by Kenneth F. Sheets
The chemical reaction known as “fermentation” has been much maligned over the years by preachers and teachers of the Bible. Many have declared it to be nothing more than a “process of corruption,” but, as will be seen below, it is far more. In many respects, fermentation is worthy of the negative publicity it has received, but this is the result of human misuse of that which God designed “good.” Humans have allowed this misuse to influence their ideas regarding when the process first came into being. Some have connected its origin to Adam’s rejection and violation of the Creator’s design. Others have seen its origin in the changed atmospheric conditions which followed God’s cataclysmic destruction in the Noahic Flood. In both instances, God drastically changed the physical conditions of human life and environment, and association with either seems sufficient to justify the negative connotations attached to fermentation. One sees it as a result of the first “sin” and makes it an effect of God’s judgment on the creation at that time, and the other associates it with God’s imposition of judgment upon a world affected by continuing “sin.” Association with either event tends to make fermentation seem anything but good.
The question, however, is not what humans have “believed” or “declared” fermentation to be, but rather, what God actually designed and revealed it to be. Mankind is infamous for its ability to take that which God has said or done and twist it into something more fitting to human concepts and sensibilities, and then to attribute back to God those same perverted “truths.” Humans like to exercise their God-given sense of dominion by doing just as Eve first, and then Adam, did in the Garden. Though claiming to represent God’s truth as He gave it, they have actually remade His truth in man’s image, that is, they have used their own finite created human mind, and not the mind of the infinite Creator God, to determine “good and evil” for themselves. Of course, this practice makes their “preaching” and “teaching” much easier and more popular, because the foundation upon which this new humanized “truth” rests fits perfectly with the way humans think in the first place. To avoid this practice and reach a true concept of fermentation, one must seek to evaluate and correlate all that God has expressed regarding this “good” chemical process.
First under consideration must be the nature of the “fermentation process.” Regardless of the time of inception, the process is one designed and provided by Yihyeh, the LORD, the God Who Is. No created being nor all acting as one, whether angelic or human, possesses the power and ability, and the authority, to set such a process in place. The transcendent Creator alone possesses all that is necessary to establish the process of fermentation in any part of the creation, let alone in the whole of it. In addition, the word “fermentation” is nothing more than a term coined by humans to describe a series of chemical reactions associated with a specific kind of deterioration of organic matter, especially those chemical reactions which produce certain by-products, not the least of which is ethyl alcohol (also called “ethanol”). Of great importance here is the fact that the chemical reactions of fermentation are but a few of the many thousands of perfectly designed organic chemistry reactions which in turn comprise but a small portion of all the perfectly designed chemical reactions which God established for His creation.
The Creator God, and what He does, is the definition of perfection. By His very nature, He cannot do less than that which is perfect, absolutely best, for all involved in every situation, and the chemical reactions of the universe, including those of organic chemistry, including those associated with fermentation, are “good” chemical reactions, perfectly designed by Him to provide “good success” in the life of humans. Human misunderstanding, perversion, and misuse of that which God provided “good” does not invalidate the goodness of what was provided. Neither man nor any other creature has the power to change the quality of what God did; the “good” of the Creator cannot be perverted into “evil” by the created. Then, too, man cannot change the chemistry or the physics or any of the sciences that God built into the creation; he can only use, or misuse, them. God built into humans a sense of dominion in order that they might fulfill their stewardship over His creation. He also included an ability to violate the criteria of His design, but He never delegated to them any measure of authority to commit such violation. The dominion of humans was bounded by the criteria of His perfect design, and fermentation is one aspect of that design, and, though humans possess the ability to misuse it, their misuse is violation and brings only destructive results.
Another aspect in the study of fermentation involves an evaluation of the physical conditions established by God for the various periods of environmental history. If the Creator’s revelation indicates, or clearly intimates, the presence of the fermentation process operating in a period of time, then the true nature of this process and some measure of its perfectly-designed function will be obvious as well. The environmental history of the creation covers three primary eras: the current post-Flood period, the era between Adam’s violation and the Flood, and the time before Adam’s violation. An evaluation of each era, with its own distinctive environmental conditions as understood from both the written and physical portions of God’s revelation, will provide insight into the relationship between fermentation and the apparent physical environment of that era.
The current post-Flood period provides unmistakable evidence that the fermentation chemical reactions, and their associated chemical by-products, are part of God’s design for this era. The “products” of fermentation reactions find use not only in the motor fuel and beverage industries but also in the production of many commodities valuable in the life of humans. Used and managed as the Creator intended, the process of fermentation, and its by-products, are highly beneficial, but fermentation is not the only source of the chemicals it produces. Man’s study of organic chemistry has provided a series of reaction methodologies, totally apart from the fermentation process, that yield the desirable products typically associated with fermentation, not the least of which is ethyl alcohol. A quick look at any organic chemistry textbook will reveal a series of such reactions.
Certainly, God did construct the physiology and biochemistry of the human body in ways that allow humans to ingest ethyl alcohol and to experience its highly-publicized, but temporary, “exhilarating” effect as it courses through the blood stream and dulls the senses. However, like the great multitude of things that humans can do, but which are not permitted in the Creator’s design, humans are not to ingest this material. Certainly, God did construct the human body so that individuals who are near death may have their senses dulled by ingesting ethyl alcohol, but this beneficial aspect is an isolated condition that actually demonstrates the necessity of avoiding this chemical and its sense-dulling effects in the normal course of human existence. Recognition of these effects dictates, then, that individuals who bear rule or authority, or who need to be thinking clearly, must avoid taking ethyl alcohol into their bodies. Despite statements by those who regularly ingest alcohol that small amounts of alcohol do not affect them, those who study human physiology have repeatedly demonstrated that the human body is affected by those same “small amounts.”
The effects of alcohol on human physiology are not determined by human perception; they are predetermined by the biochemical reactions designed into the human body by its Creator. Though the “regular ingesters” of ethyl alcohol may protest to the contrary, when they do protest, they are demonstrating the very truth they are denying, because they are exhibiting their already-dulled perception, making their judgments nonsensical at the very best. For believers, the people of God who are supposed to exercise wisdom and understanding from a clear mind, the physiological relationship between the human body and ethyl alcohol dictates that this substance be ingested only in those rare and special cases where its dulling and impairing nature in no way contributes to or orients a person toward any degree of violation of any criterion of the Creator’s design. Without question, the believer who insists that God promotes or condones the ingestion of alcohol in small quantities is seriously lacking in his understanding of God and is deceiving himself, foolishly rejecting incontrovertible physiological evidence and the design of the Savior as well. Such a position, to say the least, is not wise, and the effects can only be destructive as the whole of creation seeks to turn the erring individual from his own direction and to restore him to the only direction that brings blessing: the way of God.
Fermentation functions as one of the processes designed by God to accomplish the breakdown and subsequent “recycling” of matter into forms useful in other processes. Thus, to determine if fermentation was an active process in a specific era, one must examine that era to determine if God appeared to be “recycling” in that time. The time between Adam’s violation and the Flood was a time of death, suffering, and destruction, and thus, God’s “matter recycling” processes were not only active; they were essential. If those chemical reactions had not been in place, then the dead carcases of men, animals, and plants, and the body wastes generated by men and animals, would have accumulated to excess, but the Creator’s design included the creatures and physical systems needed to complete His “recycling” process.
Then, too, to some extent, the same reasoning may be applied to the era before Adam’s violation. The Scriptures reveal that men and animals ate fibrous foods, and yet, though the bodies of men and animals may have been perfect in efficiency, totally using up the foods ingested with nothing left in the form of waste, the Scripture gives no indication of that condition. In fact, unless one assumes that God totally changed man’s internal and external physiology when Adam violated, especially that involving the removal of waste from the body, then one must acknowledge that waste removal was an integral and perfect aspect of human existence from the beginning. In addition, the trees bore fruit, and the fruit bore seeds; so, for the seeds to germinate, the fruit would have to change form to liberate the seeds, and the mechanism of that change would not have been anything less than perfect. From the present perspective of humanity, that mechanism may be deemed a process of “deterioration” or “corruption,” but that was not the perspective of the Creator or any created being of that era. Whatever mechanisms and processes God inserted into His creation and however those mechanisms and processes accomplished their designed functions, they were all perfectly suited to their functions and to everything else in creation.
Fermentation, then, as a God-designed chemical process, must have been in place since God created, and while modern man may characterize such organic chemistry as a “process of corruption” or the products of the reaction as “the product of the devil,” these characterizations are clearly invalid and misleading. A better course of action would be to present all the chemical reactions of the universe as perfect designs of the Creator, all possessing a nature unchanged by the “corrupt manner” in which humans use them. All the creation groans and travails in the present day awaiting the redemption of humans when it will no longer be subject to misuse. God’s processes are perfect, and He may activate or deactivate any of them as He sees fit, but man cannot act as judge upon what God has said and done; it is all as He is . . . perfect.