New wineskins or old
I remember reading a story one time of a father who was trying to read the Sunday newspaper. His young son was constantly interrupting him with questions of all kinds. Finally, in an effort to keep his son busy for a while, he came upon a big picture of the world in the paper, so he took his scissors and proceeded to “cut the world” up into a giant jigsaw puzzle, then he gave it to his son and told him to busy himself with the puzzle. It wasn’t long before the boy came back into the room where his father was reading and he said, “It’s done, Dad. I’ve got the world put back together.” His father couldn’t understand how quickly he had done that, so when he asked him, the little boy said, “I couldn’t figure out how to put the pieces of the world together, so I turned the pieces of paper over and soon saw that it was a picture of Jesus. When I got Jesus put together, then the whole world was put together!” That’s a great assessment, isn’t it? When Jesus is put together right, the whole world is put together right!
In our passage today, Matthew 9:14-17, we come upon a passage I’ve often wondered about. In this passage we have the disciples of John the Baptist coming to Jesus and asking Him why they and the Pharisees, the religious leaders of the day, fast, but Jesus and His disciples do not? And Jesus explained to them that there was no need for His disciples to fast or declare a fast because Jesus, whom He likens himself to as a bridegroom, is still with his disciples and there is no need for fasting. As long as the bridegroom was with them, it was a time of a joyful wedding feast, and there is no need to be sad when the wedding is going on. But there will come a day when Jesus will be taken from them and put to death on the cross, then there will be time for fasting.
Then He gives two illustrations demonstrating the foolishness of trying to put old things with the new. The first has to do with patching a piece of clothing. If your mother ever patched an old shirt or a pair of pants, and she did so by using a brand new piece of cloth that had never been washed or placed in the dryer, she may have done you some injustice, for you see, your old shirt or old pair of pants has “been through the ringer”, so to speak. It has been washed, dried, ironed and washed all over again, and by the time it had done all that, whatever shrinking of material that was going to happen, happened. But to try to put a new piece of cloth that had never been “tested”, well, once it started shrinking over the hole, it would tear away from the old cloth and make the hole even bigger than it was before!
His next illustration has to do with putting new wine into old wineskins. In those days, there weren’t any glass bottles to put wine in, wine was poured into skins made of sheep skin. But as the wine aged and fermented, it would stretch the wineskin until all the elasticity would be stretched out of it. That why new wine was always poured into new wineskins, else new wine into old wineskins would ferment and stretch the already stretched wineskins beyond what they could stand, and before you knew it, your wine would be pouring out on the ground, thus losing the good wine.
Now here’s the point. John the Baptist came out of the Old Testament. The Prophet Malachi prophesied about him in Malachi 4:5-6. He was not the Messiah, but the forerunner of the Messiah, the one who told the world that the Savior was coming. But he represented the old religion, the old ways of fasting and sadness and contrition, not that we shouldn’t be contrite over our sins, but Jesus did not come to “patch up” the old religious system of Judaism with its rules and traditions. He came to bring something new, an age of grace and mercy that could not be mixed with an age of laws and rules. Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.” In other words, you can’t take your old life, the one you lived before you met Christ, and marry it with your new life that Jesus has given you. Jesus has made you “brand new” inside. He has given you a new way of thinking, a new way of living, and a new way of speaking and acting and doing. The old ways won’t mix with the new. One will destroy the other. But by prayer and faith, your new ways can overcome the old ways, and they can, if you, like the little boy, let Jesus put your life together for you.