This is Scott Anderson, CEO for Desiring God. You and other friends of Desiring God make possible the work of this ministry, including this podcast. Thanks for your part in helping us freely share the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. A long-time financial donor to the ministry and a faithful listener to this podcast writes in to ask a follow-up question that's drawn from your article that you wrote on typology back on May 12th on the website.

"Hello, Pastor John. Thank you for your lesson on types. Please explain the differences between typology and analogy." I think the question has enough practical relevance for those of us who preach and teach so that when we get to the end, everybody should care about this, because even if we don't use the concept of type as often as others say in our preaching or teaching, everybody, I think, should be using biblical analogies all the time.

So let me do a little education here on this typology thing. I wrote an article called "Typology—How God Targets Your Desires," which is at Desiring God, and I defined a biblical type as having three traits. And maybe before I mention those three traits and then how analogies are like them and not like them, I should just clarify for the average listener who probably doesn't know at all what a type is and why it even matters.

Let me just explain. When Paul said in Romans 5:14, "Death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam." Who is a type of the one who is to come? So Paul is saying Adam was a type—and that's his word, not ours—a type of Christ who is to come.

So we're not just spinning our wheels in interesting literary chatter here. We're trying to understand a biblical idea, not just our idea that we've put on the text, like we created the idea of types. Types comes out of the Bible. That's why it matters enough to spend time thinking about it.

So the three traits that I argued define what a type is, is that, number one, the person or the object or the event that we're calling a type resembles what is coming. So there's a resemblance. And the thing that's coming, like Christ is coming and Adam was the type, is the thing that's coming is sometimes called an anti-type.

So, for example, in 1 Corinthians 10.6, Paul uses the word "type"—or it's translated "example" in some versions, but it's the same word as "type" in Romans 5— he uses the word "type" to refer, among other things, to passing through the Red Sea as a type of baptism. In other words, there's a resemblance.

You're moving from bondage to freedom, you're passing through water, you're following a leader, and when Paul sees that, he sees a resemblance, a picture, a foreshadowing of the baptism. And so resemblance is the first. And at this point, type and analogy are the same. If a person says, "Well, isn't that just an analogy?" You can say, "Yes, at this point it is, but that's not all there is to a type." So, number two, to be a type in the Bible, the resemblance has to be designed by God to make a point.

It's not just an interesting correspondence. It's a design by God to link one part of redemptive history and the flow of history to a later part of redemptive history. And he makes this clear—Paul makes this clear in 1 Corinthians 10 when he says, "These things took place as types of us," meaning God did that.

God ordained that those events would have this resemblance to baptism. They're not just thought up by the reader; they are discerned by the reader as being intended by God. And now at this point you might say, "Well, can analogies also be willed by God?" Because he wills everything. His providence is over everything, so anytime there's a resemblance, that would be an analogy.

You could call that an analogy and not just a type. And I'm going to say at this point, yes, you could. You could talk about God-willed analogies. Okay, but the third characteristic of a type, I think, distinguishes it from the ordinary understanding of analogy. And the third trait of a type is that it's prophetic; it predicts.

God designed it not just to correspond to something in the future, but to point or to predict something in the future. And ordinarily, we don't think of analogies that way. Analogies are simply observed similarities, but types predict. They give insight into the plan that God has for the future.

So that's the main difference. An analogy resembles—you could even think that analogies are designed by God to resemble—but analogies, at least in the ordinary way we think, do not predict. Now, the reason I said maybe this would be practically useful for teachers and preachers, anybody who handles the Bible with somebody else in view, or even your own self, but especially if you've got others in mind, is that I don't think we're free to call something in the Bible a type just because it resembles something else in the Bible.

I think we should be careful, and let the New Testament give us cautious guidance what we put in the category of God-willed, predictive types. But I think that in our teaching and preaching, we're free to draw analogies everywhere. Anytime we see an illuminating similarity, we can draw it out.

Spurgeon did this like crazy. He was really good at it. I might say, "Let your words fly against the devil like stones from David's sling." Well, that's an analogy. I'm just making that up. When I say, "Your words flying against the devil," I'm not saying, "Ah, the stones in the sling were a type of your words being written in Facebook." I'm not saying that.

I'm just saying that I can see a connection, and I can use the connection to add a punch or a force to it without making any big biblical theological claim about the stones in the sling being a biblical type. Or I might say, "May the idols of secularism come crashing down like Dagon in the Philistine temple." I mean, that's a way of talking that is analogical.

I'm seeing connections, I'm drawing them out, or I could say, "Like a great avalanche on Mount Everest," for that matter. It doesn't even have to come from the Bible. It's just the way we talk, and when analogies are found in the Bible to some point we want to make, I think it can add a remarkable, provocative, memorable twist to our point, which is what Spurgeon did so effectively.

So, in our preaching and teaching, let's be careful to draw out the biblically clear types that weave redemptive history together, and let's be lavish and free to use as many provocative analogies as we can. Wonderful. Thank you, Pastor John. And you can get that article that we mentioned earlier, "Typology, How God Targets Your Desires," at our website at DesiringGod.org.

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