The Garden of Eden is one of the best-known stories of the Bible. Satan, in the form of a snake, tempted Adam and Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit, most commonly referred to as an apple. Why was it an apple and not another fruit? Keep in mind that this was Paradise and everything was perfection and bliss. The grape was the most likely fruit to be the forbidden fruit. The grape was perfect and not eaten for some period of time, and given that it was perfect and had a perfect skin, that the fruit was perhaps as large as an apple, and given that the juices within were naturally and perfectly fermented by age, each grape may have been the equivalent of a glass of wine.

The grape was forbidden so that at the end of the test, Adam and Eve would be rewarded for their obedience with a glorious banquet with the most perfect wine and entrance into Heaven, a Paradise’s Paradise unimaginable in its desirability and beauty. Adam and Eve did not pass the obedience test. Instead they tasted of the natural wine and became inebriated. Their near perfect love, minimally comparable to a grand parent’s pure love for a grandchild, was affected by the world’s first intoxication and led to a physical lust, that did not exist before.

The next day they realized what happened to their pure love and they covered themselves with leaves. This was the end of the era of perfect love. Adam and Eve could no longer be allowed to live in Paradise and were expelled to live by their own wits and labor. This explanation perhaps leads us to think that it was no accident that wine was offered at the Last Supper, that what was the cause of the fall of mankind was now the cause for mankind’s Redemption.

The intoxication in the Garden of Eden may be an indication of the beginning of man’s addiction to alcohol. Since that time in the Garden, wine was included in many a Bible story so it makes sense that Grapes were the original Forbidden Fruit and its by-product, Wine, might be the original cause of an addiction that can be traced back to the Garden of Eden.

Wine, which caused the problem, was now a part of the solution in the celebration of the “Last Supper,” when Jesus offered Wine and consecrated it into His own Blood. Prior to that, Jesus portended this transformation of wine into His own blood by changing the water into wine at the marriage feast of Cana, His first recorded public miracle.

God used every disadvantage to advantage.
God changed every negative into a positive.
How ironic, that what caused the problem,
Became the solution to the problem.

(The above is a chapter “Forbidden Fruit” from my 2002 copyright book, “Aren’t you sorry you asked…for my opinion.”)