Lost Stories Gem #27
How The New Testament Embraces The Old
When Jesus asked His disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” their answers seemed almost random at first glance. “Some say John the Baptist. Others say Elijah. And still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” But these responses were not guesses. They were testaments to a theological principle that runs through Scripture like a golden thread connecting the entire narrative of God’s plan for humanity. This principle is known as biblical typology, and it fundamentally changes how we understand the relationship between The Old Testament and The New Testament.
What Is Biblical Typology?
Biblical typology is the doctrine that certain events, persons, or statements in The Old Testament are “types” that represent “shadows” prefiguring specific attributes of Christ’s coming. The Apostle Paul articulated this with striking clarity when he wrote, “Don’t let anyone judge you about food, or drink, or festivals, or new moons, or Sabbaths, which are all but shadows of things to come, but the substance is Christ.” These weren’t mere ceremonial practices. They were pointers, divinely ordained markers guiding God’s people toward the ultimate reality of their Messiah.
The concept is deceptively simple yet profoundly complex. Shadow and substance. Type and antitype. The Old Testament as promise, The New Testament as fulfillment. Yet within this framework lies one of the most sophisticated theological systems ever developed, one that allows us to see how God has been orchestrating human history toward a specific purpose since the very beginning.
The Evidence in Scripture Itself
Jesus Himself was the master teacher of typology in The Bible. When He compared the experience of Jonah in the belly of the whale for three days and nights with His own death and resurrection, He was drawing a direct parallel between Old Testament shadow and New Testament substance. “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the Earth.” This wasn’t poetic fancy. This was deliberate instruction.
We see the same principle operating in the resurrection accounts. When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, He was foreshadowing His own resurrection. When Peter raised Tabitha, these were not isolated miracles but echoes of the greater reality to come. Each event was a shadow cast by the approaching substance of Christ.
Perhaps most remarkably, this principle appears in the apocryphal record as well. In The Gospel of Nicodemus, Annas confesses to Pilate that the Jewish leaders had discovered something extraordinary. Moses had been instructed to build the Ark of the Covenant with specific dimensions: five and a half cubits. From this seemingly random architectural detail, they deduced that the Messiah would arrive 5,500 years after Adam’s exile from the Garden. This wasn’t superstition. This was typology in action, where numbers themselves became types pointing toward God’s timeline.
Typology in The Bible’s Messianic Expectations
The disciples were not untrained in messianic theology. They had been born and bred into Hebraic tradition, educated in the expectation that a specific figure would come who conformed to centuries of prophetic utterances. They were seeking someone who fit a particular mold, someone whose birth and appearance had been precisely predicted. This is why their answers about Jesus being John the Baptist, or Elijah, or Jeremiah made perfect sense within their framework. These were all messianic figures who, in their view, had prefigured one another across generations.
When Jesus continually referred to Himself as the Son of Man, particularly drawing on language from The Book of Enoch, He was unreservedly confirming this tradition of typology. He was saying, “I am the fulfillment of all these shadows. I am the substance toward which all of history has been pointing.”
Old Testament Types and Shadows: The John the Baptist Connection
Jesus Himself provided the clearest biblical example of how typology operates. When speaking about John the Baptist, He asked the crowd what they had expected to see in the wilderness. “A prophet?” He asked. “Yes, of course, and more than a prophet, I tell you. In fact, this is the one of whom it was written: I’ll send My messenger ahead of You, who will prepare the way before You. And if you’re willing to accept it, he is Elijah who was to come.”
Here, Jesus was quoting from The Book of Malachi, the final book of The Old Testament. In that text, God had promised to send a messenger to prepare the way. Jesus identified John the Baptist as the fulfillment of that type. But notice what He did next. He read from The Book of Isaiah concerning the acceptable year of the Lord, a time of healing and deliverance. Then He stopped. He closed the book at precisely the point that discussed His First Coming and didn’t continue to the part about the day of God’s vengeance, which pertained to His Second Coming.
This wasn’t accidental. By selecting which portions of Scripture to emphasize and which to omit, Jesus revealed something crucial about typology: sometimes a shadow points to only one aspect of the substance. The type can have multiple fulfillments across different seasons of God’s plan.
The Hidden Message of the Disciples’ Answers
Now we can understand why the disciples’ responses to Jesus’ question were so significant. When they said people thought He was John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or another prophet, they weren’t making wild guesses. They were revealing their comprehension of the typological system that governed messianic expectation. These figures in Israel’s pantheon of heroes had all, in their understanding, foreshadowed the coming of the Promised One.
Typology in The Bible functioned as a kind of spiritual education system. Through repeated patterns, through recurring themes of death and resurrection, deliverance and restoration, God was training His people to recognize the shape of salvation when it finally arrived in person. The blood on the doorposts during Passover foreshadowed the blood of Christ. The temple sacrifices foreshadowed His perfect sacrifice. The Wilderness wandering foreshadowed the testing of faith. Layer upon layer of shadow prepared the way for the substance.
What This Means for Understanding Scripture Today
When we read The Old Testament through the lens of typology, everything shifts into focus. What seemed like disconnected stories and laws suddenly reveal an underlying architecture. The narrative of Scripture becomes a unified symphony rather than a collection of unrelated melodies.
This perspective also explains why the early Church insisted that The Old Testament and The New Testament form one continuous revelation. They are not separate books competing for authority. They are shadow and substance, promise and fulfillment, type and antitype. To understand one without the other is to miss the entire point.
The implications are profound. If God has been this meticulous in orchestrating Old Testament types to prefigure Christ’s First Coming, what does that suggest about the Second Coming? If the disciples could recognize Christ through understanding typology, what patterns might we be missing in our own time?
A Pattern Woven Through All of History
At its core, biblical typology reveals something fundamental about how God works in human history. He doesn’t operate through random, meaningless actions. Rather, there is an underlying principle that unites the events of time, particularly as they pertain to God’s people. Specific events in the past are designed to foreshadow future events in such a way that past, present, and future are all interwoven, ultimately confirming the controlling influence of God.
This is why understanding typology matters. It’s not merely an academic exercise in biblical interpretation. It is a lens through which we can see God’s faithfulness, His precision, and His absolute commitment to fulfilling what He promises. From the dimensions of the Ark to the three days of Jonah to the role of John the Baptist, every detail contributes to a greater narrative. As you explore the blogs, essays, books, and audio presentations at The Lost Stories Channel, you’ll discover how this principle of shadow and substance illuminates Scripture in ways that transform not just how we read The Bible but how we understand our place in God’s unfolding plan.
