God Calls Wine Good!

Recovering a Cheerful Blessing We Left Behind

There was a time when Christians spoke about wine with happiness. Scripture seems to do the same. From the very beginning of the Bible all the way to the wedding at Cana, God never hid the fact that wine was one of His good gifts to humanity. Wine is not something to fear. It’s something God calls us to handle with responsibility. And when used rightly, it brings gladness to the heart.

Psalm 104 says that God gives wine to make the human heart glad. Wine is not merely tolerated or allowed. It’s portrayed as a gift. God placed wine in creation for celebration, fellowship, and joy. The Psalmist is clearly not referring to grape juice. He means real wine – the fermented kind that can make a person feel merry.

Throughout the Old Testament, this theme shows up repeatedly. Wine was connected to feasts, offerings, covenant meals, and everyday life. God often spoke of vineyards as blessings, and He warned Israel that losing them would be a curse. Wine itself was never the problem. The issue was always how people used it.

When we get to the New Testament, Jesus carries this same pattern forward. His first miracle was not raising the dead or healing the blind. He turned water into wine at a wedding. And not just any wine – the master of the feast called it good wine. His first public sign made a statement about joy, celebration, table culture, and the presence of wine within the wedding. Simply meaning they were drinking something that made their hearts merry. 

Paul understood this too. At Corinth, some believers abused the communion wine, showing up early and drinking too much. Yet Paul didn’t remove wine from the Lord’s Table. He simply told them not to get drunk. The issue wasn’t the wine. It was the heart.

For almost eighteen centuries Christians accepted this. Wine was normal at communion and at the dinner table. Celebrations, hospitality, worship – wine was simply part of life. Nobody saw it as worldly. That idea didn’t appear until the nineteenth century in America, when grape juice was invented. A new product quietly reshaped Christian teaching and replaced an ancient biblical practice.

Today, many Christians treat wine like it’s forbidden fruit rather than a gift God delights to give. And when we do that, we weaken our understanding of joy, we flatten our celebrations, and we raise men who are afraid of good gifts instead of learning how to use them with maturity.

Wine was never the enemy. Sin is. Immaturity is. Addiction is. But wine itself is consistently described as a blessing, a symbol of joy, and a picture of the coming kingdom. Isaiah uses wine to describe God’s future feast. And the Bible ends with a cup in the hand of the Bridegroom. In God’s world, wine is always somewhere in the background.