Wine

Bread and wine sit together on the table of every covenant. We have already fixed the first: “man doth not live by bread only, but by every word… of the LORD” (Deuteronomy 8:3) — the bread is the word, and the word is the truth. But bread is only half the table. What is the wine?

Jesus gives the pair Himself, and makes the two of them the whole of true worship:

Truth is the bread. The other half is the wine — and wine is spirit. The Father will have both, and never one without the other.

Scripture does not leave this to guesswork; it says the same thing of wine and of spirit, in the same words. Both are poured out: the LORD “poured out” the “spirit of deep sleep” (Isaiah 29:10) and the “spirit of grace” (Zechariah 12:10), exactly as wine is poured. Both are drunk: we are “all made to drink into one Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:13), as the nations are made to “drink” the cup of fury (Jeremiah 25:15). Both are mingled: the LORD “mingled a perverse spirit” (Isaiah 19:14) as wine is mixed and mingled (Psalm 75:8).

And once the prophet says it flat out — the drunkard reeling in the street is not drunk on drink at all:

Drunkenness without wine — because the wine was never the point; the spirit was. Paul sets the two side by side as rival fillings: “be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18). A man will be filled and carried by some spirit; the only question is which. So when the Spirit was first poured out at Pentecost, the mockers reached for the nearest word for a man overcome and possessed — “these men are full of new wine” (Acts 2:13). They had the picture right; they only mistook the vintage.

Where does a man’s wine come from? From his own fruit. The vine bears grapes, and a people’s grapes are its works; trodden in the press, those grapes become the wine. The spirit a man carries is the pressed-out juice of his deeds.

So the fruit decides the wine. Where the fruit is corrupt, the wine is poison:

Grapes of gall press out to venom. Isaiah walks the same vineyard: God fenced Israel, “planted it with the choicest vine,” and “made a winepress therein” — then “looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes” (Isaiah 5:2-4). A vineyard with a press built into it, waiting for fruit: the works were always meant to become the wine. Wild grapes yield nothing worth drinking, only a cry for judgment (Isaiah 5:7). It is the law of sowing and reaping, stated in the press: “he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life” (Galatians 6:8).

Wine is the companion symbol to oil. The same fruit, pressed, gives two things: the oil that is burned for light — proven works made visible — and the wine that is drunk for the spirit within. Deeds tested under pressure become both the light a man shows and the spirit he carries.

Because the wine is pressed from the fruit, there are two wines, and only two. From righteous fruit comes the good wine — the “wine that maketh glad the heart of man” (Psalm 104:15), the cup of the covenant, “my blood of the new testament” (Matthew 26:28), the “spirit of grace” poured on the house of David (Zechariah 12:10). This is the Holy Spirit: gladness, grace, and life, drunk in and filling the man.

From corrupt fruit comes the other wine, an unholy spirit — and Scripture names its kinds. There is the “spirit of whoredoms” that makes a people “err” and “go a whoring” (Hosea 4:11-12) — the same cup Babylon holds out, “the wine of her fornication,” that makes “all the earth drunken” until “the nations are mad” (Jeremiah 51:7; Revelation 17:2). There is the stupor, the “spirit of deep sleep” (Isaiah 29:10). There is the “strong delusion” God sends on “them that received not the love of the truth” (2 Thessalonians 2:10-11) — refuse the bread and you are handed the poisoned wine. And there is the wine of wrath itself, “the wine of the fierceness of his wrath” poured “into the cup of his indignation” (Revelation 14:10; 16:19), pressed out when the wicked are trodden in the great winepress (Isaiah 63:3; Revelation 19:15).

One wine gladdens, the other maddens. Both are spirit; the fruit decides which.

Nowhere are the two wines set closer than at one feast. Pentecost — the feast of weeks, “the firstfruits of wheat harvest” (Exodus 34:22) — has been kept twice, and both times the crowd was full of wine.

At the first, Moses was on the mountain receiving the law when a noise rose from the camp. Joshua took it for the sound of war, but Moses knew it; and the Septuagint records the name he gave it — not the shout of battle nor the cry of defeat, but “the voice of them that begin the banquet of wine” (Exodus 32:18). Around the golden calf the people had made their own feast — they “sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play” (Exodus 32:6) — a wine-feast of the wrong spirit; and three thousand fell (Exodus 32:28).

At the second Pentecost the charge of wine was raised again — “these men are full of new wine” (Acts 2:13) — but this time the wine was the true one, the “firstfruits of the Spirit” (Romans 8:23) poured out on men who “gladly received his word”; and three thousand were added (Acts 2:41). One feast, both crowds full: one of the counterfeit wine that felled them, one of the new wine that gave them life.

This is why the Father “seeketh” worshippers “in spirit and in truth” — in wine and in bread, and in both at once. Truth without spirit is the dead letter; and when the truth itself goes sour it is the leavened loaf of false doctrine. Spirit without truth is the wine of fornication, the reveller’s cup — a people “drunken, but not with wine.” Neither alone is worship. But where a man keeps the truth and bears the fruit of it, his deeds press out into the right wine, and he is filled with the Spirit of grace — and that, the bread and the wine together, is the worship the Father is seeking.

Yet the wine we are given now is only the firstfruits — a first pouring, not the full measure; for the new wine cannot yet be fully held. Jesus said it is never put “into old wineskins”; the new wine, still working, will “burst the skins” and be spilled, and “the skins will be destroyed” (Luke 5:37; the word is askos, a wineskin). The body is the wineskin, and this mortal, corruptible body cannot contain the fulness of the Spirit — so we have the firstfruits only, and “groan within ourselves, waiting for… the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:23).

The full measure waits for new wineskins. At the resurrection “this corruptible must put on incorruption” (1 Corinthians 15:53) — a new body, a new skin — and into it the new wine is poured in full: “a new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you” (Ezekiel 36:26). The firstfruits are drunk now; the whole vintage is gathered at the last feast, the “feast of ingathering at the year’s end” (Exodus 34:22) — new wineskins for new wine, the incorruptible body at last made to hold the Spirit in full.