wisdom over the glass will mean more than heeding warnings. It will mean being so satisfied at another, deeper well that we can enjoy wine without becoming its slaves. “Do not get drunk with wine,” the apostle Paul warns, “for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18). In other words, if you do decide to drink, don’t drink on an empty soul. The best way to guard against the serious dangers of alcohol is to fill ourselves with God — to drink daily and deeply from his words, to entrust him with our fears and burdens through prayer, to thank him for the new and unique expressions of his kindness, to bury our lives and gifts and joys among his people, to sing together of our love for him. In hearts like these, drunkenness can’t get in the front door, much less find a seat at the bar.

Ironically, people who live like this, whose lives are gladly and regularly soaked in God, not only avoid the awful and destructive curses of drunkenness, but they also might get to actually and more fully enjoy some good wine.

Athanasius of Alexandria (died AD 373) was a larger-than-life figure living in a momentous century. During his time, Constantine came to power and legalized Christianity, rapidly changing the fortunes of the church within the Roman Empire. Constantine was also responsible for convoking the first Council of Nicaea in AD 325. If granting Christianity licit status sparked the public institutional growth of the church over the next decades, the Nicene Creed sparked a flood of theological discourse that soon engulfed the century.

Athanasius was present at the Council as secretary to the bishop of Alexandria. Three years later, he was elected bishop himself, becoming one of the most important — and controversial — ecclesiastical and theological leaders of the fourth century.

Against the World

Ecclesiastically, Athanasius was famously exiled five times from his episcopal see. Theologically, he sharpened his rhetorical swords against Arians (see especially his Orations Against the Arians, written between 339–343), who denied the full equality of the Son with the Father, and later Pneumatomachians (“Spirit fighters”; see his Letters to Serapion, written ca. 357), who denied the full equality of the Spirit with the Son and the Father. Athanasius’s thick ecclesiastical skin, as well as his unrelenting courage in opposing theology that did not properly honor the Son or the Spirit as God, earned him the moniker “Athanasius contra mundum” (Latin for “against the world”).

But before there was Athanasius contra mundum, there was the Athanasius who wrote On the Incarnation. On the Incarnation was the second part of a twofold work (the first part is titled Against the Greeks), likely penned soon after he became bishop of Alexandria (ca. 328–335). The book does not possess the polemical tone of his later works, nor the obvious theological targets (Arius is not mentioned, for example). It is, rather, a straightforward yet elegant theological meditation on the divine Word made flesh.

Toward the end of the work, Athanasius makes his purpose clear: to provide “an elementary instruction and an outline of the faith in Christ and his divine manifestation to us” (56). It is the kind of work a new pastor might pen in order to orient and encourage his people in matters of first importance.

Redemption in Four Pairs

Athanasius’s teaching in On the Incarnation contains several pairs that he often plays off one another in a fruitful dialectic. Consider four of these pairs, the first being Creator-creation.

Creator-Creation

On the Incarnation begins by reasserting the power of God in creation. This creative power is an ingredient in sanctified logic that, for Athanasius, moves inexorably to God’s work in salvation through the incarnation of the Son of God. In other words, redemption through the Word flows logically from his prior relation to the creature in the work of creation. When the Word became incarnate for the salvation of his people, he did not do so from an inherent necessity in his nature, but neither did he act arbitrarily. No, Athanasius reasoned, since the Word fashioned the world, it was not “inconsonant” for God to bring salvation to the world through the same One with whom he fashioned it (1).

Goodness-Grace

As Athanasius follows the biblical narrative out of the first two chapters of Genesis, he treats the fall. The corruption of death enters the world through humanity disobeying God’s law in the garden. As a result, death gains a legal hold over humanity, and wickedness spreads as the clarity of the image of God is lost. As Athanasius gets to this low point, however, he turns to the goodness of God and its inherent logic: God is a good God, and he has instilled goodness in his creation. While absolutely distinct from his creation, God is positively postured toward his handiwork, especially toward humanity, whom he made in his image for a blessed relationship with him. It would be unseemly, then, to let all of humanity slip into absolute corruption.

For Athanasius, God’s power and goodness compel him not to leave humanity in ruin — his power because to do nothing to rescue his good creation would show weakness, and his goodness because it would be improper to leave all humanity wallowing in ruin when he has the power to do something about it. But how will God help humanity’s plight in line with his justice? Athanasius considers mere human repentance as an option, but shows it to be insufficient since it does not “recall human beings from what is natural, but merely halts sins” (7). The gravity of the situation calls for the Creator, the Word of God, to be the “re-Creator,” who is sufficient to suffer on behalf of all since he made all. It was the goodness of God that compelled him to do so. In other words, God’s goodness stands behind his grace.

image–The Image

As Athanasius turns to the work of Christ in On the Incarnation, he brings particular attention to his reversal of the loss of the image of God. Humanity has continually rejected divine resources, leaving it bereft of the knowledge of God. It has rejected revelation in nature, and it has rejected revelation in word through the Jewish Law and Prophets. This loss is especially seen in the darkening of the prime location for human knowledge of God: the image within. Again, Athanasius asks, was God to leave humanity in this state?

“Seeing that humans lowered their eyes from the divine and wallowed in their senses, the divine took on flesh.”

By sending to his creation the actual Image in which humans were created, God renewed the part of humans by which we can know God. Seeing that humans lowered their eyes from the divine and wallowed in their senses, the divine took on flesh, according to Athanasius, in order to “return their sense perception to himself” (16). By this the Word brings the knowledge of God, making it accessible through the renewed image, which perceives the invisible God by means of the visible works of the incarnate God.

Corruptibility-Incorruptibility

The final and culminating pair from On the Incarnation is corruptibility-incorruptibility, which Athanasius considers from the moment of Christ’s incarnation to his resurrection. The basic structure of this pair is given a directional cast: the incorruptible Word came down and entered the corruptibility of creation in order to turn humanity from its corruption back up to God. Through taking on a body with the incorruptible Word, corruption can be reversed in humanity. But a debt must also be repaid, and this can be done only by the death of Jesus Christ and the “grace of the resurrection” (9).

“Through taking on a body with the incorruptible Word, corruption can be reversed in humanity.”

Death and resurrection reveal the real power of the corruptibility-incorruptibility pair. The death of Jesus Christ paid the debt for the ultimate end of corruptibility — death — and finally released humanity from its curse. The resurrection of Jesus Christ shows victory over death and is a witness to the incorruptibility available to all.

Athanasius puts this directionality memorably in a famous line: “He was incarnate that we might become god” (54). He does not mean that human beings lose their nature and transgress the Creator-creature divide. He has invested too much in the Creator-creature distinction for that to be true! Rather, he means that if we have faith in the one who conquered death, we gain his incorruptibility, delivered in eternal life. We gain by grace what the Son has by nature, which releases resurrection power into the believer’s life. Indeed, as Athanasius closes On the Incarnation, he points to changed lives and a changed world as blessed evidence of the truth of the incarnation.

What the Son Must Be

Thousands of writers in the history of the church have touched on the incarnation. That subject matter alone is not what has made On the Incarnation a Christian classic. Its enduring quality stems from the lucid logic Athanasius applies to one of the central mysteries of our faith. Athanasius simultaneously upholds the utter mysteriousness of God and his ways with the world and their inescapable reasonableness. The coherence of Athanasius’s thought is owing to this reasonableness, which shines through from creation to re-creation, from God’s goodness to his grace, from the loss of the image of God to its restoration in the Image, and from the corruptible made incorruptible. The whole work possesses a bracing unity, leading C.S. Lewis to call it a “masterpiece.”

While modern theology often breaks apart the doctrines of God and salvation, Athanasius treats them as a unified whole. In later works, he gives direct attention to the divine status of the Son, but in On the Incarnation the status of the Son is often entailed in what he is able to do. If the Word creates, and the Word re-creates, then the Word does what only God can do. A Son who can take what is corruptible and unite it to the incorruptible is a Son who is himself incorruptibly divine.

While On the Incarnation is edifying devotional reading, it is also a wonderful introduction to classical Trinitarian theology that developed and took shape in the fourth century. For the believing church, Trinitarian theology has never been concerned with merely the status of the Son or the Holy Spirit. It has been concerned with what must be true if Christian worship is to have integrity, and what must be true if our salvation is to be anchored in heaven. By tethering our salvation to the incarnate Son who has risen and ascended to the right hand of the Father, Athanasius firmly anchors our greatest hopes in God himself.

Audio Transcript

We’re into December already — crazy. As we approach the holiday season, Christmas, and the New Year, we’re focusing on Bible-study habits. Last week, we looked at how to study the Bible on one topic. That was episode 1998, a very practical episode where you, Pastor John, just walked us through how you do a word study on a single term or topic. It was simple, hands-on.

Coming up later this month, we’re going to look at the grammar of the Bible and the importance of that little word therefore. There are about five hundred of them, five hundred therefores in the New Testament. What does that term mean for us? What should we see? It’s another granular and super helpful Bible-study principle we need, and that’s coming on December 14. Then we look at why a daily Bible-reading habit is essential for us in 2024, for some motivation. That’s coming up on December 18.

And then we return after Christmas to look at a very common hindrance to the discipline. Inevitably, throughout the year, when my Bible reading seems flat — when I read, but my heart is dull — what should I do? What can I do? That’s on December 28. So, a big month ahead on Bible reading, all to hopefully equip and motivate us for a successful 2024.

Today we talk about learning — specifically, how to learn from the material world around us. Learning from “general revelation,” as it’s sometimes called. Pastor John, you have a new book out titled Foundations for Lifelong Learning: Education in Serious Joy. By my count, this new book contains only the second time you’ve ever mentioned Proverbs 6:6 in a book project. The verse says, “Go to the ant.” Study the ants. Learn from the ants.

This text, Proverbs 6:6, was also in your earlier book Think. But in this new book, it shows up three times: in the intro and in chapters 1 and 5. From one angle, the new book reads as a wonderful celebration of what God is teaching us through nature. How does this new book relate to Think, your previous book? How is it different? And as you wrote this recent book, what did you learn as you put all the pieces together about how the Bible pushes us outside the Bible to learn? What struck you in a fresh way?

The book Think (which was published in 2010, the year after Bethlehem College & Seminary was founded, and acted as a kind of launching vision for the school) is a plea. The book is a plea, especially to Christians, to embrace serious thinking as a means of loving God and loving people.

It’s a plea to reject either-or thinking when it comes to head and heart, thinking and feeling, reason and faith, theology and doxology, mental labor and the ministry of loving hands. I don’t want anyone to choose between the two halves of each of those pairs. So, the book is a plea to see thinking as a God-ordained means of knowing and loving God.

I think when Jesus said in Matthew 22:37, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your . . . mind,” he did not mean that loving is the same as thinking, that simply by thinking right thoughts about God, we’re loving God. I don’t think that’s what he meant.

“Truth about God is like dry firewood that we throw into the furnace of our hearts.”

What I think he meant is that thinking, the right use of our minds, is a means to loving. Loving is the fire of admiration and affection and desire in the furnace of the heart, and thinking is how the fuel of knowledge is thrown like good dry firewood into that furnace. We use our minds to grasp the truth of God in Scripture, and that truth about God is like dry firewood that we throw into the furnace of our hearts, to set our hearts to burning with love for God. That’s Think.

Two Different Books

This new book, Foundations for Lifelong Learning, grows out of my experience as a pastor who spent a huge amount of my 33 years trying to use my mind to grasp the God-intended meaning of biblical texts. That’s what I did mainly. What I have found in teaching and preaching, and in all the mental labor that goes into both, is that the very habits of mind that I use when I come to the Scriptures are the same habits of mind that I use when I deal with any reality in the world.

Foundations for Lifelong Learning is an effort to shed light on those habits of mind as we use them in reading both of God’s books, so to speak. The word, the Bible — that’s one book. And the world — that’s the other book.

This way of talking about “two books” goes back at least to the Belgic Confession of 1561, which says, “We know [God] by two means: first, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe; which is before our eyes as a most elegant book. . . . Secondly, He makes Himself more clearly and fully known to us by His holy and divine Word.” That’s the Belgic Confession of 1561.

Same Six Habits

I have spent, I suppose, most of my life focusing my mind on the Bible and then trying to help others to see the greatness of the reality that I see through preaching and teaching and writing. I’ve tried to let the Bible itself inform how I approach the Bible. What has emerged over the last fifty years is that there are these six habits of mind (or mind and heart) that make up my approach to the Bible:

Observe carefully and thoroughly what’s there in the text.
Understand accurately what is observed. What does this text mean?
Evaluate fairly, truly, what has been understood. Is it a sweet and precious reality like God’s grace, or is it a horrible and fearful reality like hell?
Feel appropriate emotions in response to the kind of reality observed and understood and evaluated — emotions like love, fear, hope, joy, admiration, revulsion, peace, or desire.
Apply all of this in wisdom to situations and people for their good and for the glory of God. I have not handled the Scriptures rightly until I am moved to make them a means of love and worship. “Be doers of the word,” James said, “and not hearers only” (James 1:22).
Express in speech and writing all that has been observed and understood and evaluated and felt and applied, so that more and more people can share in what is seen.

That’s how I approach the Bible or texts in Scripture. And what you can see is that — at least, it became plain to me over the years — these very six habits of mind are the way God wills for us to deal with the world as well as the word.

Whether it’s politics or grass seed, coronavirus or computers, cars or clothing — whether you’re looking up at clouds or down at ants — these are the realities that we deal with every waking hour, sometimes even in our dreams. And these realities in the world, the Bible itself tells us to pay attention to them. Like at the end of Job, where God essentially says, “Look, Job. Look, and humble yourself.” Or in Psalm 1, or Romans 1. These realities in the world are to be handled with the same habits of mind and heart that I have used in dealing with Scripture all these years.

This has become increasingly clear to me, especially as I tried to articulate what we are trying to do at Bethlehem College & Seminary, which is the origin of this book. That’s what this new book draws attention to: observe the world thoroughly, understand the world accurately, evaluate the world truly, feel the world appropriately — and then apply all of this and express all of this with wisdom and power, for the good of others and for the glory of God.

Learning as Living

And you asked, Tony, what struck me in a fresh way as I was putting these pieces together. Here’s one answer to that question: I realized that the foundations for lifelong learning are also the foundations for lifelong living.

“Thinking, the right use of our minds, is a means to loving.”

In fact, I got to the end of the book and that’s what I wrote the conclusion about, because it was fresh to me. I didn’t start the book thinking that way. I started the book thinking, “I’m just going to talk about lifelong learning.” But these six habits of mind are a way of describing the Christian life. It’s just what we do as Christians because of who God is and what he made us to be.

We observe because that’s why God gave us physical senses and spiritual senses. We understand because that’s why God gave us minds. We evaluate because God revealed himself as the measure of all worth. We feel because that’s why God gave us emotions. We apply and express because God calls us to love. I’m not sure I had ever seen so clearly as I do now that the path of lifelong learning is the path of lifelong living.