New Wine, Old Bottles

What most pulpits say this parable means

Nearly everyone has heard this parable explained the same way. The new wine is the good news. The old bottles are the law of Yahuah. The law was worn out and brittle, it could not hold what Yahushua brought, so He poured, and the old thing burst, and that was the end of it.

The lesson drawn from that is preached every week. The law is old, the good news is new, and a believer who goes back to the commandments is pouring new wine into a dead skin. There is one problem with it. The passage says what it is about in its own first line, and the first line has nothing to do with the law. It is about skipping meals.

What was happening in the room

A group came to Yahushua with a complaint. Not a question about how a man is saved. A complaint about eating.

Then came to him the disciples of John, saying, Why do we and the Pharisees fast oft, but thy disciples fast not? — Matthew 9:14

They were not asking whether fasting was right. They fasted. They were asking why the men around Yahushua did not fast as often as they did.

Fasting had become the way a man proved he was serious about Yahuah. The disciples of John fasted and mourned. The Pharisees fasted twice in the week, and one of them is recorded telling Yahuah so while he prayed (Luke 18:12). Their students looked across at the men with Yahushua, saw them eating a normal meal, and took it as proof that those men were not serious. One group had made its own practice the ruler, and then held the ruler up against everybody else.

Why the answer came as a picture

Yahushua could have answered with an argument. He answered with a picture instead, and He did that often. An argument is won or lost on the spot. A picture goes home with the hearer and keeps working on him, and it sorts the listeners while it does. A man who wants the truth turns it over until he sees it. A man defending his own habits hears a short story about cloth and bottles, decides it was not about him, and walks away (Matthew 13:13).

The fasting they were arguing about was never commanded

The law of Yahuah commands one fast. On the tenth day of the seventh month a man goes without food and humbles himself before Yahuah (Leviticus 16:29-31; Leviticus 23:27-32). One day in the year. Nothing else in the law tells a man when to fast.

The rest came from men. After Jerusalem fell the people began keeping mourning fasts in the fourth, fifth, seventh and tenth months, and they were still keeping them seventy years later (Zechariah 8:19). The twice-a-week fast came from the same place. Yahuah had already given His judgment on those fasts, asking the people keeping them whether they had fasted to Him at all in all those years, and reminding them what He had actually asked for: honest judgment, mercy between brothers, and no crushing of the widow, the orphan, the stranger or the poor (Zechariah 7:5-10).

This has to be said flat, because the popular teaching stands or falls on it. The fasting under dispute is not in the law. It was a custom. Whatever burst in this parable, it was not the commandments of Yahuah, because the commandments of Yahuah were never what the argument was about.

His first answer: nobody mourns at a wedding

Before the bottles, Yahushua gives them a wedding. The friends of the groom cannot be made to mourn while the groom is standing there with them (Matthew 9:15). The fast these men wanted was a mourning fast. There was nothing in that room to mourn, and no schedule of theirs could manufacture a reason.

What the new wine is

The drink has to be named or the picture stays half finished. New wine in the Hebrew Scriptures is the fresh yield, and it is never neutral. It is what Yahuah hands His people when He is good to them, named beside the grain and the oil (Deuteronomy 7:13), and it is the thing that makes a man’s heart glad (Psalm 104:15).

The prophets carry it further than a harvest. When Yahuah describes the day He brings His people back, He describes wine and He describes the end of grief in the same breath: wheat, wine and oil, a soul like a watered garden, no sorrowing any more at all, and mourning turned into joy (Jeremiah 31:12-13). That promise sits in the same chapter as the new heart with the law written inside it.

Then the sharpest piece, aimed straight at the men asking the question. Yahuah had already said what He would do with their mourning fasts.

The fast of the fourth month, and the fast of the fifth, and the fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth, shall be to the house of Judah joy and gladness, and cheerful feasts. — Zechariah 8:19

Those are the same four fasts, and Yahuah appointed them to end as feasts. So the new wine is named out of their own Scriptures. It is the gladness of Yahuah with His people, poured out by His hand, the very thing He promised would take the place of the mourning. Men stood in that room demanding a mourning fast while the joy appointed to replace it was being poured out in front of them.

The bottle is a person, and Yahuah said so

The bottle does not have to be guessed at, and it does not have to be explained by describing how containers were made. There is already a saying about bottles and wine in the Hebrew Scriptures. Yahuah gave it to Jeremiah — every bottle shall be filled with wine — and when the people repeated it back as something everybody knew, He told them what it meant. He would fill the inhabitants of the land, the kings on David’s throne, the priests and the prophets, with drunkenness (Jeremiah 13:12-13).

The bottles are the men. What fills them comes from Yahuah’s hand. One difference should be stated rather than hidden: in Jeremiah what He pours is drunkenness, and it is a judgment. The saying is not being used here to settle the contents. It is being used to settle the container, because that is the part Yahuah defined out loud. A bottle, in His own words, is a person.

What made the old bottle hard

Scripture describes the men who kept those seventy years of fasting, and the description decides this parable.

They made their hearts as an adamant stone, lest they should hear the law, and the words which Yahuah of hosts hath sent in his spirit by the former prophets. — Zechariah 7:12

They made their own hearts hard as stone, and the verse states the reason: so they would not have to hear the law. That is the old bottle. It is not the law. It is a heart that went hard on purpose so the law would stay outside of it. The same man still fasts. He fasts twice a week and feels righteous doing it, because the fasting is his own and the law is not.

Say it flat. The old bottle is a man. Not a covenant, not a nation, not a system — a man who built his religion out of his own practice and the traditions handed down to him, and who went hard on the inside so the commandments of Yahuah could never reach him. He is already full, and what fills him is his own.

Why the bottle bursts

The passage says the bottle breaks. It never says the wine was too strong, and it never blames what was poured. The Hebrew Scriptures describe that very thing and name the cause. Elihu had words in him he had not been allowed to say, and this is how he put it.

Behold, my belly is as wine which hath no vent; it is ready to burst like new bottles. — Job 32:19

No vent. Nothing wrong with the wine and nothing wrong with the filling. The vessel is shut, nothing can move, and what is inside tears it apart. Elihu could not let anything out; the men in front of Yahushua would not let anything in. It is the same fault turned the other way, and Zechariah already said how they sealed it. They stopped their ears so they would not hear the law.

So the bursting is no mystery and has nothing to do with age. Something came into that room from Yahuah’s own hand, and it did not arrive on their schedule. A man whose religion is his own habit has no room in him for that. He does not give way. He splits, because giving way would mean his practice was never the measure.

What happens to the old bottle

The parable does not leave the old bottle standing in the corner. The wine is spilled and the bottle itself perishes (Luke 5:37; Mark 2:22). Both are lost, not one. Isaiah says the same against a whole people, and names what they had done: they were children who would not hear the law of Yahuah, and they told the prophets to stop telling them the truth and to speak smooth things instead (Isaiah 30:9-10). Then comes the breaking.

There shall not be found in the bursting of it a sherd to take fire from the hearth, or to take water withal out of the pit. — Isaiah 30:14

The word is bursting. The people who would not hear the law are the vessel, and what happens is not a crack that can be patched. Not one piece is left big enough to carry a coal or scoop water. Jeremiah was made to act it out, breaking a bottle in front of the men and saying Yahuah would break that people and that city the same way, so that it could not be made whole again (Jeremiah 19:10-11). The bottle saying ends there too, with the vessels dashed one against another and no pity (Jeremiah 13:14). The old bottles are not retired. They are broken past mending.

The new bottle is a new heart with the law inside it

A hard container does not get fixed by pouring more carefully. It gets replaced, and Yahuah said so long before this argument happened.

A new heart also will I give you … and I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them. — Ezekiel 36:26-27

The order is the whole thing. Yahuah takes the stone out. Yahuah puts a living heart in. Then that person walks in the commandments and keeps them. The keeping is not the price of the new heart; it is what a new heart does. Jeremiah says the same of the same heart and names what goes inside it.

I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. — Jeremiah 31:33

Say that one flat as well. The new bottle is a man too. It is the same man made over: a new heart where the stone used to be, the spirit of Yahuah put within him, and the law of Yahuah written on the inside of him. That is the only container in the story that is preserved, and it is preserved because of what is written in it.

The picture has been turned around backwards

The popular teaching makes the wine the new message Yahushua brought, and makes the law of Yahuah the bottle. The law is the brittle container in that reading. The law is what cracks apart when the new is poured, and getting rid of it is the point of the story.

The passage never makes the law the container. Yahuah said what the bottle is, and the bottle is a man. So the law is neither the bottle nor the drink. The law is what Yahuah writes on the inside of the container after He has made it new, and what gets poured is the gladness already named, coming from His hand in the same promise where He puts His spirit within a man and that man walks in the commandments.

The coat at the front of the parable says it in fewer words. A new patch on a worn-out coat tears it worse (Matthew 9:16). When Yahuah found a priest standing before Him in filthy clothes He did not patch them; He had them taken off the man and clean ones put on him (Zechariah 3:3-4). Replaced, not repaired.

There is a cost to having it backwards, and it is not small. A house that teaches the law was set aside is left preaching a new heart with nothing written in it. It hands a person a clean container and no idea what it was made to hold, and then wonders why the life does not change.

Old wine and new wine

The scene ends on old wine, and that has a precedent in the Hebrew Scriptures as well.

No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better. — Luke 5:39

The passage does not say the old is better. It says the man says it, and the reason he gives is not an argument. It is taste.

Jeremiah described a whole nation that way. Moab had been at ease from his youth and had settled on his lees, never emptied from vessel to vessel, and the result is stated plainly.

Therefore his taste remained in him, and his scent is not changed. — Jeremiah 48:11

Being poured from one vessel to another is what changes a man. Left sitting, he keeps the taste he always had, and that taste becomes the whole reason he refuses. The next verse says what came of it: Yahuah would send men to empty his vessels and break his bottles (Jeremiah 48:12).

Age by itself is not the fault, and the point should not be overstated. Yahuah describes His own feast with wine well refined (Isaiah 25:6), and refined means poured off the sediment. The difference is not how long the wine sat. It is whether it was ever moved.

The verdict

The parable answers why the men with Yahushua were not fasting on somebody else’s schedule. The gladness Yahuah promised was in that room, and it could not be poured into hearts gone hard from years of practice, hard for the stated purpose of keeping the law on the outside.

The bottle is the man. What fills him comes from Yahuah’s hand. And the new heart Yahuah gives is not a heart with the law taken out of it. It is a heart with the law written on the inside, in a person finally able to hold it.