“He told them this parable: “No one tears a patch from a new garment and sews it on an old one. If he does, he will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined.”
To pour new wine into old bottles means to re-introduce something that has been around for sometime under the guise of a new package.
You may have heard the saying of “old wine in new bottles”. This is in fact a slight deviation from its original word order in the Bible, where Jesus says “new wine in old wineskins”.
When new wine is poured into old wineskins, they may break because they are too worn out to hold the new wine which continues to ferment. What Jesus is telling the disciples is that all bodies are transformed anew after turning to Christ. Our old bodies are not good enough to hold a new life upon conversion, just as new wine cannot be held in old wineskins.
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Chinese Bible (???)
A lot of phrases, such as "two-edged sword" and " an eye for an eye", are taken from the English Bible. Learning the stories behind these idioms is fun, and can help boost your vocabulary. Click here to find out now!