Devotional 97: The Judicial Law: Expired with the State of Israel

The Confession Read

Besides this law, commonly called moral, God was pleased to give to the people of Israel, as a church under age, ceremonial laws, containing several typical ordinances, partly of worship, prefiguring Christ, His graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits; and partly, holding forth divers instructions of moral duties. All which ceremonial laws are now abrogated, under the new testament.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 19, Section 3

Introduction

Imagine the tabernacle at the hour of the evening sacrifice. The bronze altar smokes with the flesh of the burnt offering. A priest in blood-spotted linen crosses the court, bearing a golden censer heavy with incense compounded according to the exact prescription of Exodus 30. Beyond the first veil, the seven lamps of the golden candlestick cast their flickering light across the table of showbread, upon which twelve loaves, one for each tribe, have been set in orderly rows. And behind the second veil, the inner veil woven with cherubim, lies a cube of darkness and silence and unbearable holiness into which only one man, on only one day of the year, may enter — and never without blood. The whole edifice hums with a regulated, rhythmic, almost liturgical life. Morning and evening, week after week, year after year, the round of sacrifice and offering, of washing and anointing, of feast and fast, continues without interruption. And then, upon a Friday afternoon outside the walls of Jerusalem, the Lamb of God bows His head and gives up the ghost. At that same hour, in the temple a mile to the east, the veil of the Holy of Holies is torn from top to bottom by an invisible hand. The barrier between the holy place and the most holy place, which for fifteen centuries had proclaimed that the way into the presence of God was not yet open, is ripped apart as though it were so much worn linen. The entire system of ceremonial worship, with all its regulations and distinctions, is rendered obsolete in a single afternoon. What God Himself had instituted with minute precision on the summit of Sinai, He now, with equal sovereignty, consigns to the museum of redemptive history. This is the great transaction that the third section of the nineteenth chapter addresses, and it addresses it with the quiet confidence of men who have understood that the passing away of the ceremonial law is not a problem for Reformed theology but one of its deepest confirmations. The law that was added because of transgressions, the law that served as a schoolmaster to bring Israel to Christ, the law that was never intended to be permanent — this law has accomplished its purpose and has been honorably retired. And the manner of its retirement, far from undermining confidence in Scripture, establishes it, for the abrogation of the ceremonial law was itself prophesied in the very Scriptures that the ceremonial law comprised.

Scripture Foundation

The apostolic proof that the ceremonial law was always temporary rests upon a single word that Paul deploys with devastating theological precision in his letter to the Colossians. Addressing a congregation troubled by teachers who insisted that Gentile believers must observe the dietary regulations, the festival calendar, and the sabbath ordinances of the Mosaic law, Paul sweeps aside the entire system of ceremonial observance with a sentence whose brevity conceals its profundity: "Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ" (Colossians 2:16-17). The Greek noun skia, "shadow," is chosen with an almost architectural precision. A shadow is not a substance. It has no independent existence; it is cast by something else, and it exists only as long as that something else remains present to cast it. But a shadow, for all its insubstantiality, has a real relation to the body that casts it. It indicates the outline, the contour, the general shape of the reality that stands behind it. A man who sees the shadow of his friend approaching does not mistake the shadow for his friend, but he recognises in it the indication that the friend is near — and when the friend appears, he turns from the shadow to embrace the substance. This is precisely the argument that the apostle makes. The dietary laws, the festival calendar, the new moons, the sabbath days — the whole apparatus of ceremonial observance — were never more than shadows. But they were divinely cast shadows. They sketched in advance the outline of the Christ who was to come: His priesthood after the order of Melchizedek, His once-for-all sacrifice, His entrance into the heavenly sanctuary, His cleansing of a conscience that the blood of bulls and goats could never reach. Now that Christ has come, to continue to observe the ceremonies is to behave as though the shadow were still the only thing visible — as though the substance had not yet arrived. It is to insult the incarnation by living as though the Christ whom every altar prefigured had never been born. The author of the epistle to the Hebrews develops the same argument with a different vocabulary but an identical logic. "For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect" (Hebrews 10:1). Here the Greek skia is joined, by way of contrast, with eikōn, "image," a term that in the usage of the Hellenistic world denoted the authentic representation of the original, the thing itself made present in its true form. The law possessed the shadow; the gospel possesses the image. And the writer draws the inescapable conclusion: if the old covenant sacrifices had been capable of doing what they symbolised, they would have ceased to be offered. That they were offered continually, morning and evening, year after year, was itself the proof of their impotence. The very repetition of the ceremonial system testified to its provisional character, for a sacrifice that must be endlessly repeated is a sacrifice that has never truly accomplished its purpose. The apostle Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, supplies the historical logic that undergirds both the Colossian and Hebrews texts. "Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world: but when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons" (Galatians 4:3-5). The Greek stoicheia, rendered "elements" in the Authorised Version, carries a range of meanings: the basic principles of a discipline, the ABCs of an education, the rudimentary forms that belong to the childhood of a learner. Paul's argument is developmental. The ceremonial law was the curriculum of the church's childhood, a curriculum adapted to the spiritual immaturity of God's people before the incarnation. It taught by pictures and gestures, by tangible rituals that the senses could apprehend, because the church was not yet ready for the full revelation of the Son. But to return to the stoicheia after the Son has come is not piety but regression. It is the grown man insisting upon returning to the nursery, the university graduate demanding to be reseated in the kindergarten classroom. The ceremonies were good — divinely good. But they were good for a season that has now passed, and to cling to them after their season has expired is to deny that the fulness of time has truly arrived. One further passage must be added to this foundation, for it demonstrates that the abrogation of the ceremonial law was the declared purpose of the old covenant itself. The prophet Jeremiah, speaking of the new covenant, declared that the law would be written on the heart and sins remembered no more. The author of Hebrews, citing this very prophecy, draws the conclusion with a quiet finality: "In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away" (Hebrews 8:13). The verb palaiō means to make old, to declare obsolete, to consign to the category of things that have served their purpose and are no longer in force. The old covenant did not merely fade from relevance as history advanced. It was declared obsolete by the very God who instituted it, and the declaration was made in the very Scriptures that the old covenant itself contained. The ceremonial law carried, woven into its own fabric, the prophecy of its own dissolution. And then there is the veil. When our Lord cried out with a loud voice and yielded up His spirit, "behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom" (Matthew 27:51). The passive voice — "was rent" — is a divine passive. No human hand touched that veil. It was a fabric so thick that no human strength could tear it. And yet it was torn, from top to bottom, as though heaven itself had reached down and ripped it apart. The veil was the ceremonial law in its most concentrated form: the barrier that said, "Thus far and no farther." The tearing of the veil was the ceremonial law's public abrogation, enacted not in a theological treatise but in the very sanctuary where the ceremonies had been performed for fifteen centuries. The rent veil declared, more eloquently than any sermon, that the way into the holiest was now open, that the blood of bulls and goats was no longer required, and that every believer, by virtue of union with the great High Priest who had passed through the heavens, now had boldness to enter into the presence of God.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Divines addressed the ceremonial law in this third section, they were steering the church between two errors that had produced immense pastoral damage in the century that lay behind them. On one side stood the Church of Rome, which had reconstituted much of the ceremonial apparatus under a Christian vocabulary: a sacrificing priesthood, an altar rather than a table, a calendar of holy days, a distinction between clergy and laity that mirrored the old covenant distinction between priests and ordinary Israelites, a system of penance that offered a new round of satisfactions for post-baptismal sin. On the other side stood the radical wing of the Anabaptist movement and, more recently, certain enthusiasts within England itself, who argued that because the ceremonial law was abolished, the church was bound by no outward forms whatsoever. If the ceremonies had passed away, the argument ran, so had all external ordinances: no set liturgy, no fixed order of worship, no sacraments administered by ordained ministers — only the inward leading of the Spirit, unconstrained by any outward form. Against both errors the Divines deploy a section of remarkable economy, and every phrase is chosen to do a particular theological work. "Besides this law, commonly called moral" — the opening phrase establishes continuity with the preceding section. The Divines have just declared that the moral law, summarised in the Decalogue, continues as a perfect rule of righteousness. Now they add that there was an additional body of legislation, supplementary to the Decalogue and distinct in its nature and purpose. The ceremonial law is "beside" the moral law, not an extension of it, not a detailed application of it, but a separate category of divine legislation with its own rationale and its own terminus. "God was pleased to give to the people of Israel, as a church under age" — here the Divines introduce what the Reformed tradition has always regarded as the controlling metaphor for understanding the ceremonial law. Israel was the church in its infancy. The language of "under age," drawn directly from Paul's argument in Galatians, establishes both the dignity and the immaturity of the old covenant people. They were the church, the called-out assembly of God, the objects of His electing love and the beneficiaries of His covenant faithfulness. But they were the church in its minority, not yet come into the full possession of its inheritance, governed by tutors and governors until the time appointed of the Father. The ceremonies were not a burden imposed upon an alien people; they were the curriculum of a Father who was educating His children according to their capacity. The child who learns the alphabet is not being punished; he is being prepared for reading. So the ceremonies were the alphabet of grace, the shapes and forms by which the infant church was taught to recognise the Redeemer who was to come. "Containing several typical ordinances, partly of worship, prefiguring Christ, His graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits" — the word "typical" is the theological hinge upon which the whole section turns. A type, from the Greek typos, is a divinely designed prefiguration: a person, institution, event, or ordinance that, by God's sovereign arrangement, foreshadows a corresponding reality in the new covenant. The relationship between type and antitype is not arbitrary. It is established by the same divine mind that ordained both the shadow and the substance. The Divines identify the comprehensive range of what the ceremonies prefigured: not only Christ Himself, but His graces, His actions, His sufferings, and His benefits. The high priest vested in linen and entering the Holy of Holies with blood not his own prefigured the great High Priest who, by His own blood, entered the heavenly sanctuary once for all. The scapegoat upon whose head the sins of the people were confessed and which was led away into a land not inhabited prefigured the One upon whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all. "And partly, holding forth divers instructions of moral duties" — here the Divines acknowledge a second function of the ceremonial law that is often overlooked. Not every aspect of the ceremonies was strictly typological. Some provisions were designed to teach moral and spiritual truths through the very forms that the worshipper was required to observe. The prohibition of leaven during the Feast of Unleavened Bread taught that the worship of God requires purity and sincerity. The requirement that the priests wash at the bronze laver taught that those who draw near to God must be cleansed. The ceremonial law was a pedagogy that reached the understanding through the senses, and even when a particular ordinance was not directly typological of Christ, it was never without spiritual profit. The ceremonies were not empty forms awaiting the substance that would give them meaning. They were themselves vehicles of divine instruction, shadows that, for all their insubstantiality, taught real truths to those who observed them with the eyes of faith. "All which ceremonial laws are now abrogated, under the new testament" — the conclusion is as decisive as a door closing. "Abrogated" is the strongest available term for the cessation of legal obligation. It means annulled, repealed, rendered void, stripped of all binding force. The ceremonies have not merely fallen into disuse through neglect or been rendered impracticable by the destruction of the temple. They have been positively abolished by the same divine authority that instituted them. The veil was torn. The old covenant was made old. The shadow gave way to the substance. And the church that continues to observe ceremonies that God has abrogated is not displaying a deeper piety but a defective understanding of the finished work of Christ. The Divines' use of "under the new testament" rather than "under the gospel" is also worth noting. "Testament" is the English rendering of the Greek diathēkē, which can mean both "covenant" and "testament" or "will," and the Divines choose the term deliberately. The ceremonial law belonged to the old covenant administration, the old testament. The new testament, sealed in the blood of Christ, has brought a new administration in which the shadows are no longer needed because the substance Himself is present. To reintroduce the ceremonies under the new testament is to confuse the two administrations, to behave as though the testamentary disposition of the old covenant were still in force when the testator Himself has declared it superseded.

Theological Depth

No theologian of the Reformed tradition has expounded the theology of the ceremonial law with greater penetration than John Owen, whose massive commentary on the epistle to the Hebrews remains, three centuries after its publication, the most comprehensive treatment of the subject in the English language. Owen's controlling insight is that the ceremonial law was not merely abrogated by Christ but fulfilled by Him, and that the manner of its fulfilment is the key to understanding both the dignity of the old covenant and the superiority of the new. The ceremonies were not errors that Christ corrected or inadequacies that He supplemented. They were divine institutions that He completed, shadows that He filled with substance, sketches that He coloured in with the full palette of incarnate reality. Owen draws particular attention to the language of Hebrews 9, where the writer describes the old covenant sanctuary as a "figure for the time then present" (Hebrews 9:9). The Greek word is parabolē, a parable. The tabernacle and all its furniture, the altar and the laver and the candlestick and the table and the ark and the mercy seat, constituted a parable enacted in gold and acacia wood and fine twined linen — a narrative told not in words but in spaces and objects and ritual actions. A parable is a story that points beyond itself to a reality that cannot be directly apprehended, and the tabernacle was the greatest parable ever constructed. Every detail of its architecture, every article of its furniture, every prescribed movement of its priesthood, was directed toward the Christ who was to come. The outer court, accessible to all Israelites, taught that God may be approached, but only through sacrifice. The holy place, accessible only to the priests, taught that approach to God requires mediation. The most holy place, accessible only to the high priest and only once a year, taught that full access to the presence of God awaited a greater priest and a better sacrifice. The whole structure was a sermon in three dimensions, and Owen insists that the sermon has not lost its power simply because the sermon's subject has appeared. The tabernacle is still instructive — not as a pattern for Christian worship, but as the most elaborate and detailed prophecy of Christ that the old covenant contains. Herman Bavinck, writing from within the Dutch Reformed tradition, brings to the question the synthetic power that marks all his theological work. The ceremonial law, he argues, must be understood within the larger framework of God's accommodation to human weakness. The Reformed tradition has always insisted that God, in revealing Himself, stoops to the capacity of the creature — not by diluting the truth, but by clothing it in forms that the creature can receive. The ceremonies were an accommodation of this kind, adapted to the spiritual immaturity of the church in its infancy. And Bavinck notes that the accommodation was progressive: the ceremonies of the tabernacle were simpler than those of the temple, and the prophetic critique of empty ceremonialism grew more pointed as the exile approached, until finally Jeremiah spoke of a new covenant in which the law would be written not on stone but on the heart. The whole history of the ceremonial law was a movement toward its own dissolution, a pedagogy designed to create a longing for the reality that the ceremonies could only foreshadow. And when the reality appeared, the pedagogy was complete. The ceremonies had done their work, and they were laid aside, not as worthless but as having been worth everything for their season — as the scaffolding is dismantled not because it was useless but because the building it was raised to construct is now standing. Thomas Boston, the Scottish divine whose notes on the Marrow of Modern Divinity have nourished generations of Reformed Christians, brings the doctrine of the ceremonial law to bear upon the believer's assurance with a pastoral warmth that is characteristically his own. The believer who struggles with a sense of his own unworthiness to draw near to God, Boston observes, is in the position of an Israelite standing in the outer court of the tabernacle who has forgotten that the veil has been torn. The ceremonial law, by its very existence, proclaimed that access to God was restricted, mediated, hedged about with conditions that the sinner could not meet on his own. The abrogation of the ceremonial law proclaims the opposite: that in Christ, the way into the holiest is open, and that every believer, whatever the weakness of his faith or the lingering corruption of his heart, has liberty to enter. The conscience that is still living under the old covenant, still feeling that something more must be done, some further purification must be undergone, some additional satisfaction must be rendered before God can be approached with confidence, is a conscience that has not yet grasped the full import of the rent veil. Boston's application is as pointed as it is comforting: the ceremonial law is abrogated not only in its outward observances but in its inward echo — the sense that the sinner must supplement Christ's work with his own, that he must add his tears to Christ's blood, his repentance to Christ's satisfaction, his obedience to Christ's righteousness. The ceremonies are gone, and with them must go every instinct of the heart that would reconstitute them under a new name. Robert Shaw, in his exposition of the Confession, draws attention to an aspect of the Divines' language that is easily overlooked. They do not say merely that the ceremonial laws have ceased. They say they are "abrogated, under the new testament." The passive voice conceals a divine act. The abrogation is not the result of historical accident, of the destruction of the temple by the Romans, of the mere impossibility of performing ceremonies that required a sanctuary that no longer existed. It is the positive act of God, who, by inspiring the authors of the New Testament to declare that the ceremonies were shadows whose substance had arrived and that the old covenant had been made old, Himself repealed what He Himself had instituted. The same authority that said to Moses, "See that thou make all things according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount," now says through the apostles, "Let no man judge you in respect of a holy day." No human power could abrogate what God had commanded. Only God could abrogate what God had commanded, and He has done so, in the clearest possible terms, in the inspired Scriptures of the new testament.

Puritan Application

First, learn to read the Old Testament ceremonies as the divinely designed picture-book of your salvation. Every Christian knows, in a general way, that the sacrifices and festivals and purifications of the old covenant point to Christ. But few Christians have taken the time to read Leviticus with the epistle to the Hebrews open beside them, tracing the correspondences that the apostolic authors themselves trace and discovering, in the process, a depth of meaning in the old covenant that transforms it from a bewildering catalogue of ancient rituals into a treasury of gospel instruction. The Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16), in which the high priest entered the Holy of Holies with the blood of a bull and a goat, in which the sins of the people were confessed over the head of a second goat that was led away into the wilderness, in which the sanctuary itself was cleansed from the defilement of a year's accumulated transgressions, is a gospel sermon preached in ritual form fifteen centuries before the events it proclaims. The two goats teach the two aspects of Christ's atoning work: the one slain, whose blood satisfies divine justice, and the one sent away, bearing the sins of the people into a land of forgetfulness. The high priest stripping off his glorious vestments and entering the most holy place in simple linen teaches the humiliation of the Son of God, who emptied Himself and took the form of a servant. Sit down with Leviticus and Hebrews, and let the Spirit who inspired both books open your eyes to the correspondences that He has woven into the texture of redemptive history. You will find that the ceremonies, far from being a dead letter, are alive with the gospel they were designed to foreshadow. Second, because the ceremonial law is abrogated, refuse every attempt to reintroduce it under a Christian name. The error of Rome, which the Reformers recognised with a clarity that the modern church has largely lost, was not only that it added human traditions to the Word of God but that it reconstituted the ceremonial law under a new vocabulary. The mass, understood as a propitiatory sacrifice rather than a commemorative feast, reintroduces the idea that something more than Christ's once-for-all offering is required to satisfy divine justice. The priesthood, understood as a distinct class of men who offer sacrifice on behalf of the laity, reintroduces the barrier between God and His people that the rent veil has removed. The calendar of holy days, when it is invested with an obligation that binds the conscience, reintroduces the distinction of days that Paul declares to belong to the shadows that have passed away. The believer who has understood the abrogation of the ceremonial law will not be seduced by the aesthetic appeal of an elaborate liturgy or the historical prestige of an ancient institution. He will measure every practice by a single question, the question that the epistle to the Hebrews answers on every page: does this practice acknowledge that the substance has come, or does it behave as though the shadow were still the best we have? Third, do not let the abrogation of the ceremonies become, in your own heart, a contempt for the old covenant Scriptures in which they are recorded. The same apostle who declares the ceremonies to be shadows that have passed away also declares that "whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope" (Romans 15:4). The abrogation of the ceremonial law does not make the books that record it obsolete. It makes them intelligible. Leviticus, understood as a typological manual of the atonement, is one of the richest books in the canon, and the Christian who neglects it because he has been taught that the ceremonies are abrogated is like a man who refuses to study a map of a country he has already visited because he no longer needs the map for navigation. The map is still instructive. It shows, more clearly than a firsthand tour could show, the relationships between the different regions, the routes that connect them, and the overall shape of the territory. So the ceremonial law, though it no longer binds the conscience of the new covenant believer, illuminates the work of Christ in a way that no merely abstract statement of doctrine can match. Read the old covenant not as law but as gospel — as the gospel in the form of shadow, to be sure, but as shadow so faithfully cast that, now that the substance stands before you, you recognise in the shadow the exact outline of the One you love. Fourth, let the language of the Confession — "a church under age" — inform the patience with which you disciple new believers and teach your children. The ceremonies were the curriculum of the church's childhood, adapted to the capacity of those who could not yet receive the full revelation of the Son. The principle is transferable, even though the ceremonies themselves are not. In every congregation, in every Christian home, there are souls at varying stages of spiritual maturity, and the wise teacher does not present the deepest mysteries of the faith to those who have not yet mastered the alphabet of grace. Our Lord Himself observed this principle: "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now" (John 16:12). The fullness of revelation awaited the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost, not because Christ was reluctant to teach but because the disciples were not yet able to receive what He had to teach. And in the ordinary life of the church, the same principle holds. The new convert who is still learning to distinguish justification from sanctification does not need a lecture on the hypostatic union. The child who has just begun to memorise the Ten Commandments does not need an exposition of the decree of reprobation. Wisdom builds the house of knowledge stone by stone, beginning with the foundation and rising, at a pace adapted to the learner, toward the pinnacle. The ceremonial law was the church's childhood curriculum, and the fact that the church has now reached its majority in Christ does not mean it has outgrown the principle of progressive instruction. It means only that the particular forms of instruction have changed, and the wise pastor or parent will adapt his teaching to the capacity of those he teaches, just as God adapted the ceremonies to the capacity of the infant church. Fifth, let the abrogation of the ceremonial law be the ground of your boldness in approaching the throne of grace. The writer to the Hebrews draws this conclusion explicitly, and every believer ought to draw it daily: "Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh; and having an high priest over the house of God; let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water" (Hebrews 10:19-22). The whole apparatus of the ceremonial law, the altars and the lavers, the distinctions between clean and unclean, the veils and the barriers, the calendrical round of sacrifice and purification, the entire elaborate machinery of approach to God — all of it has been swept aside by the flesh of Christ and the blood of Christ and the priesthood of Christ. To hesitate on the threshold of the holy place, to wonder whether you are sufficiently prepared to enter, to rehearse your unworthiness as though it were an obstacle that Christ's blood has not removed, is to live as though the veil were still intact and the sacrifices were still being offered. The ceremonies are abrogated. Draw near. The way is open. The blood has been shed once for all. The high priest has sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, and His sitting is the proof that His work is finished. Come boldly, not with the boldness of presumption but with the boldness of faith, the faith that takes God at His word when He declares that the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses from all sin. The ceremonial law taught the distance between God and the sinner. Its abrogation teaches the nearness that Christ has purchased. Live in the nearness.

Prayer

O Lord God, whose wisdom ordained the shadows and whose grace has supplied the substance, we bow before Thee with gratitude too deep for words. Thou didst not leave Thy infant church to wander in darkness, guessing at the shape of the redemption that was to come. Thou didst paint the portrait of Thy Son in the colours of altar and sacrifice, of priesthood and purification, of festival and fast, so that when He appeared, the faithful might recognise in His face the features that the ceremonies had sketched across fifteen centuries of worship. We bless Thee that the shadows have given way to the substance, that the veil has been torn from top to bottom, that the blood of bulls and goats has been superseded by the blood of the Lamb without blemish and without spot. We bless Thee that the way into the holiest is open, that we who were once far off have been brought nigh by the blood of Christ, and that we may now draw near with boldness to the throne of grace, there to obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need. Forgive us, O Lord, for the sluggishness of our hearts, which so often live as though the veil were still intact, which so often approach Thee with the diffidence of those who do not know whether the sacrifice has been accepted and the priest has returned from the sanctuary. Forgive us for the unbelief that looks for something more than Christ's finished work, some supplement of our own devising, some ceremony or discipline or feeling that will render us more acceptable in Thy sight. Teach us, by Thy Spirit, to rest in the fullness of what Christ has accomplished, to believe that His sacrifice is sufficient, His priesthood is effectual, and His intercession is unfailing. Grant us wisdom to distinguish between the shadow and the substance in every area of our Christian lives. Preserve us from the error of those who would rebuild what Thou hast torn down, who would reintroduce the ceremonies that Thou hast abrogated, who would place again upon the consciences of Thy people a yoke that neither we nor our fathers were able to bear. And preserve us equally from the error of those who, because the ceremonies have passed away, despise the Scriptures in which they are recorded and neglect the instruction that the shadows still afford. Make us students of the whole counsel of God, who find Christ not only in the gospels and the epistles but in the law and the prophets and the psalms, who see His outline in every type and His voice in every prophecy, and who love the Old Testament Scriptures not as a dead letter but as a living witness to the Christ who was to come, who has come, and who will come again. And when the shadows of this present age themselves have fled away, and we see no longer through a glass darkly but face to face, grant that we may enter the sanctuary not made with hands, the true tabernacle which the Lord pitched and not man, and there behold the Lamb upon the throne, the substance of every shadow, the reality of every type, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.