Types Of Christ
As we start the new year, our topics are focused on a true discipleship. Our decision to follow Christ, often smugly mocked by those around us, is not without logic. It’s important for us not to have an exclusively emotional response to the gospel - although faith does involve emotion. If we are all emotion, then, like the seed that springs up in shallow, rocky soil, when life’s troubles come…as they always do…if emotion is all we have that leads us to Christ, we will shrivel and find ourselves floundering (Matt. 13:20-21).
On the other hand, we don’t want our faith to be solely an academic pursuit; however, we have to know that there is a logical foundation to our discipleship. It’s not merely something that makes me feel good. I had someone tell me that religion is just an opiate for the uneducated mind, suggesting that, like a drug, it numbs me to the suffering around me. My reply was that actually, my faith does the opposite; it heightens my sensitivity to the suffering around me, making me feel responsible to assist and teach as much as I can. In an effort to avoid personal responsibility to others, the world ignores the rational part of faith, labeling the faithful as fanatical extremists, which isn’t wrong by definition. However, they, too, can be fanatical about what they think they know, with far less evidence.
In the interest of looking at the rationality of God’s plan, it is beneficial for us to look at the way in which He reveals it.
In Hebrews 10, the writer tells us that the sacrifices and feasts, even the priests that came before were simply shadows of what was to come. In Colossians, Paul writes that the substance of those shadows is Christ Himself.
If we look back at the Old Testament, we see a multitude of what we call “types” of Christ, that is shadows of Him.
Adam is a shadow of Christ in that he, too, was the ruler of the world for a while. However, where he failed to keep God’s commandments, bringing death, Christ kept them perfectly, bringing life (Rom. 5:14). Abel who was killed by his brother and whose blood cried out for justice is also an Old Testament complement to Christ’s sacrifice (Heb 12:24). There’s Isaac being the only begotten son who is to be offered up by a father who believes God can raise him from the dead (Heb 11:19). Chapters 37 through 50 of Genesis tell of Joseph, who was hated by his brothers and sold into slavery. Certainly, Joseph foreshadows Jesus leaving glory only to be crucified by His own nation, yet in both instances, the offenders are forgiven and provided for. In Exodus, we see Moses who leads the nation out of bondage and receives the law while Christ comes to fulfill it; there’s Aaron the high priest who makes offerings for the nation while Christ will become the offering for all nations, a great high priest after the order of Melchizadek whose death was not recorded, and thus, he is a high priest still (Heb 7:3).
We could talk about Jonah, Noah, David…not to mention the Passover lamb. Christ is foreshadowed in the Mercy Seat, the manna, the bronze snake in the wilderness, and the cities of refuge - they all point to Christ. He is the substance of the tabernacle, the veil to the holy of holies, and the Sabbath day as well.
Trying to wrap my mind around all of these types of Christ is a struggle…and also an affirmation of what I already knew to be true: Christ is the central theme of the entirety of the scripture. We know it…we say it…we teach it to our children. Yet, I forget it. Or at least, I forget the dominance of the message, the repetition of it. God points us to His Son, and He does it over and over so that, IF we open our eyes and get the world out of our heads, we can’t miss it. There’s simply no way. You’d have to be blind not to see it. But that’s where we find most of the world. It really is staggering when you think about it.
Jesus is there. He’s on every page. It’s all about Him; it always has been.
For just a moment, I want to focus on one of the types of Christ that stood out to me. Honestly, I am working on lessons about Jonah, and I thought I’d be writing this about him, but he’s not the precursor to Christ that caught my attention.
I want to consider, for just a moment, the nation of Israel as a type of Christ.
In Matthew 2, Matthew makes the connection between the nation and Jesus when he quotes Hosea 11:1 that God will call His Son out of Egypt. We know both of those references, Israel being called out of Egypt through Moses, and Joseph, Mary, and Jesus returning to Israel from Egypt after the slaughter of the innocents.
Both were delivered out of danger by God. This, however, is where the comparison stops. Where God had offered Israel everything and provided for them over and over, that child’s wickedness led to their own destruction. They got stuck in what they thought they knew.
They thought they knew what would happen when they left Egypt, but they didn’t plan on eating manna day in and day out, nor did they think they would be without water. What they found in their freedom didn’t look like they thought it would, so like a petulant child, this son, the nation, rebels and thinks that Egypt is a better bet than what God has planned.
Where both Sons would be delivered out of Egypt, only Christ learns obedience to the Father (Heb 5.8). The nation’s wandering in the wilderness for 40 years can be seen as a shadow of Jesus’s 40 days in the wilderness. The temptations are there in both situations. However, where Israel failed, Jesus triumphed! He neither complains nor gives in to His temptations; He is the substance of what the nation should have been.
The nation of Israel, God’s son, itself was just a picture, a shadow of the future Son, and Christ would be the fulfillment of all of the nation’s potential. The nation was given every signal of what the Messiah would be. They knew they were waiting for Him, and they knew what to look for; however, those who were supposed to be pointing the nation towards the Messiah were the very ones who missed it. They blinded themselves to the signs, even trying to credit His miracles to Satan. In Acts 2:22, Peter tells the crowd that God bore witness to Jesus’s deity through “...miracles, wonders, and signs which God did through Him in your midst…” And for good measure, Peter adds that they knew it! They had seen Jesus do incredible things, and still, they crucified Him.
What they thought they knew got in their way. They thought God would send an earthly savior to build an earthly kingdom, toppling Rome and putting the nation in charge. They thought they would rule and that their new king would dominate the earth.
Enter Jesus, who in His first public sermon tells the multitudes that He has come not to destroy the law but to fulfill it (Matt. 5:17). While the scribes and Pharisees had stripped the law of any real power of transformation and led God’s children away from His original precepts, Jesus arrives to be what the nation always should have been. Certainly, no one could have kept the law perfectly besides the Messiah, but the nation was so far off the path that its leaders were busy finding loopholes and limitations in the law.
Jesus, serving as the substance of the nation, speaks to the multitudes about the reality of the law’s intentions…not severity but mercy, not hatred but love, not pride but meekness, not a longing to see others destroyed but a desire for peace. This Child of God will fulfill what Israel never did; He will bring God’s perfect law to the world and offer it in love.
In Christ, we see the substance of the sacrifices made in the high places; in Christ, we see the ultimate Redeemer; in Christ, we see the fulness of God’s love for His children…all of His children as, like Abraham, He offers up His Son, but this Son will redeem the sinfulness of His nation, His other child.
As an English teacher, I talk to my students about foreshadowing. It’s an author’s device used to hint at what comes later in the story. Sometimes, it’s not until the end that we can see it - hindsight is 20/20, right?
God foreshadows Christ from the very beginning of recorded history. He is there when Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden of Eden. He is there when Moses says that a prophet greater than him will arise. He is there in the Messianic psalms. Christ’s humility is foretold in Isaiah. He fulfills more than 300 prophecies, and as John said, He allows us to see the glory of God in His very person (John 1:14).
As I was working through the types of Christ and how they foreshadow the Messiah’s arrival, I kept coming back to the definition of faith that’s given in Hebrews 11: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Christ is the substance. He is what gives our hope substance.
I suppose, in a similar way, our hope is also a shadow. Our faith provides a foreshadowing of the blessings of the kingdom while we are here on earth: joy, mercy, love, peace that passes understanding. And yet, what we are part of, this earthly kingdom, is only a shadow of the glory that will be revealed when we see our Lord face-to-face and enter into the heavenly kingdom at last. For that matter, we, too, are shadows of our perfected selves. And just as the shadows of the Old Testament were substantiated by Christ, so will the current shadows be actualized when He returns to claim His bride.
It’s what I know. It’s a surety. It’s why I follow. True discipleship is not a whim or an “opiate.” It is a logical decision to acknowledge the evidence of the things that were foreshadowed and were proven to be true. Is there an emotional component? Sure, but our belief isn’t founded in a feeling. It’s founded on the substantial evidence God has given to manifest His glory and show His invisible attributes (Rom 1:19-20). There’s no reason for us to doubt. We just have to open our eyes.
