Matthew 9:17

“Neither do men put new wine into old wineskins, or else the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins perish. But they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.”

The point is emphasised again, this time using the idea of putting new wine into old wineskins. To do so would be to cause the dried out old skins to burst. They are no loner elastic enough to cope with the fermentation of new wine. Then all would be lost, the new wine and the wineskins, for the skins would perish.

Here there is included the idea also found in John 2, that the new wine of the Kingly Rule of God has come. But it is being emphasised that it must not be put into old wineskins. The wineskins that had been built up by Judaism must be thrust aside, as He had Himself done in the Sermon on the Mount.

But the above illustrations carry also another warning, although it may well not have been in Jesus' mind. For the point lying behind the illustrations is that the introduction of the new into the old will cause rending and perishing. And that is precisely what would happen. The old wineskins of Judaism would be unable to take the arrival of the new wine of Jesus so that it would cause His death. Jesus had come to a country which was like dried out, old wineskins, so that His coming could only result in His death, and then for them the new wine would be lost because they had clung to the old) and would result in the destruction of the place to which He had come (the old wineskins, Jerusalem, would perish). For there was a sense in which it was unavoidable that the new would clash with the old.

“But they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.”

Here is the solution, to keep the new wine to new wineskins, and not try to mix it with the old. Everything must be seen anew. Thus must they rejoice in the bridegroom, and not fast over Him, and thus must they receive His new message, putting the old (Judaism) aside. Their righteousness must exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 5:20). Then they will not destroy themselves by mixing the new with the old (as in fact part of the later church did).

The idea is carried further in John 2:1 where the new wine symbolises the glories of the Messianic age indicating that the time has come for the fulfilment of Isaiah 25:6. We should note in all this that it is not what is recorded in the Scriptures that brings about the clash, it is the way in which it has been interpreted and used by its interpreters. The Scriptures contain the same message throughout, salvation by the grace of God through repentance and the offering of blood, and His continual gracious working in their lives.

‘Both are preserved.' That is, the new wine and the new wineskins. There is no thought that the old is to be preserved. The tragedy would be if the disciples began to incorporate the wrong ideas that had grown up in Judaism into the new community that Jesus was founding. There is no thought that the old was to survive alongside.

(There was, of course, a sense in which the old way in the best senses was still necessary until the new message had reached out into the world, and it would therefore be necessary for it to be maintained for a while. There were godly people around the world who had never heard the Good News. They still came to God on the basis of the old ideas. And Jesus was wise enough not to want to tear that situation apart. For it would be many decades, and even longer, before all had had the chance of hearing and responding to the new. But the old that Jesus was casting off was not these genuine Scriptural foundations. What He was rejecting was the misinterpreting of it by Judaism in the same way as they had misinterpreted the Law (Matthew 5:20). What Jesus abhorred was the thought of something which was a continual mixture of both the old misinterpreted religion and the new purified religion. In the end the old had to be shed, a process greatly helped by the destruction of Jerusalem. But none of that is in mind in His statement that ‘both are preserved').