Sunday, September 25, 2022

Patrick Fairbairn, The Typology of Scripture (1900) Using "Elias" to Denote a Forerunner

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:


"Elias" as a "Forerunner" in LDS Scripture