The following comes from Patrick Fairbairn, The Typology of Scripture: Viewed in Connection with the Whole Series of The Divine Dispensations, 2 vols (1900):
III. The thought, however, may not unnaturally occur, that if the
historical matter of the Old Testament possess as much as has been represented
of a typical character, some plain indications of its doing so should be found
in Old Testament Scripture itself; we should scarcely need to draw our proof of
the existence and nature of the historical types entirely from the writings of
the New Testament. It was with the view of meeting this thought that our third
position was laid down; which is, that Old Testament Scripture does contain
undoubted marks and indications of its historical personages and events being
related to some higher ideal, in which the truths and relations exhibited in
them were again to meet, and obtain a more perfect development. The proof of
this is to be sought chiefly in the prophetical writings of the Old Testament,
in which the more select instruments of God’s Spirit gave expression to the
Church’s faith respecting both the past and the future in His dispensations.
And in looking there, we find, not only that an exalted personage, with His
work of perfect righteousness, and His kingdom of consummate bliss and glory,
was seen to be in prospect, but also that the expectations cherished of what
was to be, took very commonly the form of a new and higher exhibition of what
had already been. In giving promise of the better things to come, prophecy to a
large extent availed itself of the characters and events of history. But it could
only do so on the twofold ground, that it perceived in these essentially the
same elements of truth and principle which were to appear in the future; and in
that future anticipated a nobler exhibition of them than had been given in the
past. And what was this but to indicate their typical meaning and design? The
truth of the statement will more fully appear when we come to treat of the
combination of type with prophecy, which, on account of its importance, we
reserve for the subject of a separate chapter. Meanwhile, it will be remembered
how even Moses speaks before his death of “the prophet which the Lord their God
should raise up from among his brethren like to himself”—one that should hold a
similar position and do a similar work, but each in its kind more perfect and
complete—else, why look out for another? In like manner, David connects the
historical appearance of Melchizedek with the future Head of God’s Church and
kingdom, when He announces Him as a priest after the order of Melchizedek;2
he foresaw that the relations of Melchizedek’s time should be again revived in
this divine character, and the same part fulfilled anew, but raised, as the
connection intimates, to a higher sphere, invested with a heavenly greatness,
and carrying a world-wide significance and power. So again, we are told (Psa
110:3), another Elias should arise in the brighter future, to be succeeded by a
more glorious manifestation of the Lord, to do what had never been done but in
fragments before; namely, to provide for Himself a true spiritual priesthood, a
regenerated people, and an offering of righteousness. But the richest proofs
are furnished by the latter portion of Isaiah’s writings; for there we find the
prophet intermingling so closely together the past and the future, that it is often
difficult to tell of which he actually speaks. He passes from Israel to the
Messiah, and again from the Messiah to Israel, as if the one were but a new, a
higher and nobler development of what belonged to the other. And the Church of
the future is constantly represented under the relations of the past, only
freed from the imperfections of former times, and rendered in every respect
more blessed and glorious. (Patrick Fairbairn, The Typology of Scripture: Viewed in Connection
with the Whole Series of The Divine Dispensations, 2 vols. [New York: Funk
& Wagnalls Company, 1900], 1:73-74)
As an example of divine predictions precisely similar in form, we may
point to Hos. 8:13, where the prophet, speaking of the Lord’s purpose to visit
the sins of Israel with chastisement, says, “They shall return to Egypt.” The
old state of bondage and oppression should come back upon them; or the things
going to befall them of evil should be after the type of what their forefathers
had experienced under the yoke of Pharaoh. Yet that the new should not be by
any means the exact repetition of the old, as it might have been conjectured
from the altered circumstances of the time, so it is expressly intimated by the
prophet himself a few verses afterwards, when he says, “Ephraim shall return to
Egypt, and they shall eat unclean things in Assyria” (ch. 9:3); and again in
ch. 11:5, “He shall not return into the land of Egypt, but the Assyrian shall
be his king.” He shall return to Egypt, and still not return; in other words,
the Egypt-state shall come back on him, though the precise locality and
external circumstances shall differ. In like manner Ezekiel, in ch. 4,
foretells, in his own peculiar and mystical way, the return of the Egypt-state;
and in ch. 20 speaks of the Lord as going to bring the people again into the
wilderness; but calls it “the wilderness of the peoples,” to indicate that the
dealing should be the same only in character with what Israel of old had been
subjected to in the desert, not a bald and formal repetition of the story.
Indeed, God’s providence knows nothing in the sacred any more than in
the profane territory of the world’s history, of a literal reproduction of the
past. And when prophecy threw its delineations of the future into the form of
the past, and spake of the things yet to be as a recurrence of those that had
already been, it simply meant that the one should be after the type of the
other, or should in spirit and character resemble it. By type, however, in such
examples as those just referred to, is not to be understood type in the more
special or theological sense in which the term is commonly used in the present
discussions, as if there was any thing in the past that of itself gave
prophetic intimation of the coming future. It is to be understood only in the
general sense of a pattern-form, in accordance with which the events in
prospect were to bear the image of the past. The prophetical element,
therefore, did not properly reside in the historical transaction referred to in
the prophecy, but in the prophetic word itself, which derived its peculiar form
from the past, and through that a certain degree of light to illustrate its
import. There were, however, other cases in which the typical in circumstance
or action—the typical in the proper sense—was similarly combined with a
prophecy in word; and in them we have a twofold prophetic element—one more
concealed in the type, and another more express and definite in the word, but
the two made to coalesce in one prediction.
Of this kind is the prophecy in Zech. 6:12, 13, where the prophet takes
occasion, from the building of the literal temple in Jerusalem under the
presidency of Joshua, to foretell a similar but higher and more glorious work
in the future: “Behold the man, whose name is the Branch; and He shall grow up
out of His place, and He shall build the temple of the Lord; even He shall
build the temple of the Lord,” etc. The building of the temple was itself
typical of the incarnation of God in the person of Christ, and of the raising
up in Him of a spiritual house that should be “an habitation of God through the
Spirit.” But the prophecy thus involved in the action is expressly uttered in
the prediction, which at once explained the type, and sent forward the
expectations of believers toward the contemplated result. Similar, also, is the
prediction of Ezekiel, in ch. 34:23, in which the good promised in the future
to a truly penitent and believing people, is connected with a return of the
person and times of David: “And I will set up one shepherd over them, and he
shall feed them, even my servant David; he shall feed them, and he shall be
their shepherd.” And the closing prediction of Malachi: “Behold, I will send
you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the
Lord,” David’s kingdom and reign in Israel were from the first intended to
foreshadow those of Christ; and the work also of Elias, as preparatory to the
Lord’s final reckoning with the apostate commonwealth of Israel, bore a typical
respect to the work of preparation that was to go before the Lord’s personal
appearance in the last crisis of the Jewish state. Such might have been
probably conjectured or dimly apprehended from the things themselves; but it
became comparatively clear, when it was announced in explicit predictions, that
a new David and a new Elias were to appear. The prophetical element was there
before in the type; but the prophetical word brought it distinctly and
prominently out; yet so as in no respect to materially change or complicate the
meaning. The specific designation of “David, my servant,” and “Elijah the
prophet,” are in each case alike intended to indicate, not the literal
reproduction of the past, but the full realization of all that the past
typically foretokened of good. It virtually told the people of God, that in
their anticipations of the coming reality, they might not fear to heighten to
the uttermost the idea which those honored names were fitted to suggest; their
anticipations would be amply borne out by the event, in which still higher
prophecy than Elijah’s, and unspeakably nobler service than David’s, was to be
found in reserve for the Church.
(Ibid., 112-14)
The next open and public
appeal made by our Lord to an ancient prophecy, was made with immediate respect
to John the Baptist. It was probably about the middle of Christ’s ministry, and
shortly before the death of John. Taking occasion from John’s message to speak
of the distinguished place he held among God’s servants, the Lord said, “This
is he of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before Thy face, and
he shall prepare Thy way before Thee.” The words are taken from the beginning
of the third chapter of Malachi, with no other difference than that He who
there sends is also the one before whom the way was to be prepared: “He shall
prepare the way before me.” The
reason of this variation will be noticed presently. But in regard to John, that
he was the person specially intended by the prophet as the herald-messenger of
the Lord, can admit of no doubt on the part of any one who sincerely believes
that Jesus was God manifest in the flesh, and personally tabernacling among
men. John himself does not appear to have formally appropriated this passage in
Malachi; but he virtually did so when he described himself in the words of a
passage in Isaiah, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye
the way of the Lord”; for the passage in Malachi is merely a resumption, with a
few additional characteristics, of that more ancient one in Isaiah. And on this
account they are both thrown together at the commencement of St. Mark’s Gospel,
as if they formed indeed but one prediction: “As it is written in the prophets
(the better copies even read, ‘by Isaiah the prophet’), Behold, I send my
messenger before Thy face, which shall prepare Thy way before Thee. The voice
of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make His paths
straight.” And there is still another prediction—one at the very close of
Malachi—which is but a new, and in some respects more specific, announcement of
what was already uttered in these earlier prophecies. In this last prediction
the preparatory messenger is expressly called by the name of Elias the prophet;
and the work he had to do “before the coming of the Lord,” is described as that
of turning “the heart of the fathers (or making it return) to the children, and
the heart of the children to their fathers.” As this was the last word of the
Old Testament, so it is in a manner the first word of the New; for the prophecy
was taken up by the angel, who announced to Zacharias the birth of John, and at
once applied and explained by him in connection with the mission of John. “Many
of the children of Israel,” said the angel, “shall he turn to the Lord their
God; and he shall go before Him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the
hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the
just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”—(Luke 1:16, 17.) Here the
coming of the Lord, as in all the passages under consideration, was the grand
terminating point of the prophecy, and, as preparatory to this, the making
ready of a people for it. This making ready of the people, or turning them back
again (with reference to the words of Elijah in 1 Kings 18:37) to the Lord
their God, is twice mentioned by the angel as the object of John’s mission.
And, between the two, there is given what is properly but another view of the
same thing, only with express reference to the Elijah-like character of the
work: John was to go before the Lord as a new Elias, in the spirit and power of
that great prophet, and for the purpose of effecting a reconciliation between
the degenerate seed of Israel and their pious forefathers—making them again of
one heart and soul, so that the fathers might not be ashamed of their children,
nor the children of their fathers; in a word, that he might effect a real
reformation, by turning “the disobedient (offspring) to the wisdom of the just
(ancestors).” Thus in all these passages—to which we may also add the private
testimony of our Lord to the disciples as to Elias having indeed come (Mark 9:13)—there
is a direct application of the Old Testament prophecy, in a series of
closely-related predictions, to the person and mission of John the Baptist. And
so far from any violence or constraint appearing in this application, the
predictions are all taken in their most natural and obvious meaning. For that
the literal Elias was no more to be expected from the last of these
predictions, than the literal David from Ezek. 34:23, seems plain enough: the
person meant could only be one coming in the spirit of Elias, and commissioned
to do substantially his work. So also Jezebel and Balaam are spoken of as
reviving in the teachers of false doctrine and the ringleaders of corruption
who appeared in some of the churches of Asia (Rev. 2:14, 20). (Ibid., 369-70)
Further Reading:
