The Old Testament Witness to Christ and His Kingdom, Mentor's Guide, MG09

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T H E O L D T E S T A M E N T W I T N E S S T O C H R I S T A N D H I S K I N G D O M

between Jesus and the characters of the OT. What we are seeking to do in this lesson is to show how these connections are made in the OT and confirmed in the New. We are seeking to understand the OT’s own logic and approach to itself as interpreted through the lens of Jesus and the apostles . This module assumes that their use and understanding of the OT takes precedence over any outside interpretive methods , including modern approaches to OT hermeneutics which would either ignore or overlook the use of the OT by Jesus and apostles. As Alsup suggests, the unity between the OT and NT is the starting point for this kind of exegetical work, and we want to help our students follow the tested hermeneutical rule to interpret Scripture with the Scriptures . At the heart of this discussion is our proposal that a typological/analogical approach to the OT represents, in its proper and cautious form, at least one credible method to understand the OT witness to Jesus Christ. This claim is made on the basis of the actual typological relationships recognized in the text itself, perhaps the most important being 1 Corinthians 10 and 15, and Romans 5. The term typos and its related words are found in various NT materials, cf. John 20.25; Acts 7.43 (Amos 5.26), 44; 23.25; Rom. 5.14; 6.17; 1 Cor. 10.6, 11; 1 Thess. 1.7; 2 Thess. 3.9; Phil. 3.17; 1 Tim. 1.16; 4.12; 2 Tim. 1.13; Titus 2.7; Heb. 8.5; 9.24; 1 Pet. 3.21; 5.3. The connections between the people of God in the OT and their history, experience, and practice in the OT accounts serves as the basis of the analogies discovered in the NT usage of their experience. In other words, the connection between the life and experience of the people of God as it embodies and prefigures Christ is made neither arbitrarily nor indiscriminately; the apostles through the leading of the Holy Spirit make connections between figures and events. Their correlations and connections allow us to study carefully the ways in which the analogies hold (or do not hold), and to gain insight into both the type (the historical event, person or institution which prefigures Christ) and the antitype (the full revelation of the analogy in the life and experience of Christ, and the teaching of the apostles). What you ought to seek here is to help your students to become careful observers of the linkages made by Christ and the apostles to the history, events, characters, and figures of the OT. The aim is neither to invent nor imagine linkages which do not occur. The heart of this approach demands that we as interpreters of Scripture be