Wine in the Bible - Part 2

This post is a continuation from yesterday's post (read it here). Yesterday we looked at God's view of alcohol consumption. Today we take a look at the wine of the Bible.
The first thing you have to understand is that even the intoxicating wine of their day was different from the wines of our time. R.L. Harris writes:

“The strength of natural wines is limited by two factors. The percentage of alcohol will be half of the percentage of the sugar in the juice. And if the alcoholic content is much above 10 or 11 percent, the yeast cells are killed and fermentation ceases. Probably ancient wines were 7–10 per cent.”^[1]

Wines today range anywhere from 8-20%, depending upon which type you examine.[2] Obviously, that’s a significant jump in alcohol content over the “natural” wine.

God, Morality, Alcohol, and Your Responsibility - Part 1

Many of you may aware of the upcoming vote on July 17, 2012 to legalize the sale of alcohol in our county. This law will not just legalize the sale of alcohol in restaurants and gas stations, but also the opening of liquor stores, and given the right circumstances, even bars.
There are several reasons given by those who are in support of passing the law. Many of them appeal to the practical nature of people. Of course we all want to do something that “makes sense.” It seems to make sense that if our kids can already find alcohol easily (even without it being sold in the county) that passing a law permitting its sale wouldn’t have that much of an impact on our children. It seems to make sense that if people are going to bring alcohol into our county anyway, we may as well get the tax revenue from selling it ourselves. It seems to make sense that we should benefit from the tourists drinking in our county instead of just “picking up their trash.”

It all seems to make sense. But upon further examination, it really doesn’t. Does it really make sense, considering the nature of alcohol (consider Proverbs 23:29) that making it more easily accessible to our county will make things better? Really?