Parable of the Wineskins

One piece of scripture I never understood...until now. And WOW! Check this out: Luke 5:37-39: "No one pours new wine into old wineskins. The new wine would swell & burst the old skins. Then the wine would be lost, and the skins would be ruined. New wine must be put only into new wineskins. No one wants new wine after drinking old wine. They say, ‘The old is better’."

OK, now I'm not a wine drinker, and never learned much about wineskins and the fermenting of wine. But after meditating on this some, I came up w/ something...let's put this into modern-day understanding:

You wouldn't put a new racing engine onto a rusted frame...it'll rip the car apart. But if you put the new engine onto a new frame, you'd have one heck of a racecar, eh?

But now say you grew up with this old Junker...it's your baby. But the engine needs to be replaced, and it'll cost more than the car's worth. Yeah, it's rusted to the core, barely runs, holes in the roof and floorboards, a real Junker...but hey, you've got memories with this thing! And why get a new car when this will still get you from point A to point B, and occasionally C, right?But now, a new car is more solid, and better built. It's made for the engine, or at least more so than the old car. Plus, you can not only build new memories, but it'll also get you to points A,B,& C, plus every other letter in the alphabet, and even borrow some letters from other languages.

But see, the Pharisees were stubborn and preferred the old clunker. So they insisted on putting the engine into it.

Jesus was introducing a new covenant...a new "frame", and trying to point out that the old frame doesn't work anymore, and needs to be upgraded, or replaced, in a sense. But they preferred the old Junker...the Law of Moses. A new engine was needed though, and if they were to put it into the old frame, it wouldn't work...or as described in verse 36, it would never fit.

Understand? Cool, huh?

---Andy :}>+-