Genesis Types Redux

Rey asked me if I would participate in the Christian Carnival with a discussion of types in Genesis, a subject I've been studying at church lately and one I've treated elsewhere in my sporadic writings in this blog. I've come to the game so late that I'm afraid we'll have to settle for quantity rather than quality.

I am inclined to read the Scriptures through a Christological lens. My default question when confronting a text is, "Where can I find Jesus Christ in this passage?" This has proven a reliable means of interpreting Scripture in the light of the gospel, especially—if I may plug one of my OT obsessions—in the Psalms. Genesis is not particularly different, however, and I think it's worthwhile to enumerate the various types. I wish there were time and space to elaborate on these. We could spend hours and pages developing the themes through the Scriptures.

This is not an exhaustive list. Here goes:

1. Adam as a type of Christ, and Eve as a type of the church:


• Eve is a special creation made out of Adam and for Adam. It is not an accident that the Bible starts with a creation event and a marriage and ends with a creation event (the new heavens and new earth) and marriage.
• Eve is made for Adam only after the whole of creation is searched for one suitable for him. Likewise, we are the only ones properly suited for Christ.
• Adam sins knowingly, choosing a life with Eve over a life with God. Likewise, the Son of God consciously chose to give his life for his own bride.


2. Abraham and Isaac:


• Abraham begins to sacrifice Isaac, only to receive him back (as it were) from the dead, and a ram is offered in his place.
• Abraham (a type of God) sends Eliezer (a type of the Holy Spirit) to find a bride (a type of the church) for Isaac (a type of Christ).


3. Joseph:


• Like Christ, sent by his Father to his brothers.
• Like Christ, rejected by his brothers (people).
• Thrown in a pit (a type of the tomb)...
• ... and presented as dead to his father, though alive (a type of rising from the grave).
• Ministers to those in prison (as Christ preached the gospel to "spirits in prison").
• Raised to a position of utmost authority in Egypt, whereas Jesus was given all authority in heaven and in earth.
• Saved Egyptians, a type I think of the Gentiles.
• In this story, Judah also acts as a type of Christ when he offers himself as a slave to take Benjamin's place.

I am almost embarrassed by how short the list is. Joseph is the most detailed as its the most recent I've studied, though I find the parallels between Adam and Christ the more poignant.

It's too ambitious for a blog posting, but if we had the time we could pursue the theme of our union with Christ through the New Testament, where we find the phrase "in Christ" repeated so often it would be trite if it weren't so marvelous.

The gospel wends its way through the whole of Scripture, and it is a joy to uncover it in all these ways. Hopefully time will present itself to continue in the near future (though given my recent updates schedule, that seems a tad unlikely).

Joseph Sold into Slavery

We covered this story on Sunday. I was struck by the parallels to Jesus' story and wanted to cover them briefly here:

• Joseph was sent by Jacob to his brothers; Jesus was sent by God to the Jewish nation.
• Joseph's brothers hated him; Jesus was rejected by his own people ("He came unto his own, and his own received him not").
• Joseph was cast into a cistern; Jesus was buried in a rich man's tomb.
• Joseph, though alive, was presented dead to his father; Jesus rose from the dead.
• Joseph was received by a foreign people and saved them from a famine—in so doing, he also delivered his family; Jesus was received by Gentiles and saved them and the Jews from their sins.

I suspect we can draw more parallels here if we want to. It strikes me how Genesis tells this same story over and over again in the lives of the patriarchs and even in the creation story.

For example, we see Abraham send Eliezer to get a bride for his son Isaac, a symbol of God the Father sending God the Holy Spirit to procure a bride (the Church) for God the Son. Again, we have the symbol of Adam naming the animals to show how Eve was made specially for him in the same way we are made specially for Christ. The Messianic prophecy is explicit in Genesis 3. We see the death of Christ figured in the sacrifice of Isaac and foreshadowings of Pentecost in the Tower of Babel.

There are all sorts of these things in the book of Genesis, and they're all worthy of some exposition. Hopefully I'll have some more time to look into them in the future.

Genesis

We have started working on Genesis in church lately, and as I feared, it has centered largely on a discussion of origins. I am not fond of the debate.

I don't really know that Genesis is intended to shape our understanding of astrophysics and biology. I know there are plenty who would disagree, but I would also stress that one needn't have such a conviction about Genesis to believe young-earth creationism. (That is to say, we can still believe in a young earth without using Genesis as the primary source for such a belief.)

I suppose at least one of the reasons that I hate having the origins debate is that it usually ignores one of the key features of science: it is supposed to change. While scientists surely draw philosophical and religious conclusions from what they've learned (and many of them quite false), science represents a changing understanding of how the world works and what it looks like. Thumbing your nose at a scientist because he misunderstood something is childish at best and at worst teaches people exactly the wrong way to approach science.

It is also true that one of the fundamental tenets of science is naturalism: that is, that natural explanations are the only acceptable ones in scientific exploration. To put it another way, if you accept supernatural explanations for phenomena, by definition what you're doing isn't science. That doesn't make it wrong; it just means that it's not science.

When we begin by disqualifying supernatural explanations, naturally we'll cause friction between those who posit a supernatural explanation and those who deny it. But attacking science for being defined as it is smacks of begging the question.

In the end, science interrogates small-t-truth, while religion interrogates big-t-Truth. It's when scientists begin to use science to shape their moral views that problems arise (see eugenics). Science cannot by its very nature say whether an act is morally right or wrong. The moral of natural selection is "survival of the fittest," but this hardly gives us license to select out the unfit members of society (despite efforts of abortionists and others).


Science is fundamentally undecidable: it cannot say with certainty that it has ever actually finished making a decision on whether something is true or not. We know today that Newtonian mechanics is flawed, even though it accurately predicts gross observations. Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics are incompatible, but we haven't yet found any reconciliation between the two. So when a YEC posits a supernatural solution to questions of origins while an old-earth atheist posits another based on science, the problem isn't that science is contradicting the Bible—at some level science always will. The problem is that the YEC is arguing with the OEA on the wrong grounds: the issue with evolution isn't the scientific application, it's the fact that morally reprehensible doctrines are derived from it and flow inexorably from a scientific application of them.

When we spend all of our time pointing out holes in scientific theories that scientists already know and admit, we do little to actually advance any sort of Biblical cause. Worse yet, we teach people that science is inherently flawed (without any qualifications on what that actually means), and we condition them to think of Genesis solely in terms of the origins debate.


With some fortune I'll have some time to discuss more themes in Genesis instead of just cussing in the near future. I have been extremely busy with a variety of personal pursuits and with buying a house, so time here has been hard to find.

Lord-willing, though, more posts will follow.

Genesis

Since the year has turned over, I am starting reading the Bible in a year from scratch. I've ditched the plan I was using before in favor of looking at passages in a more acceptable context rather than through arbitrary divisions.

Naturally, this means I'm looking at Genesis (and Matthew, when doing NT readings), and I have again been struck at the types of Christ that we see in the first few chapters. I mentioned these in some post awhile ago, but these are the ones I've identified so far:

• Adam as a type of Christ and Eve as a type of the church: when Adam is naming all of the animals, we see that nothing else in creation was sufficient to be his match, and so Eve was specially created not just for Adam, but also from him. In the same way, we were created for and from Christ.


• Adam again, when he chooses Eve over God. We read later that Eve was deceived by the serpent, but Adam ate knowingly, choosing to remain with Eve. In the same way, Christ knowingly chose to become sin on our behalf (2Co 5.21) so that we would be united with him (Ro 6).


• The prophecy of 3.15, while not a type, is nonetheless an important part of the narrative and reinforces our focus on Christ in the opening chapters.


• Finally, the institution of blood sacrifices is apropos. When Adam and Eve realize their nakedness (often taken as a symbol of sinfulness; compare to Revelation, the parable in Matthew of the wedding, and so on), they sew their own coverings, which nicely (and properly, I think) symbolizes our own efforts to cover up our sin. But when God throws them out of the garden, he kills two animals and clothes them in animal skin. We see that blood must be shed, first, and second, that God must do it. While this particular type probably doesn't have the "legs" of the others, it's nonetheless a poignant reminder of the death of the innocent in place of the guilty.

I've also tried to pay attention to the narrative a bit more as I've gone through here, in the sense that I've tried to see what the point is behind the story.

The murder of Abel is recorded in part to illustrate (as we read later in I John) the conflict between the righteous and unrighteous, and, I think, Satan's efforts to prevent the prophecy of 3.15 from coming to pass.

In that same vein, I think it's conceivable to view the events of 6.2 as Satan's effort to corrupt the human race. We certainly skip a lot of historical data when reading through Adam's genealogy, but in terms of the plot, we're really looking at how we got to the Flood. Noah survives, I think, not because he is somehow different than everyone else spiritually (I include him in the damning indictment of 6.9), but because God had preserved him in some fashion from the corrupting influences mentioned in the beginning of the chapter.

This is about as far as I've made it so far, but it's been profitable, both in review and in identifying some themes that I'll be looking for throughout the OT.