Which are a shadow of the things to come, but the body is of Christ (Galatians 3:23-25; Galatians 4:4; 2 Corinthians 3:11, 2 Corinthians 3:13; Hebrews 7:18, Hebrews 7:19; Hebrews 9:11-14; Hebrews 10:1-4).
The apostle's opponents, we imagine, taught in Platonic fashion that these things were shadows of ideal truth and of the invisible world (comp. Heb8:5), forms necessary to our apprehension of spiritual things.
With St. Paul, they shadow forth prophetically the concrete facts of the Christian revelation, and therefore are displaced by its advent. The singular verb (literally, is) quite grammatically combines the particulars of Colossians 2:16 under their common idea of a foreshadowing of the things of Christ; and the present tense affirms here a general truth, not a mere historical fact.
How this was true of the "sabbath," e.g., appears in Hebrews 4:1-11; comp. 1 Corinthians 5:6-8; John 19:36, for the Christian import of the Passover feast. The figurative antithesis of "shadow" and "body" is sufficiently obvious; it occurs in Philo and in Josephus: to refer to John 19:19 and Colossians 1:18 for the sense of body, is misleading.
For "the things to come" (the things of Christ and of the new, Christian era, now commencing), comp. Romans 4:24; Romans 5:14; Galatians 3:23; Hebrews 2:5; Hebrews 10:1. This substance of the new, abiding revelation (2 Corinthians 3:11) is "Christ's," inasmuch as it centres in and is pervaded and governed by Christ (Colossians 1:18; Colossians 3:11; Romans 10:4; 2 Corinthians 3:14).
Nothing is said here to discountenance positive Christian institutions, or the observance of the Lord's day in particular, unless enforced in a Judaistic spirit. The apostle is protecting Gentile Christians from the re-imposition of Jewish institutions as such, as impairing their faith in Christ (comp.
Galatians 5:2-9), and as, in the case of the Colossians, involving a deference to the authority of angels which limited his sovereignty and sufficiency (verses 8-10, 18, 19). This verse contains in germ much of the thought of the Epistle to the Hebrews.