“Shadow Land” by Garris Elkins

“The old system under the law of Moses was only a shadow, a dim preview of the good things to come, not the good things themselves.” Hebrews 10:1

Jesus cast His shadow from eternity into the history of the Old Testament.  The festivals, feasts and observances were all shadows, dim previews, of something that would come in the future and be revealed in the person of Jesus Christ.

The revelation of Jesus is never a call to return to a dim and expired covenant from the past, but a call forward into something new that is filled with all the good things God has prepared for us. When Jesus arrived on our planet all the old covenant imagery that foreshadowed His coming, and the regulations of law that accompanied that imagery, vanished. The very appearance of Jesus changed everything. 

In Mark 7:19 Jesus said to His Jewish friends,

“Food doesn’t go into your heart, but only passes through the stomach and then goes into the sewer.” (By saying this, he declared that every kind of food is acceptable in God’s eyes.)”

These were shocking words to the Jewish listeners.  The shadow images of the old covenant dietary rules went out the window as Jesus spoke.  The religious leaders who were in control of the shadow images of the old covenant wanted to kill Jesus for suggesting such a thing.

It is too easy to think that Peter’s rooftop instructions found in Acts 10, “Rise, Peter; kill and eat”, were the original source of our new covenant dietary freedoms.  It wasn’t.  Jesus, not Peter, is the one who sets us free from living in the shadows of something that has passed its expiration date. Whenever the presence of Jesus is made known, like it was in Mark 7, all the shadows pointing to Him are consumed in His current revelation.

Jesus has called us to experience a Kingdom that is unfolding before us. This revelation is making known the good things never seen before because they did not exist in their fullness in the shadows of the past. These are the things of substance seen only with the eyes of faith. These good things will be revealed in the brilliance of our unfolding future, not in the shadows of our past.