This is Scott Anderson, CEO for Desiring God.

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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 mentioned 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 514, death reigned through Adam, no death reign from Adam to Moses, even over those who 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, the thing that's coming is sometimes called an anti type.

So for example, in 1 Corinthians 106, Paul uses the word type or it's translated example in some versions, but it's the same word is 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 is, 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.

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 wheeled by God? He wheels everything. He's 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 wheeled 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.

And 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.

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