Panel: The One-Story Plotline of the Bible

Listen as D. A. Carson speaks on a panel on the topic of the plotline of the Bible in this address from The Gospel Coalition sermon library.

Jared Wilson: Thank you for joining this breakout. This is a panel discussion on The One-Story Plotline of the Bible. Perhaps you’re familiar with most of the fellows on the panel, but I’ll just very briefly go through and introduce them once again.

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To my far right is Dr. D.A. Carson. You’ve probably heard his session already. He is research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and the author of numerous commentaries and books. He is also co-founder of The Gospel Coalition, along with Tim Keller.

To his left is Dr. Stephen Um. Perhaps you just heard him preach as well. He is the senior minister of Citylife Presbyterian Church right here in Boston. He teaches New Testament at Gordon-Conwell and serves as a council member of The Gospel Coalition. He is the director of the steering committee for The Gospel Coalition of New England, so he is the fellow primarily responsible for the conference that you’re at right now.

Then to my right is Dr. Gordon Hugenberger. Dr. Hugenberger is senior minister of Park Street Church right here in Boston as well, and he teaches Old Testament at Gordon-Conwell.

We’re going to go ahead and get started. We’ll close with prayer, but we want to go ahead and get started with the questions to allow these men to have as much time to discuss as possible. Don, I’m going to start with you. Just so we have the definitions out of the way and lay the foundation for the rest of the discussion, what do we mean when we talk about the one-story plotline of the Bible?

Don Carson: There is a substantial school in contemporary scholarship that thinks the Bible is not a coherent book but rather a disparate collection of different documents with different stories and different emphases.

The God of the Old Testament is really not quite the same as the God of the New Testament, the God of Matthew is not quite the same as the God of Paul, and the God of Isaiah is not quite the same as the God of Daniel. If you push that sort of thing far enough, at the end of the day, you might have a disparate collection of spiritual insights or the like, but you don’t have one coherent account.

Not only do Christians say that there is one mind behind all of Scripture, the mind of God himself … however diverse the modes of inspiration, there is one mind, and therefore, the whole thing coheres … this one mind has so superintended the events of the history of redemption that there’s actually one big overarching story too. Everybody knows there are lots of little stories that get driven into it, but there’s one big story that starts in creation and fall and ends in the new heaven and the new earth.

To discern that sweeping plotline provides something of a coherent structure around which you fit all the pieces of different literary genres, all the subplots, the different stories, and the different emphases. They all get a certain coherence when you discern that one massive plotline that runs through the whole of Scripture.

Jared: What does it tell us about the author of Scripture? Stephen, if you could speak to that. What does having the one-story plotline tell us about God himself?

Stephen Um: I oftentimes say it this way, especially for preachers who are thinking about preaching from a particular text. We talk about gospel-centered preaching, Christ-centered preaching, or a redemptive-historical approach to preaching, but what do we mean by that? It’s really a hermeneutic for interpreting the Bible in this way within the one-story plotline, reading it throughout the Canon of Scripture, looking at all the various inter-canonical themes.

When we’re looking at a particular author of a particular book, I think it’s important for us to understand the author’s intention. We talk about authorial intent. What was the author trying to say? We’ll look at all of the different ways that he might look at a text, how he builds on it using grammar, and so on, in reference to the Old Testament.

I think that it’s important for us to make a distinction between understanding the main idea of a particular text (that might be the logical main point of a particular passage) and recognizing that it must always be situated in the big idea of the one-story plotline. I think that, oftentimes, preachers and laypeople who interpret Scripture only look at the main idea.

That’s important. We need to do our grammatical-lexical study and try to understand the main idea, but that needs to be situated in the larger context of the entire corpus of Scripture, in the entire Canon. It’s like going to a movie and just seeing one little part of it without understanding the whole big story. I think you’ll really be missing the bigger story.

Jared: What would it say about God as author, God as sovereign, that he uses the variety of human experience, as well as the different genres in Scripture as well (some of which are not narratives), to tell one story? Could you reflect on what that tells us about God, about his purposes, and about his attributes?

Stephen: Yes, I think that emphasizes what Don said about the cohesiveness, how the Bible holds together. We’re talking about multiple authors, in multiple generations and different social settings, being able to understand exactly what their responsibility was in light of the entire redemptive-historical work of God. Of course, a lot of the Old Testament writers didn’t fully understand. They got glimpses of it. They had certain pictures and certain types and so on.

But to be able to show how God was able to tie these things in, even in some kind of incomplete way or even in some ways where it’s kind of directing, like Don talked about the kingdom.… Even though 2 Samuel 7 is referring specifically to David, you know that story finds its completion, the whole theme of sonship being tied in with the king and coming through the Davidic line and so on. I think that just shows the character of God to be able to find one big, unified narrative arc in showing the continuity between all the different books.

Don: Could I add something to that? If God is behind the whole thing like this, it first shows his omnipotence. He’s running the whole show. He’s the Alpha and the Omega. He’s the Beginning and the End. He knows the end from the beginning; he brings it about. Genuine prophecy works through typology because God guarantees that it does. He’s running the whole show. So it says something about the sovereignty of God.

Second, it also says something about the wisdom of God. He can tie all the little pieces together, all the component bits, with all of their balance and proportion and so on.

Third, it shows that in God’s view, this particular plotline, which turns on human sin, which He alone can address, is the most important thing conceivable. It’s not a story about how to become extremely creative or a story about being as diverse as we possibly can. Creativity is mentioned in the Bible; diversity is certainly mentioned in the Bible, but at the end of the day, the plotline turns on sin, on rebellion against God, and how God goes after sinners. That is either the text or the subtext of absolutely everything in the Bible. That’s where it’s going.

Thus, it is showing that in God’s view, the addressing of sin and how we’re alienated from God and under his curse and his wrath (unless God himself, out of love, actually restores us) becomes the framework on which the whole rest of the Bible is to be understood. So there are a lot of theological implications about who God is and what God thinks is important when you discern carefully what the structure is.

Stephen: And then what you said earlier this morning, Don, about the irony when they were mocking the “king of the Jews.” When they were saying, “Crucify him, crucify him,” they were actually, without knowing it, preaching gospel. They were saying, “Crucify him,” and God used that in order to fulfill his plans.

Jared: It’s connected to John’s point in the message about the gospel being a plan. It’s encouraging to me to know that God is telling a story. There will be a resolution. He is not leaving us hanging. This is going someplace, which is certainly an encouragement in times of despair and difficulty. Gordon, let me ask you this: Can you give an example of a theme in the Old Testament that we see as developing in the Old Testament and that is resolved in the New Testament? I know there are a lot, but could touch on some of the high points for us?

Gordon Hugenberger: A theme that has been resolved in the New Testament? I think, obviously, the main theme in terms of kingdom ideas is the theme of Daniel 7. There we find the whole prediction of the sequence of world empires of kingdoms that Daniel sets forth.

This is first seen in terms of an interpretation of an idol image that Nebuchadnezzar has in Daniel 2, and then, in parallel to that, his own vision of it in Daniel 7 as a sequence of beasts. What Nebuchadnezzar envisions as a great idol … something that he worships, the work of his own hands, the kingdom-building enterprise … that which he worships as an idol, Daniel unmasks as, in fact, subhuman and bestial.

It is a series of beasts where, to begin with the lion, represents Babylon. In the sequence of these four empires, you go from Babylon to Medo-Persia to Greece and then, finally, to an unnamed fourth kingdom. During this fourth kingdom, God will raise up a king who is identified as a son of man who will reign over a kingdom that will last forever and will not pass on to everyone (like had happened in every previous generation), but to another people.

Nebuchadnezzar was having a nightmare, as some of you know, in chapter 2. The nightmare was a repetitive one, and it had enough of an implication that he could understand it. He and his short little 25 years of rule had built a kingdom greater than Assyria had managed to put together after 300 years of effort.

If you can take over a predecessor’s work and, in your little brief lifespan, outdo them, in a moment of lucidity you’re going to realize, “Well, someone can do that to me too.” Indeed, that’s the prediction: Your kingdom will now be given over to another. That one will get eaten up by yet another, and there will be still another. The only one that is going to last forever is the kingdom of the Son of Man.

In terms of the imagery of Daniel 7, it’s a divine figure. He rides on the clouds, which prior to modern aviation, only God did. Psalm 68 has God riding on the clouds. So the Son of Man riding on the clouds of heaven and being granted this kingdom that all peoples in every language are going to now worship him and submit to him obviously has its fulfillment in the New Testament. That’s why Jesus’ favorite self-designation, some 86 times, is Son of Man, and his favorite sermon topic is kingdom of God. It’s all coming right out of Daniel 7.

The big surprise is that the Son of Man isn’t just the Lord who comes in final glory to put an end to all the kingdoms of this world and eradicate all sin, but that the Son of Man is the one who sows the seed. He comes first in this much more diminutive way that seems inauspicious, almost invisible. Yet be sure of this: the Son of Man who is the sower of the good seed is the one who is going to be the reaper. He’ll send out his angels in the end time, and it will all be accomplished exactly as Daniel had predicted.

A closer look at Daniel 2 and 7 would realize that there were actually going to be two comings. In the contemporaneous Jewish speculation, all the emphasis was on the consummation, but it’s not the New Testament reading something into the Old Testament to see that there were actually going to be two phases. In phase one, there would be a rock that would be cut out without hands. In phase two, it smashes, destroys the kingdoms of this world, and grows up into a mountain that covers the universe.

That two-stage coming of the Son of Man or the work of the kingdom of God is something that came as something of a surprise in the New Testament, but it’s the fulfillment for sure. In fact, it was so powerful in terms of the timing. That’s why there was such messianic interest exactly during the Roman Empire. In contemporary Jewish speculation, they (and we) knew which kingdom came after Greece.

The sequence of these kingdoms that had oppressed the kingdoms of God was first Babylon, presumed to rule over the people that only God should rule over, then Medo-Persia, then Greece, and then a fourth kingdom. Well, what’s the fourth kingdom? What’s after Greece? Rome. So there was an absolutely intense messianic expectation.

The place was crawling with false pretenders-to-be-Messiahs, which we all learned about in university in the comparative religion classes that try to debunk the claims of the New Testament. “Well, you know that Jesus was just one more out of a long list.” Well, yes, that’s true, exactly as we would expect, and not later. It was during the Roman Empire, exactly as Daniel timed it, and, indeed, that’s the fulfillment.

Jared: So as Jesus, after the resurrection, is sidling up to the disciples on the road to Emmaus and showing them the things about himself in the Law and the Prophets, could you give us some other examples of what might have been some of the other things he was pointing out to them?

If the concept is that the Old Testament is sort of like furniture in a room, and when the lights are low, you can kind of make it out: “Maybe that’s a chair, maybe that’s a coat rack.” When the new covenant has dawned, the light is now on. If the old covenant is types and shadows, now we have this illumination backward. What might have been some of the things that he would show to them in the “room”?

Don: The most important one is that the Davidic king would also be the suffering Messiah. It’s pretty hard to find an unambiguous grasp of that truth, which is self-evident to any Christian living this side of the cross and the resurrection. It’s pretty hard to find any profound grasp of it during Jesus’ lifetime, even among the disciples. When Peter, at Caesarea Philippi, confesses that Jesus is the Christ, and Christ blesses him for it, saying, “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven,” what Peter meant by it is not what we mean by it.

We can’t think of Christ apart from the Christ who actually died, rose again on the third day, and reigns victoriously. Whereas, that’s explicitly what Peter did not yet understand. When Jesus goes on to talk about his impending death, Peter comes around and says, “Never, Lord! This shall never happen to you!” causing Jesus to wheel on him and say, “Get behind me, Satan!”

Or again, when Jesus is actually in the tomb, the disciples are not in an upstairs room saying, “Yes! I can hardly wait until Sunday!” They still don’t have categories for the resurrection. In Luke 24, the passage to which you alluded, when Jesus says to those on the road to Emmaus, “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have written,” he really is saying that some of these structures really were there in the Old Testament and that they should have seen them. It’s a moral failure not to have seen them.

That means that after Paul becomes converted, for example, he does not say to people he’s trying to win to Christ, “I know it’s a bit mysterious, this interpreting the Old Testament stuff. What you really need is a Damascus-road experience, and then you’ll understand.” No, it took a Damascus-road experience to get him to understand, but once he understood, his appeal in evangelism was always to the Scripture. As a result, he has a different reading of Old Testament texts, and you can identify how that reading works.

What is it that Jews had not seen that really is, nevertheless, there? That’s what circles around behind the whole theme of the mustÈrion in Greek: that which has been hidden in times past but now revealed. It’s not that which is not even there in times past. That’s what classic dispensationalists said. They’d see the word mustÈrion, which is mystery in our King James Version and secrets in the NIV, and they would say, “Well, this has to be a doctrine that just wasn’t there at all in the Old Testament.”

No, no, no. It was there in the Old Testament, but it was hidden, as it were, in plain sight. Out of our lostness and sinfulness, we really didn’t see it. Then in the fullness of time the events themselves, the power of the Spirit to transform to enable us to see, enabled us to see, and that which was hidden now becomes revealed and disclosed. That’s the way the term mystery is used regularly in the New Testament.

So there are huge swaths of biblical theology that turn on this “hidden but there and now revealed.” That which has been prophesied in the Old Testament and now fulfilled is also that which has been hidden in the Old Testament and now revealed. Those two things come together in Romans 16:25–27.

Stephen: To just build on that thought of the Davidic kingship and the suffering servant, and to tie it into some the things that Gordon just mentioned, in the book of Isaiah, which develops this whole theme about the suffering servant, you have this interesting Hebrew verbal combination of being lifted up or exalted (it’s translated differently in different translations). It is used in Isaiah 6 to refer to Yahweh, and it is then picked up again in Isaiah 52:13 to refer to the suffering servant. To be exalted and lifted up. The verbal combination would be ruwm nasa’.

Then it’s picked up again in Isaiah 57:15 where it says the same thing. It’s this one, referring to Yahweh, who would dwell with the lowly. So what we find in the New Testament … this is just to show that you saw glimpses of this, references in the Old Testament finding fulfillment in Christ … is picked up by the apostle Paul in Philippians 2, where he makes reference to Jesus becoming nothing.

Then it’s also developed by John in his gospel, where he uses the term, writing the Greek translation of the Hebrew, of to be lifted up and to be glorified. That’s how the Septuagint translated the Hebrew. So what John does is exploit it by showing that Jesus is the Son who fulfills the prophecy textually (you have thematic connections as well) about what was prophesied about the suffering servant.

In both instances in John’s gospel, to be glorified and to be lifted up is a reference to the crucifixion. What John is trying to say is, “If you want to know anything about the fullness of God’s majesty and his glory, you’re actually going to see it through the cross.” It’s very, very ironic in that sense, and we see Paul developing that as well.

Another theme could be the whole idea, as Don mentioned earlier, of sonship or the Son motif. You can build that up. I understand that there are different uses, son of man in Daniel and then son of God as just a reference to son, but you can develop that. I think that what Don was mentioning is very helpful.

It’s helpful to look at a particular theme. It was Goldsworthy that was kind of popularized by Keller where he says that there are helpful ways for us to make the intertextual connections. Typology is one, but that’s not the only way. You also have a story that’s incomplete that’s completed. There is a theme that is resolved. There is a law that is received. There is a symbol that’s fulfilled.

When you look at the whole theme of sonship, you can go all the way back to the garden. Luke’s genealogy refers to Adam as the son of God. You develop that. In Exodus 4:22, God says, “Israel is my firstborn son.” You can go back to Isaac. There are all these references where you have the idea of sonship, yet they are not perfectly obedient sons. They all fail in that way, and then, ultimately, you find the Son who comes to fulfill the will of the Father. So those are things you can see finding fulfillment in the New Testament.

Jared: We see that in terms of the older brother as well: the template of how the older brother, who has the birthright, behaves up until Christ, the good older brother.

Gordon, so Don was touching on how we see through the light of the New Testament what seems plainly obvious: the suffering Messiah in the Old Testament. There are some who will say that the resurrection … not just of Christ but the resurrection to come, the resurrection of the dead … that those things are exceptional twists.

Some would maintain that they’re not even in the Old Testament. They’re sort of part of the plan but are now sprung into the story: the big reveal on top of the reveal of the suffering servant. Where might we see in the Old Testament Scriptures this concept of resurrection?

Gordon: I think that part of the problem is that we’ve been blinded by a history-of-religion approach to the Old Testament that developed without a view to ancient Near Eastern literature. The assumption is that the ideas of resurrection or afterlife are only very late in the Old Testament, if at all: for example, Daniel 12, maybe a tad at the end of Isaiah, and a few other places in little dribs and drabs.

Actually, now that we have so much more (just a super-abundance) of evidence of ancient Near Eastern materials in Egypt and elsewhere, now the pendulum, if anything, is almost swinging the other way. Now it is assumed that if all of Israel’s neighbors had very well developed views of the afterlife, it would be astonishing that Israel would be totally uninterested in it.

So now there’s a new awareness and alertness to images that had otherwise not really been thought too much about, like gathered to his fathers language, including, at one time, written off as, “Oh, that’s a burial practice,” except the problem is that it’s used of those who are buried by themselves. Because they’re gathered to their fathers, now, they’re going to be buried, maybe, in a family tomb in order to give outward expression to that. So hope of continued life after life.

I think also, that we find the whole notion of, in fact, the crucifixion. What do you do with the worst of sinners in the Old Testament? The worst lawbreakers? Those who do something more horrible, more heinous than, just say, murdering one other person? Well, in the very worst cases, what you do is, after capital punishment, you do postmortem desecration of the remains. You take the body and, as it talks about in Deuteronomy 21, put it up on a tree (after the guy has been stoned) in order to be symbolically food for the birds of the air and the beasts of the field.

In the Old Testament, there’s a warning, “Don’t leave it up there; take it down before the end of the day, because anyone who is hanging on a tree is under God’s curse.” In the conception of that, what was going on was well-attested elsewhere in the ancient Near East. When someone does something terrible …

Let’s say you’re Hitler: you didn’t just murder one person, but you murdered a whole lot of people. Or maybe a Haman, like in the book of Esther; what do you do with that? Or how about the kings of the Amorites in the book of Joshua, who caused the death of many? Just go through any one of the worst of sinners, and what you end up with is a punishment where they’re first killed, and then they’re hung on trees. Then, if everyone’s following the Bible, they’ll be taken down, but the idea of that exposure is to deny them the resurrection.

Then often in the Old Testament, you also, then, buried them under a great pile of rocks, so as to keep them down. “They’re still there to this day” is a tagline that’s added. “… and that pile of rocks is still there to this day,” meaning that they haven’t gotten out yet. They haven’t been resurrected yet.

Of course, Jesus is the marvelous exception of that pattern. He dies on a cross. Therefore, he is experiencing not just capital punishment but damnation. You’re inviting God to judge in the afterlife, to accomplish the justice that we couldn’t achieve in this life. There was postmortem desecration of the remains. Then you bury him in a tomb and cover it with a rock. The rock gets moved, in his case, because of the justification, the vindication, and the being put to death for our sins and raised for our justification that was accomplished by Christ on the cross.

I would just say that you have this whole pattern again where you’re now more alert to the possibilities. You discover, “Well, no, this hope has been there for a long time.” We could look at other examples, as well, of the same sort of hope you get in the Psalms, for example. Think of passages that would try to talk at one time and were sort of being dismissed as being irrelevant to this whole question. How about Psalm 49?

“For all can see that wise men die; the foolish and senseless alike perish and leave their wealth to others. Their tombs will remain their houses forever, their dwellings for endless generations, although they had named lands after themselves. But man, despite his riches, does not endure; he is like the beasts that perish. This is the fate of those who trust in themselves.” That’s the first group. They get buried; then their home is just the dirt, and their followers reprove them.

But, “The upright will rule over them in the morning.” In Ugaritic literature (the language related to Hebrew of people living at the same time), the phrase in the morning refers to the resurrection morning. In Egypt, the whole concept of the Book of the Dead was that the Pharaoh and other persons die, go through one night’s cycle, and then resurrection comes in the morning. That’s why you want to embalm them: so that they’ll be in good shape for it. It’s a kind of yucky idea, but anyway …

“The upright will rule over them in the morning.” What’s the morning? “… their forms will decay in the grave, far from their princely mansions. But God will redeem my life from the grave; he will surely take me to himself.” That is just one psalm that, in the past, was just dismissed as talking all metaphorically, but now we know that they’re talking about the hope for the afterlife. There are many others. Some scholars have gone overboard and found it in almost every psalm, altering vocabulary to make it fit, but I think it’s certainly there.

Jared: That’s a good segue. Let’s talk about typologies for a second. Don, about 12 years ago, I read your little book, Exegetical Fallacies, and it was devastating to me. If you’re not familiar with the book, it is essentially a list of all the ways you can go wrong in interpreting the Scriptures. I came away, at first, thinking, “I will never study the Bible again, because there’s no way that I could get it right.”

A lot of us have been helped by Keller’s true and better template (Jesus is a true and better Jacob, Joseph, David, and so on and so forth), the typology idea, which I know he’s drawing from Clowney and others. Of course, there is a sense that we do what is referred to in the saying, “To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail” sort of thing. I just want to read for a second; this comes from Spurgeon’s Lectures to My Students in the chapter on spiritualizing. I found this really helpful and challenging as well:

“… employ spiritualizing within certain limits and boundaries, but I pray you do not, under cover of this advice, rush headlong into incessant and injudicious ‘imaginings,’ as George Fox would call them. Do not drown yourselves because you are recommended to bathe, or hang yourselves on an oak because tannin is described as a valuable astringent.” So what are the ways we do typology wrong? If you could address typological fallacies just for a minute.

Don: Oh, there are lots of them. When I was a boy, I heard one preacher explain to me with a straight face (I think he was telling what he thought was the truth) that the significance of Rahab’s red cord was that it was pointing to the blood of Jesus, on the assumption that Jesus’ blood was red, and this was one of the typological connections between the Old Testament and the New. It’s possible to find people who make all kinds of connections that are not much more than playing with word games.

Biblical typology finds its warrant in the biblical text. It is not something that’s imposed on the text. There are different kinds of typology, actually, but in general, you get patterns of places, institutions, or people that recur. As the patterns recur, they often, though not always, become more concentrated or clearer. After a pattern recurs, you see that this is the way God acts. This is what God is doing. This is what God is doing in history. It’s intrinsically forward-looking, but then it becomes sharper yet when it’s tied into something that announces the future.

For example, the argument of the writer to the Hebrew in Hebrews 8 is that if God, through Jeremiah, six centuries before Christ, announces a new covenant, in principle, he has announced that the old covenant is old. You start talking about another covenant, or change it in some fundamental way and call it a new covenant, you’ve automatically said the old one is old, and that which is old is, to use the language of Hebrews, “obsolete and passing away.”

So here, six centuries before Christ, is an announcement that the Mosaic covenant is already, in principle, obsolete. What do you do, then, with a recurring cycle year after year celebrating the Passover, by which God provides an ordained sacrifice that covers everyone in the house so that the destruction of the angel of death passes over and is still celebrated year after year after year? That whole covenant is going to die. What do you do with that? What is symbolized by that?

You start tying that into other arguments that come along as well. Does the blood of bull and goat finally take away sin? What is the moral significance of a bull losing its life? Does the bull come up and say, “Here’s my neck. Slaughter me. I’ll die for you. Here I am”? What’s the moral significance of this slaughtered animal?

What is it pointing to? More slaughtered animals next year? Then you start reading other kinds of texts that get interwoven with this until you’ve built up a whole pattern of expectation, and you eventually understand exactly where Paul is coming from when he says, “Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been slaughtered for us.”

What I’m claiming is that those patterns are already there in the text itself. The Melchizedekian priesthood is already understood a thousand years before Christ, at the time of David, as pointing beyond Genesis to a time when you can be king and priest. Not in the order of Levi, as that’s forbidden, but you can be a king and a priest. To be both king and priest is not intrinsically bad. Melchizedek is revered by Abraham; the greatest patriarch of all paid homage to a man who was king and priest. It can’t be intrinsically bad.

Then you have Psalm 110, the most frequently quoted Old Testament chapter, where, initially, the first oracle is pointing to a Davidic son who is going to be the great Davidic king, but who is nevertheless going to be a priest. You start looking at what these patterns of priesthood and sacrifice are doing. How did they get intertwined until they point forward to one who comes along and shows himself to be a priest in the order of Melchizedek, even while he’s also son in the line of David?

The themes intertwine so that it’s not just a straightforward typology, but typologies that are intertwined with other patterns, other typologies, and with specific texts until you have an explosion with how all these things come together, and you look back and say, “Oh yeah, I should have seen that. It’s all over the place.” You’re tripping over it once you start seeing the threads pull together in a variety of ways.

If I were giving a whole lecture on typology, I’d begin by discerning different kinds of typology and how they work. The biggest thing that you want to be careful of is lack of warrant. You want to make sure it’s not merely something you’re imposing on the text and that these typological lines are warranted by the text itself. You must find justification for them in the text or else, at the end of the day, it becomes just too speculative and uncontrolled.

I would go one stage further than that and say that once you’ve seen how those patterns work, there is some warrant for saying that you can discern other patterns. Look at this wonderful passage in Hebrews 9. The writer to the Hebrews is talking about the first covenant (the tabernacle, what it looked like, and so on).

“… but we cannot discuss these things in detail now.” This implies that if he had more time, he could have. So all the kinds of things that he’s mentioned, that he doesn’t actually tease out in terms of antitype or the like, he could have, and thus expects his readers to do so. This shows that once the patterns are laid out, you can often see how the other related structures to those patterns also fill out, in terms of typological prediction: an antitype that focuses on Christ and his Word and work. I think that Gordon wants to correct me.

Gordon: Just as a footnote, I think sometimes it’s helpful to address those who think that typology is all just excessive imagination, to recognize that there was a structure for the typology that we’re most interested in that was set up by very clear prophetic texts too. For example, take Moses, for instance. This may even relate to the suffering of Jesus and everything else.

Moses in Deuteronomy is anticipating his demise. Obviously, he’s not going to live much longer, so there’s the question of succession. So in Deuteronomy 17 and 18 you have a kind of trifurcation of offices of king, of priest, and of prophet. It’s particularly the prophet that’s interesting. God promises, “Moses, after you’re dead, folks are not going to be disadvantaged because I’m going to raise up for them a prophet like you from among the people.”

Then at the end of Deuteronomy, in chapter 34, there’s the added note that, “Oh, by the way, since then there’s really not been any prophet like Moses.” So there’s an expectation that we should be looking for prophets, on the one hand, who look like Moses in terms of doing the work that Moses did (that’s what Deuteronomy 34 emphasizes): not just prophesying, speaking the word of God, and being a mediator of the covenant, but actually doing works like him.

So when Jesus feeds the multitudes in the gospel of John, it’s not surprising that, although he hadn’t preached any sermon at that point, they’re all wondering, “Oh, this must be the prophet who was to come,” because, like Moses, Jesus is feeding the multitude. Moses had done it for the children of Israel for 40 years. Jesus does it.

You think, “Well, just one meal for 5,000 is not like a big deal,” but Jesus makes the point, “No, no, you’ve missed the point. That’s just a pointer to an even more substantive feeding, namely that I myself am the Bread of Life, and you will now live forever. This is the food that lasts forever.” So it’s an escalation: a prophet like Moses but with escalation.

In the same way that there’s escalation in Jesus’ fulfillment of the works like Moses, as the prophet who was to come, he’s also the fulfillment of Moses in terms of the aspirations that Moses has. After the golden calf incident, God basically says, “Step aside. I want to wipe out all of Israel, and I’m going to start a new Israel with you. I’ll make your name great.” God gives to Moses the Abrahamic covenant. In other words, Israel was going to be down to one person. It would be one individual. All Israel would be down to just one at that point: Moses.

After hearing God say, “I’m going to make you into a great nation. Step aside; I’m going to destroy all of them,” what does Moses do? God wants to destroy everyone, and they all deserve it because they’re all idolaters. Moses steps forward, not only as a mediator of the covenant but actually as a willing sacrifice. He says, “What a great sin these people have committed! They have made themselves gods of gold. But now, please forgive their sin—but if not, blot me out of the book you have written.” What does that mean? Kill me? No, it means damn me.

It means not just kill me, but it’s talking about this Book of Life that you get at the end of Deuteronomy and other Old Testament texts which, again, are part of this afterlife idea. It’s the register of those who will enjoy eternal life. Moses says, “Blot me out …” and God says, “It wouldn’t be good enough. Sorry, Moses.” But the day is coming when one greater than Moses will be blotted out of the Book of Life for the sake of God’s forgiveness extended to sinners who deserve nothing but damnation. So that’s the structure of typology.

Now you look for all the second-Moses figures (like Elijah and Elisha) that do works that remind you of Moses and are continuing this line of prophets, and you are right to see in them prefigurements of Christ, because the ancient reader of those texts would have thought this same way. They would have thought of them, if they were thinking in terms of Deuteronomy, as, in fact, an almost-fulfillment.

Joshua, the first of them, is like Moses. Moses goes across the Red Sea; the Red Sea divides. Joshua goes across the Jordan; well, the Jordan divides. (The Jordan is not a big deal, but at least …) Moses is privileged to win victories, as is Joshua. You can see all these parallels, Elijah and Elisha even more so, as you go through the Old Testament.

Ultimately, Isaiah’s prophecy in chapters 52 and 53, in my opinion, is really a second-Moses theme. Isaiah, who is a prophet of God, would have paid a lot of attention to Deuteronomy 18. He would have been thinking about this prophet like Moses and, sure enough, we have the filled-out portrait in the suffering servant that actually experiences this which was predicted. I would say the same thing with the Melchizedek thing.

It isn’t just that we see, “Oh, this is similar to this; this is similar to that, and okay, now I have a typology.” There’s a structure. You have a covenant with David, promising that his son will build a temple and that God will have a special relationship with him as a son. But it’s conditionalized: if he keeps the covenant and if he’s obedient. If he isn’t, it forfeits to the next generation. You sort of have this expectation that the descendants of David are going to be setting up a kind of pattern that we look for in the ultimate David.

David’s biography, then, becomes the pattern (as N.T. Wright argues) for the gospel. This is particularly true of the gospel of Luke. You start the story of David in 1 Samuel with the story of the prophet who anoints David, and you start the story of David’s greater son, Jesus, in the gospel of Luke, with the story of the miraculous birth and career of the prophet who will anoint Jesus, namely John the Baptist. Then you have echoes in the song of Mary from the song of Hannah.

The whole narrative has this remarkable parallel, because there was this prediction that David would have a son. That was forfeited. The sons of David were all born in Jerusalem and were all crappy. God, at last, through the prophet Micah, says, “Well, we really need a second David. David himself was born in Bethlehem, so the one who will be the second David, the son of David par excellence, will also have to be born in Bethlehem.”

So there’s a logic. It’s not just that they’re thinking and that God puts this thought in their minds that is disconnected to everything else. There is a logic that controls the typology to make it coherent and meaningful (to the original reader, not just to us who are reading back from the New Testament into the Old).

Stephen: Just briefly, I’ll add to that. I know you want to ask a few other questions. That’s so very helpful. By the way, if some of you are interested, Gordon has written a lot on typology, and I’ve listened to some of his lectures on Judges. It is really, really insightful. I’ve found them helpful.

I would say that what both of these men have said (and they’ve written a lot on this) is that you have to look for patterns. If you’re just trying to interpret, if you open up the New Testament and say, “I’m never going to figure out what Hugenberger just said,” then what are some of the ways in which you can do this?

Well, you have a good concordance; some of you have Bible software. You look at how the New Testament authors refer to certain places in the Old Testament, especially if there is a direct citation such as “As it is written …” Then you have to go and find where that was. Sometimes it’s an allusion or a parallel or an echo. You look at verbal semblance; you do a word study. You do this kind of work, and you try to see these patterns that are being developed of how the New Testament authors used the Old Testament.

There was a kind of an early Jewish exegetical tradition, even before the New Testament writers, where they were trying to do this. Not only do you have the use of the Old Testament in the New, but you also have the use of the Old Testament in the Old, as well as the use of the Old Testament in early Jewish literature. They were trying to figure this out. Even though that’s not canonical literature, they were trying to interpret the Old Testament in light of what they were experiencing.

By the way, Greg Beale (New Testament professor at Westminster), whom we all know, just came out with a manual on interpreting the Old Testament in the New. That’s a little more technical, but if some of you are interested, especially for those of you who are pastors, that could be a good handbook.

Don: Yes, we edited it together, first of all. It’s called Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament. It’s about 1,300 pages of double-columned small print, designed to give you a headache. On the other hand, it tries to pick up every instance of the New Testament where the New Testament clearly cites or demonstratively alludes to the Old Testament so you can use the indexes when you’re preaching through the Old Testament, as well, and often pick up a lot of connections.

It was already so long when we finished it that when I wrote the introduction for it, I only made it five or six pages, but we knew that what we really needed was sort of a handbook that goes with it on how you do this, and now Greg has come out with that. It’s called Handbook on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament: Exegesis and Interpretation.

It’s really a book for MDiv-level students. It’s not a highfalutin book. It’s not highly technical. It works through, with Greg’s implacable consistency, lots of examples of how you actually go about doing this kind of work. If you’re already an MDiv student or a pastor, you would follow it very easily.

Jared: Stephen, I’m going to give you the last word here, just to boil it down. We have a lot of preachers here who want to take this information and boil it down to their sermon prep. What encouragement or practical help could you give? You touched on it a little bit. You answered the question that I was going to ask before I asked it, which is incredible. It’s kind of scary!

If you could elaborate further for the fellow who is preparing his sermon on an Old Testament text and wants to preach Christ in the text. What are some guardrails? What are some resources? What is some further advice or information that he could use to make sure he’s not preaching Christ in an artificial way, forcing something, but also that he’s preaching a Christian sermon?

Stephen: I think what would be helpful would be to get good introductory books on just looking at what Don was mentioning, the one-story plotline, because you need to have a structure or framework for reading the Bible a certain way. This was really Paul’s hermeneutic and was Jesus’ hermeneutic.

This is not to diminish systematic theology and all the different categories like God, sin, church, and Holy Spirit. Those things are important, and we even see that in Jesus’ emphasis in his sermon in Luke 24. It’s not as if he just says to read everything narratively, redemption-historically, and doesn’t mention these things. But I do think it’s helpful to be able to look at a particular text and to situate the local context, the main idea, in light of the big idea.

I also think it has really deep practical implications because the other type of preaching, where you’re just kind of preaching topically and are looking at certain categories, again, is very logical but tends to be more ahistorical. What ends up happening is that it can lend itself.… I’m not saying it does that all the time, but it can … to a kind of moralistic preaching or preaching that focuses more on the individual rather than seeing yourself as part of this big plan of God’s work.

I would say that’s where you would start. There are a few good recommendations, actually, on TGC’s website. There’s a whole section on preaching Christ from the Old Testament. Sinclair Ferguson used to say, “Not only do we not preach Christ from the Old Testament, but also we don’t preach Christ from the New Testament.” That’s possible. You can preach through Jesus’ morality and not talk about his finished work. So I would say to go there, and there will be a lot of good references.

We did this once before. There are some good books, not that we would agree with everything that these men have said. Sometimes they place too much emphasis on, “This is the only center,” whereas Don has said that there are probably 20 or more major inter-canonical themes with many other secondary themes. Some of the stuff is more popular: Edmund Clowney, De Graaf, or Goldsworthy. Are there some other books that you could recommend, Don, just for us to build a good summary and a survey for reading the Scriptures in this way?

Don: Yes. You’ve mentioned some of the important ones. Some of the stuff is well seen by illustration. That is, it’s not a book just on method but watching some people who have done it well. So Greg Beale’s book on the temple in the NSBT series, for example, is full of rich suggestions.

Likewise, there are some other volumes in that series that show you how to do biblical theology. Whether you’re convinced by each argument or not, it nevertheless shows you how it’s done. A lot of this sort of thing is done by observing how it’s done, not simply by following rules and turning a crank, but rather by hearing preachers who do this well and reading some of the things they write.

Some of Gordon Hugenberger’s stuff, for example, or some of Clowney’s stuff. In his own day, he did it quite well. His book The Unfolding Mystery is worth reading to this day if you can pick it up secondhand somewhere. So read some of these older guys.

Tim Keller does it quite well, picking up allusive stuff in the Old Testament. He tends not to go into enormous detail. He tends to get the heart of one particular passage and tease out all of its implications, unlike John Piper who gets hold of a text and chews on it and chews on it and finally, it explodes in front of you. You think, “How come I didn’t see that?” It’s terrific. It’s wonderful.

There are different styles, and you don’t want to fit people into a certain kind of mode, but granted the different styles, you watch for preachers who are preaching the gospel richly out of the wholeness of biblical, canonical theology.

If I’m allowed one final word of advice: If you find a preacher that you like and you listen to 50 of his sermons you come out as a bad clone. If you listen to two preachers that you like and you listen to 25 or 30 of each of their sermons, you come out confused. What you need to do is listen to 10 or 20 or 30 sermons from 50 preachers who are all committed to this sort of thing. Then you’ll come out right on the edge of wisdom and a little freer to be yourself rather than to be somebody’s clone.

Stephen: That’s a good word. Someone was telling me that John Piper was speaking to a young preacher who used the word entailments. That’s a word that Don likes. John went to him and said, “Don’t use the word entailments. Don Carson can use the word entailments, but you can’t use the word entailments.”

Don: But you can use white-hot!

Stephen: That’s why sometimes when you listen to Piper and Keller. It’s like … they’re so different. Which style is better? That’s not the point. I think Don’s word is very wise.

Jared: Thank you, gentlemen. Let’s close in prayer.

Thank you, Father, for the gifts these men have and the gifts these men are to the church. I thank you that you’ve used them, and others like them, to prosper your church spiritually and to help us know your Word, which helps us love your Word, which helps us know you, which helps us love you. So we thank you for that.

Please be with us today as we continue to chew on this rich information. May we be built up to comprehend, in some even small but still overwhelming way, how glorious you are and what a great author you are. It’s in your great Son’s name that we pray, amen.