Lecture 12: Running the Grid: Criteria for a True Type, from the Lamb to Jacob's Ladder

The lecture, section by section

1. The printer's die

   A type takes its name from the typesetter's metal letter that stamps its exact impression forward: something first fully historical, photographable had cameras existed, which God also designed to print a greater reality ahead. The lamb to the greater Lamb, Melchizedek to the greater priest, David to the greater King whose reign never ends and whose life carries none of David's sin. Two arrows: one down into history, one forward and upward in elevation.

2. Type against direct prophecy

   Direct prophecy is an utterance about the future: the prophet is historical, but the prophecy itself is not historical until fulfilled, and some prophecies see multiple fulfillment, as Matthew reports Isaiah's he bore our sicknesses being fulfilled in healing after healing. A type differs precisely there: it must be historical first, and only then predictive.

3. Type against symbol, parable, and allegory

   A symbol is timelessly apt, many arrows down through the ages: the lion serves menacing Babylon in Jeremiah and the conquering Christ in Revelation because lions always picture strength; milk always pictures nourishment. A type is one on one, lamb to Lamb. A parable is a story cast alongside a truth, sometimes predictive, sometimes of the moment; an allegory carries its meaning inside itself, the breastplate consisting of righteousness.

4. Sign, vision, and dream vision

   A sign is a miracle that points, as Jonah is four times called a sign of the Son of Man's three days, and Jesus's miracles signed his deity. A vision comes by God's power while waking, as the sheet at Joppa taught Peter that the centuries of food-law separation had completed their purpose and Jew and Gentile would now be one. A dream vision comes in sleep, as Jacob's ladder carried the reaffirmed Abrahamic covenant, and Daniel's four beasts carried the whole march of empires down to the Son of Man's everlasting kingdom. Real, fully real, but not historical in the photographable sense a type requires.

5. Illustration: same level, no elevation

   An illustration teaches the same principle on the same level. David eating the showbread illustrates mercy toward human need when Jesus defends his grain-plucking disciples: hunger then, hunger now, no elevation. Job's patience, Elijah's prayer in James 5, the same: a man prayed, we pray. Every Chevrolet is an automobile, but not every automobile is a Chevrolet; every type illustrates, but most illustrations are not types.

6. Innate and inferred types

   Some types are innate, expressly declared: behold the Lamb of God; a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek; Adam, whom Romans 5 names with the very word tupos, a type of the one to come in his headship over a race, sin through the first Adam, righteousness through the last. Others are inferred, decided from the evidence, and there honest interpreters divide, as Zuck denies Joseph while Rosscup, with others, affirms him. Each may preach his honest conclusion: a type if convinced, an illustration if not.

7. Criterion one and two: history and indication

   First, historicity: every undoubted type, lamb, Melchizedek, altar, veil, is historical, and the criterion at once retires dream visions. Second, specific scriptural indication, weighed sensibly: the New Testament is not an exhaustive registry, for many direct prophecies also go unmentioned there yet stand, so an unmentioned type is possible, but explicit indication, where present, settles the matter.

8. Criterion three: a manifest, sensible analogy

   The resemblance must be above board, nothing strained, doctored, or fished from obscurity. Scroggie's famous chart of Joseph-and-Jesus resemblances holds a few that carry the weight, the rejected one become the deliverer and head, alongside many that do not: fruitful bough, made known through an interpreter, perfect wisdom shared by half the Old Testament's saints. Pink and Habershon stretched such lists toward a hundred; the honest interpreter trims to the handful that hold water.

9. Criteria four through six: arrangement, elevation, specificity

   Fourth, evidence of divine arrangement: God commanded the lamb, fixed the scepter in Judah, covenanted David's throne, and, in Joseph's own words, you did not send me here, God did. Fifth, elevation: the Day of Atonement covered Israel; the cross gathers believing Jews and Gentiles from the whole world. Sixth, specificity: the type leaps one on one to its antitype, the lamb uniquely to Christ, where a symbol like the star out of Jacob shines timelessly.

10. The grid at work: passes

    Run the candidates through. The lamb: historical, named at John 1:29, exact exchange of terms, commanded by God, elevated, specific: a type beyond doubt. The bronze serpent: commanded in Numbers 21, and John 3 trades look and live for believe and live eternally; the objection that as marks mere comparison fails, since Peter's as a lamb without blemish uses the same word. David the king, Adam the head, Melchizedek the priest: all pass. Joseph lacks the explicit New Testament mention yet answers every other line, the rejected brother become the monumental deliverer, and Rosscup counts him a type while granting full liberty to those who stop at illustration.

11. The grid at work: failures

    Jacob's ladder fails at the first line, a dream vision, not history, and its supposed echo in John 1:51 proves too little, since angels ascend and descend throughout Scripture on behalf of all the heirs of salvation; the ladder's own point is the covenant God's contact with Jacob, not one way to God. Moses' raised hands over the battle with Amalek are history, but nothing marks divine arrangement of a picture, and there is no elevation: he prayed, we pray, a magnificent illustration of dependence and nothing more. Sheep are a symbol of God's people in both testaments, the Lord my shepherd then and now, with no lesser-to-greater movement.

12. The tabernacle fancies

    Some chart the tabernacle furniture into the shape of a cross, or find the cross in Abraham walking the land's length and breadth, in the heave offering's swing, in the Passover blood on lintel and doorposts; others make the middle bar of the tabernacle's five the deity of Christ, or eternal security. Nothing in the text calls for any of it, and a student adds the quiet decisive point: the very shape of the cross is itself debated. Imagination is not exegesis, and the abuses must not sour us on the true types they counterfeit.

13. Disagreeing agreeably

    The session models its own lesson. Rosscup honors his old mentor Marshall, a true believer with a high view of Scripture who nevertheless stops short of inerrancy and of eternal security, honors Sproul across the eschatology divide, and treasures a chicken-dinner friendship with the very scholar whose strict typology he spends the hour answering. On perhaps ninety-nine percent of Scripture such men agree; on the rest, dig each other, laugh, and keep fellowship. And hold conclusions with open hands: Rosscup himself abandoned the gap theory and changed his reading of the fruitless branches of John 15, never a fundamental, always toward the truth.

14. Light for their day, light for ours

    A student asks what a type meant to saints who could not yet see its fulfillment. Answer: partial light was real light. Ahaz was called to believe a sign he could not fathom; the prophets searched their own words; Abraham trusted, and stumbled, on a covenant whose worldwide reach he never saw; believers today await a rapture no century has witnessed and are comforted still. Greater light means greater accountability: grow in grace and in knowledge, for we are not God's little angels, as Chafer wrote, but his erring children, on whom he has set his infinite heart of love.

1. Rosscup keeps warm fellowship with the very scholars he answers, over typology, eschatology, even inerrancy, while never softening his own convictions. What would that combination look like in our congregation's disagreements?

2. He abandoned the gap theory and changed his mind on John 15 after leaving seminary, and calls it gaining truth, not losing ground. What settled interpretation of yours most deserves a fresh, honest re-examination?

3. Not God's little angels, but his erring children on whom he has set his infinite heart of love. Where does that sentence meet you this week, in failure, in progress, or in how you regard a struggling brother?