Luke 5:37, commentary and pictures

The new wine is Jesus' living teaching about His kingdom, His doctrine of truth and life, the wine of God's grace with its light and power, including the Holy Spirit. The old bottles are the scribes, Pharisees, rulers, and Jewish leaders generally, whose hearts and minds were hardened, contracted, and made unreceptive by a fixed, legal religion of ceremonies, human traditions, restrictions, rigid doctrines, outward performances, dead traditions, pride, self-complacency, self-righteousness, and confidence in their own merit, while lacking spiritual life and feeling no need of a Saviour or a new heart. Their many rules about minor matters obscured true godliness and the weightier matters of truth and love for God, burdening people with requirements God had not given. Like fermenting new wine bursting dry, brittle, dried-up skin bottles, joining His truth to that old system as though merely an addition to it would expose and break the system, so the combination would fail and be lost.

His teaching was not a new doctrine but the truth taught from the beginning revealed in its original beauty; it seemed new to the Pharisees because false teaching had obscured their desire for truth. The verse therefore calls for a new, higher pattern of religious life formed by new principles of wholehearted obedience, self-denial, and self-sacrifice, not a meaningless system of manufactured tests, and religious forms that once had spiritual life cannot take its place when that life is lost. The new bottles are receptive people who gladly receive the light God sends and, through Christ's grace, regeneration, and the work of the Holy Spirit, become able to carry the gospel to others; Jesus found such vessels in humble disciples willing to learn, in the Samaritan woman, and in those He called including Matthew the publican and the fishermen, while the proud and self-righteous were not fit to receive it. Though converted, the disciples did not yet fully understand the spiritual nature of the kingdom because of the limits imposed by their Jewish instruction, showing that pure and holy hearts are necessary to become subjects of the heavenly kingdom.

To become new bottles people must leave behind old religious theories, human customs, commandments treated as doctrine, and traditions, customs, and practices that leave no room for Christ's teaching, and must surrender their own plans and wills to God, be emptied of self, and stop stubborn resistance so the wine can come to them. The same lesson applies when God works in unexpected ways: the Jews expected a Messiah but had made no place for Christ, so God's work ran contrary to their expectations, and likewise the truth will triumph but some will fall and lose the crown because they have not run the race. God prepares new bottles for new wine in those who hunger after knowledge for the purpose of blessing their fellow men, making minds able to receive more truth by expansion and development of the higher faculties so that they become deep thinkers. That preparation belongs to going forward instead of stopping satisfied with a surface knowledge of truth or Bible doctrine, measuring self among others, and settling down satisfied with sufficient talent; it comes through awake self-education to personal possibilities and privileges and through digging deeper. New bottles are also people who believe that God has spoken to them through the testimonies of His Spirit, with no quibbling and no trifling over them, and who try to practice their teachings.