Mark 2:21-22

THINGS WHICH DIFFER

‘No man seweth a piece of new cloth on an old garment … and no man putteth new wine into old bottles.’

Mark 2:21

These words were a parable and the principle laid down in them is one of great importance. The evils that have arisen from trying to sew the new patch on the old garment, and put the new wine into old bottles, have neither been few nor small.

I. How was it with the Galatian Church?—It is recorded in St. Paul’s Epistle. Men wished in that Church to reconcile Judaism with Christianity, and to circumcise as well as baptize. They endeavoured to keep alive the law of ceremonies and ordinances, and to place it side by side with the Gospel of Christ. In fact they would fain have put the ‘new wine into old bottles.’ And in so doing they greatly erred.

II. How was it with the early Christian Church, after the Apostles were dead?—We have it recorded in the pages of Church history. Some tried to make the Gospel more acceptable by mingling it with Platonic philosophy. They ‘sewed the new patch on the old garment.’ And in so doing they scattered broadcast the seeds of enormous evil.

III. How is it with many professing Christians in the present day?—We have only to look around us and see. There are thousands who are trying to reconcile the service of Christ and the service of the world, to have the name of Christians and yet live the life of the ungodly—to keep in with the servants of pleasure and sin, and yet be the followers of the crucified Jesus at the same time. In a word, they are trying to enjoy the ‘new wine’ and yet to cling to the ‘old bottles.’

—Bishop J. C. Ryle.

Illustration

‘Leather bottles in course of time become hard and liable to crack, and they would soon give way under the pressure caused by the fermentation of new wine, but new skins might be sufficiently supple and elastic to yield to the pressure and thus stand the strain. With this allusion compare the reference in the Book of Job. Elihu, having listened to Job’s attempts to justify himself before God, and to the heartless condemnation passed upon him by his three friends, could at last no longer repress the thoughts which were seething in his mind, and began to speak. “Behold” (he says), “I am full of words, the spirit within me constraineth me: my breast is like wine which hath no vent, like new wineskins (or wine-skins of new wine) it is ready to burst” (Job 32:18). Thus the thoughts fermenting within the mind and clamouring for utterance are likened, by way of analogy, to new wine fermenting within a skin-bottle.’