What is typology in biblical prophecy?

Question 10158.

Biblical typology is the recognition that God built patterns into the earlier stages of redemptive history which anticipate what He would later do in Jesus and in the last things. A type is a real person, event or institution that foreshadows a greater reality still to come.

Handled well it opens up the Old Testament wonderfully. Handled badly it turns Scripture into a puzzle box where the interpreter finds whatever he brought with him, so the discipline matters as much as the delight.

Defining Biblical Typology

The New Testament supplies the vocabulary. Paul says Adam was a typos of the one who was to come, and the Greek word means a stamp or impression, like the mark left by a die. A type is the impression; the antitype is the reality that made it.

Two features distinguish biblical typology from allegory. The first is historicity: the type actually happened. Moses was a real man, the tabernacle stood in a real desert, the lamb really bled. The second is escalation: the fulfilment is always greater than the shadow, never simply equivalent.

Allegory, by contrast, treats the historical sense as a husk to be discarded once the hidden meaning has been extracted. Biblical typology keeps both. Hebrews calls the law a shadow of the good things to come, and a shadow is cast by something solid.

The Major Types

Some types are identified for us in the text itself, which is the safest ground. Jesus said that as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up. He said that as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so would the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth. Paul says plainly that Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed (1 Corinthians 5:7).

Hebrews devotes chapters to Melchizedek, the tabernacle, the priesthood and the sacrificial system as types of the greater priesthood and better covenant. Peter treats the flood as a type of baptism. Adam is a type of Jesus by contrast rather than resemblance, since where one brought death the other brings life.

Beyond the explicitly named types there are patterns that are clear enough without a label: Joseph rejected by his brothers and raised to save them, David the anointed king rejected before he reigned, Boaz the kinsman-redeemer. I would teach those, while being honest that I am reasoning from pattern rather than quoting a verse.

Typology and the Last Things

Where biblical typology touches prophecy is in the recurring shapes that reach their final form at the end. The exodus pattern of deliverance through judgement runs from Egypt through the return from Babylon and on to the final deliverance of Israel in the tribulation. The Passover pattern of a lamb whose blood turns away wrath finds its end in the Lamb standing as though slain.

Babel, the city built to make a name for man, becomes Babylon the great in Revelation and falls in an hour. The garden with its river and tree of life at the beginning becomes the city with its river and tree of life at the end, only now there is no serpent and no curse. Scripture ends where it began, restored and immeasurably enlarged.

See the tree of life in Revelation 22 and Babylon in Revelation for those two threads.

Where Typology Goes Wrong

The abuse is easy to spot once you know the signs. Every detail is pressed into service, so that the colour of every curtain hook in the tabernacle carries a doctrine. Types are invented for which the New Testament gives no warrant. And most seriously, typology becomes the instrument by which promises made to Israel are declared to have been types of the church all along.

That last move is where I dig in. A type points forward to something greater; it does not annul the thing it was. Israel is not a type of the church, because Israel is a nation with covenant promises still outstanding, and Paul says the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. See has the church replaced Israel?

Sound Rules for Reading Types

I work with a short list. Begin with types the New Testament identifies and build outwards cautiously. Preserve the historical reality of the type rather than treating it as a code. Expect escalation, so that the antitype always exceeds the shadow. Look for the central correspondence rather than pressing every incidental detail. And never let a type overturn a plain promise elsewhere.

Those restraints will cost you a few striking pulpit illustrations. They will also keep you from teaching your own imagination as the word of God, which is a trade worth making.

Biblical Typology in the Feasts of Israel

If you want a single passage that displays biblical typology at its most orderly, take the seven feasts of Leviticus 23. They are given as Israel’s calendar, and they turn out to be a timetable.

Passover fell on the day Jesus died. Unleavened Bread speaks of a body that saw no corruption. Firstfruits fell on the day He rose, and Paul calls Him the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. Pentecost came fifty days later, and the Spirit was given on that very morning. Four spring feasts, four fulfilments, each on the day itself.

Then the calendar goes quiet for months before the autumn feasts: Trumpets, Atonement and Tabernacles. I take those as still awaiting their fulfilment in the gathering of God’s people, the national repentance of Israel and the dwelling of God with His people in the millennial reign. When biblical typology is that precise about the first four, I am not inclined to spiritualise the last three.

Biblical Typology and the Tabernacle

The tabernacle is the other great worked example, and Hebrews does most of the work for us so that we do not have to invent it.

Moses was told to make everything according to the pattern shown him on the mountain, which Hebrews calls a copy and shadow of the heavenly things (Hebrews 8:5). The single door, the altar of sacrifice before anything else, the laver for washing, the bread, the light, the incense of prayer, and the veil barring the way into the holiest place until it was torn from top to bottom.

I would teach every one of those, because the New Testament licenses them. What I would not do is assign meanings to the number of loops on a curtain or the shade of every dye. Biblical typology is at its strongest on the central lines and at its weakest when it starts counting pegs. Restraint here is not a lack of imagination; it is respect for a text that has enough riches without our additions.

See temple sacrifices after the cross for how the shadow and the substance relate once the substance has arrived.

Types and the Confidence of Faith

There is a cumulative effect to all this that I have found does more for wavering believers than any single argument.

Take one person who doubts the Bible and walk them slowly through the Passover lamb, the bronze serpent, the scapegoat, the kinsman-redeemer and the day of atonement. Do it without hurry. Somewhere in the middle of it the penny usually drops, and the question shifts from whether these connections are real to how on earth they got there.

Fifteen hundred years, dozens of writers, several languages, three continents, and a consistency of pattern that no committee could have arranged. That is not the kind of coherence a national literature develops by accident.

So types are not only for preaching. They are quietly one of the strongest arguments for the divine authorship of Scripture, and they are available to any believer willing to read the Old Testament attentively.

Where to Begin

If this is new territory, start where the New Testament starts rather than in the deep water.

Read Hebrews with an open Old Testament beside you. The writer works through Melchizedek, the priesthood, the tabernacle, the covenant and the sacrifices, and he shows his working at every stage. By the end you will have watched a first century believer read the Old Testament properly, which is the best training available.

Then read Luke 24, where the risen Jesus opens the Scriptures to two men on a road and interprets in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself. That is the pattern, and it came from the Lord before it came from anybody else.

So, now what?

The best use of biblical typology is worship rather than cleverness. When you see the ram caught in the thicket on Mount Moriah, or the scarlet cord in Rahab’s window, or the bronze serpent lifted on a pole, you are watching God patiently teaching His people the shape of the cross centuries before it happened.

That should do something to your confidence in Scripture. A book assembled over fifteen hundred years by dozens of writers who never met does not develop that kind of coherence by accident.

So read the Old Testament expecting to meet Jesus, and read it carefully enough that it is really Him you meet and not your own inventiveness. Where did you last see a shadow of Him that you had walked past a dozen times before?

These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.

Colossians 2:17 (ESV)