The Sotted Sire

“Bondage and death the cup contains; dash to the earth the poisoned bowl! Softer than silk are iron chains, compared with those that chafe the soul.”¹ Those are lyrics we used to sing here. On a Friday in late March 1839, the General Conference of our denomination, as it existed then, “resolved that strong drink, as it is usually used, is an evil and should not be practiced in our church.”² They wanted “all our members to become total abstainers from all intoxicating drinks.”³ Eventually, the rule was phrased that “none of our members shall be permitted to use as a beverage any intoxicating drinks,” and if somebody did so, “such member shall, upon conviction, be excluded from the church.”⁴ Though we rephrased the message about church discipline in 2008, we didn't drop our historic claim about total abstinence from alcohol being “the only truly responsible position for members of our churches” from our Discipline until 2016.⁵ So if you were a member here a decade ago, and you drank a beer one day after work, or enjoyed a margarita at a nice restaurant... phew, you got away with it!

One of the historic hallmarks of our denomination is a longstanding commitment to the temperance movement. A number of groups in the early nineteenth century were swept up into an uncompromising condemnation of alcohol as utterly evil. The science of their day, as they read it in keeping with a common-sense philosophy then prevalent, told them alcohol was an artificial and unnatural substance, “poisonous, dangerous to race survival, and lacking in nutritional value.”⁶ Even the smallest sip of alcohol interfered with the senses and excited the imagination, thereby already impairing “the balance between mind, emotion, and will.”⁷ We therefore, they said, “have no right” to drink a drop of it “unless prescribed by a doctor.”⁸ And so, privileging their hygiene-focused middle-class values as a measure of holiness, they concluded that every Bible reader before them had simply been too blinded by alcohol to see the true abstinence Bible for what it was.⁹ As an old song of that era had it, “When Noah bade the ark farewell, he did not make his wine to sell, and if the danger he had known, he would have left the grapes alone!”¹⁰

Now, however, we know that, far from being unnatural and artificial, “alcohol routinely turns up in natural environments.”¹¹ Fruits and other high-concentration sugar sources, when colonized by yeasts, ferment without our help. And we've seen animals who know it, like little tree-shrews in Malaysia that binge on a nectar as alcoholic as beer, elephants walking away unsteady from the fermented fruit of an African tree, and howler monkeys going wild for the alcohol-rich orange fruit of a Central American palm tree.¹² Alcohol is a lightweight molecule that travels a long distance, and so animals that eat a lot of fruit, including primates, can use it to find the best sugary fruits.¹³ For animals like that, an attraction to alcohol is a very helpful adaptation. And since – however and whyever he did it – God made our bodily animal nature in the same mold, it's not surprising that we have a similar impulse. Even Adam and Eve quite possibly would've been “routinely exposed to a low alcohol concentration in their diet” of fruits in Eden.¹⁴

Noah's pioneering work was in taking control of that natural phenomenon and making beverage alcohol, a wine. We heard last Sunday that this was part of God's plan: he gives growth to grapevines for the sake of “wine to gladden the heart of man” (Psalm 104:15). Sufficiency in wine is part and parcel of the prophets' picture of the life of God's favor (Amos 9:14), so God gave his people “a land of grain and wine” (Deuteronomy 33:28). One wine expert calls it “an analgesic, disinfectant, and general remedy all rolled into one.”¹⁵ Up until recently, wine was the best antiseptic we had, which is why the Good Samaritan pours it on the wounds of the man beaten on the road to Jericho (Luke 10:34). And since water could often have bacteria or parasites in it, wine was often safer, hence why Paul advises Timothy to “no longer drink only water, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments” (1 Timothy 5:23) – because, in a pre-modern world, “those who drank fermented beverages... lived longer.”¹⁶ Not only that, but wine was “a perfect medium for dissolving and dispensing drugs,” making “fermented beverages... the universal medicines of humankind.”¹⁷

So, given that science shows us that alcohol is a natural phenomenon in creation, and that the Bible tells us that God intended us to ferment wine from grapes, and that scripture and history alike attest to multiple good purposes that wine and other such things could serve, I'm very glad that our denomination's law threatening church discipline against any and every sip of it is no longer off the books. Our forebears seem to be in jeopardy there of falling afoul of the Apostle Paul's warning against false teachers who “require abstinence from foods,” and drinks, “that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth; for everything created by God is good, and nothing,” including things containing alcohol, “is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer” (1 Timothy 4:3-5).

So far, so good. But there's a principle of toxicology called hormesis, where for some substances, a little bit is a help but a big bit is a hurt.¹⁸ While the health benefits of low-level alcohol consumption are still hotly debated by scientists,¹⁹ it's possible alcohol is hormetic. (So is oxygen, also toxic to us in unnaturally big doses!) So, as one early Jewish writer put the matter, “this is the perception a wine-drinker requires: so long as he is decent, he may drink, but if he exceeds the limit, the spirit of error invades his mind.”²⁰

Hence, “the use and enjoyment of wine needs great care.”²¹ Our animal attraction to alcohol was designed for low doses in chewed fruit, for which there's a built-in limit of how much alcohol we could get before we're full; but beverages like Noah's wine bypass that safeguard, and, with concentrated alcohol now so cheap, that poses a serious danger.²² That's why Israel's wise men advise us to “not look at wine when it is red, when it sparkles in the cup, when it goes down smoothly; in the end, it bites like a serpent and stings like an adder” (Proverbs 23:31-32). It's no wonder some Jews wondered if the wine-grape was the fruit that damned Adam and Eve.²³ For “wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler, and whoever is led astray by it is not wise” (Proverbs 20:1).

Well, Noah's wisdom lapses. His wine leads him astray, and the serpent in it bites him. “He drank of the wine and became drunk” (Genesis 9:21). Some early Christians excused Noah here, figuring Noah “did not know the nature of wine,” that it could get him drunk,²⁴ so “he didn't know how much he should take..., and so, through ignorance, he was surprised into drunkenness,”²⁵ “the result of inexperience, not intemperance.”²⁶ Then others said that, even if Noah drank before the flood, it had taken so long to get his vineyard grown that, due to “the long absence of wine,” he'd lost the tolerance he expected to have.²⁷ But others more frankly confessed that Noah had been “led into committing a grave error through the wine.”²⁸

The tragic truth is that “even the greatest saints sometimes fall.”²⁹ As Noah drinks cup after cup, his gut lining absorbs more and more alcohol molecules, transferring them to his bloodstream. His liver puts out enzymes to process ethanol into acetaldehyde, and then other enzymes to turn acetaldehyde into an acetate salt; but Noah's building up blood alcohol faster than his enzymes can metabolize it. Not only does it get into various other organs, but it slips easily across Noah's blood-brain barrier, getting access to all sorts of chemical pathways in his noggin.³⁰ The result of that, the Bible depicts, is that “your eyes will see strange things, and your heart utter perverse things; you will be like one who lies down in the midst of the sea” (Proverbs 23:33-34), to “reel with wine and stagger with strong drink” (Isaiah 28:7).

Whatever Noah's excuse, one early bishop remarked that “voluntary intoxication... clouds the intellect more severely than any demon..., robbing its victim of any sense of values.”³¹ By drinking to drunkenness, such a person “willingly and knowingly deprives himself of the use of reason,” which is the faculty that lets us clearly see and follow God's will.³² Drinking to excess is “an irrational action that leads to further irrational actions.”³³ Hence even a “small excess is more harmful in drink than in other things.”³⁴ It's not great for you; it's not great for society. Consuming alcohol is one of the top medical risk factors for all sorts of things, and alcohol-related disorders cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars each year, to say nothing of the rest of the world.³⁵

But matters get worse. Isaiah scoffs at “heroes at drinking wine” who chase it at all hours, from early morning to late into the night (Isaiah 5:11, 22), thinking, “When shall I awake? I must have another drink” (Proverbs 23:35). Even in ancient times, you could see people who made alcohol a lifestyle, “yet, despite yesterday's spree, still gulping down one drink after the other.”³⁶ Hosea warns that wine has power to “enslave the heart” (Hosea 4:11), to the point where a person is “swallowed by wine” (Isaiah 28:7). For reasons scientists are still trying to understand, regular drinking for some can create a dependency, an addiction, that so stacks the brain against the will that a person may drink compulsively even while taking no pleasure in any of it.³⁷

Our denomination has long felt the addictive perils of alcohol. Our founding bishop had a brother who might well qualify as an alcoholic, confessing that “I could not resist it, and... if I was started, then all resistance was gone,” try as he might.³⁸ As the brother traveled for work, he often had to live hotels where the owners sold alcohol. The results were predictable; the brother's health deteriorated, and the bishop lost his brother in 1905, less than three months after the bishop excoriated his brother for “the way in which you threw your life away.”³⁹ Their letters are tragic and painful to read, with little sympathy in evidence. The devastation of alcohol addiction is a too-common story now and then, and it used to be far worse. In the first seven decades of our nation, alcohol abuse skyrocketed until the average American drank over five gallons of absolute alcohol each year, much more than today.⁴⁰ It's no wonder there developed an organized prohibition movement, the point of which wasn't to go after drinkers but to go after dealers (like some of those tavern-keepers and hotel owners of the day) who used the addictive qualities of alcohol as a profitable weapon for “the exploitation of the weak, impoverished, and defenseless.”⁴¹ Our denomination was, no surprise, a big supporter of Prohibition, deeming the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment “a glorious triumph in the warfare for the uplift of humanity.”⁴² Despite the fourteen-year experiment, however, our sad finding was: “the national thirst is still unabated.”⁴³

Noah's thirst could've developed into a drinking habit that risked addiction. But he didn't: his excess in drinking “was reserved to that one instance alone.”⁴⁴ Still, even on that one occasion, it laid Noah low. “He became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent” (Genesis 9:21): Noah “reclined with his thighs naked and uncovered,”⁴⁵ then “passed out in the tent unclothed.”⁴⁶ Not a pretty sight, least of all from a fellow in his seventh century.

Taking a step back, the new world has a new garden, where Noah, a second Adam, has reached out and picked the fruit, making wine with it; and as a result of what he does with the fruit, he's found naked “in the midst of his tent” (Genesis 9:21). It's obvious what the Bible's getting at here, right – garden, fruit, nakedness? This is “a replication of Adam's sin,” happening all over again in the clean new world.⁴⁷ And Noah's tent will provide little more protection than Adam and Eve's fig leaves did. This is “a bad start to a second human race.”⁴⁸

The Israelites under Moses had to be careful in their camp, since the LORD dwelled with them, “so that he may not see any thing of nakedness among you” (Deuteronomy 23:14). Yet here Noah adopts “an indecent state of nudity,” albeit in the privacy of his tent and not in public.⁴⁹ Not only was that a cultic offense, but it was deeply embarrassing. For a person's naked body to be exposed was a disgrace (Isaiah 47:3). It's no wonder Nahum warns Nineveh that God will “make nations look at your nakedness and kingdoms at your shame” (Nahum 3:5). When prisoners of war were taken captive, they were often led away “naked and barefoot, with buttocks uncovered” (Isaiah 20:4), as “a form of humiliation for defeated enemies.”⁵⁰ “By disrobing, Noah invests himself with a lowered status, one befitting powerless captives and servants.”⁵¹ He's ripped away his dignity.⁵²

We know that, in many cases, drunkenness can be a gateway to committing further sins. When the Apostle Paul warns us, “Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery” (Ephesians 5:18), he's paraphrasing an earlier Jewish book that said, “Do not be drunk with wine, because wine perverts the mind from the truth, arouses the impulses of desire, and leads the eyes into the path of error.”⁵³ Early Christians worried that a drunk person is thereby rendered “more capable of evil,”⁵⁴ and can be a real danger to others, even unintentionally, as we see often on the road, with a third of traffic fatalities related to alcohol.⁵⁵ “Thus he commits sin and is unashamed. Such is the drunkard, my children: he who is drunken has respect for no one,”⁵⁶ and may “sin by uttering lewd words, by fighting, by slander, by transgressing God's commands.”⁵⁷

But in addition, excessive alcohol also “lessens strength and multiplies wounds” (Sirach 31:30). We're told how several Israelite royals were assassinated while “drinking himself drunk” (1 Kings 16:9) or while “merry with wine” (2 Samuel 13:28). Inebriation often plays a tragic role in impairing victims of sexual assault, heightening their risk and vulnerability.⁵⁸ Just so, Noah, in his tent, is “brought low like a motionless corpse.”⁵⁹ – naked, unconscious, and too addled by alcohol to regain consciousness any time soon, clearing the way for whatever it is his son Ham does to victimize him in the very next verse (Genesis 9:22).

But early Christians wondered if perhaps God allowed this sin at the level of the letter for the sake of an even greater beauty at the level of the spirit. For “all this was said in type of the Savior,”⁶⁰ in that “the drunkenness and nakedness of Noah... contain the mystery of Christ's suffering and death.”⁶¹ Jesus, during his conversations with his dearest disciples, often foretold his coming passion in terms of “drinking the cup that the Father has given me” (John 18:11), “the wine of God's wrath poured full strength into the cup of his anger” against the sin of the world (Revelation 14:10). Jesus prayed not to drink it, if there were any other way (Mark 14:36).

But there wasn't. “He drank and was inebriated” by suffering as he was beaten and crowned.⁶² “When they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them” (Matthew 27:35). “His mortal flesh was stripped naked,”⁶³ “and his thighs were laid bare – the dishonor of the cross.”⁶⁴ Like the naked Noah victimized by some act of Ham's, the naked Christ “endured abuses and derision and submitted to the ultimate torment of the cross.”⁶⁵ And in this story, all of us play the role of Ham, for when we fall away to sin, it's “crucifying once again the Son of God to our own harm and holding him up to contempt” (Hebrews 6:6). The voices of mockery toward the Lord, the contempt for his inebriating suffering, are our voices. Noah's sin reveals Christ's salvation.

But also in a moral sense was the tale of Noah set down for us, “so that we may guard against drunkenness as much as possible, with the picture of such a fall clearly described before our eyes in Scripture.”⁶⁶ Jesus himself tells us to “watch yourselves, lest your hearts be weighed down with... drunkenness..., and that day [of his coming] come upon you suddenly like a trap” (Luke 21:34). Why would it then be a trap? Because drunkenness can so dull “the reason of the human mind... that it does not even have concern for itself, much less for God.”⁶⁷ One early Christian suggested that “men drinking insatiably the wine... made a transgression worse than Adam and... commit themselves to the eternal fire.”⁶⁸ A bishop later followed these lines with the declaration that truly voluntary drunkenness (as opposed to compulsive, as sometimes in addiction) is “a mortal sin... classed with homicide and adultery and fornication.”⁶⁹ And they got this from their Bible, because St. Paul lists “drunkenness” among the “works of the flesh” and “drunkards” among those who “will not inherit the kingdom of God” (Galatians 5:19-21; 1 Corinthians 6:10).

No wonder some ancient readers, stepping beyond Scripture, advised that “if you wish to live prudently, abstain completely from drinking,”⁷⁰ and that a person “will do well if she avoids the use of wine entirely.”⁷¹ That's especially the case for someone with addictive tendencies or who otherwise is “easily the worse for taking wine” – according to theologians in the Middle Ages, for somebody like that, the consumption of even small amounts of alcohol would become “unlawful.”⁷² To toy with that serpent waiting at the bottom of the cup, to play games with its fangs and risk its venom while aware of the consequences, would ignore the goodness of God. “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise” (Ephesians 5:15).

For the rest of us who are lawfully free to do so, if we then choose to imbibe, the standard must be “careful moderation in the use of alcohol,”⁷³ to “not drink wine to the point of losing self-control.”⁷⁴ “Since we belong to the day, let us be sober” (1 Thessalonians 5:8), even as we enjoy a moderate dose of alcohol with thanks as God's provision. Yet in it all, “be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers” (1 Peter 4:7). But whether we take the cup or not, as St. Augustine says, “let us be temperate, and, in whatever we do, let us know why we are doing it.”⁷⁵ Understand your freedom in Christ, but be mindful, as were the campaigners for justice in the age of Prohibition, of how your choices relate to commercial interests of exploitation even today.

Remember also that “it is good not to... drink wine... that causes your brother to stumble” because of your influence (Romans 14:21). Be judicious in time, place, and company. In the presence of those who may suffer deep offense or else be misled to drink intemperately if they see you drink even temperately (“nothing is unclean in itself, but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean” [Romans 14:14]), join them in abstaining. But, in the presence of those who may be misled to drink intemperately if your abstention leads them to think the rule for Christians is heavier than they can bear, model temperate partaking before their eyes. “So then, whether you... drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31).

Instead of intoxication with alcohol, the Apostle bids us instead “be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18). As one pre-Christian philosopher put it, “when grace fills the soul, that soul thereby rejoices... so that, to many of the unenlightened, it may seem to be drunken, crazy, and beside itself.”⁷⁶ Just so, at Pentecost when the apostles and other disciples were “all filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:4), skeptical onlookers accused them of being “filled with new wine” (Acts 2:13) despite it being just nine o'clock in the morning (Acts 2:15). Those skeptical onlookers misperceived the beautiful intoxication of the grace of the Holy Spirit, proving themselves unenlightened in not being able to see the signs of great grace in the apostles' souls – the same grace, the same Spirit, that should be operative in the Church's gathered worship as we sing, thank, and revere Christ our Lord with all love (Ephesians 5:19-21).⁷⁷

So “wake up from your drunken stupor,” the Spirit cries, “and do not go on sinning” (1 Corinthians 15:34). In light of our blessed hope, why should we “fall away or weigh down our hearts with drugs and drunkenness?”⁷⁸ There's a gospel of hope for the world for us to spread! There's a channel of blessing we're meant to become! The Holy Spirit is at hand! And “the fruit of the Spirit is... self-control,” or sobriety (Galatians 5:22-23). Thus the sober saints “are drunk in a sense, for all good things are united in the strong wine on which they feast, and they receive the loving cup from perfect virtue.”⁷⁹ May we, clothed in the Christ who became inebriated and naked for us, drink this virtue forever, being swept up in “righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17)! Hallelujah! Amen, and amen.

New Life, New Joy

The flood is over; the world's reborn, and life has God's blessing to go on. Over the past several weeks, we've heard the story of a second creation, as God restores a new world, albeit one accommodated to the crookedness of the human heart. In pagan tellings of the story, after the hero of the tale appeases the gods by his sacrifice, he gets whisked away “toward the east, over the mountains,”¹ “far away, where the rivers rise.”² Since he was thus “removed from the world of men,”³ he couldn't well headline a sequel. But in Genesis, Noah very much returns to the world; and, with a plot wide open, we have the luxury to skip ahead an untold amount of time.⁴ This next episode could begin right after the flood, but the action would still take “at least six years” to get underway, said some ancient readers.⁵ Others allowed time for a whole new generation to be born first (Genesis 9:19), maybe thirty-two grandchildren running around or grown before the story even starts.⁶

Whatever the jump forward, when the next verse begins, we read that “Noah began to be a man of the ground” (Genesis 9:20). Now, in the beginning, Adam was made “to serve the ground” (Genesis 2:5), and when he lost the garden, that's what he did: he was exiled “to serve the ground” from which he'd been made (Genesis 3:23). Cain was “a server of the ground” (Genesis 4:2), and God described his labor to him by saying, “You serve the ground” (Genesis 4:12). They worked at the ground, pushed their labor into the ground, wooed the ground. But Noah is a man of the ground, or you could even translate it as 'a husband of the ground.' He's wooed and won. He's become “the master of sowing and cultivating,”⁷ a “master of the new earth,”⁸ engaging the ground in a way kinglier and lovelier than Cain or even Adam had. No doubt that includes farming wheat that he and his family can grind for flour and bake for bread.⁹ But as the first 'husband of the ground,' he's a pioneer in a new kind of agriculture, just like his Cainite counterparts were great inventors of civilized arts and crafts (Genesis 4:20-22) or his ancestor Enosh was a pioneer in religion (Genesis 4:26).¹⁰

And so Noah “planted a vineyard” (Genesis 9:20) – he “tilled the soil with care and planted a vine with his own hand,” a biblical declaration that early Christians championed as refuting pagan myths that vineyards and their products were invented by this or that pagan god.¹¹ Noah's invention was a truly human achievement: under the hand of God, he “devised vinedressing from the instruction implanted in his nature.”¹² So far as the Bible tells it, Noah is “given credit for planting the first vineyard,”¹³ as “the initiator of orchard husbandry.”¹⁴ Archaeology seems to testify that the wild Eurasian grapevine was domesticated in the late Stone Age, and maybe not far from the mountains of Ararat – or, as one archaeologist put it, “the Noah Hypothesis has been confirmed.”¹⁵ In one Jewish legend, what happened was that Noah had found a vine-shoot that washed out of Eden in the flood, and, after prayer and fasting, God bade him “arise... and plant the vine,” since “for you it will be life.”¹⁶

Speaking of the Garden of Eden, if everything from the start of chapter 8 onward has been replaying the story of creation, then we'd be due for the planting of a garden right now, wouldn't we? And so it's no coincidence that here we find this vineyard in chapter 9, which – in some loose way – corresponds to the garden from chapter 2. In Genesis 2, though, “the LORD God planted a garden... in the east” (Genesis 2:8). Here, Noah “planted a vineyard” (Genesis 9:20), effectively playing God's role as planter.¹⁷ Noah aspired to “create his own version of the experience of life in the garden,”¹⁸ and so once it's grown, Noah “functioned as a new Adam,”¹⁹ indwelling “a new Garden of Eden presided over by Noah, the image of God.”²⁰

The Bible doesn't tell us much about God growing the Garden of Eden, how long he took for that, but Noah gets no luxury of miracles here. A vineyard could be so slow to build up and mature that it was often planted with an eye to the next generation reaping most of the fruit.²¹ Noah “took the time and trouble to cultivate a vineyard” through years of intermittent labor, investing in it patiently, with season after season of building and pruning, waiting patiently for the first full harvest of its grapes.²²

And all Noah's patient work was like a prophetic parable, to show in advance how “the Lord, having a care for the human race, established the synagogue among the Jewish people,” as one medieval monk put it.²³ Isaiah pretty famously pictured Israel as the LORD's Vineyard when he sang, “My Beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill: he dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a tower in the midst of it, and he hewed out a wine-vat in it” (Isaiah 5:1-2). And even Jesus echoed the same, describing God's work with Israel as that of “a master... who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower” (Matthew 21:33). Noah foreshadows God's patient care for his holy nation.

But notice that, for both Isaiah and Jesus, a core element of a vineyard is a winepress – a vineyard isn't just to grow grapes as a snack, but to make wine out of. Grapes naturally carry a strain of yeast, a single-called fungus that's suitable for fermenting the grapes' own sugar and producing ethanol.²⁴ With a little help, that natural process can be guided to function as “controlled spoilage” of the grapes, preserving them.²⁵ At its minimum, that involves stomping the grapes out into must,²⁶ letting it ferment, and then sealing it away from oxygen to stop bacteria from turning the ethanol into acetic acid and making vinegar.²⁷ Noah must do that, pressing and fermenting the grapes, in the gap between verses, by verse 21 he has wine.

Some early Christians, when they read this, figured Noah “was the first to crush the fruit of the vine,”²⁸ and so “made the first discovery of wine drinking.”²⁹ The Bible doesn't say that for sure, and scientists like to imagine prehistoric humans gathering grapes, storing them densely enough that the weight presses those on the bottom, and finding that the juice left behind was ever so slightly alcoholic.³⁰ Archaeologists have found wine residue from over seven thousand years ago in Georgia and northwest Iran,³¹ and wine is thought to have been “a central part of the life and religion of early humans in the Near East” all the way back to the late Stone Age.³²

But it's fascinating that, seventeen years ago, in a cave near the Armenian village of Areni, archaeologists found a plastered area littered with grape seeds, which drained into a sixty-liter vat embedded in the cave floor. It was a Stone Age winery, the oldest one we've found so far, over six thousand years old.³³ That ancient winery is less than fifty miles east of the mountain we today call Mount Ararat. It isn't close enough or simple enough to be Noah's own, but it attests to an ancient legacy of wine-making in the Ararat region; and from that general area is where the traditions of growing grapes and making wine spread throughout the biblical world.³⁴

Remember that when Noah was born, his father Lamech prayed he might bring relief from the agonizing toil of farm labor (Genesis 5:29). A number of scholars see Noah's introduction of wine as part of his answer to that prayer,³⁵ bringing “partial relief from the curse upon the earth that makes him sweat for his bread,”³⁶ “comfort for humanity in the fruit of the vine,”³⁷ making “a good way to 'come down' from the workday and block out a humdrum existence.”³⁸ This morning, we read in a psalm where one reason why God gives growth to “plants for man to cultivate” is so that humanity “may bring forth” from the grapevine “wine to gladden the heart of man” (Psalm 104:14-15). God provides the grapevine with wine as his intention, for us to relax and enjoy it!

Used appropriately, Israel saw wine as “a God-given blessing.”³⁹ It represents “more than mere sustenance.”⁴⁰ Israel's traditions of wisdom remembered that “wine gladdens life” (Ecclesiastes 10:19) and said that “wine, from the beginning, was created for joy” (Sirach 31:27), “an important joy of everyday life.”⁴¹ No wonder King David appointed one official to oversee his kingdom's vineyards and another official to oversee the royal wine-cellars (1 Chronicles 27:27). No wonder the Bible's pictures of abundant living include “vats bursting with wine” (Proverbs 3:10), and God's promise of restoration for his people was that “they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine” (Amos 9:14), “for the enjoyment of relaxation, cheerfulness, and good spirits.”⁴²

It's not for nothing that Israel's sacrifices to God were always accompanied by pouring out wine to him – nearly two bottles with every lamb, two and a half with every ram, almost four bottles with every bull (Numbers 15:5, 7, 10).⁴³ Nor was it for nothing that one of Israel's biggest holidays celebrated “the produce from... their winepress” (Deuteronomy 16:13), with encouragement for them to enjoy “wine or strong drink, whatever your soul desires..., and you shall rejoice, you and your household” (Deuteronomy 14:26). It was an accepted truth in Israel that they “turned to relaxation and enjoyment... to celebrate a festivity” when they'd “indulge in wine after sacrificing.”⁴⁴ And not just Israel, but anywhere in the ancient world, “celebrations of the wine harvest or the first tasting of the new wine often had overt religious expressions.”⁴⁵

So ancient Jewish writers depicted Noah letting his wine age five months before, on New Year's Day, “he made a feast with rejoicing,”⁴⁶ where they were “blessing the Lord of Heaven, the Most High God.”⁴⁷ Then, “the wine being ready, he held a sacrifice and gave himself up to festivity,”⁴⁸ so that Noah “rejoiced, and he drank some of the wine, he and his sons, with rejoicing.”⁴⁹ This is a picture of celebration, of enjoyment, of delight! Thus Noah heeded the call to “eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a merry heart” (Ecclesiastes 9:7), savoring his sabbath rest in his makeshift Garden of Eden.⁵⁰

With that garden, Noah played twin roles, that of the LORD God in planting it and that of Adam in enjoying it. And in that, who else could Noah be foreshadowing but Jesus Christ, in whom the nature of the LORD God and the nature of Adam are united unconfused in a single person? As God, he planted the whole world for us; then, as man, he dwells in this world as one of us. And in this great vineyard, Jesus presents himself to us as “the True Vine” tended by his Heavenly Father (John 15:1). For how do the prophets describe grace, if not as the gift of “wine... without price” (Isaiah 55:1)? One old-time preacher urged that, in “the good things involved in our salvation,” we should “consider especially where wine has proved useful, and tremble.”⁵¹ Christ offers his saving wine to intoxicate us, to cheer us, to delight us with the joy of heaven on earth. It's through “the grain and the wine and the oil” of the Church's holy gifts that we become “radiant over the goodness of the LORD” (Jeremiah 31:12). Christ's cup is a “saving potion... for the salvation of the soul,”⁵² “wine that cheers God and men” (Judges 9:13), which makes our hearts rejoice in the LORD (Zechariah 10:7)!

Noah's wine was but a promise of the true wine from the True Vine, the blood not of grapes but of the God-man. One old Christian reflection on Noah's vineyard declared that “its fruit will become the blood of God, and just as the race of men have been condemned through it, so through Jesus Christ Emmanuel in it they will receive a calling and entrance into Paradise.”⁵³ Paradise! Noah's vineyard imitated it, but Jesus leads us into a better Eden than before. And what is that, if not Holy Communion, where Christ shares with us the sweet bounties of his Paradise in bread and wine, body and blood? So come! “Wisdom has built her house..., she has mixed her wine, she has also set her table” (Proverbs 9:1-2). In this “house of wine,” our Savior's banner over us is love, all love and joy and delight (Song of Songs 2:4). Let us feast now at Wisdom's table, let us glean now from the vines of Eden, let us be cheered now by the richest wine of Christ our Savior! Hallelujah! Amen.

Fear and Dread, Meat and Blood

The flood is over; the skies are clear. Since God remembered Noah a chapter ago (Genesis 8:1), we've been walking through creation all over again: the creative wind blowing over the deep, the separation of the waters, the return of dry land, and suddenly out from the ark come the flying and crawling and leaping and running things, and then human beings. So what we really want to know is whether this rewind will undo the exile of Adam and Eve, if this is a full do-over that undoes curse and fall. Sadly, a stow-away couldn't be kept off the ark: sin.¹ “The intention of man's heart is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21). We cannot waltz our way back to the Tree of Life. “The restoration is not a return to paradise.”² See, we're just not that innocent. Instead, God is going to rebuild the world around what we've become. Such a redesign will not only acknowledge our darkness, but accommodate it and even try to harness it for something good.³

In the first creation, after “God created humanity in his own image” (Genesis 1:27), the very next verse sees that “God blessed them, and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth'” (Genesis 1:28). The exact same thing happens here, where “God blessed Noah and his sons, and he said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth'” (Genesis 9:1). So far, so good! But here the words diverge. In the first creation, God continued by urging original humanity to “subdue [the earth], and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the skies and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:28). The rewrite takes some liberties, ones which inject “a more sinister atmosphere” into the mood.⁴ In place of subduing the earth and exercising royal dominion in a peaceable kingdom, we hear the blessing fall flat.

Shifting from commandment to statement, God tells Noah and sons that “the fear of you and the terror of you shall be upon every living thing of the earth and upon every bird of the skies, in everything that moves on the ground and in all the fish of the sea” (Genesis 9:2). Now, the prophets invite God's people to have just one cause of fear and trembling: God himself (Isaiah 8:13; Malachi 2:5). But more often, 'fear and terror' is military language.⁵ When Israel invades the promised land, they should “not fear or be terrified” (Deuteronomy 31:8), because instead “the LORD your God will lay the dread of you and the fear of you on all the land that you shall tread” (Deuteronomy 11:25). So what is this saying about how we're relating to the other life on earth?

God is describing “animosity between man and the animal world.”⁶ The truce of the ark has expired,⁷ and they come out no longer as docile subjects but as combatants who look on us as invaders of their world, “enemy troops,”⁸ as though “war has been declared on animal creation.”⁹ Here “men are proclaimed to be a necessary terror to all the animals of the earth and the birds of heaven,”¹⁰ so that “all things were in dread even of man's shadow.”¹¹ In other words, most animals naturally “fear and shun man because of this regulation.”¹² And that's wise, because the darkness in us, whereby we so easily lapse from a “care mindset” to a “conquest mentality,”¹³ poses a danger to the creatures around us. So not only does this fear and terror clear the way for “a safe haven for Noah's descendants,”¹⁴ but it protects animals from us, encouraging them to stay clear as we rebuild.¹⁵

Now, when I look in my cat Bezalel's eyes, I certainly don't spy any fear, terror, or dread there; I'm not sure any animal has ever been quite so thoroughly domesticated as that one. But this verse went out of its way not to mention domestic animals like him.¹⁶ They're not the ones we're at war with; they're on our side. But when foxes get in the henhouse, when coyotes prowl the streets, when vultures circle and lions surround, they'll meet a firm human enemy ready to fight and conquer. And no sooner does God observe the conflict than he rules on its outcome: “Into your hand they are delivered” (Genesis 9:2), much as David taunted Goliath that “this day the LORD will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down” (1 Samuel 17:46). As Luther points out, “the human being is endowed with reason, which has the advantage over all the animals.”¹⁷

And so we have no need to fight dirty. There's no call here to mistreat animals, no license to subject them to any needless cruelty, much less the lawless violence that filled the earth before the flood. Even when it comes to these wild creatures, God doesn't tell us to strike fear and terror into their hearts; he's describing a situation, not prescribing it.¹⁸ We can't read this verse right if we forget that, in just a few verses, God will make the same 'covenant of peace' with every animal that he makes with us (Genesis 9:10). To live in that peace, we first must tame ourselves. And if that's true of the wild animals newly in our power, much more for the beasts we already live with, of whom Wisdom says, “Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast” (Proverbs 12:10). But with them as with the wild ones, this second creation will remain a struggle, an imperfection; they'll keep contesting our authority all the days of the earth, deferring true domestication and dominion to the end.¹⁹

Already, in rewriting chapter 1, we've gotten off-script. But here things go further afield. What came after the blessing of dominion there is God telling us what to eat: “Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food” (Genesis 1:29). If Genesis 9 is following the same order, Noah and his sons should be hearing about their food in verse 3, and they do. Only it isn't salad that headlines the menu this time. “Every moving thing that lives, for you it shall be food. As the green herbs, I have given you everything!” (Genesis 9:3).

Does that mean that before the flood, nobody ever flipped a burger? Most Christians through the ages have read it exactly that way. In the fifth century, one commented that “in the beginning, God did not countenance the human consumption of flesh,” so the original humans “got their nourishment from the produce of the earth” alone.²⁰ Two hundred years earlier, another wrote that “humanity's first food was only seeds and the fruit of trees. Then later, guilt added the use of bread” at the fall, and now with Noah “the use of meat was added.”²¹

I'm not quite sold, myself. The animals most similar to us, chimpanzees, “clearly relish meat,”²² even more than the other primates, nearly all of whom “include some component of animals in their diet.”²³ Scientists recognize that the shortened human digestive tract seems designed to rely on meat,²⁴ that the shape of our leg bones is designed to give us endurance for persistence hunting,²⁵ and they suggest that the increase in brain size since earlier fossils may have been driven by the social complexities of hunters sharing meat after a kill.²⁶ So far as archaeology is concerned, “our ancestors were flesh-eaters from the beginning.”²⁷ Even sticking to the Bible, the story of the garden distinguishes wild animals from livestock (Genesis 1:24); Abel raised sheep and had the idea that God would like the flesh of one in sacrifice, which is a weird idea to come up with unless you already think of a sheep's flesh as food.²⁸ One commentary concludes that “people probably ate meat before, but now God gives a divine command saying it is fine to do so.”²⁹

It was said long ago that “divine grace grants to human needs the right kinds of foods suitable to the times,”³⁰ in general “to arrange things appropriate to specific times” and to “make new concessions.”³¹ God now, for the first time, explicitly authorizes eating meat, giving it the verbal go-ahead with gusto and extending to the human palate “a wider provision” than before,³² where “the freedom to eat what they please is broadened,”³³ “permitting the consumption of them all without hesitation.”³⁴ It would have been generous of God to offer us just one species, so “how much greater a blessing it must be considered that all animals fit for food are permitted!”³⁵ Now “human beings in general are allowed to eat any kind of meat,”³⁶ from “every animal whose food is shown not to be harmful to the body and human society admits as food.”³⁷ It isn't Israel's standards of cleanliness alone that count here, but those of any culture, with customs open to pig and pufferfish, bat and horse, dog and monkey, scorpion and tarantula – Noah gets no such limits. And so here we have “God's permission for humans to be hunters,” and not only hunters but ranchers and butchers and grillmasters.³⁸

Through the ages, some have speculated that the new gift of meat was so that Noah's family wouldn't starve before they could grow enough crops to subsist on,³⁹ or that God gave us meat “to provide more strength to the human body” now that we have to “develop the whole world,”⁴⁰ or that “the earth became less fertile and weaker due to the flood” and so meat compensates for that lower-quality produce.⁴¹ But still others wondered if meat was prescribed for us “in virtue of weakness, as a medicinal remedy” for our unhealthy bodies and spirits.⁴² And that might be closer to how to read this verse.

Before the flood, the leading expression of our dark-heartedness was 'violence,' hamas, a lawless aggressiveness that filled the earth (Genesis 6:11). In effect, God's gift of meat aims to “drive out one passion with another, and cure a greater ailment with a lesser.”⁴³ Hunting, butchery, carnivory – God offers them as outlets for these predatory animal instincts lurking under the veneer of our humanity, “in the hope that man's ferocity would thereby be sated.”⁴⁴ In offering us this “means for controlling human impulses,”⁴⁵ God aims this development in diet to help our “progression toward holiness” in ways that will only be clear in hindsight.⁴⁶

For in the garden, the man had received a very open grant, that “of every tree of the garden, freely you may eat” (Genesis 2:16), just as now “as the green herbs, I give you everything” (Genesis 9:3). But on the mountain as in the garden, something had to be held back. Before, there was one tree off-limits, that “you shall not eat from it” (Genesis 2:17). Now, there's a type of eating that remains off-limits: “Only, flesh with its soul, its blood, you shall not eat” (Genesis 9:4).⁴⁷ The covenant here comes with a command, a law. But God's typical pattern holds true, that “first he bestows blessing... and then gives us commands that are light and easy.”⁴⁸

The limit God places, as a limit, reinforces “the absolute authority of God over all life,” lest we forget and think we're masters because we're conquerors.⁴⁹ No carnivorous animal can avoid eating flesh with the blood still in it, often still pumping and flowing as the devouring begins – “pieces of raw flesh and limbs that are quivering,” to borrow Luther's colorful phrase.⁵⁰ We aren't to ape chimpanzees “crunching on bones and tearing flesh,”⁵¹ too lazy or impatient or ignorant to lay our prey to rest and process its meat.⁵² Nor are we called to be scavengers,⁵³ like some early hominids who used tools to get at the marrow and brain of animals already gnawed up by lions and leopards.⁵⁴ Our instincts are mediated by intellects; we know, in a way no chimpanzee or hyena does, what each creature is, and that leaves us without excuse to revere the life we take.⁵⁵ The death of the smallest animal “should not be taken lightly,” even for our most basic needs.⁵⁶ And as a corollary, to avoid animalistic predation, “eating blood is put under a total ban.”⁵⁷ As though this rich substance were saturated with the animating spirit of the life it once sustained, God refuses to let it be consumed and instrumentalized.⁵⁸

For every creature, its meat is in principle handed over to us, to satisfy our irrepressible cravings; but the blood within is the forbidden fruit of every living thing, held back to put brakes on our predatory natures. But now God hammers home a promise: “Surely the blood of your souls I will require” (Genesis 9:5). He doesn't say that about any other animal, but he does about us, “for in the image of God he made humanity” (Genesis 9:6). Our highest and godliest qualities depend on our lowest animal functions, all of which are sustained through the circulation of blood.⁵⁹ In us, God has a vulnerable image. Cruelty to animals offends God deeply as an attack on his beloved work, but violence to a human being is a vicarious attack on God himself.⁶⁰

God implicitly acknowledges here that it's going to happen. We will be subject to violence; human blood will spill – such evil is part of the warp and woof of life in this second creation.⁶¹ God does not promise he'll stop it; what he does promise is that he'll 'require' our blood – keep a strict accounting of it, and not let anybody cook the books.⁶² If our blood is disturbed, detained, and in discord, he promises to redeem it all.⁶³

Not a drop is left to fall uncounted by God's extensive audit, his “relentless pursuit until punishment is meted out.”⁶⁴ That applies even in the case of an animal attack: “From the hand of every living thing I will require it,” he says (Genesis 9:5). In some mysterious way, “God will demand accountability from animals that kill people,”⁶⁵ a notion less alien to ancient thought than to ours.⁶⁶ Whatever harms human life must fall – be it animal or machine. And if even a grizzly isn't guiltless in mauling a man, how much guiltier those of us who hear and understand the law? “From the hand of every living thing I will require it, and from the hand of the human” (Genesis 9:5). Since “the same nature is the mother of all people..., we are all brothers... bound by the same law of parentage.”⁶⁷ Every act of human-on-human violence is a replay of Cain, and if God once let Cains off easy, no more: “From the hand of a man's brother I will require the soul of the human” (Genesis 9:5).

Whether animals acting on instinct out of fear and dread, or the knowing brother of the victim, God demands the shedder of human blood repay the debt they owe. That's hardly cheery news for our country, where we've succumbed to a strong delusion that the industrialized slaughter of unborn human beings is somehow healthcare, where we've been in one war or another for around 93% of our national history and still find time to lead the global weapons trade, where we can always retread the scenes of lynchings and massacres, where mass shootings and gang violence became background noise, we have tens of thousands of murders within our borders each year. God demands an answer from the hand of the guilty for all of it.

But how does God get his answer? By these six Hebrew words in perfect symmetry: “Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall his blood be shed” (Genesis 9:6). And now, at last, we understand. On the one hand, being made in God's image was the source of our dignity, the reason our lives should remain inviolate and not subject to human disposal. But equally, God's image is a grounds of authority; and in a world where we're driven toward mayhem, being God's image is a call to subdue mayhem – to be instruments of divine justice, commissioned to redeem each other.⁶⁸ Were it not for these words of authorization, only God could validly respond to the wrongdoings of those who bear his image.⁶⁹ But here he entrusts to his image the likeness of the Judge, so that “like God, he has the power to grant life and kill,”⁷⁰ to follow in the footsteps of the Father of flood and flame.⁷¹ Only by policing ourselves can the covenant of Noah be a success.⁷²

And so we ourselves are called to be “God's agents for exacting compensation” for all these grave wrongs.⁷³ This law “employs human wildness in the service of avenging human bloodshed,” allowing our aggressive impulses to minister the justice of God rather than our own lawless desires.⁷⁴ God calls humans to sometimes redeem blood by blood, affirming human dignity and value thereby much the same as jailing kidnappers affirms human liberty.⁷⁵ That can't be a free-for-all; it requires a new structure in society. Up until now, we've heard of human dominion over other creatures, but the Bible's not yet given one man any rule over another – no kings or judges with “the right to exercise rule and government” – but now that becomes unavoidable.⁷⁶

These words of God are then “the source from which stem all civil law and the law of nations..., for here God establishes government and gives it the sword to hold wantonness in check, lest violence and other sins proceed without limit.”⁷⁷ Here we're witnessing “the beginning of divinely mandated political authority.”⁷⁸ Even pagan nations recognized that the basic principle of governance was authorized by the gods,⁷⁹ a divine assignment “to make justice prevail in the land, to abolish the wicked and the evil, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.”⁸⁰ It's no surprise that in the oldest laws we've found, the first rules read: “If a man commits a homicide, they shall kill that man; if a man acts lawlessly, they shall kill him.”⁸¹ Paul confirms that “the governing authorities... that exist have been instituted by God,” established in a sinful world to administer law as “a terror... to bad conduct..., an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer” (Romans 13:1-4).

After changing our diet and habits, after affirming our lives and founding a government, God again bids us “be fruitful and multiply, and swarm on the earth and multiply in it” (Genesis 9:7). Now blessing is a command.⁸² Despite the lethal violence now baked into the world, in the face of fear and dread and blood, God wants the world to march on unterrorized, defiantly joyful and life-affirming. But “the natural good of life is now bound up with the legal good of right and the legal obligation to defend it.”⁸³ This is the new creation God covenants.

Looking back, people suggested that, based on this primeval law, “Noah began to command his grandsons with ordinances and commandments and all of the judgments which he knew,”⁸⁴ an idea that, in later Jewish thought, bound every human society to uphold certain universal laws.⁸⁵ But atop those laws, as Noah was the Moses of all humanity, so Moses would become the Noah of a new creation called Israel, the kingdom of God. And Moses brought them a covenant and a law, which granted them food, that “whatever your soul desires, you may slaughter and eat flesh, according to the blessing of the LORD your God” (Deuteronomy 12:15) – except that for this kingdom, many animals were withdrawn from the menu, creatures “unclean to you” so that “you shall not eat any of their flesh” (Leviticus 11:8). And “you shall eat no blood whatsoever in any of your dwelling places, whether of bird or beast; every soul who eats any blood, that soul shall be cut off from his people” (Leviticus 7:26-27). For “the soul of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the soul” (Leviticus 17:11). The animating blood of an animal becomes, as it were, a ransom for the living soul of the human who offers it on the altar.⁸⁶ For “without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins” (Hebrews 9:22).

When it came to human life, though, Israel was warned from the first that they mustn't be predators of fellow human beings (Exodus 20:13), “lest innocent blood be shed in your land... and so bloods be upon you” (Deuteronomy 19:10). For if they did, “blood pollutes the land, and no atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed in it except by the blood of the one who shed it” (Numbers 35:33). To that end, God laid down a criminal justice system, ordering judges to try cases by standards of evidence and inquiries into motives so that justice could be done (Numbers 35:30-31).

But, sadly, the prophets found Israel's justice wanting. “There is no faithfulness..., no knowledge of God in the land; there is swearing, lying, murder, stealing, and adultery; they break all bounds, and bloodshed follows bloodshed. Therefore the land mourns, and all who dwell in it languish, and also the beasts of the field and the birds of the skies and even the fish of the sea are taken away” (Hosea 4:1-3). Only in the distance could they imagine a new “covenant of peace” that would banish predators from the land (Ezekiel 35:24) or even turn predators into friends who “shall not hurt or destroy” on the mountain of God's peace (Isaiah 11:9).

To bring that day's answer to humanity's long and bloody story, “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son..., born under the law” (Galatians 4:4). Jesus, the Son of God, foretold how he'd “be delivered into the hands of men, and they would kill him” (Mark 9:31). True to his word, he was arrested in a garden, and Israel's own council of elders “all condemned him as deserving death” (Mark 14:64). Turned over to Gentile governing authority, he released a murderer but, “having scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified” (Mark 15:15). It was a judicial process, but a gross abuse of the authority granted to Noah and sons. They administered their capital punishment to him, condemning themselves as murderers (Acts 7:52). For on that cross, God the Son in human flesh was “put to death” (1 Peter 3:18), “killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23).

And yet their evil was harnessed for good by the Father's saving will, which “put him forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (Romans 4:25) by the sons and daughters of Noah, whether American or Iranian, Chinese or Haitian, Russian or Ukrainian, Israeli or Palestinian. “In him we have redemption through his blood... according to the riches of his grace” (Ephesians 1:7). Whether our failings are measured by the law of Moses or the law of Noah, “the precious blood of Christ” has “ransomed us from the futile ways inherited from our forefathers” (1 Peter 1:18-19).

Proving his resurrection by eating broiled fish in front of his bewildered disciples (Luke 24:42-43), he sent them with good news for all the children of Noah. And as they transcended the limits of Moses, Jesus' lead apostle Peter had a vision while dizzy with hunger one day while waiting on his lunch; he saw all creatures, was told to “rise and kill and eat,” and though he objected they weren't all kosher, thrice he was told not to reject “what God has made clean” (Acts 10:14-15), even as Jesus had already subtly “declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:19). The apostles determined together, by the Holy Spirit in their council, that Gentile believers, though free from the law of Moses, should at least “abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality” (Acts 15:29).⁸⁷

Within these boundaries, like Paul said, “food will not commend us to God: we are no worse off if we don't eat and no better off if we do” (1 Corinthians 8:8). He had no problem eating meat, kosher or not, but “if food makes my brother stumble, I'll never eat meat” (1 Corinthians 8:13). The Apostle Matthew, according to an old tradition, was a vegetarian.⁸⁸ But Scripture condemns those who “require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth” (1 Timothy 4:3), so “let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food” (Colossians 2:16). And so we may “eat meat with the blood drained off,” a symbol (some say) of repentance, “so that the earlier life may not be retained on their conscience... but may be poured out as if by confession.”⁸⁹

And this all leads to the new covenant's grant of food, something better by far than what Noah ever heard: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:53-54), when God's reckoning will restore all things and “the saints will judge the world” (1 Corinthians 6:2).⁹⁰ For then “the kingdom of the world [will] become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ” (Revelation 11:15), and the laws of the nations will become “the law of Christ” (1 Corinthians 9:21), and we will feast with God forever in a world finally at perfect peace (Isaiah 25:6)! Hallelujah! Amen.