29.09 | Shadows & Realities

Hebrews 9:15-10:18

‘For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near.’

Hebrews 10:1

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My seven-year-old daughter Eeva loves games that use shadows.

There is ‘Shadowlands’ (as she calls it), where we’re only allowed to tread in areas of shade on the ground — jumping over any patches of sunshine. There’s the game where we try and jump on top of each other’s shadows, running in wild circles to try and get shadowside of the other. And there’s those evenings where shadows become wildly elongated, lifting flamingo legs as they pace the horizon before us.

Shadows are at once nothing and yet are something — without any substance but also bearing the recognisable shape of the object or person that made them. A shadow is really less a thing in and of itself, as it is evidence of the true thing. A shadow cannot be squashed or spoken to, hugged or harmed, tasted or touched. It can only point beyond itself to something vastly more substantial and real than it could ever be.

I wonder how those early Israelites felt as they saw the tabernacle. I wonder how those priests felt as they stood inside its fabric hull — with smells of incense and fresh bread and burning oil. As they looked on those sacrifices made, crackling flames and rising smoke. They could see all this stuff. They could smell it. They could touch it. They could feel the texture of fabric and hear the crackling of flames.

And yet, we read yesterday, the tabernacle was but a shadow of the heavenly things.¹

And the Law, we read today, has but a shadow of the good things to come.

Shadows.

Matters of faith bring us to the interaction of shadows and reality, and, if we’re honest, most of our experience tends to be of what seems a very real, substantial world around us, with matters of faith feeling distinctly shadowy. We see the grim realities of pain, and hear of the beauty and peace of the age to come, and the pain feels so greatly more substantial. Heavenly things — faith things — can begin to feel like things obscure and ethereal, murky and unclear. What we can see and touch and feel and smell feels like reality. Faith can feel like shadows.

And yet, our author today invites us to a different vantage point. For the forms of religion, as expressed for over a millennia through the Old Testament story, he says, was mere shadows. The tabernacle was a shadow. The Law was a shadow. Every sacrifice was a shadow. Every tangible form and manifestation of Hebraic religion was merely a shadow, stretching away from the coming reality.

What do we do with this?

We take the clear heartbeat of this passage. We lift our eyes from the shadows to the substance, for dead religiosity always focuses on the shadow at the expense of the reality.

And herein we hear the deeper invitation of faith itself. For we do not deal, in faith, with shadows. We deal with reality. We deal not with vain hopes and wispy dreams, but in the imminence of a reality as vastly more substantial from our own as you are from your own shadow. Where light shines unimaginable brighter and the grass grows impossibly greener and the waters foam with blues beyond our capacity to understand. 

When the world feels overwhelming, my friends, recall this: we walk in these days in the Shadowlands.²

But the glory of the days to come is deeply, truly, substantially, and eternally,

Reality.

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Reflect:

Growth in faith combines meditation on truth and the activation of the Spirit.

Lift your mind in meditation of the greater reality of the coming reign of King Jesus.

Ask the Spirit to animate this in your soul, until we learn to see shadow as shadow, and know to the depth of our bones the truth of His perfect reality.

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Pray:

Spirit of God,

Animate me again today.

For this mind,

And this heart,

Cannot always see past

The shadows.

They can so fill my mind

That my faith becomes religion,

And my fears become my focus.

They can so fill my heart

That hope recedes behind a flood of pain

And I can no longer see.

And so,

Spirit of God,

Lift the veil;

Reveal to me the eternal things—

That I may walk this land of shadows

Absorbed by and in truer sight of

Reality.

In Jesus’ Name,

Amen

Old Testament: 

For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:

2 Chronicles 1-3 | Psalm 114

1. Hebrews 8:5

2. A phrase C.S. Lewis used before Eeva got there