Hermeneutics III: Careful Connecting

Welcome to the Beholder God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for Media Grazie, with John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church New Albany and author of the Beholder God series. John, last time, last two times that I've been able to sit in here, I completely forgot to introduce you.

So I apologize for that, and I apologize to you for not introducing John. But speaking of the last two episodes, we spent two weeks discussing different tools in what we call hermeneutics. Now, remind us real quick, what does hermeneutics mean?

Hermeneutics is the fancy word for how a person approaches a text in order to interpret it correctly.

Yeah, and we discussed five different tools, and we saved one because we felt like it deserved its own episode, and that was called types and anti-types. Now, what are types and anti-types? What do we mean by that?

Typology and the Relationship Between Type and Antitype

Yeah, we don't use this terminology as much in everyday life as we might in some of the other tools. And so I think just, let's get a summary statement of types and anti-types, and in this summary statement, we'll have a number of things that we want to unpack through the episode.

In fact, there are six things that we want to call our attention to so that when we deal with types and anti-types in the Scripture, that we're careful, as careful as we can be. You know, we wanna be good stewards, and we want to use the right tools to interpret the Scripture.

So, typology, it's the study of similarities among historical persons, events, or institutions, which occur in the Bible. The types come first, and they point us to their anti-type, that is, their fulfillment.

Therefore, the types have a foreshadowing or prophetic nature. The anti-type, that is, the fulfillment of the type, is always greater than the type itself. The type comes to an end when the anti-type fulfills it.

And finally, the Bible always instructs us regarding the relationship between these two and causes us to look back with a clearer understanding from the fulfillment back to the original type.

Yeah, now, one little clarification that we wanna make, when you hear the words type and anti-type, don't think type and then opposite, or opposed to, because typically, when we use the word anti, that's what we're gonna mean.

So, type and anti-fulfillment, one thing that we've mentioned before is the shadow and the substance. So, John, where do we start when we're talking about types and anti-types?

Well, the most basic fact is that there is an analogy or there is a likeness. The Bible is saying to us, this thing which you are looking at right now, this person, this event, this institution, it is like something that will come in the future.

And so, with each of these points, we have six of them. I think we can use the Passover lamb as a pretty simple illustration. When we see the Passover lamb in the Old Testament and then we're reading in the New Testament, we soon find out that the Passover lamb is not just a Passover lamb that was used at that moment in history, but it is like something else that is coming.

So, there's an analogous relationship. There is a likeness between two things.

So, one example of that, we can look and see the different offices of the Old Testament, right? So, we see the priest in Aaron and we see the prophet. When we look at Nathan or we look at Samuel, we see the king when we talk about David.

And each of these offices, the New Testament tells us, points to, they are types of Christ. There's a film that we sell at Media Grazie. It's called American Gospel. And I don't think I've ever seen it so clearly illustrated before between these three offices and the fulfillment of Christ.

And it's this really amazing animation that the director, Brandon Kimber, uses. But one of the points that one of the speaker makes in this film is that you see these prophets and you think these are godly men.

They are.

But they also fail. They fall short. And you look at the priests and they fall short. And you look at the kings and they fall short. So, each of these things, they're not enough in and of themselves. They must be pointing forward to something else.

And they are indeed because we see the fulfillment, the perfect priest, the perfect prophet, the perfect king in the person of Jesus Christ, right?

Second thing we have. So, there's a likeness between one thing and something that's coming. But there's also historicity. That is, this thing, this person, this event happens in human time, in history.

And it is pointing to something else that's like it that also will happen in human history. And so, that's different than a symbolic description. If we, when we talk about God is like something,.

God is a father.

And so, we think of the category fatherhood. And we think God is like an earthly father, but perfect and infinitely better. But that's a category God gives us. But that's not a type. There's no father on planet Earth at some point where the Bible points and says, do you see that man, that father, that is a type.

And there's something coming in the future that will fulfill that. And so, a type and an anti-type is a very special kind of symbol.

Right, and the reason that we're making this distinction is because, remember, the whole point of this series is that we read the Bible, we listen to the scripture carefully. And so, what we don't want to do is we don't want to say, well, here's a type when there's really not one there.

And here's the anti-type when it's not really there. So, we can see the same thing in the anthropomorphism of God, right? We see the scripture say that God rescued Israel with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.

Well, that's not a type. That is the term called anthropomorphism. And so, we have to be really careful here and allow the scriptures to tell us what are types and what are anti-types. We'll talk more about that in a little bit.

But there's another thing, and it's called foreshadowing.

Right, the third element of a type in an anti-type relationship. So, they're like each other. They are, one occurs in history, and then the fulfillment of it occurs later. But because of that quality, the type always has what we would say is a foreshadowing, you know, a looking forward, or a prophetic nature to it.

And so, while the type itself, whatever person or event or institution or thing occurs in human history, while it has value in itself at that moment. So, we can think of manna. The people were given manna in the wilderness, and the manna certainly had value.

I mean, if you didn't have manna, you would have died. You would have starved to death. So, the manna in itself at that moment in human history was very valuable, but it served a dual purpose. Later in the New Testament, Christ says, that manna was a picture of the bread that comes from heaven, and manna is not really the heavenly bread.

The real heavenly bread is me, Jesus of Nazareth. So, manna has, as all types do, kind of has a dual role. There's the role that it has at that moment, and then there's the other role that it is pointing you forward.

It's like a sign, and it's pointing you ahead and saying something is coming. There's a prophetic quality to that.

Yes, we can't look at these things as though they're just Sunday school lessons that, okay, I read this story when I was a kid, and now it's done. No, there's great value in these things. I think of it like this.

When 10 years ago now, my wife and I just celebrated our 10-year anniversary. So, 11 years ago, I gave my wife a ring, an engagement ring. John, I've never bought something so expensive in my life. That ring had value in and of itself.

It was an important ring, still is, but it was even more important because of what it pointed toward, where it was going, and it meant the marriage that would soon come. So, there was great value, and there's great teaching.

There's great application when we read about manna, but we can't let it stop there. We must look ahead and see the anti-type.

The Passover Lamb, the Bronze Serpent, and the Fulfillment in Christ

Yeah, so, again, some other illustrations. Take our original illustration, the Passover lamb. The Passover lamb was sacrificed and then eaten, and its blood was brushed over the door of the Jews' homes, and the angel of death passes over, and God's wrath passes over that home.

And so, obviously, there is enormous worth in that activity, but it has an even greater worth, and that is when we see Christ on the cross. We have been prepared for centuries by the Jewish ritual of the Passover lamb.

We have been prepared for thousands of years to understand that when Christ is lifted up, this is the lamb of God. This is what the lamb was pointing us to, and the Passover lamb's greater value is that it helps me to understand the death of Jesus Christ, and how the wrath of God might pass over my life and not rest on me.

But you can think of the bronze serpent in the wilderness, which, in John 3, Christ compares to himself. We have the tabernacle, the temple, the priesthood. All these things, in their place, had value, but the greater value is that it's pointing to something more precious.

Right, but I think that there is still, at least I've noticed a tendency among a lot of people who say, oh, the Old Testament, that's good to read. It's kind of like for super-Christians, but I live in the red letters.

I live in the New Testament, you know, from Matthew forward. Well, no, there's great value. We don't have two Bibles, right? The Old Testament and the New Testament are not two separate Bibles. It's one Bible.

It's one, it's God's overarching story of redemption that starts with Genesis and is not finished until Revelation. And when we see it through that paradigm, when we see it through that lens, we talked last episode about lenses and how we see things.

We need the New Testament to understand the Old Testament, but the Old Testament richens and deepens the New Testament.

Greater Worth, Temporary Shadows, and the Book of Hebrews

Yeah, another thing with the type and anti-type is that there is always escalation moving from the type to the anti-type. From the shadow, from the prophetic picture, the object lesson, to the fulfillment of that.

It's not a level line, right? So we're not, you know, when you think of the Solomon's Temple, so impressive, the gold, the, you know, the holy place, the sacrifices, the holy of holies. And, you know, sometimes you might find people tempted saying, you know, I wish, I'm glad we have Christ, but sometimes I wish I could have Jesus plus all those wonderful Old Testament things.

You know, that would be so much, that would be even better. But actually that's wrong. And the reason it's wrong is that when God gives us a type, a picture, and it is prophesying or pointing us to, foreshadowing us to something in the future, the thing that it's pointing us to is always of greater worth.

So as great as the temple is, Christ is greater. As great as the high priest was, Christ is greater. As great as the sacrifice system was, Christ is greater. Whatever you see, whenever you see a type and an anti-type, always the fulfillment, the thing that fulfills it is always greater than the thing that points us toward it.

Yeah, and the book of Hebrews is filled with this. We have a greater covenant. We have a greater priest. We have a greater temple. All of the things that were so valuable and valued in the Old Testament, we have, it's not some thing, we have some one of far greater worth, far greater value than anything in the Old Testament.

So John, okay, so we've got escalation. What do we look to next?

The Shadow Passing Away When Christ Comes

Well, another wonderful thing about types and anti-types is that the type doesn't just point to something that's coming and they're equal, right? So what's coming is greater.

Right, so Jesus is the temple.

Right, yeah, so Passover lamb and Jesus are not equal. Jesus is so infinitely superior. But also, it's not like this. We're not seeing a type pointing to something greater and then the anti-type appears and they both run side by side.

Actually, when the type is fulfilled in its anti-type, when the shadow is fulfilled because the substance has come, then the shadow passes away. And when the type is fulfilled in its anti-type, then the type then is terminated or it ends.

It's designed to be temporary. The anti-type is not. So think of what the writer of Hebrews says. He says some pretty amazing things. And one of the shocking things he says is he talks about the Old Covenant and says all these things in this Old Covenant, they were basically, they were pointing you to Christ and what you have in the New Covenant.

And they are passing away. They're designed to be temporary. They pointed us to Christ, Christ came, and now they've come to an end. And he says, these things which had glory no longer have any glory.

And they're fading away. So whatever we look at, whether it's the Passover lamb being fulfilled in Christ, we no longer offer the Passover lamb. The high priest fulfilled in Christ, we no longer have an earthly high priest.

The temple fulfilled in Christ, we no longer have an earthly temple. We no longer have a sacrifice system. You just go through all those wonderful types in the Old Testament. Christ is the fulfillment.

And when the fulfillment comes, not only is it greater than the original picture, the type, but the original type then is terminated or ends when it finishes its job, so to speak. I pointed you to Christ.

Do you see him? He's here. And then we look at Christ and the type then fades. And so they don't run side by side.

Letting Scripture Define Typology and Distinguishing It from Applicability

With all of these wonderful things that we're saying about types and anti-types, and they are wonderful truths. They are wonderful realities. When we're reading through the scriptures, there might be a temptation to say, I wonder if this is a type and anti-type.

How do we be careful listeners when it comes to that? Are we free to say, oh, I see the type and anti-type here?

Well, I think that a careful way of approaching it is that we want scripture itself to be the guide for helping us to understand what scripture presents as a type and an anti-type. So we need, really, we need in the fulfillment, we need in the fulfillment, we need someone pointing us back and saying, do you see this here?

Yes, I see this. I see Christ on the cross. That is what that way back then, that is what that was preparing you for. And so we have the last element of typology, and that is retrospection. When the fulfillment comes, we are guided by scripture to understand that this is actually what we were being prepared for by the type, by the shadow, by the foreshadowing event or thing or person that preceded it in history.

And so there is a wonderful, I think, like this, just a wonderful connection and a harmony. And I wouldn't think of it as kind of a circle, like a merry-go-round where you just go in a circle. I think of it as a spiral.

So there is a circular element, but it's always getting higher. So I look at the type, it's pointing me to Christ. I look at the sacrifice system. I hear John the Baptist say, "'Behold, the Lamb of God.'".

And immediately I think, lamb? So I look back at the lamb, and then I look at Christ and I see him on the cross. So the type is fulfilled. No longer does the lamb need to be sacrificed. And I understand the cross better.

But understanding the cross better, I'm taught by the Old Testament to look back and say, do you understand why all those lambs in the Old Testament were important? It's not just because they were a part of an expression of a Hebrew faith.

It's because they were pointing you to Christ. So this type brings me to Christ, and the fulfillment points me back to understand with a retrospective understanding. It gives me 20 -20 vision of the Old Testament picture.

And so I go back, and then as I understand this better, I understand that better. And it's just, as we grow as Christian, there's an ever-deepening, ever-expanding magnitude to the work of redemption.

And it's not just that it's getting bigger in front of my eyes, but it's becoming more clear as the type and the anti-type are understood more clearly. So we want to let the Scripture guide us. But I do want to say this.

There are areas in Scripture where we see applicability. And so we're reading through the Scriptures, and we say, you know, that kind of love reminds me of the kind of love that God has shown me through His Son, or that kind of faithfulness reminds me of God's faithfulness, or that act of mercy reminds me of God's mercy.

And it's not that the Bible says this is a type that will be fulfilled in Christ, and then it will come to an end, but there is applicability. Of course, there are various symbols in the Scripture, but applicability and types are different.

So it's just always good to kind of restrain ourselves. Sometimes what we find at the church here is that as people come to Christ, and they embrace the Gospel, or they embrace Christ through the Gospel, they are so thrilled with Jesus.

You know, they've heard about Him all their life in the Mid-South, and now they've met Him, so to speak. And so they read the Bible, and every passage they read, they're like, that's Christ, that's Christ, that's Christ.

And well, yes, you can see Christ, you know, you can see Him in the reflections of Christ, you know, all through the Scripture, but they're not all types. And as we grow as believers, we have to say, okay, I know that my heart, you know, reaches out to Christ in every passage, but when I'm talking, strictly speaking, about what is a type, what is an anti-type, what is pointing me to Christ, what is being fulfilled in Christ in a way that's so much greater than it was originally, and what passes away after Christ comes.

Well, those are types and anti-types, and we want to let the Scripture itself teach us that.

Foreshadowing in Literature and the Need for Redemptive Preparation

Now, coming from a literature background, I've loved literature my entire life. The term that we typically would use for this is foreshadowing, right? So when you look at any great work of literature, there's always foreshadowing.

And if you look, you know, once you have read through a novel or you've read through a series by a great writer, there's actually benefit. I think of Conan Arthur Doyle with Sherlock is one of the best with this, as is Tolkien with the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Once you finish their works, if you'll go back and read them again, you can see all the ways that they foreshadowed the ending. They didn't spoil it, they didn't give away the ending, but they certainly kind of crept up to it and built you up for it so that when it ended, you think, well, how else could it have ended with all of this work that was done before?

Now, if you don't do that buildup, if you don't do that foreshadowing, then the reader is left completely caught off guard. There's actually a term for that, deus ex machina. I'm sure my Southern accent really murders that Latin.

No Latin would understand that.

But it means God of the machine. And Charles Dickens, one of my favorite writers, uses deus ex machina a lot because he saw the life as coincidence and one thing just randomly would happen and all the world's problems would be fixed.

It happened a lot, and that's one of the criticisms of him. Again, great writer, but you want to foreshadow. Can you imagine if we had thousands of years of redemptive history and there was no foreshadowing of Christ, there was no type of Christ that would prepare us for him, and all of a sudden the Messiah appears and we say, what does this mean?

We don't understand.

Yeah, so like you said, with fiction, so you're being prepared by good writers. And then maybe other writers just like, you get into the, you're halfway through the book and you think it's all gloom and doom and there's no good way out of this and then suddenly, like you said, so then the author uses this kind of abrupt intervention like, aha, you didn't know that this was about to happen and it just from out of nowhere.

But the scripture's not that way. You know, we don't look at the human race and its fallen condition and we see that my mind, as Paul says, the intellect no longer understands and appreciates the things of God because of sin.

The heart doesn't yearn for God because of sin and the will does not submit itself to God because of sin. So man is outwardly and inwardly completely influenced by sin. And you know, as we see humanity, we could have such a dark picture and say, well, there's no hope for anybody.

No civilization, no individual country, no family, no individual person, you know, there's no hope. And then suddenly God surprises you and say, aha, you didn't know I was gonna do this and here's Jesus.

But instead, how much better that he prepared us. When you think about the incredible quality of redemption, and I mean that in the sense of the truest sense of incredible, unbelievable almost. If we had not been prepared by centuries to understand what the work of Christ would accomplish, how would we believe the New Testament writers when they said that the death of this man, who is the son of man but also son of God, can wash your sins away.

All along this terrible gloom, there's been like a slow dawn that's rising. And of course, in the Old Testament, it's not as clear exactly what this is gonna be, but it's clear enough for the believers to hope in what God will do.

And from the New Testament, it's like noonday light. And we understand for thousands of years, we have been prepared to see that the work of Jesus is not too good to be true. It's not a myth that men made up.

We were prepared for it by these types.

Testimonies from Behold Your God and the Value of the Study

One of the things that we love about going to conferences is being able to interact with people who have gone through the studies that we produce or seen the films that we make and hearing feedback from them about how those projects have impacted their families, their small groups, and their churches.

Eventually, we started asking them if we could record their stories so that we could share those with you. Nolan and Melissa are from Mississippi, and their church went through Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically.

I mean, we were fortunate enough to take some families through it with us along that journey. And like we had talked about earlier, it is an investment of time. And it was a 12-week study, but to watch not only other families, how it just transformed other families, and watched out, watched how God, through His Spirit, just transformed and knocked down.

Where the Hermeneutic Comes From and Why the Tools Matter

So John, just to wrap up, two things very quickly. One, where in the world does all this stuff come from? And two, after going through all of the different tools over the last three episodes, what if I feel overwhelmed?

Yeah, both those are really good questions. First, where do they come from? Is it from theologians? Is it from old books? Is it from literary people? No, the hermeneutic, the method we have to approach Scripture, we actually get it from the Scripture itself.

And that is, for instance, when you're reading the apostolic letters in the New Testament, you ought to be learning two things at once. And maybe you don't even notice you're learning it. First, you're learning what you ought to believe.

Like, they're explaining, this is what Jesus did. This is what He meant when He said this. This is what was accomplished when He did this. So you're learning what you should believe. But if you pay close attention, as you're tracking with Paul through Romans, you're also learning how you are to come to understand these things.

How did Paul understand these things? And Paul constantly takes the types and the prophecies and the, well, all the tools that we've talked about. You can see Paul and Peter and John and James in their writings.

They go back to the Old Testament and they accurately interpret what the Scripture is teaching. And so when we read the Bible, you ought to be knowing, what am I to believe? But also, how do I come to that belief?

And do I use the same method Paul used? And that's what we've been talking about. But what if you're overwhelmed? Recently, I watched a YouTube video on handmade guitars and I really get suckered into this stuff.

I mean, it's bad. So I was watching Father and Son, actually it's called Gooding Guitars. And they were just, they did a video and a well-known handmade guitar company, Father and Son, and they make a very limited number of guitars each year.

And they were going through all the tools and it's all the old world ways of making it, you know? And so I didn't even know half those tools. I'm not a woodworker. So I thought, well, I wanna get some of those tools and we'll use them with kids in the churches in illustration.

So that's what we're doing with these here. We have a chisel, all right? And a draw blade, draw knife. And here, this little fella, he's a caliper. It's got tiny little millimeters and you can measure very small distances.

And here's a plane and I have a bunch of others over in the corner. And I got them all off of eBay for very cheap until you pay for shipping. And then they're not so cheap. Why did I get them? Well, I think of these tools.

And so I saw all those two men working the wood,.

Beautiful woods.

They work them and they work, you know, every week. They only make a couple guitars a week. And I thought, wow, that is, you know, they talked about how it takes about seven years to learn, to teach a person how to make the guitar from beginning to end like this.

And I thought, you know, God has given us tools, not woodworking tools, but God has given us tools and he's given us the greatest teacher, the Holy Spirit. And we have the greatest material, not beautiful mahogany or walnut, but he's given us his truth.

And I don't want to be careless with this book and careless with the tools. When other men with lesser materials and lesser tools are so careful to build a beautiful instrument, what we have when we use the tools right with scripture, something so much infinitely more significant than a beautiful guitar.