In Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave, the philosopher describes a world where people live in a cave, viewing the entire world by the shadows that dance in front of them. The shadows are projected from the world behind them, but they think that the shadows are the “real” world—they give names to them, and they live as if this is reality. Eventually, the prisoners break free and enter the real world, discovering that everything they were watching was but a distortion of the real thing. The allegory has prompted philosophical discussions about the nature of reality for centuries, and we see in the New Testament of the Bible how the ‘reality’ of Christ is much greater than the ‘shadow’ of the law we see in the Old Testament. While the law was merely a small trace of the real, embodied reality of Christ’s ultimate sacrifice, it still pointed to the ultimate reality that became real to us.
