THE SHADOWS HAVE PASSED (WHY DO YOU RETURN?)
What is this strange disease among professing Christians in our day? What is this backward emphasis on a temporary system of types and shadiws? Where does it come from? Lack of trusting in Christ? Yes. Yes, that is where it comes from.
There is a backward gaze that refuses the blazing light of Christ and instead longs for the dim outlines of the former age. Men speak much of feasts, of days, of seasons, as though the substance had not yet come, as though the veil were still hanging, as though the Lamb had not yet been slain. But what is this, if not a quiet denial of the sufficiency of Christ? For the feasts were never the life of the people of God; they were witnesses, pointing forward to a greater fulfillment (Leviticus 23; Colossians 2:16-17). You have no idea what you are talking about.
Consider what you are doing when you bind the conscience to these observances. You take what God Himself declared to be a shadow and treat it as substance. You rebuild what God has torn down. The Passover has been fulfilled in Christ, who was offered once for all (1 Corinthians 5:7; Hebrews 10:12). Pentecost has been fulfilled in the outpouring of the Spirit, not on one day only, but as the abiding gift of the presence of Christ to the Church (Acts 2:1-4; Acts 2:38–39). Tabernacles has been fulfilled in God dwelling with His people, not in tents made with hands, but in the living temple of His redeemed (1 Corinthians 3:16). Will you then leave the living reality to cling again to the sign?
Please find something constructive to do for the work of Christ. Get out and tell people about the love of Jesus rather than changing His name and drawing attention to your “rediscovery of truth” which is nothing but a radicalized failure to see the significance of the fall of the temple system. Join the fight against oppression, racism, injustice. Stop with this madness returning people to a law system you are not in any way keeping. There are real issues to fight. At present you are using your gifts in the kingdom of darkness, distracting from the true light of the gospel.
Some will say, “We do not trust in these things; we only observe them.” But I ask plainly, why observe what God has fulfilled? Why return to the tutor when the Son Himself has come? The Apostle Paul did not speak gently when he saw such tendencies. He said, “You observe days and months and seasons and years; I am afraid for you” (Galatians 4:10–11). Afraid—not amused, not indifferent—afraid. For he saw that this path does not end in harmless remembrance, but in a subtle shifting of trust away from Christ and toward outward forms.
Mark this well: the danger is not merely in open legalism, but in the quietly sick habit of placing weight where God has removed it. Today it is “we simply keep the feasts.” Tomorrow it is “we ought to keep them.” And soon enough it becomes, “we must keep them.”
Some of you are already there. You say you are not binding it while you constantly imply you are the one “truly” following “Yeshua.” Thus the conscience is ensnared, and Christ is no longer all. What began as curiosity ends as bondage. What began as interest ends as obligation. And the glory of the New Covenant is clouded by the shadows of the old that has vanished away (Hebrews 8:13).
Will you really go backward? Shall those who have tasted the fullness of Christ hunger again for signs and symbols? Shall those who worship in spirit and truth return to calendars and ceremonies as though righteousness were found there (John 4:23–24; Romans 14:17)? God forbid. Stand fast in the liberty by which Christ has made you free. Let no man judge you in respect of a feast day, for your life is not measured by seasons, but hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 2:16–17; Colossians 3:3).
Let the feasts remain where God has placed them—in the past, as witnesses. Let Christ stand where God has exalted Him—in the present, as all in all. And if any man would glory, let him glory not in days, but in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to him, and he to the world (Galatians 6:14). For in Christ, not in shadows, is the fullness of God, and in Him alone is the rest of the soul.
BDD
