The Use of the Old Testament by the New
This text originally appeared in Spanish in Edificaci n Cristiana in the 1990s.
From the time of the New Testament onwards and for many centuries thereafter all Christian teachers, as Gerald Bray has forcefully reminded us,1 accepted Christ’s claim that the law, the Prophets and the Psalms spoke of him (Luke 24); and they therefore interpreted the Old Testament Christologically. To that end they often used topology. For them Melchizedek was a type of Christ: the New Testament itself said it was so (Heb 5–7); and Abraham’s offering of his son Isaac on the altar was a type of God the Father’s sacrifice of his Son at Calvary, even though the New Testament nowhere said it was.
During the last century, however, typological interpretation has come under suspicion from many different directions, not least because of the arbitrary and grotesque extremes to which it has often been carried. Evangelicals, of course, accept that the New Testament itself from time to time interprets the Old Testament typologically; and since they believe in the inspiration and divine authority of the New Testament, they are obliged to accept that typology is a valid method of interpreting the Old. At the same time they remain concerned that this undeniable fact leads some expositors and preachers to engage in fanciful and arbitrary allegorising of Old Testament passages often to the outright neglect, if not the perversion, of the straightforward, literal and practical meaning of the passages concerned. As a result it has been widely felt by many scholars that the only way to avoid this fanciful and illegitimate method of interpretation is to follow the rule that nothing in the Old Testament should be interpreted as a type unless the New explicitly says that it is a type.
Now the intention of the rule is good; but of course it does not itself have the authority of the New Testament behind it, and in its outworking it could be reductionist. To start with, it could lead to the idea that in interpreting an Old Testament passage, we are faced with the stark and simple choice: either interpret it literally, or, if the New Testament explicitly permits it, both literally and typologically. But in fact the New Testament itself shows that the choice is often far wider than that; and it is the purpose of this article to draw attention to some of the many different ways in which the New Testament writers make use of the Old.
1. Straight Repetitions
Sometimes the New Testament simply repeats what the Old Testament says: ‘Honour thy father and thy mother,’ says the Law (Exod 20:12); ‘Honour thy father and thy mother,’ says Ephesians 6:2.
2. Broad Comparisons and Similes
‘As it was in the days of Noah,’ says Christ (Luke 17:26–27), ‘so shall it be also in the days of the Son of Man’. And in this instance he himself points out the particular details he has in mind in drawing the comparison: ‘they ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all’.
Or again, ‘As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up that whoever believes may in him have eternal life’ (John 3:14–15). In this case, however, Christ explicitly mentions only one detail of comparison between the two events: the lifting up of the serpent and the lifting up of the Son of Man. He does not actually point out that the Israelites were perishing because of their sin, or that they only had to look to the serpent on the pole in order to live. It would be unlikely in the extreme, however, that because our Lord did not explicitly mention these other details of comparison it was illegitimate for Nicodemus, or for us either, to suppose he intended us to see them. The teacher of Israel would have known this Old Testament story off by heart; he could be left to see these other details for himself.
Or again, consider 1 Peter 1:18–19. Peter is here reminding his readers that they have been redeemed with the precious blood of Christ; and from one point of view he need not have added anything else to convey the cost of redemption. But he adds a simile: ‘… as of a lamb without blemish and without spot’. Why the simile? It is in fact part of a sustained and deliberate attempt, throughout Peter’s first chapter, to evoke the history of Israel’s ancient Passover. The Israelites were redeemed by the blood of a literal lamb that had to be without blemish (Exod 12:5). Arrived at Sinai, they promised to obey God’s law and were thereupon sprinkled with the blood of the old covenant (ch. 24); and they then journeyed on to an inheritance, flowing with milk and honey, reserved in Canaan for them. Now Peter does not state that Israel’s redemption was a type of our redemption through Christ; but he systematically describes our redemption in language taken from Israel’s, so that the mental images evoked by Israel’s redemption become a thought-model to help us grasp the significance of what Christ has done for us. So we have been redeemed with the blood of Christ as of a lamb …; we have been sanctified unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus (1 Pet 1:2); we have been begotten again, ‘unto an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled … reserved in heaven’ for us (1:3–4). And continuing this evocation of Israel’s Passover, Peter makes use of another category of interpretation.
3. Metaphor
‘Gird up the loins of your mind … and set your hope perfectly on the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ’ (1:13). Some modern translations dispense with this metaphor altogether, and express in literal language what they feel the metaphor was meant to convey. They judge that the custom of literally ‘girding up one’s loins’ has fallen out of modern usage, and that therefore a metaphor drawn from that custom would not be understood by a modern reader. That may be so. But in that case the modern translations would have done well to indicate in a footnote that the Greek does have this metaphor and that the background of the metaphor is once more a detail from the regulations of Israel’s Passover. The Israelites were not allowed to eat the Passover lamb in just any way they chose, but only with ‘your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it in haste’ (Exod 12:11). The implication of being delivered from the wrath of the destroying angel was that they would be free forthwith and immediately to leave Egypt and to begin their journey towards the hoped-for Promised Land. If they really believed the hope, they would take the journey seriously; and that meant preparing their bodies for serious travel by girding up their loins. To fail to gird up their loins would leave them unprepared for journeying. To refuse to gird up their loins and journey, would call in question whether they really believed the hope.
By using this metaphor, based on Israel’s experience, of girding up the loins of our minds … and setting our hope perfectly on the grace that is to be brought to us, Peter vividly pictures the mental preparation we must make and the rigorous thinking we must do in order to work out the implications of our Christian hope for the way we conduct life’s journey.
4. Legal Precedent
Now another category. When Paul (Rom 4:3) cites Genesis 15:6, ‘And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned unto him for righteousness,’ Paul is not presenting Abraham’s justification as a type of ours. His justification was an actual instance of justification, just as much as ours is. No, Paul is citing Abraham’s justification as a legal precedent, a piece of case law. If one man, Abraham, was justified by faith, then that establishes the principle. Everyone hereafter can be, and must be, justified on the same terms and conditions, that is by faith, and not by works.
But having cited Abraham’s experience as a legal precedent at the beginning of Romans 4, Paul uses quite a different category at the end of the chapter to apply the lesson of Abraham’s faith to us.
5. Analogy
If Abraham was justified by faith, then it would be necessary for us to know what ‘faith’ means in this context. In Abraham’s case it meant, says Paul (4:18–22), believing God when he promised that Abraham would have a son. And since Abraham’s body was as good as dead, and so was Sarah’s womb, it meant that Abraham had to continue putting his faith in a God who could bring life out of death. Now we are not required to believe that God is going to give us a child. But we are required to put our faith, not in our own merits or efforts, but in God ‘who raised our Lord Jesus from the dead’; hence the analogy between Abraham’s faith and ours. Our faith did not effect Christ’s resurrection from the dead, nor even contribute to it. God alone could, and God alone actually did, do it. Faith for us, too, means trusting solely in God to do for us what we, like Abraham, could never have done ourselves.
6. Fulfilment
Often when the New Testament uses the word ‘fulfil’, it is referring to events that were predicted in the Old Testament and then were fulfilled in New Testament times. So, for instance, Micah 5:2 predicted that the Ruler in Israel was to be born in Bethlehem; and Matthew 2:4–6 observes that Micah’s prediction was fulfilled by Christ’s being born in Bethlehem.
But in other places the New Testament uses the word ‘fulfil’ in a rather different sense. Matthew 2:15 asserts that our Lord’s being taken as a child to Egypt and his subsequent being brought back out of Egypt to Palestine ‘fulfilled’ Hosea 11:1, ‘When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt’. But look at Hosea 11:1 closely and you will see that it is not a prediction. It is a statement recording the past fact of history, that in the early days of the nation’s history, God loved Israel as a father loves his son, and called him out of Egypt. How, then, we must ask, can Matthew say that this historical fact that took place hundreds of years earlier was fulfilled in the child Christ’s return from Egypt? What does he mean by ‘fulfil’?
To answer this question let’s take a detour. James (2:21–23) says that the scripture, ‘Abraham believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness’ (Gen 15:6), was fulfilled when Abraham offered up his son Isaac on the altar (ch. 22). Now once more, Genesis 15:6 was not a prediction, it was not even a promise. It was a statement of fact. As soon as Abraham believed, he was justified. How then can James say that this statement was later fulfilled in the event of Genesis 22, when Abraham was justified by his works?
The answer is this. It is perfectly true that in Genesis 15 Abraham put his faith in God; and though his faith was not immediately steady and perfectly consistent2 he was brought to the position (ch. 17) where his faith rested solely and uncompromisingly in God, and Isaac was born. But when Isaac grew up God in his wisdom required Abraham to demonstrate by his works that his faith was still in no one else, not even in Isaac, but in God alone. And Abraham’s faith came through triumphantly. He offered up Isaac, his faith in God’s promises unshaken, convinced that God would be true to his promises even if it meant raising Isaac from the dead (Heb 11:17–19). In other words, the faith in God that Abraham exercised in Genesis 15:6 was ‘fulfilled’ in Genesis 22, in the sense that it was there brought to its pinnacle, and demonstrated by being exercised at the highest possible level.
In the same way the original Passover was a historical event, it was not in itself a prediction. But according to Christ, Passover was ‘fulfilled’ in his death (Luke 22:15–16). The principle involved in the original Passover, redemption from the destroying angel by the blood of the unblemished lamb, was to be repeated, only at an infinitely higher level, by the death of the Lamb of God at Calvary, for the redemption of mankind.
And the same may be said about Israel’s original call as an infant nation out of Egypt. It was repeated, recapitulated, at the highest level by the call of the child Jesus out of Egypt.
This sense of the word ‘fulfil’, then, would lead us to postulate another category: prototype.
7. Prototype
The Greek word typos, is used in the New Testament in two or three different senses. It is not then a rigidly technical term that carries only one meaning. This is reflected in the different equivalents that are used in the Spanish Bible to convey the various connotations of the Greek word: Romans 5:14 figura; 1 Corinthians 10:11 ejemplo; Hebrews 8:5 modelo. The latter refers to the plan or pattern that God showed Moses in the mount, and not to the tabernacle which Moses subsequently made according to that modelo (Greek: typos). But if we follow popular usage (there is no reason why we shouldn’t) and refer to the tabernacle which Moses built as a ‘type’, then by ‘type’ we mean that this building was designed by God himself in its architecture, internal division, furniture, rituals and functions as both a copy, in early materials and actions, of the great spiritual realities of heaven, and also as a shadow of the ‘good things’ that would come through our Lord’s incarnation, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension (Heb 8:5; 9:11; 10:1). And since God himself designed the tabernacle for these purposes, we may rightly suppose that it was everywhere perfectly adequate to teach its intended lessons.
But it is different with, say, the life of Abraham. That was certainly not designed by God in all its details. His lies over Sarah (Gen 12 and 20) and his fathering of Ishmael were of his own devising. And yet there are certain features of his life and behaviour that the New Testament claims were to some extent a kind of anticipation of greater things to come. Paul, for instance, argues that God’s command to Abraham to cast out the slave-woman, Hagar, and her son, Ishmael, is to be equated with the fact that in Christ we are no longer slaves but free-born sons like Isaac was, and that therefore we are to dismiss any attempt to keep us any longer under the bondage of the law (Gal 3–4). Now Paul’s interpretation of Genesis here has worried many expositors, for it seems to them that Paul is treating the historical record of Genesis as though it were an allegory. But that is not so, as can be seen from the following comparison:
| I | II |
|---|---|
| 1. Gen 15 | 1. Gal 3:16 |
| The seed and the inheritance promised to Abraham. | The promise to Abraham and to his seed: and the seed intended was Christ. |
| Interval while | Interval while |
| 2. Gen 16:7–16 | 2. Gal 3:19 |
| Hagar and Ishmael are placed by the Angel of the Lord in Abraham’s home. | The law was added by God |
| Until | Until |
| 3. Gen 21 | 3. Gal 3:21 – 4:7 |
| Isaac, the promised seed is born; whereupon, Ishmael is, by God’s command, cast out. | And with the coming of the Promised Seed, we are no longer under the tutelage and bondage of the law. |
And with the coming of the Promised Seed, we are no longer under the tutelage and bondage of the law.
It is quite clear from this that Paul is not treating the Gentile history as if it were an allegory. His exposition states (II.1) from the very same event as in Genesis (I.1), God’s promise to Abraham, regarded by Paul every bit as much as history as Genesis intends it to be. The only extra in Paul is that he maintains that when God promised ‘seed’ to Abraham, God meant by that term, not simply, and not even primarily, Isaac but Christ. Of course, unless Isaac had been born to Abraham, there would have been no Christ later on. But it is equally true that if by ‘seed’ God had meant simply Isaac, the promise that the seed should inherit the land would never (in this life) have been fulfilled.
Paul starts then by regarding the promises of Genesis 15 as history. He then observes that just as there was in history an interval between the promise of the seed to Abraham and the eventual birth of the promised seed, Isaac, during which the Angel of the Lord set Hagar and Ishmael in Abraham’s home, until the promised seed came, so on the larger historical scale there was an interval between the original promise to Abraham and the coming of The Seed which is Christ, during which interval God subsequently imposed the Law on Israel until Christ should come. And then he argues that just as God commanded Abraham, upon the birth of Isaac to cast out Hagar and the slave-boy son, so now that Christ has come we are to cast out the Law as a means to justification and inheritance.
To Paul then, the historical episode, Abraham – Hagar + Ishmael – Isaac was not a type, but a prototype of the bigger historical movement, Abraham – the Law – Christ.
The first aeroplanes were very flimsy things, and they were forever breaking down and crashing. No one would think of calling them ‘types’ of the later aircraft. But they were prototypes of the modern airliner; for those first aeroplanes embodied certain basic principles of aeronautics which we now see expressed at a vastly higher level of competence and achievement in the jumbo jets that fly across the sky thirty-five thousand feet about our heads.
And in the development of God’s great historical plan of redemption there were many prototypes in Old Testament times of that full and complete redemption that was to be wrought out by Christ in the fulness of time.
8. Allusion
Finally, for the moment, we should notice that the New Testament is full of allusions to the Old Testament. Sometimes they are explicit, as, for instance, when Jude says of the false teachers of his day: ‘Woe unto them, for they went in the way of Cain, and ran riotously in the error of Balaam for hire, and perished in the gainsaying of Korah’ (v. 11). On other occasions they are implicit, as for instance, when the risen Lord promises to give the overcomer to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God (Rev 2:7). To pick up this allusion we should need to remember – for the Lord himself does not here point it out – that in the garden of Eden there stood the tree of life, and that the ancient Greek translation of ‘the garden of Eden’ is paradeisos.
These allusions – and there are scores of them – drive us back to the Old Testament. But questions arise. First, what point and purpose did the New Testament writers have in making all these allusions to the Old Testament? And secondly, when we go back to these Old Testament stories to discover their point, are there any principles that can guide and control our interpretation of these stories, so that we do not foist our own ideas upon them, but actually discover the message that the Old Testament itself intended by them?
But we have run out of space; and the answers to these questions must await another occasion.
Footnotes
1 Creeds, Councils and Christ, Leicester, IVP, 1984, pp. 50–4
2 He adopted Sarah’s suggestion, took Hagar, and begat Ishmael.