The Substance Belongs to Messiah

We have seen who was judging the Colossians, and why. Yet the next line is often thought to settle the matter. Here are the two verses together:

Colossians 2:16-17 Therefore no one is to krino κρίνω kree'-no(judge) you in regard to food or drink or in respect to heortes(festival) or new moon or sabbatons(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23); things which are a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Messiah.

“A shadow of what is to come.” The usual reading runs like this. A shadow is only a dim outline, and once the reality arrives, no one needs the outline anymore. The Messiah has come, so the feasts, the new moons and the Sabbaths have done their work and can be set aside.

That sounds natural. But it depends on reading the sentence in the past tense, and Paul did not write it in the past tense.

A Shadow in the Present Tense

The Greek is ha estin skia ἅ ἐστιν σκιά skee'-ah, “which are a shadow.” Estin is the present tense of the verb “to be.” Paul does not say that these days were a shadow in the time before the Messiah came. Writing years after the cross and the resurrection, he says that they are a shadow. And they are a shadow “of what is to come,” not of something that has already come and gone.

Think of how a shadow works. Picture a man walking down a street late on a sunny afternoon, with the sun low behind him. His shadow stretches out along the pavement in front of him. Someone waiting farther down the street sees the shadow before the man himself arrives, and knows that he is coming. The shadow is not the man. But it is real, and it is cast by someone solid who has not yet arrived.

That is Paul’s picture. The feasts, the new moons and the Sabbaths are a shadow cast ahead of something “to come,” and the one who casts that shadow is still on his way. The word Paul uses for “substance” is literally “body,” soma σῶμα so'-mah: “but the substance belongs to Messiah.” The solid reality that casts the shadow belongs to Him, and that is what gives the shadow its shape and its meaning.

The Shadow Still Falls

Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say that because the substance belongs to Messiah, the shadow is worthless. He says that the substance belongs to Messiah, and the shadow still falls.

The person waiting on that street does not turn away from the shadow because it is only a shadow. As long as the one casting it has not yet arrived, the shadow is the very thing that tells him someone is coming and from which direction.

In the same way, the feasts point to what God has not yet finished. To call them a shadow is not to call them empty. It is to say that they point to something real, something that belongs to the Messiah, something “to come.” A shadow that points forward is a reason to keep watching it, not a reason to throw it away.

“Every Day Alike”?

Readers often set a second passage beside Colossians 2, and it too deserves a careful look. In Romans 14, Paul writes:

Romans 14:5-6 One person krino(judges) one day above another; another krino(judges) every day — let each one be fully convinced in his own nous νοῦς nooce(intellect, spiritual domain). The one who observes the day, observes it to the Lord; and the one who does not observe the day, to the Lord he does not observe it; and the one who eats, eats to the Lord — for he gives thanks to God; and the one who does not eat, to the Lord he does not eat, and he gives thanks to God.

At first glance, this seems to leave the Sabbath to personal preference. Some keep a day, some treat every day the same, and Paul accepts both.

But two things in the Greek change the picture.

First, many English Bibles print “every day alike,” but the word “alike” is not in the Greek text, which is why the YLV leaves it out. What Paul wrote, word for word, is “one judges a day beyond a day, another judges every day.” Translators add “alike” to make the English sentence smoother. That is understandable, but it slips into the verse something Paul did not write: that all days are equal.

Second, neither the word sabbaton σάββατον sab'-bat-on nor the word heorte ἑορτή heh-or-tay', feast, appears anywhere in Romans 14. If Paul were releasing believers from the day God wrote into the Ten Commandments, it would be strange for him to do so without ever naming it.

What, then, is the chapter about? Paul tells us at the start:

Romans 14:2 One person believes he may eat all things, but the one who is weak eats only vegetables.

The subject is eating: one person eats freely, while another, the “weak” one, eats only vegetables. And the days in verse 5 are bound up with that eating: “the one who eats … and the one who does not eat.” The natural reading is that these are days of eating and not eating, days that some people chose for fasting. Nowhere does the chapter say that the day God set in the Ten Commandments was handed over to each person’s private conviction.

What the Apostles Did

If Colossians 2 and Romans 14 meant that the appointed times were finished, we would expect to see the apostles stop keeping them. We see the opposite.

Acts 2:1 And when the day of Pentecost was being fulfilled, they were all together with one mind in the same place,

The Spirit was poured out on a feast of the Torah, the day of Pentecost, the Feast of Weeks, and on that day the disciples were “all together with one mind in the same place.” Years later, as we saw in Chapter 16, Paul hurried across the sea “to be in Jerusalem, if possible, on the day of Pentecost” (Acts 20:16).

And to the church in Corinth, a church full of believers from the nations, Paul wrote, “Therefore let us celebrate the feast” (1 Corinthians 5:8). We read that verse in Chapter 7. Because the Messiah is our Passover, Paul says to keep the feast; he does not say that the feast is over.

That is how the shadow works. It still falls and still points ahead, and the people who knew the Messiah best went on walking in it.

This leaves a question that many readers will already be asking. If the apostles kept the Sabbath and the feasts, where does the idea of Sunday worship come from? Most people who answer that question turn to one particular night in a city called Troas.