When Paul writes in Colossians 2:16–17, “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 things to come, but the body is of Christ,” many translations miss the weight of his voice. This isn’t a dry doctrinal note—it’s a vocative moment, a proclamation born out of devotion and vision.
Paul is not dismissing the Sabbath or the festivals. He is anchoring them in their true orientation: Messiah. The shadow remains, but the body—the sōma—is here. And that body casts its meaning forward into the Olam Haba, the world to come. That’s why Isaiah 66 speaks of all flesh coming to worship from new moon to new moon, and from Sabbath to Sabbath. Not in a return to tribal liturgy, but in the universal reach of a renewed covenantal cosmos.
The Sabbath is a joy, a delight, a rehearsal—but it is also more than memory. It is prophecy. It gestures toward the age when rest is no longer symbolic but embodied—when the heavens and earth are remade and Sabbath becomes the very rhythm of existence. We must not lose the earthly sign, but neither should we mistake the sign for the substance. To cling only to the form is to risk missing the One who fills it.
Let us, then, honor the Sabbath—not as a nostalgic practice, but as a heavenly invitation breaking into time. Let us keep the festivals—not as boundary markers, but as reminders of a feast that is even now being prepared. And let us not allow judgment to cloud the joy of those who live in the shadow while tasting the fullness.
The wrestling continues, but the limp is holy.
