Lecture 13: Signs, Symbols, and the Veil: Typology Closed, Prophecy Opened

The lecture, section by section

1. Jonah: a sign first, a type perhaps

   Is Jonah a type of Christ, three days in the creature answering three days in the earth? Many say yes, and Rosscup is untroubled by the label, but his own reading follows the context: Matthew 12 calls Jonah a sign four times, once from the enemies and three times from Jesus, so the emphasis falls on the miracle that proves, the resurrection signing his deity and kingship. And categories can overlap: the lamb is both symbol and type; a thing may be two devices at once without either canceling the other.

2. Elijah's name on John the Baptist

   Malachi promised Elijah before the great day, and Jesus says John fulfilled it. Elevation is absent, two great servants of God, so this is not typology but the symbolic borrowing of a name for like qualities, exactly as Revelation calls Jerusalem Sodom and Egypt for its corruption, and calls a wicked woman in the early church Jezebel. As for the two witnesses of Revelation 11, Moses-like and Elijah-like in their powers, their identity is simply not revealed, and Rosscup declines to name them.

3. Enoch, the ax head, and the prophets' calls

   Enoch's translation is historical and wonderful, but nothing marks divine arrangement with reference to anyone later, and rapture believers experience the same taking, not a greater one: an illustration, not a type. The floating ax head is a miracle in a life full of miracles, not a picture of resurrection. The calls of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Amos are illustrations for every servant God summons. Unusual is not the same as typical.

4. The middle bar and the honest boundary

   Of the tabernacle's five bars, some make the middle one the deity of Christ, others eternal security. Rosscup's verdict is a model of exegetical honesty: I do not know what it stood for, except that it was there to help hold the structure up, and that is as far as I can go. The messenger relays what the word warrants, adding nothing, as Revelation 22 warns.

5. The veil passes the grid

   Is the veil a type? Hebrews 10 answers innately: the new and living way opened through the veil, that is, his flesh. Historicity, explicit indication, exchange of terms, divine arrangement in the tabernacle's God-given pattern, elevation from Israel's one high priest one day a year to believing people of the whole world in constant access, and specificity to Christ alone. The veil stands among the surest types, at home in Hebrews' wider tabernacle pattern.

6. Types beyond Christ himself?

   Against the strict school's Christ-only rule, Rosscup holds some non-christological types possible, tentatively: Old Testament believer-priests elevated into the believer-priesthood of 1 Peter 2; Abraham's servant sent to fetch a bride for Isaac as a possible picture of the Spirit gathering a bride for Christ; Abraham himself, in Genesis 22, a possible type of the Father who spared not his own Son, with the ram in the thicket a second type of the greatest offering. Possible, above board, never forced, and always held with open hands.

7. The ark, the flood, and baptism

   A student raises 1 Peter 3:21, where baptism is called the antitype of the flood. The flood's waters saved no one; the ark did, and those inside passed through the circumstances of water, the preposition marking locale, not instrument. So the ark is a type of Christ, the greater ark of safety, and baptism saves only as it joins the believer by faith to him, never by the water itself, a reading the analogy of faith confirms and Romans 6's death-to-life symbolism fills out. No baptismal regeneration hides in Peter's antitype.

8. Honest differences versus promiscuous handling

   Matthew 16:18's rock, Peter, his confession, or Christ, has drawn careful papers arguing each view from context: that is the category of honest difference among diligent evangelicals. The cross-shaped furniture charts and middle-bar revelations belong to another category entirely, claims without scriptural warrant, where the interpreter's imagination has replaced the text's authority. The line between the two is exegesis, and the stakes are the teacher's accountability before God.

9. Why prophecy matters

   The final unit opens. Prophecy matters because of the person and program of God, whose covenant promises thread Genesis from chapter 12 to Jacob's descent into Egypt; because of balance, avoiding both extremes; and because Scripture weaves prediction into godliness, prophecy always summoning holy living rather than idle speculation.

10. Criswell and the skipped Apocalypse

    The great Dallas pastor W. A. Criswell preached through the Bible for years and always stopped at Jude, untrained in Revelation's symbols and afraid of them. Convicted at last, he took weeks away with the best books of every millennial school, prayed over the whole, and returned to the pulpit announcing he had come out premillennial, launching the series that became his published volumes on Revelation and then Daniel. The story rebukes the first extreme, playing prophecy down; the hobby-horse rider who preaches nothing else is the second; the whole counsel of God, as Paul gave the Ephesian elders, is the cure for both.

11. First difficulty: the confusion of terms

    Interpreting prophecy is hard, first, because scholars use the same words differently: literal means natural and sensible in one writer and crass rigidity in another's caricature; spiritualizing means godly reading to one and allegorizing to another. Ramm's survey documents the tangle. Read each scholar by his own definitions, represent every position honestly, and give yourself years: many students rightly settle their millennial convictions only after seminary, from much reading.

12. Second difficulty: near and far in one package

    Prophecies can hold near and far fulfillments in one unit. Isaiah 13 and 14 summon the nearby Medes against Babylon and then sweep to world judgment and shaken heavens far beyond that hour. Details of the Olivet discourse divide interpreters between the year seventy and the second advent. And in the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus read Isaiah 61 and stopped mid-sentence, before the day of vengeance, saying today this Scripture is fulfilled only of the first-advent words: two advents clustered in one prophecy, as Isaiah 52 and 53 join the suffering and the still-future exaltation of the Servant.

13. Third difficulty: the sheer amount

    Between a fourth and a fifth of Scripture was predictive when given, an enormous field spanning covenants, prophets, parables, and apocalypse. Even the prophetic parables demand care: one scholar reads the talents' outer darkness as a saved believer's dim zone in the millennium, a reading Rosscup searches the Scriptures for and cannot find, eisegesis serving a system. Grace is a free ticket, he answers, and grace is also a transformer.

1. I do not know what it stood for, except that it held the structure up. Where would saying that kind of honest I-don't-know actually strengthen, rather than weaken, your credibility as a teacher or witness?

2. Criswell skipped Revelation for years out of fear of its difficulty, then gave it weeks of prayerful study. Which book or doctrine have you been quietly skipping, and what would your version of his study leave look like?

3. Grace is a free ticket and grace is a transformer. Which half of that sentence does your own heart most need this season, and how do the two halves guard each other?