What follows here is not bedtime reading nor a webpage to ask your phone to read out whilst you’re driving. It will require a block of your quiet time when you’ve got a clear mind!

Here I want to introduce the deception itself and then on the next page show one or two passages of relevant scripture and also some of the consequences. I want to start by forming a solid biblical basis upon which to build what follows and we will now return to those two scriptures mentioned in the intro to typology. 

The most obvious and virtually impossible text to both ignore and refute regarding typology is 1 Cor 10:11, the context being Paul has been mentioning some of the failures in Israel’s history then says – “Now all these things happened unto them for examples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come” KJV. 

Almost every Bible version will translate the Greek word there, ‘tupos’ as ‘example’, and traditional church sermons often involve the use the OT stories and Israel as being “examples” for us. However the real meaning of ‘tupos’ is ‘type’, like a rubber ink stamp for example, one we can put our ‘type’ on, like an address or something. Looking superficially we may ask, ‘well what’s the difference’? You need to think about this but by using the word ‘type’ it means that something is there to make an impression eg that rubber stamp, or a typewriter (a ‘type’ writer!) for another example, will make an impression on a piece of paper. That impression is called the antitype.
So, the type hits the ink and leaves an impression and what Paul is saying is that the Old Testament story/person/event is the type, Jesus Christ is the ‘ink’ and the impression it leaves is its corresponding New Testament story/person/event.

And that’s so important to recognise the difference because if Israel’s experiences were simply ‘examples’ then in theory a perfect church could easily learn from and never repeat Israel’s mistakes, and that is NOT what the Bible teaches. And this is one example of where subtle translation issues have monumental history changing impacts as we will see. By using the word type and not example, Paul MUST be saying that the church at that time were the impression, the antitype, coming from the ‘type’ in Israel’s history and if you read it he is encouraging his listeners not to be part of that.

We’ve already used another perfectly clear cut example elsewhere on this site to validate typology, and although the word ‘tupos’ is not used in John 3 it is clear that Jesus Himself says the bronze serpent Moses crucified in the Wilderness is a type of Himself hanging on the cross ie Jesus is the antitype that makes the type, the brazen serpent, as Jesus Himself becomes sin (the snake) for the healing of all who come to Him. 

Just one more, and this time I am going to let Matthew do the typological interpretation, because we have to believe it then, there is no debate. If we say Matthew’s got this wrong we may as well all go down the pub and drink ourselves happy… 

Please look at Matthew 2:15, talking of Jesus fleeing to Egypt with His parents, verse 14, ‘so he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, 15 where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son”. KJV. 

If we do our homework we find the prophet was Hosea and Matthew refers to Hos 11:1 “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son”. KJV

And this is the passage that I want to expand upon and show the monumental importance of understanding the meaning of tupos or type.

Reading the scripture at face value, it is clear that Hosea is referring to the nation of Israel when they left Egypt in the Exodus so what on earth has Matthew been drinking to use this event in Jesus life, not Israel’s, to even refer to, never mind ‘fulfil’ Hosea 11:1? The only hermeneutic that makes any sense out of this is the typological one ie Jesus is the impression, the antitype, and Israel is the type. And we will see later how that actually makes perfect sense. 

At this point I want to introduce that monumental deception referred to in the title. It is called 

DISPENSATIONALISM or DISPENSATIONAL THEOLOGY 

Even if you’ve never heard those words, it’s a standard biblical hermeneutic today and this is what we’ve virtually all been taught. You don’t need all the detail, only if you want to sound educated on a Sunday morning, the basic points suffice for practical purposes here. Dispensational Theology, again according to Wiki “is a theological framework for interpreting the Bible which maintains that history is divided into multiple ages called “dispensations” in which God interacts with his chosen people in different ways”. The underline is mine, and of course I believe in the different dispensations, but the key point I want to show is how this underlined part separates the church and Israel and gives them two parallel but very distinct histories of God’s people side by side. 

Now this is where we need to deprogram because, and I know this from person experience how I once thought, for a person to suggest otherwise about the Church and Israel exposes his madness doesn’t it! Yet that’s exactly what typology shows us. The typological interpretation makes no distinction between Israel and the church – the arrival of Jesus was the fulfilment of the law and the prophets, the linear progression/completion of Israel, following the biblical principle of the ‘physical first and then the spiritual’ – Jesus is true Israel, as Matthew tell us in that passage we have just looked at. Jesus also said Himself that He came to fulfil all the law and the prophets, to bring them to completion, and when He was hanging on the cross He said it is finished, and the new so called Church age begins. 

Again, we really need to park up and take note here. This is the point many people who are climbing out the rut fall back in. Dispensationalists, now exposed, at this point attack typology by calling this Replacement Theology, where God gets fed up with Israel and replaces them with the Church. And to be fair, this is what it sounds like doesn’t it, to the less discerning reader. And I fully agree that Replacement Theology can’t be correct can it because all of the Bible promises are clearly to Israel aren’t they and it’s at this point that all those who don’t think for themselves are deceived and reject the truth.  

You see, typology doesn’t actually suggest that the Church replaces Israel, if we think about it, it’s actually saying the Church IS Israel. That’s a monumental difference. What we confusingly call ‘the Church’ is actually the continued linear progression of Israel, the chosen physical Holy Nation of Israel in Ex19:6 is simply the type of the true spiritual Holy Nation in 1Peter2:9, which is the antitype. In Galatians 6:16 Paul speaks of New Testament believers as “the Israel of God” and that is a much better way of understanding it isn’t it. In Romans 11 Paul tells us we are grafted in to Israel, not replaced them (from my experience of sharing these truths I can say this here is where the next batch of people fall back into the rut by incorrectly interpreting Romans 9-11. That detail will be on the next page though but you must study that too). And one more point before moving on, before Dispensational Theology was introduced in the mid 1800’s Israel in the Exodus was often referred to as ‘the church in the wilderness’, and don’t forget too, that was pre 1948, the so called return to the land…. Those guys back then knew all this, it was just normal.

One point I emphasise over and over again when seeking an accurate interpretation of scripture, no matter what the subject matter being taught, is that if we keep these following two lenses of interpretation in mind for the correct, stress ‘bigger picture’, understanding of any Bible passage, using one or the other we won’t go far wrong with our bigger picture interpretation – firstly, scripture is so often simply only about the ‘contrasting of Jew and gentile’ or it’s sister lens ‘introducing and contrasting the Old Covenant and the New Covenant’, and secondly, the relevant one here being the contextual lens of ‘think Jesus Christ not Israel’ for the context of the subject matter, which is pretty much the same thing in different form.

And here, the point being that this whole subject matter of the church replacing Israel becomes clear when we see through ”this is all about Jesus Christ not Israel“ lens. We have already seen from Matthew that Jesus Christ is true Israel, the antitype that comes from the type. Now think carefully, THINK JESUS CHRIST. If we consider ourselves as Christians, we are described as being found “in Christ” aren’t we. Outside of Christ we are our old dreadful sinful unsaved selves but ‘in Him’ we take on His perfect identity and are saved, hallelujah!! Similarly, if Jesus is true Israel and we are ‘in Him’ then in this aspect too we too become as He is, we take on His identity, ie Israel. To repeat, Paul calls us the Israel of God in Gal 6:16 and for clarity I say we are “the Israel of God, in Christ Jesus”. We saw earlier what I believe are the two great lenses for the bigger picture view and here now, for the detail, the greatest interpretative lens of them all by far, is that of those two most incredible words in the whole of existence, ‘In Him’. And the OT saints were saved in exactly the same way, they were also ‘the Israel of God, ‘in Him” ‘, by way of faith in the keeping of the Law and the Offerings, which all foreshadowed or were types of Christ or some aspect of Him. Old Testament physical Israel looked forward to the Cross by their sacrificial system, we look back to it as we offer ourselves as a ‘living sacrifice’ as Paul puts it but we BOTH look for our salvation ‘in Him’, in the Cross. It’s not all about Israel, it’s not all about the Church, it’s all about Jesus. 

I have written that as clearly as I can but I know from my personal experience, that is only knowledge and it really only becomes alive when the Holy Spirit takes that knowledge and illuminates it to us. That is my prayer here that you ask for God to reveal that to you because it’s implications are literally life changing. Understanding that is revolutionary knowledge in today’s day and age and without that illumination, a Christian is severely stunted in his spiritual growth, he can only go so far. 

And that my dear friends is why they don’t want you to know about typology because once we realise that Jesus Christ is true Israel, that Jesus Christ perfectly lived out and perfected that task which Israel ultimately failed in by not leading the people to God, that Israel failed to recognise Jesus as the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets, that blows wide open the whole deception over both the world and the church today because if Jesus Christ is True Israel then that nation in the Middle East today must be…go on, you work it out. That’s the doctrinal part, and I’ll elaborate on a few of the doctrinal details and critical scriptures in the next section, plus how the implications of that should, if you’ve grasped this message, cause you to re-evaluate your whole entire Christian paradigm if you’ve been taught dispensationalism, especially your eschatology (understanding of end times). Referring back to the video on the homepage, and if I dare say this, but if we attend virtually any church in the UK on a Sunday morning in 2024 we are somewhat like those cyclists trusting that little green man for our future as we trust our Pastors. Both Pastor and Green Man may mean well, but….

But what about the secular side then, what about how this so called great monumental deception that I keep writing about manifests itself in the world in everyday life? 

Well, as with the church aspect, on this page I’ll try and expose the deception and bring it into light but I don’t wish to elaborate too much with the monumental consequences for a two fold reason. 

Firstly, I’ve presented enough signposts here now and I think it is best when we are left to ourselves to ponder over the implications of that over the coming weeks and months, years maybe and let the Holy Spirit reveal those enormous implications. That is my (ongoing) experience, I never had a human teacher with regards to this topic, and that way Truths are installed deep rooted rather than us just believing ideas what the preacher says. For me, I remember when I first saw this in 2018, about once a day after that I’d just suddenly randomly think “my goodness” as another totally life changing implication dawned on me not only as scriptures come alive when they now randomly come to mind but also when seeing news headlines, stories from history etc, these too all now make total sense when looking through this new lens. I wasn’t learning these things, they simply appear perfectly clear as a result of looking at things through this new lens of Jesus Christ being true Israel and we progressively realise the world is not quite the secular place we all think it is. I’ve come to realise the word secular shouldn’t even exist, or at best it just describes an illusion. Some even say that everything in this world is nothing but a physical manifestation of a spiritual truth, similar to how a TV manifests all those invisible signals into our visible world …but that’s for another time.

And secondly, largely down to other people’s total ignorance, sharing some of the implications of this is more and more likely to get us in deep trouble nowadays, which is something I’m expecting, but I’m not going out asking for it! And that’s what I meant in the intro by saying this subject is a matter of death then life for some of us!

I will say, the more we meditate on this topic the more we realise that virtually all, if not everything we see in our modern history books, our news headlines, that we are taught in our schools today etc is just pure and total deception, deception at its very very best. And that’s how what I call this mother of deception manifests itself in secular life. Initially it’s immensely scary when we realise we’ve been lied to all of our lives on a scale previously unimaginable but then we go on to develop the understanding to read exactly what is truly happening and a great peace comes over us and replaces all previous fear and uncertainty. The peace that God gives, not the world.

Be blessed, in Him. 

All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden “in Him”. Amen and hallelujah.

——-

DISCLAIMER 

Just to fend off potential attackers for as long as I can, I’ve copied below a text which I can say I totally wholeheartedly agree with (except just one almost irrelevant point but I will still mention it just in case any really clever educated people read this…. That is, I believe in biblical covenants and I believe every single thing in this article but I would not call myself a covenant theologian nor use the words “Covenant Theology” which are used below. More on that in the section ‘Think Covenant’). 

So, here goes.

“It is not uncommon today to hear the argument advanced that Covenant Theology is anti-semitic, because it it is erroneously accused of teaching that the New Testament Church replaces God’s Old Testament people, ethnic Israel. Some of these critics of Covenant Theology (such as Dispensationalists and Progressive Covenantalists) use the pejorative term “Replacement Theology” to describe what they believe Covenant Theology teaches.

However, this term is an inaccurate and unfair representation of Covenant Theology since no Covenant Theologian we have ever run into would recognize himself to teach such a thing: while it is true that Covenant Theology emphasizes the unity of God’s people throughout redemptive history, and denies that the Church is a distinct people of God that exists alongside his other people, ethnic Israel, yet it most certainly does not teach that the Church “replaces” Israel. Quite to the contrary, it teaches that the Church has been in existence ever since God first established his Covenant of Grace with Adam, and that, while the Church was composed of the believing remnant of national Israel during the Old Testament era, God’s design was always to expand it and bring all the nations into its fold, just as he promised Abraham (Gen. 12:3; Gal. 3:7-9). Today he has done that, and so now, his Church is composed both of the believing remnant of the Jewish nation, as it always has been, and also of a believing remnant of the Gentiles, who have been grafted in and made a part of the same body. So Israel has not been replaced, it has just been expanded to include Abraham’s children by faith from every nation on earth (Ephesians 2; Galatians 2 & 3).

Sadly, some Christian theologians of the past have in fact been anti-semitic, both before and after the crystallization of the biblical framework of Covenant Theology; but anti-semitism is not at all intrinsic to Covenant Theology which, when properly understood, demands an ongoing acceptance of the believing remnant of the Jewish nation as a necessary part of God’s Church (see Romans 11).

Monergism Copyright © 2008