In Genesis 9, "Noah drank of the wine and was
drunken...uncovered within the tent... and cursed be Canaan." This is
the first mention of strong drink in the Bible. It caused one of the
best men to be drunk. it brought nakedness and shame. It brought a
wicked episode that produced great distress and it leveled a curse on
a home! It always does!
Oh, the broken hearts caused by drink! Again and again I've had
people come to my study with a sad account of heartache and tears, and
so often they begin the conversation, "My husband drinks!"
Some little children in our Sunday school were recently heard to
say, "Guess how much my daddy spent on beer last week?" (These
children have few clothes and practically none of the nice things of
life because "Daddy drink!")
Another child said to me recently, "Pray for my daddy--he was drunk
last night." LIQUID DEVIL!
Three children died in a Michigan fire while their mother and
father were out at a drinking party. Far the rest of their lives and
for eternity these parents must remember that their lust for strong
drink caused the death of their own children!
A story told of a woman who stood near the magistrate who was
hearing a case against her husband. Somehow the pathetic face of the
woman touched the judge, and he said to her, " I am sorry, but u must
lock up your husband." "Your honor," she returned, "wouldn't it be
better for me and the children if you locked up the saloon and
let my husband go to work?"
J. Edgar Hoover has suggested that "Criminals are not born, they
are home-grown." We can believe this when we learn of small children
begging for milk outside the bar while their father is inside getting
tanked up, or when I see the Colorado wife who came to the revival
meetings bruised, with her eyes black from the beating her
whiskey-drinking husband had given her the night before. And when I
remember the young man in my biology class in high school who was so
popular with the girls, who had his own car, who boasted of his
conquests in sin even as a high school junior, but who just a few
years later was found in his home almost dead from alcoholism and
malnutrition. His wife was dead by his side of the same cause. Rotten
food was decaying on the table in that terrible stench-filled house.
Oh, the distress that strong drink brings to the family.
Chaucer, in 1340, said, "Character and shame depart when wine comes
in." Sir Wilfred Grenfell said, "Alcohol has wrecked more lives,
starved more children, murdered more women than any other single
factor."
Men say they swallow strong drink--but strong drink swallows them,
really! Solomon said, "His own iniquities shall take the wicked
himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins." (Proverb
5:22)
One of the most notorious proofs of the utter depravity of the
human heart is the inclination to strong drink: in the fact that a man
will allow himself to be mastered by such a vicious "Liquid Devil"!
