Christ In The Shadows

Christ In The Shadows

By Apostle Felix

18  But the Jewish religious leaders challenged Jesus, “What authorization do you have to do this sort of thing? If God gave you this kind of authority, what supernatural sign will you show us to prove it?”
19  Jesus answered, “After you’ve destroyed this temple, I will raise it up again in three days.”
20  Then the Jewish leaders sneered, “This temple took forty-six years to build, and you mean to tell us that you will raise it up in three days?”
21  But they didn’t understand that Jesus was speaking of the “temple” of his body.
22  But the disciples remembered his prophecy after Jesus rose from the dead, and believed both the Scripture and what Jesus had said.

John 2: 18 – 22

Christ in the shadows, though with all the potential to save to the uttermost, is unable to save. Jesus was rejected in His home town of Nazareth and they naturalized and refused to acknowledge that He was the Christ, therefore He was unable to heal their sick, but a few. He could not heal the sick because the people had shadowed the revelation of Christ under the natural knowledge they had of Christ. It was the natural knowledge of Jesus they had that had limited their faith to receive from Him.

16  So then, from now on, we have a new perspective that refuses to evaluate people merely by their outward appearances. For that’s how we once viewed the Anointed One, but no longer do we see him with limited human insight.

2 Corinthians 5: 16

The outward appearance can oftentimes veil who the person is. So many folks judge people by mere physical appearances, and make conclusions. So many people have missed opportunities of a life time because they misjudged a person by his appearance. The physical appearance can be regarded as a shadow. It is a house in which the real substance lives. Jesus was not an handsome man as portrayed in Hollywood. He was just an ordinary looking man from the village.

2  For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.
3  He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. 

Isaiah 53: 2, 3

Christ was in the shadows. The Almighty God decided to lower Himself to such an extent that His own creation despised and rejected Him. He hid Himself in a frail body that was subject to death and humiliation. This is the Creator of all things subjecting Himself to His own creation.

Jesus was hidden in the shadows in the Old Testament. He was hidden in the Jewish feasts and sacrifices. The feasts and the sacrifices had no power to save anybody. The sacrifices were repeated every year, and animals had to be killed each year for a temporal remission of sin. The annual sacrifices were a shadow of the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. The Tabernacle and all the rituals which were conducted there all had one meaning – Jesus ‘s death and resurrection. God had asked Moses to build a Tabernacle that housed the presence of God because God could not live in a sinful man. The tabernacle and the sacrifices were a shadow of the coming Jesus.

Jesus was born as man under the system of shadows. He was circumcised on the eighth day according to the law. He came to fulfill the law through the His death and resurrection, so that you and me can have life. His body, referring to the shadow, was destroyed so that the substance could be revealed. The old had to be done away with for the new to be revealed. Thank God that He died and on the third day he rose from the dead.