Shadows

I grew up in rural Saskatchewan and there was no electricity on our farm. In the night as I made the trip to the outhouse as a child I was afraid of the shadows that were everywhere it seemed to me as a child. I knew that they were only the shadows of trees or buildings or machines or clouds or ... It was the last "or" that bothered me and my imagination inserted many scary things after that "or". My mother told me that they were only shadows and not real.




Hebrews 10:1 says, "The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves." The Law it says is a shadow but not of something that is scary but something that is good. As a child when I was in bed I often saw the shadow of my mom coming into the room. That was not a shadow of something to be afraid of but the shadow of something good following. As soon as my mother entered the room I was no longer interested in her shadow but in her. It is the same with the Law. The Law is a shadow but it tells us that there is something real and good coming. We don't elimate the shadow but we also don't study the shadow for the shadow's sake but we study the shadow so that we know more about the real substance that made the shadow.