Commentary on Hebrews and the Catholic Epistles John Calvin (continued)
Chapter
Heb 10:1-4
Hebrews Chapter 10:1-4
1. 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.
1. Umbram enim habens lex futurorum bonorum, non ipsam vivam imaginem rerum, sacrificiis quae quotannis eadem continenter offeruntur nunquam potest eos qui accedunt perficere (vel, sanctificare.)
2. For then would they not have ceased to be offered? because that the worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins.
2. Alioqui annon desiisent offeri? propterea quod nullam amplius conscientiam peccatorum haberent cultores semel purgati.
3. But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again made of sins every year.
3. Atqui in his fit quotannis commemoratio peccatorum. 4. For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins.
4. Impossible enim est ut sanguis taurorum tollat peccata. 1. For the Law having a shadow, etc. He has borrowed this similitude from the pictorial art; for a shadow here is in a sense different from what it has in Colossians 2:17; where he calls the ancient rites or ceremonies shadows, because they did not possess the real substance of what they represented. But he now says that they were like rude lineaments, which shadow forth the perfect picture; for painters, before they introduce the living colors by the pencil, are wont to mark out the outlines of what they intend to represent. This indistinct representation is called by the Greeks {σκιαγραφία}, which you might call in Latin, ``umbratilem``, shadowy. The Greeks had also the {εἰκὼν}, the full likeness. Hence also ``eiconia'' are called images (imagines) in Latin, which represent to the life the form of men or of animals or of places.
The difference then which the Apostle makes between the Law and the Gospel is this, --- that under the Law was shadowed forth only in rude and imperfect lines what is under the Gospel set forth in living colors and graphically distinct. He thus confirms again what he had previously said, that the Law was not useless, nor its ceremonies unprofitable. For though there was not in them the image of heavenly things, finished, as they say, by the last touch