Beth Moore - Substance and Shadow - Part 1
Would you turn with me to the book of Colossians chapter 2. The book of Colossians chapter 2. What I'd like to do with your permission is read you 19 full verses before we ever get started. We're going to lock in on a theme that comes late in our reading, but I want to give it some context. I'll tell you a little bit about Colossae in just a little while as we go through the lesson, but I wanna begin by reading it.
Now, let me tell you something. I intended to just teach chapter 2. Well, let me tell you, it's so full by, I mean, you've got you a whole theology lesson within the first three verses, then another one in the next three and another one and the next three and another one in the next three. It's that kind of thing. And so I thought: Okay, we're gonna go for a piece of it that the Lord has really led me toward and then we're gonna expand it from there. So we're going thematically. But I want to read it to you first. Now listen, how I'm going to do this, when it's a long reading, what I like to do is be able to look up some so that I can look out at you and it somehow keeps the attention a little bit better so that it won't get tedious, because I want you to feel it.
Now I'm gonna be teaching out of the CSB which I dearly, dearly love, but I learned this book out of the ESV. And so it's my natural inclination to return back to the verbiage and to the language of this particular translation. It's what I want you to hear it in because you'll hear it in the CSB as we go in it this weekend. So Colossians chapter 2. I want you to just... would you just get into the passages with me? I can't say enough how much the point of our scripture study and our Bible attentiveness is about engagement with God. And we don't separate the words of God from the mouth of God. What we're after is God himself.
And so, as I read through these passages, let it settle and interact with it. Let there be if there's not any kind of verbal or audible groaning, but let there be groaning inside. The pure beauty of it. These verses are so beautiful, I don't know what to do with them. So let them settle on you as I read them to you. The apostle Paul, to the saints in Colossae who he has never seen with his eyes. There's already a church in that city of believers, established through the prophets and apostles, Christ Jesus being the cornerstone, but he himself has not seen them with his own eyes. He's just heard about them, good things and troubling things.
So I'll begin to read. He says to them: "For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea and for all who have not seen me face to face, that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach," listen carefully, "all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery". I'm gonna read that again. "That their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, with those around you, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding".
I wanna pause there for just a moment and say this much to you. I believe with all of my heart, this is one reason I believe so strongly in a community of faith, whatever size it may be. I love personal Bible study. That is part of my ongoing life. I'm in the scriptures with the Lord every single day, one on one, just the two of us, just me and God. But I firmly believe that there is a limited understanding that we get from the things of scripture and from the things of our faith when we are alone in it and not in communities of faith, because there's something about being with one another and hearing the faith of one... do you remember when Paul said to Philemon: "And I pray that the sharing of your faith may be used so that you will come to the full knowledge of every good thing that is in you because of Christ".
He's not talking about witnessing. He's saying, "As you share with one another what God is doing in your life through Christ, then you build up the other one". I, you know what, I never thought to pray like that. I never thought to approach the Lord like that. I didn't understand that's what that scripture meant. Think about it again. Ephesians chapter 3, when he says: "That you may comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height and to know the love of God, which surpasses all knowledge". In other words, together with the saints. So that's what he's saying here in this letter: "Being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery, which is Christ".
Now, he's writing to a people who have been raised in an atmosphere of lots and lots of heady philosophy. And so he wants them to know, you know from the beginning that in your love of mystery and of all the mysterious things, I wanna tell you what is the mystery of God: Christ. "In whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I say this in order that no one may delude you with plausible arguments. For though I am absent in body, yet I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good order and the firmness of your faith in Christ. Therefore, as you receive Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.
See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily". What do you even do with that? I'm just gonna read it again. "For in him, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority". Just to give you a little idea of what some of the attitude is here, Paul is going, "What in heaven's name are you looking for out there? You have got it all right here. It is right here before you, it is all in Christ. You are incapable," he is saying to them, and he is saying to us, "of getting to the bottom of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge that you would find in Christ Jesus".
Verse 11: "In him you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead". Listen carefully. "And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him".
These are going to be our thematic scriptures. "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. Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the head," if you have an ESV, if you have several of the formal versions, you will see a capital letter, Head, "from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God". "Grows with a growth that is from God".
The Colossians were in a culture where there was great emphasis on the mysteries, on higher knowledge that might be attained to by harshness to the body or a certain way of being or doing, by following certain kinds of rules that would put you to a great test. But if you were able to do that, you could attain to the superior kind of spirituality. And he has come to take that apart. He is speaking to both pagan belief, pagans who become believers that are mixing their old pagan beliefs, a little of what they liked best about it, in with their Christianity, as well as those who were Jewish that have become Christians, and they're mixing in a little bit of that. And he is saying to them, that is of no value to you, in who you are in your identity with Christ.
Your sufficiency is completely in Jesus, and there is nothing else you can do to get you to a higher place where he is concerned. And so he is unraveling that particular error, and we wanna see him do it as well. I want you to see something. I want you to hear it in the CSB. I wanna read 16 and 17 again. Now I'm reading in the Christian Standard Bible. It says this: "Therefore, don't let anyone judge you in regard to food or drink or in the matter of a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath Day". I want you to remember those three things. "These are a shadow of what was to come; the substance is Christ".
Now I gotta tell you, after learning it in the ESV and after seeing it in several formal versions and then reading it here, and it can be translated any one of these ways: The substance belongs to Christ, the substance is in Christ, and the CSB says the substance is Christ. One of the things I love about having several translations to look at is, is it just a little bit of change, just a little bit of a different wording, and suddenly something pops off the page. The substance is Christ.
It says that in 18: "Let no one condemn you by delighting in ascetic practices or worship of angels, claiming access to a visionary realm. Such people are inflated by empty notions of their unspiritual mind". These are shadows of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. What I want to suggest to you is that the ramifications of having those two things confused are absolutely enormous, but to have them straight is a freedom that really is beyond description for a human being.
I want you to see with me that those words, that shadow and substance, in Greek, those words would very simply be skia, that would be shadow. Soma, substance. So there's even the sound. One of the things that I love about Paul's writing and I really, really love this in the Old Testament because there's so much narrative art in it where there are so many plays on words. Because most of us don't read the original languages, we can't appreciate that it's not just what the Word is saying, it is how the Word is saying it. It's the gorgeousness of how the words are going together and Paul must have really loved words.
For one thing, there would never be an end to a sentence. His sentences would go on a full paragraph long and there would be just no breath taken anywhere in the whole sentence. But he also, you can see, you can hear him have a certain rhythm in a lot of his writing and you can certainly hear it here with the shadow and substance, skia and soma. Skia and soma, shadow and substance. What does he mean? I love what scholar JDG Dunn says, speaking of Christ: "He is the reality which casts its shadow backward in time".
Now, you and I are gonna deal with how we feel about shadows this weekend. And we're gonna find that our range of ways that we think of shadows, as to whether or not it's a positive connotation or it's a negative connotation, is much like it would be in the scriptures. There's also all of that. If you did a word search on the word "shadow" from Genesis to Revelation and I did exactly that in preparation for you, you would see the full range of things. You would see Job saying over and over again, "My life is just a shadow. I mean, it means nothing. There is no substance to it. And of course there's substance to it. But I mean, it just feels like it means nothing. It's just disintegrating before my eyes".
There's all of that kind of thing. There's the shadow that is scary. There are all the things that we think of. There are shadows that it's... shadows are beautifying. They're terrifying. They're verifying, they're mystifying, typifying, and they can be magnifying. And here's what I want to say that all the "ifyings" are wrapped up in shadows. And when you and I turn a corner, I was having a conversation with someone yesterday and talking about, it was my cousin driving the car, and he was talking about driving when he said, "I only have a couple of miles left before I run out of gas". And I said, "Well, you're not a woman".
Women do not have the luxury of just, like, having one more mile left in their tank. Why? Because we're vulnerable and because we feel like that's in the shadows. Scary, it's frightening. And there's something about shadows so mysterious to us and yet so beautiful that when you look at a scene, I sit out and as often as I'm home, I sit out and watch the sun go down through the trees. We live surrounded by trees in a tiny little place in the woods, and I just can look through all the trees and the beauty of it is in the shadows that the sun is making as it goes through the trees. Now, I want to build six points with you that talk shadows with us, that give us understanding so that we can sort out these two things. And the very first one is this: shadows can't exist apart from light. Oh, I love that point. Somebody go, "Amen".
So whenever you are in a time where you feel like you are really in a shadow, it's like a darkness has been cast over you. Whenever you are in a time like that, you need to know that you cannot be in a shadow that the light is not close by. Because the only way that shadow is happening is that the light is causing it. So on the other side of that shadow, there is the light. And the brighter and more intense the light, then the more intense the shadow. And so you gotta know and I gotta know that it's light that literally creates shadows. And in front of every shadow is the light. The title of our study this weekend is "Shadow and Substance".
And so here's what I want to do with you, with your patience. I want to take a moment. This is one way I really love to study. I want to take a moment and I want to think through the basic elementary science of shadows. So let's just think that we're sitting in a classroom for just a moment in a public school. And what is a shadow and what makes it work? Because sometimes we just think, "Well, I mean, I know what a shadow is". Yes, but how does it work? And what are the elements that go along with it? So let's do a little of that. So that when we get into the less elementary theology of shadow and substance, it will begin to make more sense to us.
So I want to tell you a couple of different things and the first one is this, and these are not things that you need to write down, just facts about shadows. Is that shadows are comprised of three components. So in order to have a shadow, there are three components and those three components are that there's got to be a, what did I just tell you a moment ago? There's got to be a light, and then there's got to be some kind of object, and then there's got to be some kind of surface. So what I've asked my coworkers to do here at Living Proof is just give me a little bit of light so that I can show you what we mean by shadow.
So I've got, if you can see around me, I've got the light behind me, it's gonna be an intense light and I've got me a surface there, and then I'm the object that is between the light and the surface. So you can see the outline of it. I mean, if I turn to the side, you'd go, that's Beth Moore's nose if I have ever seen it in my entire life.
Now, if I did this right here, my husband would love me most of all because I would look most like a deer and he's a deer hunter and you know, because we could do all sorts of things. We could do a snake, we could do talking, we could do ducks, we could do swans, we could do lots of things because all we need to do is even though this is not real, not something that we can touch tangibly, it's coming from something else, we know that if we got a light, it's coming straight at us, and we are between it and the surface, we have what we call a shadow. This is what it takes to make a shadow.
So this becomes the point that we get into with our shadow and substance. To cast a visible shadow, a clear shadow, the object needs to be opaque. Now, tell me some synonyms of the word "opaque". What would that be? Solid, absolutely, solid. So we need something solid that the light is not able to be translucent through or transparent through because that's what's going to cast the shadow, is that which is of substance, that which is opaque, that which is solid.
So I bring up this particular illustration for you to see that here we have a demonstration of the cross, and here we have the shadow of the cross. You've got something that's solid here, that's not transparent, not translucent. And you see its shadow over here. These seem like very elementary things, but they will play into our lesson as we go through it. So three things are necessary: the light and the object and the surface. And the surface really does matter. There's a difference between putting something on a flat surface like this. I chose the surface very, very specifically because it was going to give us the best shadow. If this was, say, for instance, fake fur, it would look totally different. If it was sequins, totally different. We're looking for a surface. When it hits a surface that is nice and flat, then it's going to make a clearer shadow than what we would see otherwise.
Now, here's an interesting thing. Shadows are rarely exact duplicates of the object that is blocking the light. We know that. We know that, because we've seen them before, that something that looks shadowy to us, that can look really scary to us, the way a tree can do at night with the light of the moon, whatever it may be, that which is somehow frightening to us, and we have to turn around and see what is the real thing that is casting the shadow. A shadow can be a disfigurement or maybe that's too strong a word. It can be a variation. It can be a suggestion of without being a complete replica of. And it depends on what angle the light is coming from. That's gonna make a big difference and what the object is and what the surface is going to be that it's projected on.
Now, here are a couple of things that I really love. I love that we find if we think about the sun and that's our best example of something that we all would understand that casts shadows. And I want you to think with me how it works because, of course, the Earth is spinning around, spinning around, spinning around, the sun. Feels like the sun is moving, but no, no, we're moving, we're moving. And so the sun does this wonderful, wonderful thing. Our shadow is going to change with the angle of the light. So say I'm standing out in a field, and then the sun is going to come up. My shadow is gonna be the longest behind me when the sun is the flattest. Does that make sense? Because it's coming up over the horizon.
So if I'm turned this way, and this is east, isn't it? Oh, thank you, God. Thank you, God. That was a word of knowledge that you just saw. Okay, thank you, God. Thank you, God. Okay, so to the east and so that the sun is coming up there, so it casts the longest shadow here. So it's gonna come up, it's gonna come up, it's gonna come up, and the more it comes up, the shorter that shadow is gonna get, and when it's right over my head and it's straight up noon, then the shadow might not even be visible, depending upon the size of my hair. And then it's gonna do a 180 because then it's gonna go the back direction, and it's gonna then cast the shadow this way.
When it sets to the west, it's gonna cast a shadow this way. Now, this is something that the scriptures understood fully. This kind of verbiage is all over it. But I've got you a couple of verses that I want to read to you. Jeremiah 6:4 says this. It references this very phenomenon that I'm talking аbout: 'Woe to us, for the day is passing; the evening shadows grow long.' In other words, the day is almost over. The day is almost over, because the shadow has grown long. Psalm 109:23: "I fade away like a lengthening shadow; I am shaken off like a locust". These are ways that the Psalmist describes what it is like for that lengthening shadow to say you are coming toward the end of your days.