by Jon W. Quinn

I cast a shadow if I were walking down the street and the sun was shining. Its size and shape mimic my own to some degree. It is a lot shorter than I really am at midday. It is a lot taller than I am when the sun is low on the horizon. If you were standing around the corner from me, and the sun was at my back as I was walking toward the corner, you would likely see my shadow before you saw me. But you would not think that the shadow was me. Not in truth. It is just the shadow. The real me (or the true me) is still around the corner.

In this instance, truth is not so much a contrast with something false as it is with something without substance. The shadow has no substance. When Jesus was talking with a Samaritan woman at a well, He used the word "truth" in this way. He contrasted the spiritual shadow of the old with the new spiritual reality that He was bringing to the world.

Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 4:21-24).

Now, Jesus was definitely not saying that the time had finally come to worship God correctly and sincerely. That had always been so. God has never accepted anything less than that. When Jesus said, "But an hour is coming, and now is," He was announcing the arrival of something new, and that new thing, He said, is worshipping God "in spirit and in truth."

The New Testament of Jesus Christ refers to the Law of Moses as a covenant being replaced by His own covenant. Jesus is the mediator of a new covenant (Hebrews 12:24), which makes the old one obsolete (Hebrews 8:13). In fact, the regulations of the Old Covenant served as mere copies, or shadows, of the New Covenant. Using the priesthood as an example, the Scriptures insist that those priests under the Law of Moses "serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things, just as Moses was warned by God when he was about to erect the tabernacle; for, 'See,' He says, 'that you make all things according to the pattern which was shown you on the mountain.' But now He has obtained a more excellent ministry, by as much as He is also the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted on better promises" (Hebrews 8:5-6). Other Scriptures affirm the same thing as well.

"For the Law, since it has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the very form of things, can never, by the same sacrifices which they offer continually year by year, make perfect those who draw near" (Hebrews 10:1).

"Therefore no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day -- things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ" (Colossians 2:16-17).

So, as Jesus was talking to the Samaritan woman, He affirmed that Jerusalem had been the correct place to worship under the Old Law. But now, the hour had arrived when the shadow of the old would give way to the new spiritual reality of His new covenant. It would now be pleasing to God to worship Him in spirit and in truth, and no longer by the shadow. The substance belongs to Christ.

The Old had fulfilled its purpose. It had led us to Christ, but it had only been the shadow of the New. The faithful of the Old Testament had worshiped God in the shadow of Who was coming.

But now Jesus has arrived, the substance that had cast the shadow, so we now worship in spirit and in truth, and no longer in the shadow.