New Wine for New Wineskins

September 10, AD 2010 (updated September 28, 2011)

New Wine for New Wineskins
Frank Allnutt

If you have read some of my recent commentaries or delved into my writings on the Christian’s new heart, you may recall that I hold to the biblical definition of “Christian,” which is: “if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17). To say that teaching is abstract is an understatement! Our Lord understands that, of course, and so He provided us with doctrine, including several analogies, in the Bible to help us better understand.

In this commentary, I will provide a doctrinal overview and one of those analogies (“New Wineskins for New Wine”), along with one of my heart illustrations. For further reading, click to chapter 7 of The Christian’s New Heart, “The Miraculous Heart Transplant.”

God’s process of making you a new creature in Christ
When you received Christ by faith, you were “born again” through God’s grace (Ephesians 2:8, 9). You were instantly saved from your sins, redeemed, justified, sanctified, and reconciled to God. And all of this involved receiving a new spiritual heart. Your personhood, through spiritual baptism, was placed into Christ’s death and resurrection. It was crucified in that it was taken out of Adam, and resurrected in that it was placed in Christ. At the same instant, God removed your sinful old heart (spirit, natural life, and soul), which you had inherited from Adam, and gave you a new spirit and a new soul. He placed His Spirit and the eternal life of Christ in your new spirit-part. The Holy Spirit placed you into Christ through spiritual baptism (not water baptism, which is symbolic).

Note in the following illustration that your personhood, when united with the new-man heart, “personalized” it with your uniqueness, thus your personhood and new heart are said to be your new self.

The Christian is a new creation in Christ

Through this instant process of becoming a Christian—a new creature—“the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.” This new creature, according to the Bible (1 Peter 2:), is literally a member of a new “race” or species of human being. Christ was the first person of this resurrected new species—the first new man—and all believers have been resurrected in His likeness. The one difference is that Jesus retained His deity; however, we were not resurrected as gods, and never will become gods.

You are a new man with a new spiritual history. Your old self was an old man whose history as a species began in the Garden of Eden and ended when you became a Christian. Had your old spiritual self continued to live on, your destiny was to spend time everlasting in hell. You became a new man at the time of your salvation, and the new man’s spiritual history became your new spiritual history. In this way you were crucified, buried, and resurrected with Christ.

Paul writes that all of us believers were spiritually baptized into Christ and therefore into the history of the new man in Christ: “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, in order that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self [being an old man] was crucified with Him, that our body of sin [the flesh, old human nature, old humanity] might be done away with.... Now if [since] we have died with Christ, we believe that we [as new creatures] shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him” (Romans 6:3-9).

You were resurrected with Christ into newness of life (Romans 6:5, 8, 10, 11), spiritually detached from the world “and seated with Him in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 2:6).

Now, let’s look again at Galatians 2:20, this time with my bracketed amplification. Just as Paul proclaimed this truth about himself, you, as a new man in Christ, can say the same about yourself: “I [as an old man] have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I [old self] who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I [as a new man] now live in the flesh [mortal body] I [as a new creature] live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me” (Galatians 2:20).

New Wine for New Wineskins
Our Lord’s analogy of wineskins illustrates that your new heart can be seen as a “container” in which there are contents: “Nor do men put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out, and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved” (Matthew 9:17).

At the time Jesus was ministering on earth, wine making involved the use of animal skins (usually goat hides) fashioned into leather bottles called wineskins. Grapes were picked, and the juice was squeezed out and poured into the wineskins. As the new wine fermented, it produced gases which caused the wineskin to stretch to its limit. After the wine was used, the wineskins were discarded. If new wine were placed in an old wineskin, the expansion would burst the seams of the already stretched wineskin, ruining it, and the wine would leak out and be lost.

Now, let’s consider how the analogy of the wine and wineskins correlates with your new heart.

Jesus was talking about containers (old wineskins and new wineskins) and their contents (old wine and new wine). He said the Pharisees’ old wineskins were their old, Adamic, stone-dead hearts which were spiritually dead to God and incapable of understanding the New Covenant of grace through Christ. Their old wine was a legalistic system, based on the Torah or laws of Moses, but supplemented over time with their own laws. Within their souls, there “fermented” erroneous notions about mixing law and grace, namely that grace could be appropriated through obedience to the law. But the Pharisees had it backwards, for through grace, believers are empowered and can be motivated by love to obey. Grace is not realized through law; rather, law is fulfilled through grace (which is love in action).

Pharisees, as well as all Israel, lived under the Mosaic economy or administration, which was based on Torah Law. Christians, however, are not under Torah Law, but live in God’s grace through the New Covenant of Jesus Christ.

At the Last Supper, Jesus took a cup of wine and said: “Drink from it, all of you; for this is My blood of the [new] covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:27, 28).

Just as the new wine of the New Covenant of grace could not be “poured” into the old wineskins (old hearts) of the Pharisees, you too were born with an old wineskin (heart) that could not be “ﬁlled” with the New Covenant. Paul writes that “a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him, because they are spiritually appraised” (1 Corinthians 2:14). But a Christian is not a “natural man”; he is a new creature!

New wine also symbolizes the Holy Spirit and things of the Spirit. Paul tells us, “And do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be ﬁlled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18). The natural man has an old wineskin (heart) that cannot be ﬁlled with the new wine (the Holy Spirit and “things of the Spirit,” which includes love [agape] and grace).

New wine, as Jesus taught, also represents His “blood.” And His blood is symbolic of His life. By drinking the sacrament of wine, we signify that Christ’s blood or life is the source of our life—we share His eternal life!

When you became a Christian, God exchanged your old wineskin for a new wineskin —your old heart for a new heart—because your old heart was not sanctified, and therefore was not an acceptable vessel for the indwelling and filling of His Holy Spirit.

The Lord's Supper
In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul gave this insight regarding partaking of the wine and bread:

26For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.

27Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner, shall be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord.

28But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup.

29For he who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgment to himself, if he does not judge the body rightly.

30For this reason many among you are weak and sick, and a number sleep” (1 Corinthians 11:26-30).

It is beyond our scope here to consider the totality of the Lord’s supper, but I bring it into our study to focus on two implications of Paul’s writing: First, Jesus said the wine represented His “new covenant”; second, Paul said to “examine” yourself and do not to partake of the wine and the bread in an “unworthy manner.” There are four things that could be construed to partake of the wine and bread in an “unworthy manner”:

The individual is unworthy if he does not understand or rejects any part of the New Covenant. For example: Does he understand and accept that part of the New Covenant is God’s promise to perform an ontological heart transplant in His chosen ones (Ezekiel 36:26, 27)?
The individual is unworthy because he is not truly a Christian, but is, ontologically speaking, an old wineskin which is unsuitable for new wine.
The individual is unworthy because he has a hardened heart that is divided by sin, and his flesh-like soul, while ontologically new, functions as an old wineskin in that it is filled with old wine (lies and impure thoughts, emotions, and desires). In effect, partaking of the wine and the bread is for the Whole-Hearted Christian, not for the CINA (Christian In Name Only) or for the Half-Hearted Christian.
The individual is unworthy because he does not “judge the body rightly”—his own physical body or way of living in the broader sense, or the state of other members within the body of Christ.

The Holy Spirit will not reside in a substantively unclean vessel—the elements of its makeup must be pure. When God gave us a new heart, it came with His total sanctification; no part of it was old or unclean. Understand, however, that the new heart can become conditionally unclean—superficially defiled by “debt” resulting from actual sin. Such a soul requires cleansing, restoration, renewal, and often times healing.

Wine from grapes can adversely affect the brain’s ability to function under control of the mind, but the wine that is the Holy Spirit enables the mind of the soul (and thus the healthy brain) to function with supernatural efficiency. Here is my paraphrase of Paul’s advice: “And do not get drunk with wine from grapes, for that is dissipation of the soul and body, but submit your soul to be filled with the enabling new wine that is the grace-ministering Holy Spirit, who continually and forever dwells within your spirit” (Ephesians 5:18, paraphrased).