Don't Drink, Don't Smoke
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

If you look carefully at a bottle of Rolling Rock beer you'll notice a number. It reads 33. The number comes with no official explanation, but a number have been proposed. The best guess I've heard is that the number signifies the year 1933, the year Prohibition came to a blessed end. There aren't too many folks left who much care for the idea of prohibition, at least of alcohol. Our collective conscience remembers the heyday of gangsters, and the unsightly sight of normal, law-abiding citizens uneasily slinking into speakeasies. But we still can't quite give up the idea that if someone is out there doing something we think they shouldn't, well then, there ought to be a law.

There are too many real horror stories about those who abuse alcohol. Our nightly news rarely comes and goes without some sort of drug related crime being reported. And then there is tobacco. And all it takes to raise that specter is the sight of someone hacking away with a coffin nail in their nicotine stained hand.

Here's a question for all those horrors. Whose business is this anyway? When did we start asking the government to make sure we wash behind our ears? Where in Scripture, or in the Constitution, where in the name of common sense is it said that governments exist to make sure we don't hurt ourselves? I know, I know, there are no victimless crimes. But there are, or rather there ought to be, crimeless victims. That is to say that just because someone suffers doesn't mean a true crime has been committed. Some mothers buy their kids too much junk food. Should there be a law? Some people wear too much perfume. Should there be a law? Some folks invest their earnings at the race track before buying health insurance. Should there be a law?

The solution to social ills is not always more government. In fact, more government creates more social ills than it seeks to solve. But the reason we're given for more government is all too often too much government. Consider our last example. As far as I know, neither the state of Minnesota, nor Virginia, nor Tennessee (the latter two tobacco growing states that just slurped up some of the settlement money) has ever caught so much as a cold from cigarettes, let alone lung cancer. Yet there they are, listed as plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit. The reasoning goes like this. The money goes to the states because the states have been paying the medical bills for fools with smoking related illnesses. This is the man at the race track, puffing away while trying to pull a trifecta. You and I are paying for his folly. He has no insurance, and he's smoking. So what do we do? Do we tell him, "Hey, you're on your own." No, we tax his cigarettes.

You've also seen the moms with the junkfood. You're standing in line wondering what kind of nut would buy all that artery clogging processed sludge and then you have the coronary as she pulls out her food stamps to pay for them. And you think, "They shouldn't be able to buy that junk with food stamps" instead of the more sensible, "Why are we buying food for people in the first place?"

I take pleasure in the very vices (with the exception of illegal drags) that the government seeks to stamp out like some spent butt. I take these pleasures in moderation, in part because they cease to be pleasures when one overindulges. I also eat Blizzards from Dairy Queen. And I fail to practice anger in moderation when the state, in seeking to keep its citizens from sinning, keeps me from enjoying my God given rights to these pleasures. The Bible has a word for people who, in order to make sure no one comes close to breaking God's law, add man's laws to it, Pharisees.

But at least the Pharisees understood in what court such laws would be enforced. The solution to the man who drinks too much, or smokes too much, or eats too much, is not the state, but the church. We confess our lack of faith in the power of Christ's keys when we instead clamor to get Caesar to use his sword against the merely sinful instead of the criminal. When we cry to the state, "Make those bad people stop that!" we are affirming our conviction that the state is God, and state law is the Holy Spirit, given the power to convict of sin. In a word, when we ask the state to purify the sinner, we show ourselves to be sinners of little faith.

Drunkeness nearly destroyed 19th century England. The ravages of abusing alcohol scourged the land. But the people went not to the voting booth, but to their prayer closets, and God sent revival across the land. And that revival did something far more significant than lowering the rate of alcoholism, it brought souls into the kingdom of God. And that was its purpose. The prayers were not that people might be saved that they might stop drinking too much, but that people might be saved such that they would be given the water that gives life.

Think about what you're asking the state to do before you ask it. Is it a proper function of the state, or do you plead out of desperation, "We've tried persuading, now it's time to get out the battle-axes and swords." ? If you're desperate to stop a social ill, do that for which we usually wait until the final act of desperation, get on your knees and pray. And while you're down there, confess your unbelief, and ask Him to shrink the state, not grow it.