There is a doctrine floating around among those few churches that keep anything close to a passover service; a doctrine which says that for the passover service grape juice is just as good as, if not better than, wine.

Now if a person chooses not to drink wine the rest of the year, that is their business (Romans 14:21). Drinking wine does not commend you to God, neither does abstaining from wine – God simply doesn’t care. This article isn’t meant to prove that drinking wine is perfectly permissible, indeed encouraged in the Bible; that’s another paper. This is about why wine is NECESSARY at the passover.

To put grape juice in place of wine is an affront to God. Wine is commanded to be drunk at the passover, and must be drunk at the passover or else you have no sacrifice for your sins, and no hope of salvation. It’s just that simple. Grape juice isn’t good enough, and this article will demonstrate that from several different angles beyond question.

Before I get into that though, I should mention that one of the most common excuses is that “some people are recovering alcoholics and can’t taste a sip of wine without a relapse!”

So… is the God you serve unable to heal their alcoholic addiction? Is that person’s will power and desire to obey God so weak that a thimbleful of wine will cause them to relapse into a gallon of wine a day? If so, that person has no right taking the passover in the first place! And if the church isn’t willing to set up with him all night or all week if necessary till he gets over it, then none of them have a right to be taking the passover either!

Harsh? Yes. It’s time someone took a stand for something. This is the command of God. If you don’t do it, YOU ARE NOT OBEYING GOD. This is deadly serious! If you mess with the passover and substitute human reasoning based on faulty premises to make excuses for your sins or those of your Church, YOU MESS WITH THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST! If you don’t obey God, you won’t be in the first resurrection, and that is that!

If God commands wine at the passover, you’d better drink wine. If a person “can’t” drink wine, GET THEM able to drink wine; prayer, healing, the entire church fasting for a week, WHATEVER IT TAKES. And if a person goes off the deep end because of a teaspoon of wine, God can heal him – or doesn’t your church believe in trusting God?

That said, let’s start at the beginning. What, EXACTLY, did God command?

Mark 14:23-25 And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them: and they all drank of it. And he said unto them, This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many. Verily I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God.

All the gospel accounts are pretty much identical in relating this; Jesus took a cup with an unnamed substance, commanded them to drink it telling them it symbolized his blood, and then said that He would drink “no more” of the fruit of the VINE until He drank it in the kingdom of God.

So clearly, whatever was in the cup was the fruit “of the vine”. I don’t think anyone disputes that, so I’ll move on. Jesus died on passover which usually falls between late March or late April, and this was said the night before He died. Again, no one argues that.

What that means is that everyone admits that Jesus drank “of the fruit of the vine”, IN APRIL!

If the significance of that doesn’t jump out at you, let me explain. Grapes are one of the LAST crops to ripen every year. You’ll have figs, peaches, plums, melons, squash, corn… practically everything in your garden is ripe BEFORE grapes. It’s a simple biological fact which you can easily verify yourself. Parts of the southern U.S. have a climate quite similar to Palestine in terms of seasons. Here, the earliest of grapes don’t ripen until JULY! As I write this it is almost OCTOBER and I can still find a few grapes clinging to my vine!

In April, grapes sometimes don’t even have LEAVES, much less blossoms! So it is impossible – flatly, biologically impossible – for any fresh grape to be found anywhere in the middle east in APRIL. What does that mean? That Jesus did NOT drink fresh grape juice at that passover. So if He drank the fruit of the vine, it HAD to be wine.

2,000 years ago they didn’t have refrigeration. So here is an experiment for you; sometime next July or August, buy some fresh organic grapes. Put them in a sheepskin bag (or a glass jar). Sit them in a cool, dark place. Fast-forward to April. Open up that sheepskin. You won’t have grape juice! You will have WINE! Grape juice will AUTOMATICALLY turn into wine if left out without refrigeration in a matter of WEEKS!

It may not be great-tasting wine; but it will most definitely be an alcoholic WINE. So you see, from that simple standpoint alone, it’s impossible that the “fruit of the vine” was intended to be grape juice.

Deuteronomy 32:14 …thou didst drink the pure blood of the grape.

So then, why was the “blood of the grape”, and specifically the fermented “blood of the grape” – wine – selected for the passover?

Obviously the first thought is that wine looks rather like blood; from a distance and in the right light, at least. But there is a lot more to be said than that.

Judges 9:12-13 Then said the trees unto the vine, Come thou, and reign over us. And the vine said unto them, Should I leave my wine, which CHEERETH God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees?

Notice that carefully; the grape vine claimed that wine CHEERS God AND Man. Grape juice doesn’t do that. Sure, it tastes good but so does mango or pear juice. Only wine CHEERS the heart. How specifically does it do this?

Proverbs 31:6-7 Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and FORGET HIS POVERTY, and REMEMBER his misery NO MORE.

Obviously, grape juice doesn’t hurt your memory at all. But it’s a well known fact that wine can get you so plastered that you forget your own name, much less your poverty or problems. So in part, wine cheers you by making you forget your misery. So now think about this; The passover is about the forgiveness of your sins. The wine, specifically pictures that forgiveness.

Matthew 26:27-28 And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.

When we come to God and take the passover, it is with the thought in mind that we have sinned. Our misdeeds forced God to choose between killing us and killing His innocent Son. We in effect killed Him ourselves. But God forgives us when we drink the wine; at that moment, He “forgets” our sins.

Psalms 103:12 As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.

Sin is what causes hearts to be heavy; sin is what causes poverty; and sin is what causes misery. Only two things make that better: wine, and the blood of Christ. Do you suppose then, that it is a coincidence that God chose wine to symbolize Christ’s blood?

Grape juice can’t make you forget sin. But wine can. Wine is not the answer of course. But wine was the perfect symbol for Christ’s blood because it already does in a shallow, temporary physical sense exactly what Christ’s blood does in a permanent, spiritual sense – make you remember your miserable past no more, because it is washed away forever.

Isaiah 65:17 For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.

But there is yet another reason, even more compelling, why God chose wine instead of grape juice. And to explain it, I have to first explain the basic process of how wine is made.

Wine making involves the taking of some fruit juice, most commonly grapes, and exposing it to a yeast. There are millions of types of yeasts out there, and each will impart a different flavor to the wine. Some are more tame and mild-tasting, some are quite wild. Once a wine has been exposed to a yeast, the yeast settles in and multiplies. The yeast consumes the sugars in the juice and as a by-product creates carbon dioxide and alcohol. This process is called fermentation, and can be quite violent as the carbon dioxide bubbles and fizzes out of the bottles. So violent in fact that if you seal the fermenting bottle, the bottle will explode.

Naturally, the longer it sets, the more it ferments and the higher the alcohol content. And the longer it ferments the drier the wine tastes, because there is less sugar left. At some point the yeasts run completely out of sugars and die. At this point the finished wine is quite stable, because new yeasts would have nothing to eat in the wine; the high alcohol content keeps out most bacteria, and kept properly it can be stored for hundreds of years even without refrigeration.

The reason grape juice is an unfit symbol for the passover is that grape juice is unstable. Yes, it’s sweet, but if you leave grape juice alone for a few days every wild yeast that floats by nests in the juice and when you come back who knows WHAT you might have! When juice goes bad because the wrong yeasts got into it, it becomes vinegar. Not pleasant to drink!

Wine on the other hand is stable; permanent. No matter what yeasts it’s exposed to, it will still taste pretty much the same. It’s safe. Safe from yeast. Safe from leaven. Safe from sin.

See, yeast is a leaven. In fact, it’s the only leaven most of the world has had access to over the years, because yeasts are airborne and exist pretty much everywhere. So when God talks about leavening picturing sin, He’s talking about yeast.

But when God commands that you get all leavening out of your house for the feast of unleavened bread, didn’t it seem odd to you that He never commanded you to get rid of your wine, which is leavened with yeast just as bread is? It did to me. But the reason was quite simple. The process of making wine completely consumed the leaven until there was none left!

This life is about taking creatures who are born innocent and exposing them to sin. Dragging them through a lifetime of seeing the results of sin until they hate it with every fiber of their being, so that they would NEVER want to sin again.

That’s not quite the effect is has on most people – at least, not for now – but that’s the goal. We are born with a carnal nature. Our own built-in leavening. And this leaven works in us. How it works! And it effervesces and ferments and boils in us! And then as we understand the truth we learn how to get that nature under control; how to choose God’s yeast over Satan’s (see my article, “The Leaven Of Righteousness”).

And gradually our sweet innocence is consumed. Naiveté disappears. If we’re doing as we should, it’s replaced with understanding. A deep knowledge of the reasons WHY sin is wrong. A knowledge so deep that we no longer even WANT to sin. But throughout our lives that yeast will continue to feed on every drop of sweet innocence that is left in us, and test us in every way imaginable. Eventually, that innocence will be consumed.

No longer will we be tossed about by every wind of doctrine, because we’ll KNOW where we stand. No longer will we be susceptible to this lie or that, because we’ll have seen how that goes and be incorruptible. We will, in short, have turned from grape juice, to wine.

Adam and Eve were innocent. They’d never sinned, and they were sweet. But because they had never sinned, they didn’t know why they shouldn’t. And so when wild yeast came along, they soured and turned to vinegar.

That sort of “Grape-juice-righteousness” isn’t good enough for God. Righteousness that hasn’t been tested through the fires of leaven is, for all practical purposes, worthless. It can’t be trusted because it hasn’t been tested. We have.

We were born innocent, as they were, and we were immediately leavened; throughout our lives, that leaven has percolated and bubbled in us, causing us all sorts of trouble; and as we choose, with God’s help, the right path, the sugar of our innocence which is so tantalizing for yeast, such an easy target for sin, is consumed; in its place is gradually created an alcohol – a permanent, stable nature.

By the time we die, our naivete should be well-nigh consumed by Satan’s yeast, which should be well on its way towards starving itself into extinction, leaving behind only the pure blood of the grape.

Wine pictures the blood of Christ because Christ went through that same process of development as wine did; The first Adam was sweet grape juice; but when he was exposed to wild yeasts they took him over and he soured.

But Christ as the second Adam, despite being born sweet grape juice, when He was exposed to the leaven of a carnal nature was not taken over by that leaven. In the course of rejecting the various temptations throughout his life, these “fermentations” we all go through, the leaven was starved out and God was able to make Him perfect (Hebrews 12:23), and completely eradicate the leaven, and now knows that Christ can be trusted forever, being immune to the temptations of leaven.

So the wine at the passover symbolizes God forgetting your sins, and you forgetting your sins. And it symbolizes the process Christ went through to provide that pure incorruptible blood we partake of at the passover. And grape juice can never do that.