Does Colossians 2 Abolish the Sabbath?

Leviticus 23 lists the weekly Sabbath and then the annual feast sabbaths — Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, the first and last days of Unleavened Bread and of Tabernacles — and then distinguishes them: "These are the feasts of the LORD... beside the sabbaths of the LORD" (Leviticus 23:37–38). The annual sabbaths were tied to the sanctuary calendar, fell on varying weekdays, and were full of sacrificial symbolism pointing to Christ. The weekly Sabbath belonged to the Ten Commandments and pointed back to creation.

Paul says the things blotted out were "the handwriting of ordinances that was against us" (Colossians 2:14) and that the feast days, new moons and sabbath days "are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ" (Colossians 2:17). A shadow prefigures a future reality — exactly what the sacrificial feast calendar did, meeting its fulfillment at the cross. The seventh-day Sabbath prefigures nothing; it commemorates a finished creation (Genesis 2:2–3) and, in Isaiah's picture, continues into the new earth (Isaiah 66:22–23).

Colossae faced a mix of asceticism, angel worship and festival-keeping that Paul calls "the rudiments of the world" (Colossians 2:8, 20–22). His counsel is: don't let anyone judge you over these ceremonial observances now that Christ has come. Nothing in the chapter addresses the fourth commandment, and the word "Sabbath" in verse 16 is plural — sabbath days, the annual ones of the festival calendar.