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In the book of Habakkuk, the Lord spoke to the
prophet Habakkuk about His judgment upon the nation of Babylon. Babylon was
going to come down upon Judah, destroy the land, and carry the people captive.
Habakkuk cried out to God and said, “Lord, but they are so wicked! How could
this happen?” God declared to Habakkuk that He was going to judge the
Babylonians, and He listed five particular areas where His judgment would fall.
We come to the fourth of those judgments in Habakkuk 2:15-17,
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Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also, that thou mayest
look on their nakedness! Thou art filled with shame for glory: drink thou also,
and let thy foreskin be uncovered: the cup of the LORD’S right hand shall be
turned unto thee, and shameful spewing shall be on thy glory. For the violence
of Lebanon shall cover thee, and the spoil of beasts, which made them afraid,
because of men’s blood, and for the violence of the land, of the city, and of
all that dwell therein. |
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Notice what God said in the fifteenth verse,
e fifteenth verse,
“Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy
bottle to him.”
Let us consider what the Lord says about liquor.
Even when people around us are not living for Christ, we can still be victorious
through our personal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. In this world in which we
live, standing for the Lord means going against the grain. As we consider what
the Lord says about liquor, we realize that God’s opinion is not the popular
view of our society.
In the book of Habakkuk, the Lord said that He was
going to judge the Babylonians for their use of alcohol. If the Bible is true
and if this statement is truly the Word of God, think of those among athletes,
models, and movie actors who have advertised liquor and offered it to the people
of the world. God’s judgment is already pronounced upon this type of behavior.
These people, whom the world considers beautiful, have offered their talents and
beauty to advertise for the liquor industry. They are all under the certain
judgment of God. It is inescapable. They have entered into the inescapable
judgment of God by offering liquor to their neighbor.
If you are wondering why I am so serious about
this, I am serious about it because of what the Bible declares and what I have
witnessed in the lives of others. The first church I pastored was the Greenback
Memorial Baptist Church in Greenback, Tennessee. Early on in that pastorate, as
I was returning home one evening, just before turning into the little community
of Greenback, I saw that an automobile accident had taken place just moments
before I arrived. I stopped my car, got out as quickly as I could, and rushed to
the scene of the accident. When I arrived, no one had been moved. Two men had
been coming over the hill driving north and had struck a man and his family in
an oncoming vehicle. The two men in the automobile were unable to stop their
vehicle because they could not control it. They were driving under the influence
of alcohol. Oddly enough, they did not sustain any serious injuries, but the
family they struck suffered greatly.
I helped load the father into the rescue squad
ambulance as he drew his last breath and died. I later had to tell his family
that he was dead. I helped load the mother into an ambulance after seeing that
her leg was crushed. She was crippled for life. I helped load a little
red-headed boy, whose body was cut and his ankle maimed and crushed. He would be
crippled for the rest of his life. We pried up the automobile to retrieve a
little preschooler from underneath and then reached back under the wreckage and
got his leg which had been severed from his body. I carried it in my lap in the
ambulance all the way to the hospital. That little boy would have no leg for the
rest of his life, and would grow up without a father because someone wanted to
drink a few beers and have a good time.
Drinking Alcohol Causes Suffering
The Bible says in Habakkuk 2:15,
“Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy
bottle to him, and makest him drunken also, that thou mayest look on their
nakedness!”
The word
“woe”
means “judgment and destruction.” Drinking alcohol
brings suffering. Consider some statistical information I have gathered. One
information sheet comes from the third and fourth
Special Reports to the United States Congress on Alcohol and Health.
In this report the medical authorities say that
with every drink one shortens his life twenty minutes. They also tell us that
there are eleven to seventeen million alcoholics in America. America spends
fifty billion dollars a year on alcohol. We think that we are making money from
taxing liquor, that it is a profitable business, but the report to Congress says
that alcohol problems cost theAmerican economy an estimated 68.6 billion dollars
every year. These are problems that result from people who drink–physical
problems, jobs lost, man hours lost, and accidents taking place on the highways.
The leading cause of mental retardation among children is alcohol consumption
during pregnancy. I say this as kindly as I know how, but a woman is a careless,
selfish human being to drink alcohol while carrying a baby.
Nearly twenty thousand people are killed every
year on our highways because of alcohol. One person dies every twenty-one
minutes in an alcohol-related auto accident. Of course, that does not mean much
to us unless someone we know is involved. Eighty-three percent of all fire
fatalities are alcohol-related. Fifty to sixty-eight percent of all drownings
are alcohol-related. Up to eighty percent of all suicides are alcohol-related.
Forty percent of all fatal industrial accidents are alcohol-related. Eighty-six
percent of all murders are alcohol-related. Sixty-five percent of all child
abuse is alcohol-related. This same report says that 200,000 Americans die each
year, either because of their own consumption of alcohol or someone else’s
consumption of alcohol. This information can be obtained by anyone who is
interested in knowing the truth.
Another report entitled, “The Truth About Beer,”
is provided by the United Tennessee League because some people think it is
alright to have a few beers.
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Approximately fifty percent of all teenagers have tried beer before they enter high
school. Ninety percent of all high school graduates have used beer. Peer
pressure is great to join the crowd and have a couple of beers. Eighty percent
of the teenagers who drink today indicated that their friends also drink.
Television commercials present a very glamorous picture of beer drinking.
Endorsements by highly recognizable former athletes make beer drinking appear to
be the macho thing to do. These commercials show young people enjoying the ‘good
life’ with a beer or other alcoholic beverage in hand. In some commercials,
beautiful models endorse beer and thus the sex appeal angle is introduced: ‘If
you want to get a pretty girl, drink a beer.’ Television programs consistently
depict the drinking of alcohol as an integral part of an attractive and
successful life, and in many programs, alcohol is presented as a way of coping
with the problems of life. |
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And in case you do not know the facts about beer,
the article says,
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The alcohol contained in beer is grain alcohol, chemically known as ethyl alcohol. The
percentage of alcohol in beer ranges from approximately three percent to eight
percent. This may not seem like much alcohol; however, a twelve-ounce can or
bottle of beer contains a half ounce of alcohol. This is the same amount of
alcohol that you would obtain from other drinks such as a glass of wine filled
with natural wine, an average cocktail, an average highball, an average martini,
or a shot of one hundred proof whiskey. Approximately sixty percent of the
alcohol consumed in the United States is from beer. Clearly, beer is the
beverage of choice by Americans. Alcohol is a very powerful drug to which the
body can quickly develop both a psychological and physiological dependence.
There are at least eleven million alcoholics and perhaps as many as seventeen
million alcoholics in America. Many hundreds of thousands of them are teenagers.
One out of every ten drinkers becomes addicted to alcohol. Statistics indicate
that one out of every two people will be involved in an alcohol-related accident
in their lifetime. |
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You may say, “It’s none of my business.” If you
have never taken a drink, it is still your business because half of us are going
to be hurt by someone who is drinking.
Alcohol is involved in approximately sixty percent of all highway fatalities. In the
United States alone, over twenty-five thousand people die and seven hundred
fifty thousand injuries occur on American highways each year because of alcohol.
Three quarters of a million people are injured because of alcohol each year in
America. Three people are killed and eighty people are injured by alcohol every
hour in America. On a typical weeknight, one out of every ten drivers is driving
under the influence of alcohol.
And one article said, “There are certain hours
during the day when they have proven that not only one out of every ten, but
three out of every ten drivers are under the influence of alcohol.”
Many say that liquor is a disease. Someone has
said, “If liquor is a disease, it’s the only disease that requires a license to
propagate it. It’s the only disease that’s bottled and sold. It’s the only
disease that requires outlets to spread it. It’s the only disease that is spread
by advertising.”
Does it do something to you when you see athletes
getting their bodies in tremendous condition and then to see that the sporting
events are sponsored, for the most part, by beer companies?
A former Prime Minister of England, William
Gladstone, frequently distributed this article to his friends:
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Drunkenness expels reason, drowns the memory, distempers the body, diminishes strength,
inflames the blood, causes internal and external wounds; it is a witch to the
senses; a devil to the soul; a thief to the purse; a beggar’s companion; a
wife’s woe, and children’s sorrow.
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I remember the night when my youngest son
graduated from our Christian school as valedictorian of his class. I was so
grateful to the Lord for him. But the night that I
watched him graduate, I could not help
but recall that we had a lovely couple in the first church I pastored, who had a
son the same age as my youngest son. They were in school together. They had
planned to graduate the same night. But their son did not graduate. Their son, a
few weeks before graduation, took a friend home and was coming back to his home
to be in at the proper time that his parents had allotted for him. A man and a
woman in an automobile, who had already taken their clothes off in a drunken
stupor, were driving down the highway on the wrong side of the road and crashed
into the automobile driven by this young man. They killed him instantly. The drunken driver never knew that he
struck my young friend.
Drinking liquor causes suffering. The world is
suffering for many reasons, but one of the biggest reasons is beverage
alcohol–beer, wine coolers, liquor, and all the rest. God is against it because
it causes suffering. It could be you or one of your precious children that is
the next to be killed.
Drinking Alcohol Causes Shame
The Bible says in Habakkuk 2:15,
“Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy
bottle to him, and makest him drunken also, that thou mayest look on their
nakedness!”
God associates drinking with immorality. He ties
the two together. If you ever notice the beer commercials, they are promoting an
immoral lifestyle. They say, “Live it up!” And the beautiful young bodies that
you see will not remain young and beautiful forever because drinking alcohol
will cause shame. I noticed, in my reading, that a famous actor who portrays a
constant drinker and philosopher on a television sitcom has had himself admitted
into an alcoholics’ treatment center. Though he portrays a character that
promotes drinking every week on television, he has had to admit himself into an
alcoholics’ treatment center and has tried to commit suicide on a number of
occasions while in that center. I am not against that man, but I am against his
sin and what he promotes. If anyone should see it, he should see it. I could go
down a list of famous people who have either overdosed, killed themselves, or
wrecked and ruined their lives because of their drinking or substance abuse.
Drinking brings shame.
Have you ever seen a drunken woman? I remember
from my childhood seeing drunken women. Everything that was decent and holy
about life was shamefully disgraced as something beautiful turned into something
animal-like. These women had no regard for what they did; they had no shame in
showing their bodies or using filthy language because of drinking liquor.
The Word of God says in Habakkuk 2:16,
“Thou art filled with shame for glory:
drink thou also, and let thy foreskin be uncovered: the cup of the LORD’S right
hand shall be turned unto thee, and shameful spewing shall be on thy glory.”
What does the last part of verse sixteen mean? It
literally means that they would be vomiting on their own glory. He said, “Mighty
Babylon, greater than all, you will be vomiting on your own glory.” If you will
remember from the reading of God’s Word in Daniel chapter five, one night the
leaders of Babylon were in a drunken stupor and fell to the Medes and Persians.
Many a man has started out handsome, robust, and strong, and many a young lady
has started out looking beautiful. Somehow they found their way into a singles’
bar or some “club,” and the Devil lied to them until everything good was gone.
No honor was left. Their honor was given to the cruel, and now all that is left
is shame.
I know men and women of means who have destroyed
their health; who started drinking with family as young people, and today they
are drunkards. Even with all the wealth they possess, they cannot regain what
they have lost. Their lives are covered with shame because of drinking.
Heed this warning that the Lord gives us in Hosea
4:6,
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My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I
will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast
forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.
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You may need to share this with someone someday
because God will use His Word to speak to that person. God is speaking here
about the leadership of Israel and what happened to them. He rejects them, and I
want you to notice why. The Bible continues in verses seven through eleven,
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As they were increased, so they sinned against
me: therefore will I change their glory
into shame. They eat up the sin of my people, and they set their heart on their
iniquity. And there shall be, like people, like priest: and I will punish them
for their ways, and reward them their doings. For they shall eat, and not have
enough: they shall commit whoredom, and shall not increase: because they have
left off to take heed to the LORD. Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the
heart.
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God says the entire problem came with whoredom and
drinking, and He had to reject His own people.
The Bible says in Isaiah 28:7,
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But they also have erred through wine, and through strong drink are out of the way; the
priest and the prophet have erred through strong drink, they are swallowed up of
wine, they are out of the way through strong drink; they err in vision, they
stumble in judgment.
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In Proverbs 20:1 the Bible says,
“Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is
deceived thereby is not wise.”
You do not know what you have your hands on when you hold a bottle of beer. You do not
know what you have your hands on when you hold a glass of wine. You may say, “I
know people who can handle it.” No, you do not, friend. It just looks as if they
can now.
You may ask, “What about wine?” Go with me to New
York City, where I spent eight years ministering to people, or any other major
city in America, and I will show you the people whose minds are gone. What do we
call them? We call them “winos.” Why are they called winos? Because the cheap
wine that they drink destroys more of the brain cells than any other beverage
alcohol. Wine is a mocker. This is what the Bible says.
In Proverbs 23:19-35 the Bible says,
“Hear thou, my son, and be wise, and guide
thine heart in the way. Be not among winebibbers; among riotous eaters of
flesh.”
This means if you have gotten into the
company of drinkers, you had better find another crowd.
“For the drunkard and the glutton shall
come to poverty: and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags. Hearken unto thy
father that begat thee, and despise not thy mother when she is old.”
Some may say, “Those old people don’t know what they are talking
about!” They do know what they are talking about!
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Buy the truth, and sell it not; also wisdom, and instruction, and understanding. The
father of the righteous shall greatly rejoice: and he that begetteth a wise
child shall have joy of him. Thy father and thy mother shall be glad, and she
that bare thee shall rejoice.
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No mother and father rejoices when their children
are in sin, destroying their lives. The Bible says,
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My son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways. For a whore is a deep
ditch; and a strange woman is a narrow pit. She also lieth in wait as for a
prey, and increaseth the transgressors among men. 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. Look not thou
upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it
moveth itself aright.
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Have you seen the wine-tasters move the wine
around and talk about the body and the fragrance of the wine and how beautiful
it is? The Bible says not to look at it because,
At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder. Thine eyes shall
behold strange women, and thine heart shall utter perverse things. Yea, thou
shalt be as he that lieth down in the midst of the sea, or as he that lieth upon
the top of a mast. They have stricken me, shalt thou say, and I was not sick;
they have beaten me, and I felt it not: when shall I awake? I will seek it yet
again.
How pitiful! People wake up after being affected
by liquor, but when they wake up, they get another drink.
I have seen people beautifully dressed enter into
a place and come out acting like, excuse me, the worse kind of harlot that ever
lived. What changed their behavior? Alcohol. I have seen mighty strong men
brought down by alcohol. Drinking alcohol causes shame.
Drinking Alcohol Can Be Stopped
The Lord Jesus Christ can enable a person to stop
drinking. This is not a matter that one can simply fight his way through; he
must have God’s power. You may say, “I’m going to turn over a new leaf. I’m
going to give up the booze. I’ll clean out my refrigerator; I’ll never take
another drink.” That will not do it. It is not just turning from the evil; it is
turning to the Lord that we need.
I would to God that every man, woman, boy and girl
in the world would say, “I’ll give my life to the Lord Jesus. I’ll ask Him to
forgive my sin and by faith trust Him as my Savior.” Are you a Christian? Are
you truly a Christian? Then may every one of us say, “By the grace of God, we
will live for Christ.”
If you do not know Him as your Savior, you should
trust Him now. Ask Him to forgive your sin and be your Savior. Living for Christ
is a daily matter. You will be strengthened day by day, and with each passing
day, God will help you to be stronger to resist temptation. It will be a daily
matter, but you can stop.
Every evil in our lives should be treated as if we
are living with the Devil himself, and we should say, “God, help me! I won’t
bring this Devil into my life anymore! God, help me.” Call it “sin” like it is.
Call it sin and go to Christ and ask Him to help you. Ask Him to forgive you and
help you and He will. Every victory in life is won by living consciously in the
presence of Jesus Christ.
This is not just about drinking liquor. The Lord
Jesus loves you. He will forgive you for everything you have ever done and come
to live in your life. He will give you the Holy Spirit to empower you to do what
is right if you will simply trust Him. No one can trust Him for you. Others can
pray for you and they can love you, but you must give your heart to Him. May God
help you to do this today.
An excerpt from the book
“Issues of Life Answered From the Bible” by Dr. Clarence Sexton
Used
with permission of Crown Christian Publications. Please write
for permission to reproduce this article outside of your personal use.
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Issues
of Life Answered From the Bible
As believers in the Christian faith, our lives should be characterized by Christlikeness. We are to be people of conviction and compassion. Let us stand strong for the Lord Jesus Christ and stand with compassion for the souls of men. The issues of life must be answered from the Bible. This book by Dr. Clarence Sexton will provide solid answers from God’s Word on issues ranging from what God says about going to war to our personal accountability to God.
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The
Glory Due His Name
The third volume in the series by Dr. Clarence Sexton teaches us that waiting on God, dealing with others in integrity, and trusting the Lord in the midst of the violent storms of life are ways in which our lives can bring Him the glory due His name.
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