33 Then they said to Him, “Why do the disciples of John fast often and make prayers, and likewise those of the Pharisees, but Yours eat and drink?” 34 And He said to them, “Can you make the friends of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them? 35 But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them; then they will fast in those days.” 36 Then He spoke a parable to them: “No one puts a piece from a new garment on an old one; otherwise the new makes a tear, and also the piece that was taken out of the new does not match the old. 37 And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; or else the new wine will burst the wineskins and be spilled, and the wineskins will be ruined. 38 But new wine must be put into new wineskins, and both are preserved. 39 And no one, having drunk old wine, immediately desires new; for he says, ‘The old is better.’ ”
Luke 5:33-39 (NKJV)
I’ve always thought that the Old/New wine referred to Law and Grace. However, Jesus tells us (and this is common sense information) that the OLD wine is better; aged wine tastes better than newer wine. However, I still think the interpretation I hold is correct.
The NLTse Study Bible says:
The religious leaders were resistant to change.
The ESVSB says:
New, fermenting wine would stretch the old, inelastic wineskins and cause them to burst. New wine needs newer, more elastic skins. No one is best understood as an ironical condemnation of the Pharisees, who favored the past and rejected the arrival of the kingdom and the “new covenant” (22:20) it brought. The point of these two metaphors is that one cannot mix the old and the new covenant, and that the new covenant era inaugurated by Jesus’ coming will require repentance (Matt. 4:17), regeneration (cf. John 3:3), and new forms of worship (cf. John 4:24).
J. Vernon McGee writes,
The natural man likes his old ways. He likes his old wine — that is, his old religion. The important thing is to recognize that our Lord brought something new to mankind — the gospel. He did not come into the world to do any patching of the old garment. He did not come to patch up the Law. He came to pay the penalty of sin by dying on the cross. But He did more than that. He arose from the dead so that He could place upon us His robe of righteousness. He gives us the new wine of the gospel. The new wine of the gospel must be placed in the new wineskin of grace, not into the old one of law. “And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit” (Eph. 5:18). This is the message that the Lord gives out today. He came to give us something new. He came to save us by faith in Him.
This entire chapter points in one direction, and that is to present the glorious gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ in as many ways as possible so that men might hear and have an opportunity to choose whether they will accept Him or reject Him.
All of us must make this decision for ourselves.
Finally, David Stern says,
This verse and the next speak to the issue of whether faith in Yeshua the Messiah can be combined with Judaism. Here the old coat is Judaism. The unshrunk cloth is Messianic faith which has not been adapted (“shrunk”) to the framework of Judaism as currently practiced. (“Shrinking” here is simply an aspect of Yeshua’s “patch” metaphor. It does not imply that Messianic faith must be diminished in order to fit into Judaism.) Combining unadapted Messianic faith with traditional Judaism doesn’t work—the patch tears away from the coat; that is, faith in Yeshua apart from Judaism—and, later on in the case of Gentiles, faith in Yeshua apart from the foundational truths about God taught in the Tanakh—is useless and worthless. Not only that, but it leaves a worse hole—attempting to combine unadapted Messianic faith with traditional Judaism leaves Judaism worse off than before. The implication is that one must shrink the new cloth—adapt Messianic faith to Judaism—for Yeshua does not imply that there is anything wrong with patching an old coat! The early Messianic Jews did adapt Messianic faith to Judaism, but the later Gentile Church did not. Instead, some forms of Gentile Christianity became paganized precisely because the Tanakh was forgotten or underemphasized. Messianic Jews today are once again trying to bring New Testament faith back to its Jewish roots.
I believe the truth can be found somewhere between Stern and McGee.
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