The Substance Belongs to Christ

It is remarkable that the only mention of Sabbath-keeping in all the epistles comes in Colossians 2, where Paul identifies it as one of the requirements of Jewish law eclipsed in Christ. The apostle writes:

“Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.”

The Sabbath, Paul says, was a shadow. That’s important.

Copies and Shadows

That’s the same word [skia] used twice by the writer to the Hebrews concerning the entire order of priestly sacrifices. He says of the priests of Judaism, “They serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things.” Again, in chapter 10, he writes, “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.” Concerning the sufficiency of Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice, he concludes, “There is no longer any offering for sin.”

Accordingly, Christians have abandoned the shadow of the ceremonial law. Frankly, so have the Jews, but for a different reason. They haven’t got a temple in which to sacrifice.

Shadows are not substance. Those who possess Christ have everything we need in him. He is our Sacrifice and he is our Sabbath Rest. For that matter, he is also our Circumcision, which is the argument Paul is making in Colossians just prior to his remarks about the Sabbath being a mere shadow. He writes, “In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ.” He wrote this to a church that was mostly or entirely Gentile. It may be that no man among the saints in Colossae was literally circumcised.

A System Superseded

So then, Christ superseded the literal and material sacrificial system of Judaism. As a result, Christians do not make sacrifices on an altar. We possess the reality of which the sacrifices only spoke. Likewise, Christ superseded literal circumcision, and Christians are therefore under no obligation to be circumcised. We possess the spiritual reality of which circumcision was only a picture.

How then do some Christians preach the mandatory keeping of the Sabbath-shadow when the other shadows have all been done away with? It too was only a picture of the rest available to the believer in Christ.

Hebrews 4 is all about the rest that is already ours in Christ. “We who have believed enter that rest,” says its writer. He goes on, “There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God.” It is not that this Sabbath rest is still future for the Christian (for example, to be obtained in heaven), but rather (if you follow his argument), this final Sabbath rest remains to be identified in the same way Paul has identified the other “rests” of scripture in the previous verses (God’s seventh day rest and Israel’s rest from war provided by Joshua).

So let’s identify it. What then is this “Sabbath rest” that remains for us? It’s certainly not yet another rule to keep or a day to abstain from any labor on pain of displeasing God. Hebrews goes on to expound on it: “For whoever has entered God’s rest [by trusting in Christ, see verse 3] has also rested from his works as God did from his.”

Entering into Rest

The believer rests from dead works. That includes Sabbath-keeping and the pale mimicry of the Sabbath that legalistic Christians still introduce into their faith with so-called Lord’s Day rules and regulations. The substance belongs to Christ. Clinging to a shadow is an act of self-disqualification, not from salvation but from the enjoyment of the true Sabbath rest God has provided in Christ.

There is a reason the epistles don’t mention Sabbath-keeping except to disparage it as superfluous for the believer in Christ (“See to it that no one takes you captive”, “Let no one pass judgment on you”, “Why do you submit to regulations according to human precepts and teachings?”). Like the circumcision question, the Sabbath question was put to bed for good in Acts 15. The apostles wrote to the Gentiles in Antioch that “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements …”

Keeping the Sabbath was not one of them. The rest the Sabbath symbolized is already ours, and it’s not literal but spiritual. That’s the message of Colossians 2.