Dr. James Rosscup · The Master's Seminary · 96 minutes
Lecture by Dr. James Rosscup, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Three territories in one session. First, the Bible's phenomenal language: suns that rise, armies like grasshoppers, men swifter than eagles, and why none of it threatens inerrancy. Second, the disputed parables: the rich man and Lazarus, the three stories of Luke 15, and the sheep and the goats. Third, the doorway into typology: what makes the lamb a true type of Christ while the fish gate of Jerusalem preaches nothing at all. Listen for the closing rule: every type is an illustration, but not every illustration is a type.
The principles for figurative language gather up the whole course: read the context before all else fails, let the next phrase and the wider book define the figure, use cross-reference, interpret the literal base and identify the transfer, as Jeremiah's lion from the thicket becomes the Babylonian invader the book itself later names. And keep the study fresh before God: never let the habit of the word grow cold and ritual.
Sometimes the spirit, not the strict letter, carries the meaning, as gouging out the eye commands drastic severity against sin the heart would otherwise keep committing. And Scripture speaks anthropomorphically because God stoops to human forms to be understood, the same heart that sent the Son to become man. Yet the literal remains the default: Samson's lion, David's lion and bear, were beasts indeed. If the literal sense makes sense, seek no other sense.
The sun rises and sets in Psalm 113 as it does in every weather report: the language of observation, true from the observer's standpoint and no error at all. The moon turned to blood, armies like grasshoppers and like the sand of the sea, convey dread and multitude, not figures to be counted. Scripture speaks as men speak, and inerrancy is never at stake in a phenomenon truly described.
David's lament calls Saul and Jonathan swifter than eagles, stronger than lions: hyperbole, the honest exaggeration every language uses, as we credit a runner with jet-like speed. Daniel and his friends test ten times better; Nebuchadnezzar orders the furnace heated seven times hotter, seven carrying its familiar force of completeness, here of intensity. The interpreter takes the point, great speed, great superiority, utmost fury, without torturing the numbers into arithmetic.
Seven and ten often carry completeness, as the ten virgins picture the complete company awaiting the bridegroom, without teaching that half the world will be ready. Yet the seven churches were seven actual congregations, and the ten plagues fell ten actual times. Classify by context, and beware conclusions the symbol never intended.
A few argue it is history, not parable: it says a certain man, it is not labeled a parable, and it uses actual names. Each argument fails on inspection: a certain man opens parable after parable; many undisputed parables also go unlabeled; and Ezekiel names two sisters, Oholah and Oholibah, who are not sisters at all but Jerusalem and Samaria. The great majority of careful interpreters call it a parable, and its teaching is just as real either way.
Luke 15 holds three distinct parables, not one: the text's this parable introduces the first, and a certain man had two sons opens a fresh story exactly as parables elsewhere begin. The sheep and the goats is mostly discourse, but at its core sits a kernel parable, the shepherd's separating call, crowning the Olivet chain on preparedness: the ready enter eternal life, the unready eternal fire.
The sheep are marked by visiting prisoners, feeding the hungry, deeds of love. Correlation guards the doctrine: the passage does not mention faith, grace, or the Spirit, but Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians do, and the whole counsel of God teaches that such deeds please him only as fruit of faith working through grace in the Spirit's power. A passage silent on the root is not a denial of the root.
Scripture's symbols run through persons, animals, numbers, colors, and objects. A symbol is timelessly apt: milk always pictures nourishment, the lion always pictures conquering strength, which is why it can serve Christ in one passage and the devouring adversary of 1 Peter 5 in another. Scarlet and snow carry sin and cleansing in Isaiah 1; and at the great white throne, the book of life and the books of works together silence every mouth: the name absent from the one, the life condemned by the others.
A type is something first fully historical, a person, animal, or object real enough to photograph, which God, the great I AM who commands all history, also designed to point forward to a greater reality: the lamb to the greater Lamb, the bronze altar to the cross. The word comes from the typesetter's die that stamps its image forward. Not every detail transfers; the central correspondence, not the lamb's four legs, carries the meaning.
One extreme finds types everywhere: Augustine juggling numbers until Pentecost's fifty yields the hundred fifty-three fish; Eve from Adam's side made a type of the spear in Christ's, though Adam slept no sleep of death; a whole gospel preached from the gates of Nehemiah's Jerusalem; and rival partisans making the ten tribes' secession a type of Luther, or of the Pope, as suited them. The other extreme, partly in reaction and partly in unbelief of the supernatural, denies typology altogether. The truth holds the careful middle.
One strict scholar demands four marks for any type: divine design, Old Testament saint recognition, a Christ-and-salvation focus, and explicit New Testament indication. Rosscup honors the caution and questions the second: nothing suggests Abraham's generation saw Melchizedek as a picture of one to come; progressive revelation means God knew more than the saints of the hour, and the New Testament's light shines backward. And against the claim that as Moses lifted up the serpent is mere comparison, he answers: Peter's as a lamb without blemish uses the same little word, and no one doubts the lamb.
Is Joseph a type of Christ? Careful interpreters divide; Rosscup says yes, on a few solid resemblances, the monumental deliverer foreshadowing the far greater Deliverer, while trimming the fanciful hundred-item lists down to the handful that hold water. David the king prefigures the greater King. Daniel, merely and magnificently godly, does not stand out as a type. And the boundary rule: an illustration can be imaginary and same-level, like David's showbread illustrating mercy; a type must be historical with a movement from lesser to greater. Every Chevrolet is an automobile, but not every automobile is a Chevrolet: every type is an illustration, but not every illustration is a type.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Why does the sun rises and sets pose no problem for inerrancy?
2. How should swifter than eagles in David's lament be read?
3. What force does seven carry in the furnace heated seven times hotter?
4. What conclusion should not be drawn from the five wise and five foolish virgins?
5. How does Ezekiel 23 answer the argument that actual names prove the rich man and Lazarus historical?
6. How many parables does Luke 15 contain, per the lecture?
7. What guards the sheep and goats from teaching salvation by works?
8. Why can the lion picture both Christ and the devil?
9. What two features define a biblical type?
10. What is wrong with Augustine's path to the one hundred fifty-three fish?
11. Which of the strict school's four criteria does Rosscup most question?
12. How does Rosscup answer the claim that the bronze serpent is mere comparison because Jesus says as?
13. Why is Joseph a stronger candidate for a type than Daniel?
14. What does the Chevrolet rule state?
All fourteen correct. Lecture 11 is complete.
Swifter than eagles, ten times better, seven times hotter: Scripture uses the honest exaggeration of ordinary speech. How does recognizing that deepen rather than weaken your confidence in the Bible's truthfulness?
The sheep were known by prison visits and shared bread, fruit of a faith the passage assumes. Which of those concrete mercies could our congregation take up this month, and in whose strength?
Rosscup grants his students full liberty to call Joseph a type or only an illustration, provided the conclusion is reached with careful work. Where do you need that combination, honest conviction plus room for a brother to differ?
The promise embedded in John 3: as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. The old picture kept its appointment with the greater reality.
The lecture's own trail: the major parables commentators, Hultgren, Ellisen, and Kistemaker, on the disputed parables; Ada Habershon's study of the types and A. W. Pink's Genesis gleanings as examples to sift rather than swallow; the two-volume doctoral work on the hermeneutics of typology behind the four criteria; and the assigned reading in Zuck, who differs from Rosscup on Joseph, a live exercise in weighing careful teachers against the text.