07 - The Shadow and the Substance

As we have seen, the old – the Mosaic – covenant was always intended by God to be temporary, to last until the work of Christ, who came into the world in order to fulfil it and thus render it obsolete by bringing in a new and very different covenant. Again, as we have seen, while God made his intention of all this known through Jeremiah (Jer. 31:31-34), it fell to the writer of the letter to the Hebrews to give us the fullest interpretation of this prophecy (Heb. 7:11-12,1-19,22; 8:6-13). Paul, of course, also spoke of it (Gal. 3:15 – 4:7).1 Indeed, within his promise of the Spirit to guide the apostles into all the truth (John 16:12-15,25) – all the truth they could not understand before the resurrection – Christ had indicated that in that complete revelation the language of shadow, picture and figure, which he himself had used, would be replaced by plain instruction: