Coming up today on Renewing Your Mind… When Jesus arrives teaching about the kingdom of God, the Pharisees and teachers of the law have found it offensive. Today on the Lord's Day edition of Renewing Your Mind, Dr. R.C. Sproul helps us understand that the new wine of Jesus' words wasn't compatible with the Pharisees' old wineskins. This morning we're going to continue our study of the gospel according to St. Luke.
We are in the fifth chapter, and I will be reading from verse 33 through verse 39, and I would ask the congregation please to stand for the reading of the Word of God. Then they said to Him, Why do the disciples of John fast often and make prayers? And likewise the disciples of the Pharisees, but Yours, eat and drink. And He said to them, Can you make the friends of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them. Then they will fast in those days.
And 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. 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. But new wine must be put into new wineskins, and both are preserved.
And no one having drunk old wine immediately desires new, for He says, the old is better. You've just heard the unvarnished Word of Almighty God bearing the fullness of His authority and truth. Please receive it as such. Be seated. Let us pray. Again, O Lord, we ask that You would visit us this hour with the presence of Your Holy Spirit, that He may aid us in our understanding of the things that we have just heard, for we ask it in Jesus' name.
Amen. Last week we looked at Luke's description of the call of Matthew, the tax collector, and how that after that evening he had a feast at his home for Jesus and invited all of his friends, the other tax collectors of the day, and the Pharisees were put out by that because Jesus was now associating with known sinners and publicans. But that was not the end of their distress. That was not the finish point of their critical attitude towards Jesus.
And so they raise a new issue in the passage that we've seen this morning. We're told that they come to Jesus asking Him this question, why do the disciples of John, that's John the Baptist, fast often? Likewise, the disciples of the Pharisees do that, but your disciples eat and drink. We don't see them fasting. So they were upset about Jesus' apparent neglect of their tradition of fasting. In the Old Testament, God commanded that the people of Israel fast on one occasion, on the Day of Atonement. But then for the rest of the time, fasting was a matter of voluntary activity and practice. And we see two times when fasting occurs most frequently in the Old Testament.
The first reason or the first time is when people were seeking for a deeper and sharper focus on the things of God so that it would withdraw from the normal activities of this mundane life in which we live and devote themselves exclusively to contemplation and meditation on the things of God. The second reason why we see additional fastings in the Old Testament was as an expression of mourning. When death came to a loved one, or great defeat to the nation, or a time of repentance was at hand, the people would express their grief and their mourning by rending their garments and by entering into a fast. But the Pharisees, who were the arch conservatives of Israel, created new laws that God never imposed upon the people. They created their own traditions, and their traditions sought to require the Jews to fast twice a week for at least a portion of the day.
And not only that, in their zeal for righteousness they began to teach the idea that fasting was such a righteous enterprise that it would bring merit to the person who fasted. So this was just one more element of the Pharisees' attempt of self-righteousness. On another occasion, Jesus rebuked them for substituting their traditions, the traditions of men, for the law of God. This is the first rule of the legalist. What the legalist does is legislates where God leaves people free.
They take you may and turn it into you must. And that is absolutely fatal to a healthy Christian life. And the Pharisees who considered themselves the ultimate standard of righteousness were the fathers of this kind of legalism. The second point of legalism, which is the first part, is that idea that thinks that you can earn your way into heaven legally by doing good works or by obeying the law. And again, the Pharisees were at the forefront of those who taught that fatal error of the things of God.
They were, as I say, arch-conservatives. But what they were zealous to conserve was not the law of God. Now when John the Baptist came, he came in the prophetic image. He spent time living in the wilderness, living off of wild honey and locusts. He was an ascetic. He was given to self-denial and to this asceticism so that he could focus his mind critically on the things of God. And he taught his disciples to do the same thing.
So for John the Baptist and his disciples, fasting was a frequent experience. But there was this accusation that came elsewhere where the Pharisee says, John the Baptist and his disciples are involved in self-denial, but Christ is a winebibber. But in any case, the Pharisees were arch-conservatives. But what they were jealous to conserve was their own traditions. And we have to be careful here, because in the New Testament, there is another tradition that is spoken of. Jesus is sharply critical of the traditionalism of the Pharisees. But when we come to the apostolic age, the Apostle Paul speaks warmly and devoutly about what he calls in Greek the parateses, which he has received, and which he instructs his readers to pass on to everyone. The parateses is the Greek word for tradition, and it means a giving over from one to the next.
And so there is a godly tradition, the apostolic tradition, the apostolic tradition, which is to be maintained and guarded in every age of the church. There are those, I know, beloved, who love all things old and have no room for change in their lives. We'll see some of them next Sunday morning here at 830 Sharp for the 830 worship service, and they'll be so disappointed that there are people who if it's new, it can't be good. That's their attitude.
They're so tenacious in their conservatism. On the other hand, you have people who believe it can't be good unless it's new. The old is always outmoded, outdated like the people and the philosophers that gathered together at the Areopagus in Athens on Mars Hill, and as Paul tells us, they were there to discuss what's new. We see this curse on the church all the time where we always are receiving new insights, new theologies that come down the pike to challenge classic Christian orthodoxy. And if you don't like the liberal fad of today, wait five years.
It'll change because people are busy trying to discard the classic, the true, the biblical tradition, and replace it with something else. And so it takes great discernment. It takes great wisdom and a knowledge of the things of God to know when to be conservative and when to be open. And so I ask you, if you are a conservative, because I am a conservative.
They don't come any more conservative than I am. But we always have to ask ourselves the question, what is it that we're trying to conserve and why? I don't care a fig about preserving human traditions just because they're traditions, but I do care about preserving the biblical and the apostolic tradition and those traditions that have arisen up through 2,000 years of church history that have been used of God to serve the apostolic tradition. But in any case, we have this conflict now between Jesus and the Pharisees. And how does Jesus respond to the question, what about you and your disciples? Here's how Jesus answers the question. In so many words, what He says to the Pharisees is this, what time is it?
What time is it? They weren't wearing wristwatches or carrying clocks around, but Jesus wasn't asking them what time it was in the day. He was asking them what time is it in terms of redemptive history. As you know, the Bible was written over literally thousands of years, and God's revelation of Himself and of His plan of redemption and of salvation was revealed gradually and progressively beginning in Genesis and then expanding through the prophets and the whole Old Testament where God was adding new information about the kingdom that was to come. And He established feasts that were to be celebrated, the feast of the Passover and the Day of Atonement and the Feast of Weeks and of the ingathering. All of these things were not to be fulfilled in and of themselves. The New Testament tells us the blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sin, and yet there was this elaborate procedure in the Old Testament of the slaying of the animals on the Day of Atonement. But these things were the shadows of what was to come.
They were symbols that pointed beyond themselves to that which would come in the fullness of time, that when the final sacrifice would be made and the ultimate atonement be offered, these shadows would then be discarded. Now you have people today who want to take all of the Old Testament and bring it over into the New Covenant. And then you have people who say the Old Testament is totally obsolete. They don't care a bit about it, and all they care about is the New Testament.
No, no, no, no, no. There is an intimate relationship between Old Testament revelation and that which is given to us in the New Covenant. There is a sense of eternal continuity between the things that are taught in God's revelation in the Old Testament and that which comes to us in the New Testament. But at the same time there are things that pass away, that are abrogated. The ceremonial law, the dietary laws of the Old Testament have been set aside. The moral law of God has not. And Jesus understood that, but the Pharisees didn't get it.
What time is it? And He answered the question by saying when there is a wedding feast, the friends of the bridegroom don't fast when the bridegroom is there. When the bridegroom comes, the fast is over. When the bridegroom comes, it's time for a feast. And of course Jesus was speaking of Himself, just as Israel was the bride of God in the Old Testament, so the New Testament church is the bride of Christ, and He's the bridegroom who had been promised for centuries before.
And now He's here when the bridegroom is here. You don't fast. You don't mourn. You don't rend your garments. You rejoice.
You throw a party. But the Pharisees didn't know what time it was. The Pharisees didn't get it, and thus their critical spirit at this point. So Jesus says the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken away, and then the bride will… and the friends of the bridegroom will fast, referring to His execution and His removal at the end of His incarnation in His earthly ministry at that time. That's why in the early church after the departure of Jesus, there was a great revival of voluntary fasting among Christian people and during times of persecution.
When the Christians were being thrown to the lions and suffering, their fellow believers would pray and fast for them in such perilous conditions. And then Jesus, to explain this further, tells these two simple parables about the cloth and the wineskin. He said, now look, I know you Pharisees aren't tailors, but you should know something basic about sewing. If you have a pair of pants and you tear it, have a hole in that pair of pants and you want to patch it, you don't get a new piece of garment from a new pair of pants and cut that away, and without rinsing it and shrinking it, try to add it to the old pair of pants. But if you give an unshrunken piece of material and you sew it on the old piece, the first thing you do when you wash it was that that piece, the patch that you've been used to patch up your pants will shrink. And when it shrinks, it'll pull the threads off, and the hole that you had in your pants before you patched them will be worse than when you started.
Am I going too fast? Well, I don't know how closely the Pharisees were listening to this illustration that Jesus gave, but I'm sure they paid attention to the next one because now it touched upon something important to them, and that was their wine. And He gives this illustration. He says, 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. But new wine must be put into new wineskins and both are preserved, and no one having drunk old wine immediately desires new, for He says the old is better. Unless you believe, for example, as many Christians in America, probably the only nation in the world to believe this, that they didn't make real wine in the Bible, an idea that was invented not by exegesis, but I think by the Welsh's grape juice company. And when I hear some of my friends saying that what they call wine in the Bible isn't really wine, I wonder what Bible they're reading. Here's again a clear example when poor Noah made a vineyard, and he made wine and drank too much of it.
He got drunk. He didn't get drunk on grape juice, and we see that throughout the history of the Bible. But here in this illustration, Jesus says, you take new wine, you don't put it in old wineskins.
Why not? Because the old wineskins made out of goatskin or sheepskin have been stretched because the wine that was in them was continuing to ferment and stretching this leatherette substance to its limit. And Jesus said if you put new wine in the old wineskin, and that new wine starts to ferment, and in the fermentation process, the gases in there expand and stretch the old wineskins. The old wineskins have already been stretched, so if you put new wine in there and leave it in there, you're going to lose the wineskin because it's going to break.
What else are you going to lose? You're going to lose the wine. You put the wine in the wineskin to keep the wine, to preserve the wine so you can carry it about so you can enjoy the wine. And so in this case, if you put new wine in the old wineskins, you're going to lose both the wineskin and the wine.
So Jesus said, look, what do you do? If you've got new wine, you've got to have a new wineskin. You put the new wine in the new wineskin, and then the wineskin can expand as the wine is fermenting, and you won't lose either the wineskin or the wine. And then when you're done, you won't be saying, well, the old wine was good but not interested in the new. Well, the old wine was good because it was fermented.
That's why it was good. And now they love the old wine better than the new wine. But what Jesus is saying is simple. You can't just take the kingdom of God and the arrival of Jesus and just put it on top of the Pharisees' traditions.
It won't fit. Something new is happening here. There is a new covenant. Yes, it builds upon the old, but it can't be absorbed totally by the old. You have to have a new aspect if you're going to fit into the new covenant, and by extension, you can't have Christ and squeeze Him into your old life and expect that to work. This dreadful teaching that is spread throughout evangelical Christianity that teaches the carnal Christian idea that you can become converted to Christ and never change, impossible. That is blasphemy.
It is so against the teaching of Christ and against the New Testament. When you are born again by the Holy Ghost, you're a changed person, and if you're not a changed person, your conversion experience is false. You can't be born of the Holy Spirit and not be a changed person, impossible. The sanctification that follows takes our whole lifetime and then into glory, but change begins immediately and really. And one way you can check yourself if you question whether you're converted is, has there been any change in my life or am I still living the old way in the old wineskins with the old clothes that are torn and tattered? But if you are in Christ, beloved, you are a new creature, you need a new set of clothes and a new skin to carry the wine of the Holy Ghost. Let's pray. Father, thank You for making all things new, for making us new, for giving us a new covenant that is so much richer and so much better and so much fulfilling, more fulfilling than the old.
Thank You that You do all things well, and You have given us the bridegroom and made us His bride. Amen. We can't just add Jesus to our old life. You know, conversion means nothing less than complete transformation. That's what the Apostle Paul meant when he said, Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things are passed away. Behold, all things are become new.
Dr. R.C. Sproul has provided us with a helpful explanation of Jesus' parable today as we continue our verse-by-verse sermon series from the Gospel of Luke. We return to the series each Sunday, and we're glad you've joined us today. Helping you study and understand God's Word is one of our priorities here at Ligonier Ministries, and that's why we're eager to get today's resource into your hands.
Contact us today and request R.C. 's commentary on the Gospel of Luke. When you give a donation of any amount, we'll be happy to provide you with a digital download of this nearly 600-page commentary.
Our offices are closed on this Lord's Day, but you can give your gift and make your request online at renewingyourmind.org. Let me remind you of Table Talk Magazine. It's another helpful resource.
Dr. Sproul liked to call it the little magazine that could. It exists to help establish us in the Word to deepen our understanding of God and apply this knowledge to our daily living. In every issue, you'll find theological articles and daily guided Bible studies written by trusted pastors and teachers. Learn more and subscribe at tabletalkmagazine.com. Thank you again for joining us today. Renewing Your Mind is the listener-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. We hope you'll make plans to join us again next Sunday.
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