New Wine and Old Wineskins

Matthew 9:17 reads, "Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; if it is, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into new wineskins, and so both are preserved." RSV  What is the significance of this verse?  What is Jesus attempting to teach by this example?  Though Jesus often used everyday items to describe eternal concepts, and though He often used parables to convey an idea; He never gives us anything that is not needed.  God's Word is never unnecessary or irrelevant.  There is an idea here that God has determined that we need to know in order that we might grow to be more useful to Him in the keeping of His harvest fields.

This instruction should make perfect sense to any wine-maker.  It stands to reason that the fermentation process creates gasses which  cause considerable pressure; pressure that would burst an old, weakened wineskin.  To hold the developing wine, a new skin; one with a bit of elasticity and stronger than an old one, must be used.  But Why would Jesus be concerned about making sure we knew how to make wine properly?  Don't you think that he must have been thinking of something besides the vintner's art?  I do.

I don't think that Jesus is speaking of wine, at all.  He is speaking of a common vessel and the substance that fills it.  We are the vessel; what are we filled with?  Do we contain the old earthly ways and ideas that have failed us throughout our lives, or do we carry the new message of salvation through the grace of God, by His Son Jesus Christ?  Lets take a moment to look at the containers that we are, and then consider the difference between the old and new wines.

We are all made in the spiritual image of God.  It's who we are.  We are not the body that we are temporarily occupying, we exist apart from our containers.  We sit at the mouth of the  container deciding what to allow in, and what to reject.  We go to school and learn a set of principals to start us off and then we are exposed to input from every side.  The friends we make, the advertisements and content that we are accosted with in print and on television, the leanings of our families; these all help to form the content of our containers.  We sit in judgment over the incoming information and try, (in our limited capacities), to make the choices that bring us to the ends that we think that we desire.  But like a dog chasing it's tail, we don't know that we are chasing foolishness until after we catch it.

So now we stand with a mouth full of our own tail making the realization that we want something else.  We spit it out and push it aside as we go on toward the next imagined necessity.  But this error haunts us because we have been through a lot and expended a tremendous amount of effort in the attempt to achieve what we no longer want.  These things pile up as sediment at the bottom of our bottles and while we may not spend much time thinking about them, they are there, all the same.  Not only is the sediment swirling at the bottom of the bottle, but the methods we used, however flawed, to obtain these wasted trophies; those processes have become a part of who we are and will invariably enter in to our decision making processes in the future.

The sludge that's at the bottom fouls everything else you add, no matter how pure the new content may be.  Unless you can get rid of the old content, the new content will be defiled.  You must be poured out and washed clean but Jesus says that even this is not enough.  He says that the new wine must have a new container.  But thanks be to the Father for by Him, through Christ we are made new.  When we accept Christ as our Lord and Saviour we become a new creation in Christ, the old has gone and all things are made new.  But does this have to do with wine?  The wine that Jesus refers to in this parable is the Gospel of saving grace through faith in Him.  This is the wine that can not be held in the old wineskins.

The old wine was fine in these old wineskins, we had grown to accept the slurry that we had mixed for ourselves from the hodgepodge of philosophical nonsense and it felt right, that is; before the call of the Father that brought us to Jesus .  "But I've worked so hard to get where I am.  I hate to let it all go and start over!  I'll just add this new stuff about Jesus and mix it in with what I've already got."  It won't work.  If you pour white paint into a can that still had some black in it, you will end up with grey.  Now, you can add more white, and even more to try to overpower the remnant of black that was left in the can and though the shade of grey may become exceedingly pale, it will never be bright white.  But this is exactly what people do.

Jesus knows that there is no way that our old containers, these old wineskins, can ever be washed clean enough to hold the new wine that He has for us.  The only option is to create us anew.  Once we are new creations in Christ, then we may be filled with the new wine of Christ's Gospel, with Christ Himself.  But there are a couple of conditions that we might do well to look at in regard to this new wine and these new skins.  What happens when we attempt to hold the new wine in an old skin, and what about the new skin that is left unfilled?

In Luke 11, we see the account of the man who sweeps the evil spirit out of his house and then the spirit, returns finding everything clean and in order, brings with him seven other wicked spirits, "… and the last state of that man is worse than the first."   In order for us to avoid the same fate as this man, we must fill ourselves with the Word of God, the Gospel of Christ, the new wine.  It is one thing to be empty, but another to empty, the emptiness.  If you have a bottle of water, how do you empty it?  You simply pour it out, right?  Now the bottle is not really empty, it is still full of air.  How do you remove the air from the empty bottle?  This is just a bit trickier!  The only way to empty the emptiness from the bottle is to fill it with something else, with the grace of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ, with Christ Himself.

The other scenario is to put the new wine into the old skin.  I have already hinted at this with the example of the paint cans but  Jesus says that the old skin will burst and ruin both the skin AND the wine.  The pretender, the old skin unwilling to give itself over to the complete regeneration of Christ's Holy Spirit, puts on the trappings of the redeemed but we need to notice that this is a, "putting on," not a, "filling up."  These are the ones who play church for an hour or two on Sunday morning but then on their way home stop off at the casino for a couple of drinks and a few hands of Black Jack.  The Gospel of Christ never gets past their head; it is choked off at the neck and is never able to penetrate their hearts.  The inconsistency between what they know and how they act eats them away from the inside.  The wineskin is destroyed.  The saddest part is that they may never acknowledge the fallacy of their supposed faith until they stand at the judgment bar of God and face their destruction as they are cast out.

That's the wineskin, but how is the wine destroyed?  We are cities on a hill, right?  What do you suppose the world thinks of the Gospel of Christ when they see the old wineskins wandering around professing new wine, but obviously being nothing but the same old wineskin that they always were?  The message is destroyed by the hypocrisy of the pretender.  They stay away from the church, in droves, in order that they not be associated with the likes of those who profess faith and yet act like devils.  They say things like, "If that's what you call Christianity, no thanks, I'll pass!"  So, it is true; the new wine and the old wineskin are both ruined.

Brothers and sisters, we have become new creations at the will of our Beloved Jesus, this is not something to be taken lightly, it is a huge responsibility.  We can not allow our lives to blacken the testimony of the Grace of God; His divine plan of redemption through faith in the sacrifice and resurrection or our Lord Jesus Christ.  Many know the thrill of seeing a new believer come to the cross and accept the gift, some may carry the glow of knowing that they were used of God to play some small part in the salvation of another.  As rewarding an experience as this can be, the horror of chasing even one person away from Christ's salvation is immeasurably worse.  We have been charged to spread the Gospel to all who would receive it.  If we are spreading the wrong message, even if only by our actions, we are doing damage to the cause of Christ.  Have you received the gift of God in Christ Jesus?  Then you are a new creation, a new wineskin.  Allow yourself to be filled with the new wine, the Gospel of the Living God, the, "Good News," of Jesus.  The small still voice of the Father which you heard calling you to the truth of Jesus, this is the message that we are to proclaim from the rooftops as we forge assuredly onward…

All for the Glory of Christ

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