Typology

Posted by Pastor Beatty (user1) on Oct 20 2007 at 4:41 PM

I suppose I'm so used to a typological reading of Scripture that I just assume it's all talking about Jesus.  As a result, I expect to find types of Christ all over the Bible.  In fact, I suppose I hardly ever preach a sermon where I'm not tying something into Christ and His work.

Since the entire creation reflects the glory of God, all creatures must image some aspect of God's nature.  Moreover, since Scripture comes to us in words, and words are "symbols" which represent other things (of course, I realize they do more than that) the Bible itself is a symbolic book.  Hence, typology and symbolism are inescapable. 

Nevertheless, we still come across people (especially it seems in Reformed circles) who argue that unless the NT explicitly states something is a type of Christ we aren't allowed to make a connection between that thing or event and some aspect of the person and work of Christ.  In response to this faulty hermeneutic, John Barach has written a nice little article on the necessity of types, showing that in reality and in practice no one abides by the notion that the NT must make the connection or we're not allowed.  After all, we don't have to have a type stated explicitly, Jesus has already told us it's all talking about Him (Luke 24:25-27, 44-45).      

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