Wineskin in the Smoke

“I am like a wineskin in the smoke,” wrote the Psalmist in Psalm 119:83. The metaphor takes my mind back to the high Andes Mountains in northern Peru nearly 20 years ago, to a cemetery of Incan warriors and a little man in that cemetery who had a tiny pot to sell.

He told us that he found the pot while digging around in those open graves. The huge pyramid-shaped stones that once covered the graves and been blasted apart by grave robbers. All the gold was stolen. But stirring with a stick in one crypt, he hit something, he said, and it turned out to be the little pot.

It had been sitting in this house for a long time, he told us, but he would sell it to us. I took it in my hand and handed him the money. The pot smelled like smoke and was tarnished with soot.

“What happened to this pot?” I asked Larry Johnson, the missionary. He told me that the Quechua Indians did not build chimneys or smokestacks in their homes. The smoke curls up from the perpetual fire used for cooking and heat, rises to the ceiling, and creeps around the top of the room until it finds a crevasse or crack through which to escape. In doing so, the odor of smoke permeates their clothing and blankets, and the soot coats everything.

A Bedouin tent in the Middle East does not have a chimney. As with the little Quechua houses, the smoke from their fires curls around the tent until it makes its way out.

A wineskin is a bottle made of leather. The leather needs to be dried when it is new, but continual drying will ruin it. A wineskin in a Bedouin tent, hanging on a line, would be coated with soot and partially dried and cooked by the smoke. It would eventually be dried and cracked, tested and damaged by heat and smoke. The metaphor calls to mind a tent rather than a palace, and indicates a nomadic life, maybe even the life of a fugitive.

Think of King David no longer in the palace but on the run from his enemies, hiding in the hills, living in tents. This psalm points to the contrast between good times and bad, between the palace and the tent, between sitting on the throne and running from those who want to kill you. It is a variation on the theme of life’s extremities.

The psalmist was in a very difficult part of life’s journey, and the difficulty had lasted for a very long time. He was worn out, confused, and crying out for help.

Despite his trying circumstances he confessed again, “I have put my hope in your word” (Psalm 119:81). Threaded throughout this psalm are the polarities of painful despair and irresistible hope. This hope that has survived such pain and trials is anchored by the word of God that does not change with changing seasons. When your hope is anchored in God’s word, you are spiritually and emotionally prepared for life’s surprises.

And you weather the trials, no matter how severe, because you know that God is honest and faithful and always keeps his word.