What is the meaning of type and antitype?

The word antitype does not occur in the A.V., but the Greek word ἀντίτυπον occurs in Heb. 9:24, translated 'figures,' and in 1 Peter 3:21, translated 'like figure.' It is that which answers to a type, as a wax impression answers to a seal: if the device is sunk, the impression will be raised, or vice versa. To take a simple but beautiful example, a lamb was offered up for a burnt offering both morning and evening under the law; and in the N.T. we read, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." It is plain that the morning and evening lamb in Israel were types and the death of the Lord Jesus was the antitype. In Heb. 9:23, the 'heavenly things' are the type, and 'holy places,' Heb. 9:24, the antitype, or what corresponded to the pattern. In 1 Peter 3:21, eight souls were saved through water, of which baptism is the figure, or what answers to it. Doubtless there are many other antitypes in the N.T., but every antitype must have a type to which it corresponds, though the correspondence may not lie on its surface. Where scripture is silent as to types and antitypes the teaching of the Holy Spirit is needed, or grievous error may result in associating two things together which have no spiritual connection, though names and words may seem to correspond.

The word rendered "examples" in the first of these scriptures is really "types," and that given in the second as "figures" is more exactly "antitypes." Attention to the teaching of each will readily enable us to understand the difference. The journey of the children of Israel through the wilderness, divinely sustained as they were by the manna from heaven and by the water which flowed out of the smitten rock, was typical of, and shadowed out, the Christian's passage through this world, which has become morally a wilderness to him, because his home is in the Father's house, where Christ has gone to prepare a place for him. A type therefore is a thing, an event, which is taken up by the Spirit of God to adumbrate something in the future. And there are typical personages, such as Isaac, Joseph, Benjamin, Moses, Aaron, David, and Solomon, who are selected to prefigure Christ in some special character or office. An "antitype," as in the second scripture, is a correspondence with something already existing. Thus the tabernacle, a figure (image) for the time then present, made after the pattern shown to. Moses in the mount, was a revelation of heavenly things. It was not intended so much to point to the future, although it be true that it is only in Christianity that the things revealed by the tabernacle can be understood and inherited, as to display what belonged to heaven. Hence the apostle says: "Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands" (that is, into the holy places of the tabernacle, where only the priests could enter), which are the figures (the antitypes) of the true, "but into heaven itself," etc.; for indeed it was "heaven itself," of which the "holy places" were the antitypes. A symbol again is different. For example, the sun, moon and stars, in Matt. 24, as also in Revelation, are used in a symbolic sense, as symbolizing governing authorities - the sun as supreme, the moon as derived (she receives her light from the sun), and the stars as subordinate, authority. So the new moon was, to borrow language, "the symbol of the reappearance of Israel in the sun's light, hailed with joy by the people, and connected with redemption in the thought of faith." Then also there are figures and illustrations. When, for instance, our blessed Lord says, "I am the door," He uses a figure to teach that it is through Him we enter into the possession and enjoyment of heavenly things. The spiritual mind, guided by the Holy Spirit, will have but little difficulty in comprehending these distinctions, and in seizing their significance, when studying the Scriptures.

That which is prefigured in a type is seen in the 'antitype,' ἀντίτυπον, translated 'like figure,' 1 Peter 3:21; and 'figure,' Heb. 9:24. If the tabernacle be taken as an illustration, the type or pattern was seen in the mount, that is, figuratively in heaven, and the tabernacle itself was the antitype. Heb. 9:24. Then again, the tabernacle may be taken as a type, and the saints now, as forming the house of God, the antitype. Christ is "Son over his own house, whose house are we." Heb. 3:6. Many things in the O.T. are typical of those in the N.T., as seen in 1 Cor. 10:11; but, as in all else, the teaching of the Holy Spirit is needed, or there is danger of adopting connections which are merely fanciful.

A few examples of types are here appended: the student of scripture will find it profitable to search out (in dependence upon the Holy Spirit) the numerous types of the O.T. with their antitypes in the N.T. They may be found in 1, persons; 2, places; 3, things; 4, events.

1884 28 Of the numerous kinds of figures used in Scripture there are four most frequent, of which the characteristics should be remembered. The simile is any case where a resemblance is drawn between two objects; as "the righteous shall flourish like the palm tree." The metaphor is the putting of one thing, because of its analogy, to express another, as "Ephraim is a cake not turned." The symbol is the designed use of one object to represent some other object or thought to which it has an affinity, as baptism to represent death and resurrection. And the type is the same as the symbol, except that the type relates to some future thing (called the antitype), whereas the symbol relates to something past or present. There are about a dozen others figures: but I think most of them explain themselves, and the distinction between them (metonymy, synecdoche, and so forth) are chiefly of interest to grammarians and rhetoricians.

And this leads us to remind readers that no type is perfect in all its particulars. Hebrews 10:1 would lead us to expect this, for what it states is as true of patriarchal days as of the time of the law. We have not the very image of the Antitype but only the shadow of Him or it. Now a shadow gives us but little in the way of detail. We get an outline and can discern, for instance, whether a shadow is that of a house or a tree, without knowing where are the windows in the former or the branches in the latter. If we recognise this limitation in the types we shall be saved from the effort to force meanings into small details connected with the person or incident forming the type, which so often ends in what is fanciful and imaginary.

We must remember that types are not intended to teach truths, their purpose is to illustrate them. They are but the shadows and not the very image of that which they are used to typify. This is perfectly understandable when we realise that Christ is the great substance of these shadows, the full image of all that was partial. In none of these types can we find the full truth of Christ and His work, yet they are the means God has used to convey to our hearts and understandings the knowledge and enjoyment of those things which in their intrinsic character are infinite, and which find their full and perfect expression in the Christ of God, and in no other.

In seeking to interpret the beautiful types of the Old Testament we must always apply this necessary safeguard, "Types are illustrative of truths, not expressive of them." The propriety of this will be seen when we consider how infinitely greater is the substance — Christ, of which they are but shadows. How immeasurably superior is the fulfilment — Christ — to that which is but the figure. How soft and subdued is the light that emanates from those types. It is not yet the noonday splendour of the full revelation of God the Father, as made known in the Son; it is still the starlight of types, symbols and shadows; but the eye of faith can penetrate these shadows and contemplate with ever increasing delight the glorious Substance of whom they speak.

The failure of the shadows of the law to give the perfect image of the reality is of two kinds, and it would seem two only. One example of this failure is familiar to us in the rent vail. It was not something of which no account could be given, but had a definite lesson of its own, and a needful one. Its meaning was that the way into the holiest was not yet made manifest: the law could show no way. Thus this class of examples, as the apostle says, were figures for the time then present (Heb. 9:9). — needful assurances of the weakness and inefficacy of law in its very nature. Of the other class of examples we can find one which bears very directly upon the matter before us. The death of the animal preceded its burning upon the ground or on the altar: in the antitype it was the reverse, the judgment upon sin Christ endured before death, and not after it; and the inversion of the order here has helped to occasion the very misconception of the priestly work coming only after death. Yet it is surely clear that this inversion is simply a necessity of a sort easily to be recognized, although the Spirit of God has none the less turned it to account. Thus from some natural necessity or from the character of the law itself this want of correspondence between type and antitype seems to arise. To imagine it where there is no such need is on the other hand to introduce unmeaning and causeless confusion into the inspired Word: no example of such a kind can be produced, it is confidently believed, from the whole range of Scripture.

In the passage in Ephesians before referred to there is much more than an illustrated appeal to wives and husbands in view of Christ's relationship to the Church. That relationship is stated in a very definite way in antitypical parallelism to that of the first Adam and the woman divinely given to him. Adam, we are distinctly told in Romans (Rom. 5:14) "is the figure of Him that was to come." Christ is called in Corinthians (1 Cor. 15:45) "the last Adam." But notice the contrast also, which here as always, in one way or other, obtains between type and antitype: "the first Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening Spirit." The same parallel, yet contrast, is seen in this passage in Ephesians: "Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for it, that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the Word, that He might present it to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing, but that it should be holy and without blemish." It was God who presented Eve to Adam: it is Christ who as the fruit of His own self-sacrifice presents the Church to Himself.

Yet even so we find that the relation here between type and Antitype is contrast rather than comparison. First, Moses was faithful in God's house as being part of the house himself; whereas Christ is the builder of the house. Second, the house in which Moses ministered was just Israel; he bore the burden of that nation but of that nation alone. The Lord Jesus acts on behalf of "all things." He that built all things is God, and the Lord Jesus is He by whom God built them. Third, in the small and restricted sphere of Israel Moses ministered as a faithful servant; but in the vast sphere of all things Christ ministers to the glory of God. Let us meditate on these points and we shall begin to have large thoughts of Christ.