MAN BY DESIGN — INSTALLMENT TEN: Substances WHAT THE FATHER GREW, WHAT MEN ENGINEERED, AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN STEWARDSHIP AND MASTERY IN WHAT A MAN PUTS INTO HIS BODY

By R. Bryant Starnes

THREE CATEGORIES — KNOW WHICH IS WHICH

This installment is going to be honest in ways that will discomfort men reading from either side of the argument. The men who think the Father takes a hard line against every substance will not like the parts where the gifts are honored. The men who think every substance is fine in any quantity will not like the parts where mastery is named. Both sides are wrong because both sides are running the test on the wrong axis. The Father did not ask is the substance moral? He asked who sits on the throne of your life?

Three categories run through everything in this installment. The man who knows which category he is dealing with knows what test to apply.

Category one. What the Father grew. Plants and their products, given by Him at creation. Wine, beer, tobacco, cannabis, coffee, tea, and the broader plant kingdom. Genesis 1:29 — “every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed.” 1 Timothy 4:4 — “every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving.” These are gifts. The test for gifts is stewardship versus mastery. The molecule does not determine the answer. The throne does.

Category two. What men engineered. Synthetic compounds, distilled industrial alcohol, refined opioids, methamphetamine, fentanyl, vapes engineered for maximum addiction delivery, refined sugar, the ultra-processed products from installment seven, and most pharmaceuticals. The Father did not grow these. Men made them. Some have legitimate uses. Most do not match anything He gave. The test still applies, and it applies harder, because many of these substances were specifically designed by men optimizing for addiction or profit — the engineering itself is not neutral.

Category three. What He forbade by name. Pornography. Drunkenness as state. The use of any substance specifically to escape what the Father is calling the man to face. These are not stewardship questions. They are commandments. The piece will not equivocate on these, because the Father did not.

The man who confuses the categories will get the test wrong. The man who treats wine like pornography is adding rules the Father did not add and refusing gifts He gave. The man who treats pornography like wine is treating a direct prohibition as a stewardship matter and lying to himself about what scripture says. Both errors are forms of disobedience, in opposite directions, and both are common.

THE MASTER TEST

Every substance question runs through the first commandment.

Exodus 20:3. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” The Hebrew — lo yihyeh lecha elohim acherim al panai — no other gods upon My face. The Father is not negotiating for primary place. He is declaring it. And the test for everything in a man’s life is the same test we have been running since installment six. Has it taken His place?

Three diagnostic questions go underneath the first commandment when applied to substances. The man who runs them honestly in front of the Father will know where he stands.

One. Has it taken His place? Is this substance the first thing you reach for in stress, in pain, in joy, in boredom, before you reach for Him? Has it become the way you cope, the way you celebrate, the way you sleep, the way you wake? When you imagine your life without it, do you feel relief or do you feel a hole? The hole is the diagnostic. A gift fills no holes that are His to fill. A master fills the hole the Father is supposed to occupy.

Two. Could you lay it down? If the Father asked you to set this substance aside for a season, or for life, could you do it? Not would you want to — a man may not want to give up a thing that is still in proper place. Could you? If the answer is yes, the throne is His. If the answer is no, you have found the master.

Three. Are you refusing a gift He gave? The third question runs the other direction, and most religious teaching about substances skips it. The Father gave plants and their products as gifts for our good, for food and for medicine. To refuse a gift the Father gave, out of religious self-imposition rather than honest necessity, is its own form of dishonor. Paul named this directly in 1 Timothy 4:1–5 — men teaching others to abstain from what God created to be received with thanksgiving. The man under stewardship does not refuse gifts. He does not abuse them either. He receives them in their proper place.

Has it taken His place. Could I lay it down. Am I refusing a gift He gave. Three questions. One throne.

These three questions, run honestly, will resolve almost every substance question a man faces. The man asking the questions is doing the discernment the Father requires. The man who refuses to ask them is the man whose answer is already known to him and to the Father, even when he is lying to himself about it.

WINE — WHAT THE FATHER SAID PLAIN

Wine is the substance scripture addresses most directly, and it is the cleanest example of the principle. The Father gave wine as gift. He also named drunkenness as failure. Both truths sit in the text, side by side, with no apology for either.

On the gift side. Psalm 104:14–15 — “He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth; and wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread to strengthen man’s heart.” Wine is in the same list as bread and oil — the staples of life, given by the Father, for the man’s good. It is not tolerated. It is given for the purpose of gladdening the heart of man.

Deuteronomy 14:26 is the verse most modern Christians have never read. The Father, instructing Israel on how to celebrate the festival before Him, says — “And thou shalt bestow that money for whatsoever thy soul lusteth after, for oxen, or for sheep, or for wine, or for strong drink, or for whatsoever thy soul desireth: and thou shalt eat there before the LORD thy God, and thou shalt rejoice, thou, and thine household.” Wine and strong drink, commanded as part of the celebration before the Father. Not despite Him. With Him. In His presence. In thanksgiving.

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.” Strong drink and wine prescribed for the suffering. Medicine for the heavy-hearted. Given as instruction in the wisdom literature, not as concession to weakness.

Yeshua’s first miracle was making wine. John 2. The wedding at Cana. He turned roughly one hundred and twenty gallons of water into wine, and the master of the feast said it was the best wine of the night. His enemies later called Him a winebibber (Matthew 11:19) — a charge that sticks only when there is wine in the picture. He drank wine. He never apologized for drinking wine. He gave wine at the Passover meal as the sign of the new covenant in His blood. The substance is not at war with His ministry. It is woven into it.

Paul to Timothy in 1 Timothy 5:23. “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities.” Wine prescribed medicinally by an apostle. Not condemned. Recommended.

On the master side. Proverbs 20:1. “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.” The same wine the Psalms call gladness becomes a mocker when it has taken the man. Same substance. Different relationship.

Ephesians 5:18. “And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit.” Drunkenness is named directly. The Greek word for excess is asotia — dissipation, wastefulness, the state of a man whose life is being thrown away. The condemnation is specifically of being controlled by the substance to the point of dissipation. The same passage that condemns drunkenness was written by the same Paul who told Timothy to drink wine for his stomach. There is no contradiction. The substance is good. The mastery is forbidden.

Genesis 9:21. Noah, after the flood, planted a vineyard, drank of the wine, and was found drunk and naked in his tent. The Father did not cover Noah’s shame. Noah’s sons did, and the cost of the failure rippled into the next generation. The first recorded drunkenness in scripture is in the man the Father had just preserved through the flood. The text does not pretend even a righteous man is immune to losing the test.

BEER — IN THE SAME CATEGORY AS WINE

The honest reader will ask whether beer belongs with wine in category one, since beer is a human process applied to grain rather than something picked from a vine. The answer is yes. Beer was the dominant alcoholic beverage in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, brewed from barley by men in essentially the same process used today — malting, mashing, fermenting. When the Father gave Israel the festival instruction in Deuteronomy 14:26, the Hebrew word shekar — translated strong drink — referred to a category of fermented beverages broader than wine alone, and beer was almost certainly included. The Father authorized the festival money to be spent on yayin (wine) or shekar (strong drink including beer), to be consumed in His presence in celebration. Beer is gift, in the same category as wine, treated under the same test.

Wine and beer share a structural feature that distinguishes them from category two products. Both are human processes applied to what the Father grew, but the processes work within what the biology of yeast on sugar naturally produces. Wine ferments to roughly eight to fifteen percent alcohol. Beer ferments to roughly four to seven percent. Neither concentration was engineered past what the natural process yields. Men did not push beyond what the Father built into the biology. They worked with His design and received what it produced.

This matters when we get to category two, because the line is not did men do anything to it? Bread is a human process applied to wheat the Father grew. Olive oil is a human process applied to olives. Cheese is a human process applied to milk. Scripture commends all of these. The line is not human involvement. The line is whether the process stays within what the Father built into His creation, or whether men pushed past it into territory He did not grow.

One distinction worth naming. Modern industrial beer — mass-produced lagers using corn and rice adjuncts, hops engineered for shelf life, pasteurization, filtration, artificial carbonation — is in a different place than traditional beer brewed from malted barley, water, hops, and yeast. The traditional process is essentially what the men who wrote scripture would have recognized. Industrial mass-produced beer has crossed into engineering. The principle does not change. The acceleration and the additives do. A man drinking a craft beer his neighbor brewed is in a different relationship with the beverage than a man drinking the industrial product whose name is on every billboard. Both are still beer. The first is closer to the gift the Father blessed.

TOBACCO, CANNABIS, AND THE OTHER PLANTS HE GREW

The other plants. The ones the Father grew that scripture does not name directly because they were not in the cultural area when the text was written.

Tobacco was native to the Americas and unknown to the men who wrote scripture. Cannabis grew in the broader Near East and may have been known but is not named explicitly in the canon. Coffee was an Ethiopian discovery, tea was Chinese, and neither was on Israel’s radar in the relevant period. None of these substances has a direct scriptural endorsement or prohibition by name. The principle that applies to them is the principle Paul gave in 1 Timothy 4:4 — “every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving.” Plants the Father grew are gifts. The test is the same test that applies to wine. Stewardship or mastery.

Tobacco. The plant the Father grew, with documented small amounts of nicotine that occur naturally in the broader nightshade family — tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and potatoes all contain trace nicotine, far below pharmacological dose, but real. The plant has been used for centuries in pipe and cigar form by men who were not addicted, and addictively in cigarette form by men who were. The same plant. The difference is the engineering and the relationship. A man smoking a cigar with his sons at a wedding is not in the same place as a man on three packs a day who cannot leave the house without his lighter. The plant is what the Father made. The relationship is the test.

Cannabis. The plant the Father grew, used historically for fiber, oil, and as medicine across many cultures. The active compound, THC, has documented effects on focus, sensory regulation, anxiety, sleep, pain, and appetite. Some men respond to cannabinoids with calm and clearer thinking. Some men respond with paranoia and fragmentation. Individual response varies, and a man who reaches for it without honest self-knowledge can find it serving him or mastering him — the same as wine. For some men with neurological wiring that produces sensory overload — ADHD, AuADHD, autism spectrum, certain anxiety conditions — cannabis can function the way Proverbs 31 describes wine functioning, as medicine for a real condition. For other men, cannabis becomes the master that runs the day. The plant does not change. The man’s relationship to it does.

Caffeine. Coffee and tea. The mildest of the plant gifts in this category, and the one most men reading consume daily without thinking about it. Same test. A cup or two of coffee in the morning, in thanksgiving, supporting a man’s work, is gift. A man who cannot function without three pots before noon and a Red Bull in the afternoon to stay awake has identified a relationship that has begun to slip out of stewardship. The molecule has not changed. The throne is the question.

Other plants He grew that fall in this category and that the piece will not enumerate exhaustively — the medicinal herbs, the kitchen herbs with documented therapeutic effects, the fungi some men use ritually, the various plants used by various cultures for various purposes. The principle does not change. If the Father grew it, the test is stewardship versus mastery. If men engineered it, the test gets harder.

On all of them, the same three questions. Has it taken His place. Could you lay it down. Are you refusing a gift He gave. The Berean works it out himself, in front of the Father, with self-accountability as the ongoing practice. Discernment is not a one-time decision. It is the daily walk applied to what you are putting into your body.

PHARMACEUTICALS — WHAT THE FATHER SAID ABOUT THE HEART OF MAN

Now the section that has to be in this installment, because most men reading are more likely to be on a prescription drug than to be using cannabis or alcohol. And before we get to the specifics, we have to lay down the lens that runs through this whole section, because without it the man reading will default to trusting the institution that gave him the prescription, and that default is the problem.

The Father has been plain about the human heart since Genesis. Jeremiah 17:9 — “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Genesis 6:5 — “Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Romans 3:10 — “There is none righteous, no, not one.” This is His assessment of the species, and it is consistent across the canon. Men, left to themselves, do not bend toward truth and the good of others. They bend toward self-interest, deception, and the protection of whatever they have built. The institutions men build inherit the deceitfulness of the men who built them.

Yeshua confronted this directly with the religious leaders. They had every credential. They had Torah training, institutional authority, social standing, doctrinal legitimacy traced back to Moses. They were the official experts on the Father’s word. And they were wrong. They were so wrong that the One who actually wrote the Torah they were teaching had to come correct them in person, and when He corrected them they killed Him for it. Their position required them to be right. He was the truth standing in front of them showing them they were not. Yeshua named them in Matthew 23 as whitewashed sepulchres — beautiful outside, full of dead men’s bones inside. The credentials did not protect them from being wrong. The system that credentialed them did not protect them from being wrong. Their position as leaders was the very thing that made them most resistant to recognizing what was true when it stood in front of them.

Institutions credentialed by other institutions do not produce truth by virtue of their credentials. They produce what the men running them are inclined to produce.

This is the lens that applies to every institutional declaration about what goes into your body. The FDA, the CDC, the AMA, the WHO, the major medical journals, the pharmaceutical industry itself — every one of them is run by men whose hearts the Father has named as inclined toward evil. Some of what they say is true. The default posture toward what they say is not trust. It is testing. The Berean posture from installment four, applied here. 1 Thessalonians 5:21 — “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” Psalm 118:8 — “It is better to trust in the LORD than to put confidence in man.” Psalm 146:3 — “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.”

Hear this carefully, because it is easy to misread. The piece is not telling you to stop your medications. Some men reading take pharmaceuticals that are keeping them alive — insulin, blood pressure medications after a real cardiac event, anticoagulants after a stroke, antibiotics for a real infection. The Father uses physical means and men. He sent Naaman to wash in the Jordan, He told Hezekiah to put figs on his boil, He healed the blind man with mud. He is not above the body or its treatments. Refusing real medicine in the name of natural is its own form of pride. Stewardship is not asceticism.

And. The pharmaceutical industry as it currently operates is not a neutral provider of healing, and the regulatory machinery overseeing it is not a neutral referee.

THE REGULATOR IS NOT WHAT YOU WERE TOLD

The man who has been told the FDA is the trustworthy referee in this should know what the institution actually is, because the heart-of-man principle the Father named is observable in the agency’s record.

Since 1992, when the Prescription Drug User Fee Act passed, a substantial portion of the FDA’s drug review budget has come from fees paid by the pharmaceutical industry the agency is supposed to be regulating. By the 2020s, that figure was roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of the drug-review budget. The agency reviewing the drugs is paid, in significant part, by the companies submitting them. Senior FDA officials routinely leave for executive positions at the companies whose drugs they once reviewed. Pharmaceutical executives are appointed to senior FDA positions. Scott Gottlieb, FDA commissioner from 2017 to 2019, joined Pfizer’s board within months of leaving the agency. Stephen Hahn, commissioner from 2019 to 2021, became chief medical officer of the venture firm that founded Moderna. The pattern is decades long and bipartisan.

The Aduhelm case in 2021 is the cleanest recent example. The FDA approved Biogen’s Alzheimer’s drug despite the agency’s own advisory committee voting overwhelmingly against approval — ten members against, none in favor, one uncertain. Three advisory committee members resigned in protest. Subsequent congressional investigation found inappropriate collaboration between FDA staff and Biogen during the review process. Aduhelm was priced at fifty-six thousand dollars per year per patient. The drug was withdrawn from the market in 2024 after additional studies showed minimal benefit and significant safety concerns. The agency had approved a drug that did not work, against its own advisors, after irregular contact with the sponsor.

Vioxx, Avandia, OxyContin. Drugs the FDA approved that subsequently caused tens of thousands of deaths or fueled the opioid epidemic. Vioxx alone has been estimated to have caused thirty thousand to sixty thousand deaths from cardiovascular events before withdrawal in 2004. The internal documents from the OxyContin approval and subsequent oversight are public record now and they are damning.

The COVID era specifically. The emergency use authorization process compressed safety review timelines. The clinical trial protocols had real limitations on duration and follow-up. The agency’s posture on vaccine safety surveillance during 2021 to 2023 was, by any honest reading, more aligned with public confidence messaging than with rigorous adverse-event investigation.

None of this should surprise the man who has read what the Father said about the human heart. The institution is exactly what scripture would predict. The man citing FDA approval as evidence of safety is citing an institution paid by the people it is supposed to be regulating, with documented capture issues, with a track record of approvals that should not have been granted. The Berean posture applies to the regulator as much as to the drug.

WHY WINE IS DIFFERENT FROM PHARMACEUTICALS

The honest reader will ask why wine, which men also process, is treated differently from pharmaceuticals, which men also process. The question is sharp and it deserves a direct answer.

Three distinctions separate them.

First, concentration. Wine concentrates what nature already produces — the ethanol from fermentation, at levels yeast itself yields, with no molecular modification. Beer the same. Pharmaceuticals typically push concentrations of bioactive compounds far beyond what the source plant contains. Willow bark contains salicin at perhaps one to two percent. Aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid at one hundred percent purity, dosed at concentrations the body would never encounter chewing willow bark. The active molecule has been concentrated by orders of magnitude past what the Father grew, and the body has to handle a dose nature does not produce.

Second, modification. Wine’s alcohol is the same ethanol the yeast makes. Men did not alter the molecule. Pharmaceutical chemistry frequently modifies the source molecule — often for the explicit purpose of making it patentable, since unmodified natural compounds are public domain and unprofitable. Aspirin is not salicin. It is salicin chemically altered. The modified molecule may behave similarly or differently from the original, with different side effect profiles, different interactions, different long-term effects. The men who modified it modified it for business reasons, not biological ones, and the body has to deal with what they made rather than what He grew.

Third, economic structure. Wine production has been a folk craft for thousands of years, undertaken by households, monasteries, and small operations, with the economic incentive aligned with making good wine for people to enjoy. Modern industrial pharmaceuticals are produced and recommended within an economic frame structured around chronic dependency. A patient who is healed stops paying. A patient whose symptoms are managed pays for life. The molecule is selected, modified, and marketed under that incentive structure.

And one more thing worth naming honestly. The Greek word pharmakeia — the root of our word pharmacy — appears in scripture exclusively in lists of forbidden practices. Galatians 5:20, Revelation 9:21, Revelation 18:23, Revelation 21:8, Revelation 22:15. It is consistently translated sorcery or witchcraft. The category named by that word historically referred to men using drugs and potions in ways that exceeded natural processes, often invoking spiritual powers in the process — a healer-priest figure mixing compounds to achieve effects the natural substances would not produce alone. The piece is not arguing that all medicine is sorcery. The Father uses physicians and material treatment. But the category scripture warned about is real, and modern pharmaceutical chemistry, with its molecule modifications, dose escalations, and economic structure resembling a priesthood more than a healing profession, has features that map onto it. The man under stewardship can tell the difference if he runs the questions honestly.

WHAT ELSE IS IN THE PILL

There is one more piece of the pharmaceutical question that most men reading have never thought about. The active ingredient is one piece. What is in the pill alongside the active ingredient is another piece, and it matters.

Tablets and capsules contain excipients — the inactive ingredients that make the pill possible to manufacture, store, and absorb. The active drug is usually a small fraction of the pill. Most of what the man swallows is excipient. The categories are well documented in pharmaceutical manufacturing literature.

Binders hold the tablet together. Microcrystalline cellulose, povidone, hydroxypropyl methylcellulose, starches.

Fillers bulk out the tablet to a manufacturable size. Lactose is common, which is itself a problem for the lactose-intolerant population that is rarely warned. Mannitol, sorbitol, calcium phosphate.

Disintegrants make the tablet break apart in the stomach. Sodium starch glycolate, croscarmellose sodium.

Lubricants prevent the tablet from sticking to manufacturing equipment. Magnesium stearate is the most common. Talc.

Coatings color, flavor, or protect the tablet. Titanium dioxide for whiteness, polyethylene glycol, various synthetic dyes.

Preservatives prevent microbial growth. Methylparaben, propylparaben, benzalkonium chloride, sodium benzoate.

Most of these are classified by the FDA as generally recognized as safe — the GRAS designation. The word generally is the operative word. The classification is based on long-standing use and limited toxicology testing, not exhaustive safety verification, and the agency making the classification is the same agency we just covered — paid by the industry, captured by the industry, with documented approval failures. The GRAS list is not the gold standard the man on the prescription was led to believe.

Some excipients carry documented concerns. Titanium dioxide was banned as a food additive in the European Union in 2022 over genotoxicity concerns. It remains permitted in pharmaceuticals in the United States. Polyethylene glycol — PEG, derived from petroleum — has been associated with allergic reactions, including some of the anaphylaxis cases seen with mRNA vaccines that use PEG-lipid nanoparticles. Synthetic dyes have been linked to behavioral effects in children. Aluminum compounds in some traditional vaccine adjuvants have ongoing debate about cumulative neurological effects. The ingredients are real, the concerns are documented, and the man taking the pill is consuming all of them — not just the active drug.

On the COVID vaccines specifically, since the question is on every honest man’s mind. The mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) do not contain aluminum or formaldehyde — those concerns apply to certain other vaccines, not these. The mRNA vaccines do contain polyethylene glycol in the lipid nanoparticles, which is petroleum-derived and which has been documented in the anaphylaxis cases. They use a novel mRNA platform that was deployed at scale without long-term safety data, on a compressed emergency-use timeline, by the same regulatory machinery whose capture we just covered. The platform may have legitimate uses. The deployment did not match the safety standards a man under stewardship would apply to anything else going into his body. The questions a man should be asking about anything from this category are the questions every man should have been asking about the COVID products and was discouraged from asking.

The questions a man under stewardship runs on his prescriptions:

What is the cause of the symptom this medication is treating? Most pharmaceutical interventions address symptoms, not causes. A man on blood pressure medication has high blood pressure as a symptom — of what? Diet? Sleep? Stress? Sedentary life? Substance use? The medication may be reasonable while he addresses the cause. The medication as the only intervention, with no investigation of the cause, is the industry’s preference, not necessarily his.

Has my doctor recommended what the Father grew before what men made? In an honest medical practice, lifestyle, food, sleep, movement, and natural compounds are the first line for many conditions, with pharmaceuticals as backup or accelerant. In most modern practice, the order is reversed because the order has been shaped by the industry. The man under stewardship can ask his doctor about the order, and a good doctor will answer honestly.

What are the side effects, and what conditions am I going to need new medications to manage as a result of this one? Polypharmacy — the practice of stacking medications because each one creates a side effect that requires another medication — is endemic in American medicine, especially for older patients. The man on six prescriptions should ask whether the cascade started with one medication addressing a symptom that could have been addressed otherwise.

If I addressed the cause, could I reduce or eliminate the medication? For a meaningful percentage of conditions — type 2 diabetes, hypertension, mild depression, some chronic pain, sleep disorders, gastrointestinal issues — the answer is yes. Diet, sleep, movement, sunlight, stress reduction, and addressing what He grew first can produce changes that the medication was designed to mask.

Stewardship of the body the Father gave includes stewardship of what enters it through prescription. The man who lets his doctor make the decisions without examination is doing the same thing the man who lets his pastor read scripture for him is doing. He is outsourcing what is his to do. The Father gave the man a body and a mind to assess what is being done with both. Use them. Honor your doctor when he is right. Question him when he is wrong. Find a different doctor when the one you have refuses to be questioned. The Berean posture applied to medicine.

WHAT MEN ENGINEERED — BEYOND PHARMACEUTICALS

Beyond pharmaceuticals, there is another category men have produced: substances designed specifically for addiction or extreme intoxication, with no analog in what the Father grew.

Distilled spirits at industrial concentration. Wine at fifteen percent alcohol is the gift the Father grew. Vodka at forty percent, fortified wines, and engineered beverages designed to deliver alcohol at concentrations the Father did not put into any plant are different. The Bible distinguishes wine and strong drink — shekar in Hebrew — and treats both as gift in some contexts and warns about both in others. A man can be mastered by wine. He can be mastered faster by spirits. The principle does not change. The acceleration does.

Refined opioids. The poppy is a plant the Father grew. Opium has been used as medicine for thousands of years. Heroin, oxycodone, fentanyl — these are refined products designed to deliver opioid effects at concentrations the Father did not put into the poppy. Fentanyl is roughly one hundred times stronger than morphine, by weight, designed to be lethal at trace doses, killing tens of thousands of American men per year. The plant the Father grew can be used in stewardship. The engineered product is different.

Methamphetamine. There is no plant the Father grew that produces methamphetamine. It is a synthetic compound, designed by men, optimized for intense reward, with no traditional medicinal use comparable to its effects. It belongs entirely in category two, and the test of stewardship-versus-mastery applies harder, because the substance was specifically engineered to capture the man.

Vapes and e-cigarettes. Engineered nicotine delivery systems designed to bypass the natural absorption rate of pipe or cigar tobacco, producing addiction in young men who would never have started smoking traditional tobacco. The plant the Father grew is not the issue. The engineering is.

Refined sugar. Covered in installment seven. The Father grew fruit, with sugar wrapped in fiber, water, and nutrients. He did not give men a five-pound bag of sucrose. The refined product is its own substance, and it is mastering more men than any drug on this list, because it is everywhere and culturally invisible.

The man under stewardship recognizes the difference between a gift the Father grew and a product men engineered. He extends grace and curiosity to the first. He brings skepticism to the second. The engineering is a tell. When men have spent capital and intelligence to design a substance for maximum reward and minimum effort to consume, the man asking has this taken His place? should expect the answer to come back yes more often than not.

PORNOGRAPHY — FORBIDDEN BY NAME

This one is not a stewardship question. The Father did not say look at it carefully and assess whether it has taken My place. He said do not look. The text is plain. The piece will be plain.

Matthew 5:28. Yeshua, in the sermon on the mount. “But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” The standard is not the act. The standard is the look with the lust. Pornography is the industrial production of that look. A man who is consuming pornography is committing what Yeshua named as adultery, repeatedly, against the wife he has or will have, against the woman the Father may yet give him, and against the men whose daughters the women on the screen once were.

Job 31:1. The righteous man’s covenant with his own eyes. “I made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a maid?” Job set the standard for himself before he had a problem. He governed his own gaze. The man who has not made that covenant has left the gate open. The man who has made it knows what to do when temptation comes. He has already decided.

The seventh commandment. Exodus 20:14. “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” The Hebrew is lo tinaph — you shall not commit adultery. Yeshua extended the commandment from the act to the look. He did not soften it. He sharpened it.

And the truth about what pornography does. The dopamine economy of the brain is not designed to handle unlimited novelty on demand. The brain rewards encounter with a new mate as a reproductive imperative. Pornography presents the brain with an apparently infinite supply of new mates, all at once, with no friction, no relationship, no covenant, and no consequence. The system the Father designed gets overwhelmed and rewires. The man becomes less responsive to his actual wife, less capable of the slow work of real intimacy, less able to be present in the body with a real person. His brain has been trained to expect novelty he cannot get from one woman across a lifetime, and the marriage suffers, and his soul suffers, and the children suffer when the father they need is not the man he was made to be because the screen made him someone else.

This is not optional discipline. This is the seventh commandment as Yeshua interpreted it. A man who is using pornography is in active sin and the path back is the path back from any sin. Confess. Forsake. The cross. Accountability. The brother. The Father. Practical: cut the access. Filter the device, give the password to your wife or to a brother, change the routines that produce the temptation, replace the time with prayer and movement and work. Romans 8:1 — “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.” The man returning is not condemned. The substance is named. The path is open.

And one more thing, because honest. Drunkenness, as a state, falls in this category too. Not wine — the gift. Drunkenness — the loss of self-control, the willing surrender of the man’s judgment, the state Paul named as asotia, dissipation. Ephesians 5:18 commanded against it directly. A man who gets drunk repeatedly is not in a stewardship question with wine. He has crossed into a forbidden state. Same diagnostic. Same path back.

THE PATH BACK — THE WAY IS REAL, AND IT IS NARROW

If you have been reading this and recognized yourself in the master’s seat — the substance running you, the relationship out of stewardship, the throne occupied by something not Him — hear several things in order, because they all have to be said.

First. All men are not created equal in capacity or in burden. The Father gave different talents to different men, different temperaments, different vulnerabilities. The parable of the talents in Matthew 25 has the master giving five to one, two to another, one to a third — to every man according to his several ability. Some men can drink wine for fifty years without ever struggling. Some men cannot drink one drink without it taking the throne. Some men can use cannabis as medicine for sensory overload and walk faithfully. Some men cannot touch it without it becoming the master. The substance does not change. The man does. The man finding himself struggling with what other men handle easily is not a failed version of those other men. He is the man the Father made, with the burden the Father knew he would carry, walking the path the Father set for him specifically.

Second. The struggle is not anomaly. The struggle is the human condition under the curse. Adam and Eve fell. Cain murdered his brother in the second generation — the violence in the human heart was active before the population numbered more than a few. By Genesis 6, “the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually,” and the flood came. The pattern was set early. The man fighting addiction is fighting the same fight every man fights at some level, just with the lines drawn around a specific substance instead of the broader pattern that runs through everything in fallen humanity.

Third. The Father has provided everything needed, and the way is narrow. Matthew 7:13–14 — “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” The Greek for narrow is tethlimmenē — pressed, constrained, afflicted. The way is not just narrow geometrically. It is hard. It costs. It presses on a man. Few find it because few are willing to walk a way that requires that much.

The path back is real. The Father has provided everything. And the way is narrow. Few find it. The man who turns toward Him is in good company — small, but good.

Some men will be delivered from their substance immediately. The Father lifts the burden, the desire is gone, the freedom is plain, and the man walks out of the master’s house and never looks back. This happens. Scripture and history are full of it. The Father can do it any time He chooses, and sometimes He chooses to.

Other men will fight their substance for years. The desire returns. The relapses come. The brothers fall away. The substance whispers at three in the morning long after the decision was made. Paul described his thorn in 2 Corinthians 12 — something the Father did not remove, that Paul prayed three times to have removed, and the answer was “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.” The Father did not deliver Paul from his thorn. He gave him grace to walk with it. Some men reading will be delivered. Some men will be given grace and asked to walk faithfully across years that do not get easier.

Both men are walking the same narrow way. Both are walking with the Father. Both are stewarding what they were given. The walk is the showing up, regardless of whether the substance has fully released its grip. The man who has fallen seventy times and gotten up seventy-one is walking. The man who fell twice and gave up is not.

And the Father is not keeping score of relapses. He is keeping score of direction. Show up tomorrow, then the day after. He will meet you every time you turn toward Him, regardless of how many times you turned away yesterday.

Now the practical, because principle without action is not stewardship.

Confess. Name the substance. Name the relationship. Name what has been on the throne. To the Father plain, in your own words. To one other man if the substance is severe enough that you cannot break it alone. The naming is the gate.

Forsake. Cut the access. The man who confesses but keeps the substance close has not forsaken. The bottle goes. The dealer is blocked. The website is filtered. The phone is changed. The friends who only call when there is something to use get shorter calls. Not forever necessarily, but until the relationship is reset. Forsaking is not symbolic. It is logistical.

Receive the covering. The forgiveness is purchased. The standing is settled. 1 John 1:9 — “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Faithful and just. Not reluctant. The Father does not begrudge a returning son. He runs.

Walk forward. The walk from installment five. Scripture, prayer, obedience, rest. One other man if you can find him. The dark-place treatment if the addiction is severe. And medical intervention is sometimes part of stewardship. Some addictions — alcohol withdrawal at chronic levels, opioid withdrawal, severe nicotine dependence — require medical support to break safely. Refusing real medicine in the name of faith is the same pride we named in the pharmaceuticals section. The Father uses doctors. Use them when the body needs it.

CHOOSE LIFE

So — brother.

The Father gave gifts. He grew plants. He made the man with the capacity to enjoy what He grew, in stewardship, with thanksgiving. Wine to gladden the heart. Beer for the festival. Plants to heal. Foods to nourish. Substances that, used in their proper place, contribute to a man’s flourishing.

He also forbade specific things. Pornography by name. Drunkenness as state. The use of any substance to escape what He is calling the man to face. These are not stewardship questions. They are commandments.

And He warned about the men who would tell us what is safe. The institutions men build inherit the deceitfulness of the men who built them. The Berean tests every claim, including the claims of the regulator, the doctor, the journal, and the agency. He trusts the Father. He tests everything else.

Deuteronomy 30:19. “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” Substances chosen rightly are gifts that produce life. Substances mastering a man produce death, slow or fast depending on the substance and the depth of the mastery. The choice is whose service the substance is in.

Receive what He grew. Refuse what He forbade. Be honest about what men engineered. Run the diagnostic. Confess what needs confessing. Forsake what needs forsaking. Walk forward into the next ordinary day on the narrow way that few find but the Father has marked clearly enough for any son who turns toward Him to see.

Receive His gifts. Refuse His prohibitions. Steward the rest. Walk the narrow way.

❖ ❖ ❖

NEXT IN THE SERIES — INSTALLMENT ELEVEN

The Aging Man: how the body the Father gave changes through the seasons of a man’s life, what He said about gray hair and finishing well, and the difference between decline and stewardship.