Type of Christ: How the Old Testament Points to Jesus
Short answer: A type of Christ is a person, event, or institution in the Old Testament that God providentially shaped to prefigure Jesus and the salvation he brings. The New Testament calls these patterns shadows, copies, and foreshadowings. Colossians 2:16-17 says, "Let no one therefore judge you in eating, or in drinking, or with respect to a feast day or a new moon or a Sabbath day," and the following verse identifies those observances as a shadow of the things to come, while the substance belongs to Christ. Typology is not allegory or guesswork. It rests on the fact that God wrote one unfolding story, and the earlier chapters anticipate the later ones. The Passover lamb, the sacrificial system, the priesthood, the tabernacle, and even Adam himself function this way. They were real and commanded, yet they were provisional, pointing beyond themselves to a greater fulfillment.
What Makes Something a Type and Not Just a Parallel
Almost anything can be made to resemble something else if a reader is creative enough. That is not what the New Testament does. A biblical type has three marks: it is rooted in history, it is set in motion by God rather than by human invention, and the New Testament itself identifies the correspondence. Romans 5:14 gives the clearest example, saying death reigned from Adam until Moses, and calling Adam "a foreshadowing of him who was to come." Paul does not merely notice a resemblance between Adam and Jesus; he treats Adam as a divinely appointed pattern. The word behind the English translation carries the sense of a sketch or outline, something that shapes what comes later. This is why careful teachers insist on letting the apostles set the boundaries. Where Scripture names the correspondence, we may speak with confidence. Where it does not, we should be cautious and label our observations as possible rather than certain.
The Shadow and the Substance in Colossians 2:16-17
Paul is writing to a congregation being pressured to add religious observances to Christ as if he were insufficient. His answer is not that the old covenant commands were evil, but that they were preparatory. The dietary rules, the festivals, the new moon celebrations, and the Sabbath all belonged to a system that was always meant to be outgrown in the sense of being fulfilled. When Paul calls them a shadow, he is not belittling them. A shadow is real, and it is caused by something real. But nobody clings to a shadow once the person casting it has arrived. The force of the argument is christological: if the substance belongs to Christ, then demanding these observances as necessary is a step backward, not forward. The point is not that the Old Testament was mistaken, but that it was pointing somewhere, and that somewhere has come.
Jesus Reading His Own Bible on the Road to Emmaus
Luke 24 records the most important interpretive lesson in the New Testament. Two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem, confused and grieving, and Jesus joins them unrecognised. He does not begin with comfort; he begins with rebuke, saying in Luke 24:25, "Foolish men, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken!" Then, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he explains the things concerning himself in all the Scriptures. Notice what this establishes. The Old Testament was not merely a collection of moral tales and national history with a few lucky predictions sprinkled in. It was a unified testimony to a coming person, and the risen Christ is the authorised interpreter of it. Our typology is not a modern innovation; it is following the method Jesus himself used. Every legitimate type of Christ is a footnote to that Emmaus road conversation.
The Passover Lamb as the Clearest Type
In Egypt, Israel was spared not by moral improvement or by negotiation but by blood. A lamb was slain, its blood applied to the doorposts, and the destroyer passed over. That event was commanded, historical, and repeated annually for generations. Then John the Baptist sees Jesus and says in John 1:29, "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" The imagery is unmistakable, and Paul makes it explicit when he writes in 1 Corinthians 5:7 that Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed in our place. What the Passover lamb could not do, since it was an animal and its blood could not cleanse a conscience, the Lamb of God accomplishes once for all. The type is not a coincidence of language. It is God designing Israel's rescue from Egypt as a rehearsal for the greater rescue from sin and death.
Why the Sacrificial System Could Never Finish the Job
If typology is real, then the inadequacy of the types is part of the message. Hebrews 10:1 says, "For the law, having a shadow of the good to come, not the very image of the things, can never with the same sacrifices year by year, which they offer continually, make perfect those who draw near." The repetition itself was a sermon. If the sacrifices had worked, they would have stopped. Every morning and evening, every annual Day of Atonement, the priest stood again because the work was not finished. This is the pastoral value of understanding types. They teach us that our standing before God was never meant to rest on ritual performance. It rests on a priest who sat down because his offering was complete. The law's inability is not a failure of God's plan; it is the plan disclosing its own shape.
Prophet, Priest, King, and the Office That Fits
Israel's three anointed offices function as types in a way that is easy to grasp and easy to abuse. The prophet speaks God's word, the priest mediates between God and the people, and the king rules on God's behalf. Each office was anointed, each was limited, and each eventually failed in the hands of sinful men. Jesus holds all three perfectly. He is the final prophet, the great high priest, and the king whose kingdom has no end. The New Testament applies all three to him repeatedly, which is why teacher, sacrifice, and lord are not three separate saviours but one. The value of seeing the offices as types is that it prevents a partial Christ. Some people want only a forgiving priest. Some want only a commanding king. The Bible presents one anointed figure in whom all the offices meet.
Misusing Types: Allegory, Fancy, and Forced Connections
Typology has a bad reputation in some circles because it has been badly used. Allegorising turns the Good Samaritan's two denarii into two sacraments and the innkeeper into the apostle Paul. This method treats the text as a code to be cracked rather than a story to be heard, and it produces preaching that cannot be checked by anyone. The cure is not to abandon typology but to discipline it. Ask whether the New Testament names the correspondence. Ask whether the type depends on something incidental, such as a number or a colour, or on the central action of the passage. Ask whether your reading makes the fulfilment greater or merely more complicated. Where Christ is clearly foreshadowed, preach it boldly. Where the link is speculative, either leave it out or make plain that it is an observation rather than an apostolic claim.
The Typology That Changes How You Read Your Bible
Once the shapes are visible, the Old Testament stops being a foreign country. The ark that saves through judgment, the bronze serpent lifted up for healing, the manna in the wilderness, the rock that gives water, the tabernacle where God dwells with his people, the kinsman redeemer who pays a price he does not owe, the substitute who dies in another's place, all of these take on a direction. They are not moral fables with a tacked-on Jesus sticker. They are the vocabulary God chose in advance so that when the Word became flesh, his people might recognise him. This is also a safeguard for the church. If Christ is the substance of the shadows, then nothing else can be the substance. Not tradition, not experience, not religious achievement. Sundays belong to him, and so does the whole of life.
Reading Types Without Losing the Plain Meaning
Typology does not cancel the original sense of a passage; it completes it. The exodus really happened. The lamb really died. The temple really stood. If we treat the Old Testament as nothing but a set of symbols with no historical weight, we lose the very foundation the apostolic interpretation rests on. Paul's argument in Romans 5 depends on Adam being a real man whose real disobedience brought real death. The Passover typology depends on a real night in Egypt when real blood was applied to real doorposts. The pattern holds: God acts in history, and then he acts again in a greater way. Honest teaching keeps both layers intact, giving the original event its full dignity while showing why it was never sufficient by itself. The type is a promise; the antitype is a person. Both belong to the same story, and the story is true.
Biblical fidelity check
What Colossians 2:16-17 establishes is that the ceremonial observances of the old covenant were a shadow whose substance belongs to Christ. It does not establish that Christians are forbidden to gather on a particular day, nor that any specific day is now mandated. It also does not cancel the moral law or turn the Old Testament into a book of subjective symbols. A common misreading is to hear Paul abolishing the Hebrew Scriptures as if they were a mistake. That cannot be right, since the same author wrote that all Scripture is God-breathed and profitable. The shadow was God-given, and a shadow that God drew is not an error. It is a signpost. The error is in the people who refuse to move toward the destination.
The second common misreading runs the other direction. Some treat typology as if anything in the Old Testament can mean anything we like, provided we eventually mention Jesus. This produces preaching that is unfalsifiable and, frankly, unhelpful, because it teaches people to read their Bibles the way one reads a horoscope. The New Testament writers themselves are restrained and purposeful. They fasten onto the central actions of the story, the lamb, the priest, the king, the temple, the first man, and they interpret them in line with the whole sweep of redemptive history. Where faithful Christians differ, they differ mostly over how much weight to place on patterns that Scripture does not explicitly name. That is a place for humility, not for division.
Other passages that speak to Colossians 2:16-17
Four studies help fill out what Paul assumes here. John 15:5 Meaning: Abiding in Christ the True Vine shows Jesus taking up an Old Testament image and applying it to himself. Romans 8:1 Meaning: No Condemnation in Christ explains the outcome the shadows could never produce. Scriptural Christianity: A Bible Study from John Wesley's Classic Sermon and The Almost Christian: A Bible Study from John Wesley's Classic Sermon press the application home: the substance belonging to Christ means nothing less than belonging to Christ himself.
Frequently asked questions
How do I know if something is a type of Christ or just my imagination?
The safest test is whether the New Testament itself makes the connection. When Paul calls Adam a foreshadowing, or when he says Christ our Passover has been sacrificed, the link is authoritative. Where Scripture is silent, you are offering an observation rather than a doctrine, and it should be labelled that way. A legitimate type usually depends on the main action of a passage, not on a minor detail like a number or a colour. It also makes the work of Christ clearer rather than more obscure. If your interpretation needs a long explanation and still leaves people confused, it is probably not a type.
Does typology mean the Old Testament is not relevant on its own?
No. The Old Testament is God's word and stands on its own as revelation, history, poetry, law, and prophecy. Typology does not empty it of meaning; it reveals the direction it was always travelling. Israel's deliverance from Egypt was a real deliverance for real people. The temple was a real place where God met his people. Reading those events as pointers to Christ does not make the original events into fiction. It honours them by showing that God was doing something larger than the immediate moment, and that the earlier acts were preparation for the greater one still to come.
Are Christians still required to keep the Sabbath and the festivals?
Colossians 2:16-17 tells believers not to let anyone judge them regarding feast days, new moons, or Sabbaths, because these were a shadow. The New Testament does not impose the ceremonial calendar on the church as a condition of standing before God. That said, faithful Christians have differed about whether a weekly day of rest and worship continues as a creation ordinance and how it should be observed. What is clear is that no one is justified by keeping days, and no one should be condemned for a conscientious practice of them. Christ is the substance, and he is the ground of our acceptance.
