St. John Chrysostom: The Law a Shadow

I thought this was one of the most beautiful ways I have heard this expressed:

“For” (he says) “the Law having a shadow of the good things to come, not the very image of the things”; i.e. not the very reality. For as in painting, so long as one [only] draws the outlines, it is a sort of “shadow” but when one has added the bright paints and laid in the colors, then it becomes “an image.” Something of this kind also was the Law.  (Homilies on the Epistle to the Hebrews 17.5)

Again, credit CCEL.