There is a way of reading the Old Testament that makes the Hebrew Roots Movement's conclusions almost inevitable. If the Torah is simply a collection of laws to be obeyed, the feasts a calendar to be observed, and the Levitical system a programme to be implemented, then the question becomes purely practical: which laws apply, and how do we keep them? The HRM answers: all of them, because they are God's eternal instructions.

But there is another way of reading the Old Testament - a way that is older than the HRM, older than the church fathers, older than the New Testament itself. It is the way the apostles read it, the way Jesus read it, and the way the Old Testament itself invites the reader to read it. It is called typology. And once you see it, the HRM's approach to the Torah looks not like faithfulness to the text but like a failure to read it the way its own Author intended.

What Typology Is - and What It Is Not

Typology is the interpretive recognition that certain people, events, institutions, and objects in the Old Testament were designed by God to foreshadow and point forward to their fulfilment in Christ. The earlier thing - the type - is a real historical event or person or institution. It is not a myth or an allegory. But it was also designed, from the beginning, to prefigure something greater that was coming.

This is different from allegory, where a text is treated as a code concealing a hidden spiritual meaning unrelated to its historical reference. Allegory was popular in Alexandria - Philo used it extensively to harmonise Jewish scripture with Greek philosophy - and some early church fathers used it too freely. Typology is more disciplined. It requires that the type be genuinely historical, that the correspondence between type and fulfilment be grounded in the text itself, and that the New Testament either explicitly identify the correspondence or clearly presuppose it.

It is also different from prophecy, though the two overlap. Prophecy is verbal prediction - words about the future. Typology is structural correspondence - a pattern in earlier events that the later fulfilment fills out and exceeds. Both are forms of divine foreshadowing. Typology operates through the texture of history itself.

The New Testament's Own Typological Reading

The New Testament does not merely use typology as a convenient interpretive tool. It insists on it as the divinely intended way to read Israel's scriptures. This is not a later Christian imposition on the Old Testament. It is the claim of the New Testament writers themselves.

Paul is the most explicit. In 1 Corinthians 10, reflecting on Israel's wilderness experience, he writes: "These things happened to them as types, and they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come." - 1 Corinthians 10:11. The Greek word is typoi - types. Paul is not using a metaphor loosely. He is identifying a specific interpretive category: Israel's history was shaped by God to instruct later generations typologically.

In Colossians 2:16–17, addressing the question of festivals, new moons, and Sabbaths directly, Paul writes: "These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ." Shadow and substance. The Torah's calendar was the shadow. Christ is the substance. To pursue the shadow when the substance has arrived is not faithfulness - it is confusion about what the shadow was for.

The writer of Hebrews develops this at greatest length. The entire argument of Hebrews 7–10 is typological: the Levitical priesthood was a type of Christ's eternal priesthood; the tabernacle was "a copy and shadow of the heavenly things" (Hebrews 8:5); the sacrificial system was "a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities" (Hebrews 10:1). The word "shadow" (skia) appears three times in Hebrews in this connection. The word "copy" (hypodeigma) appears twice. The writer is not improvising an interpretation. He is drawing out what the structure of the Old Testament itself implies.

Jesus as the Typological Reader

Before Paul or the author of Hebrews, Jesus himself read the Old Testament typologically - and he did so with an authority that went beyond interpretation. He claimed to be the referent of the types.

In John 3:14, he identifies himself with the bronze serpent Moses lifted in the wilderness (Numbers 21:8–9): "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up." The serpent on the pole was a type. The crucifixion is its fulfilment.

In Matthew 12:40, he identifies himself with Jonah: "For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." Jonah's experience was typological - a real event whose deeper significance was the death and resurrection of Christ.

In John 6:32–35, he identifies himself with the manna in the wilderness: "Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven... I am the bread of life." The manna was real bread. But it was also a type of the true bread - and Jesus is the substance the type was pointing to.

Most comprehensively, in Luke 24:27, on the road to Emmaus, the risen Jesus opens the scriptures to two disciples: "And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself." And again in verse 44: "Everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled."

Jesus's claim is not that the Old Testament contains some prophecies about him. It is that the entire sweep of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms is oriented toward him - that he is what the whole thing was pointing to. This is a typological reading of the whole canon.

Major Types and Their Fulfilments

The following survey is illustrative rather than exhaustive. The patterns run through every major institution and narrative of the Old Testament.

Adam - Paul calls Christ "the last Adam" in 1 Corinthians 15:45 and "the one man" whose obedience reverses the one man's disobedience in Romans 5:12–21. Adam was the head of the old creation; Christ is the head of the new. Adam's failure brought death; Christ's obedience brings life. The correspondence is not metaphorical. Paul reads the Genesis narrative as structurally designed to foreshadow Christ.

The Passover Lamb - Paul states it directly: "Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed." - 1 Corinthians 5:7. The requirements for the Passover lamb in Exodus 12 - unblemished, no broken bones - are fulfilled precisely in the crucifixion (John 19:36). John the Baptist identifies Jesus as "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29) - invoking the entire sacrificial typology of the Torah. The Passover was not merely a historical commemoration. It was a forward-pointing type whose fulfilment ends its function as obligation.

The High Priest and the Day of Atonement - Hebrews 9 draws this out in detail. The high priest entered the Holy of Holies once a year, with blood, to make atonement for Israel. This was the type. Christ, as the true High Priest, entered the true Holy of Holies - the very presence of God - with his own blood, securing not annual but eternal atonement (Hebrews 9:11–12). The Day of Atonement type has been fulfilled once for all. Its annual repetition is superseded, not by cancellation, but by a fulfilment so complete it renders repetition not merely unnecessary but theologically incoherent.

The Tabernacle and Temple - Hebrews 8:5 states that the earthly tabernacle was "a copy and shadow of the heavenly things" - Moses was shown the heavenly pattern and told to make an earthly copy. The earthly copy was the type. The heavenly reality to which it pointed is the substance. When Revelation 21:22 describes the new Jerusalem and says "I saw no temple in it, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb" - the type has been permanently replaced by the reality it was pointing to all along.

The Manna, the Rock, the Bronze Serpent - As noted above, Jesus identifies himself with manna and Paul with the rock (1 Corinthians 10:4: "the Rock was Christ"). The wilderness provision was real - and it was also a type. Israel was fed with bread from heaven; those who eat the true bread from heaven will never hunger. Israel drank water from a rock; those who drink living water will never thirst.

The Feasts - Paul calls them "a shadow of things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ" (Colossians 2:17). The fulfilment of each feast in Christ is not hard to trace. Passover - Christ sacrificed. Unleavened Bread - Christ the sinless one in the tomb. Firstfruits - Christ the firstfruits of resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:20). Pentecost - the giving of the Spirit. The autumn feasts (Trumpets, Atonement, Tabernacles) point to final eschatological realities still to be consummated. The feasts were never arbitrary dates on a calendar. They were a prophetic drama, rehearsed annually, pointing to the great acts of redemption that Christ would accomplish and consummate.

What Typology Does to the HRM's Argument

Once typological reading is understood, the HRM's foundational claim - that Torah observance is ongoing obligation for all believers - looks very different. The HRM reads the Torah as a flat list of commands, all of equal and permanent applicability, the observance of which constitutes covenant faithfulness. Typology reads the Torah as a structured anticipation of Christ, in which the commands served multiple purposes simultaneously: moral formation, communal identity, and above all, prophetic prefiguring of the redemption to come.

When the substance arrives, the shadow does not become irrelevant - it becomes transparent. You can now see through it to what it was always pointing at. The Passover lamb was pointing to Christ; now that Christ has been sacrificed, the lamb's function as obligation has been fulfilled. The Day of Atonement was pointing to Christ's atoning death; now that Christ has entered the true Holy of Holies with his own blood, the annual ceremony has been superseded by what it foreshadowed. The feasts were rehearsals for the drama of redemption; now that the drama has unfolded in history, the rehearsals have given way to the reality.

This is not the abolition of the Torah. It is, as Jesus said, its fulfilment (Matthew 5:17). The Torah is honoured most deeply not by treating it as an ongoing programme to implement but by recognising what it was pointing to all along - and finding that referent in Christ.

The HRM and the Danger of Treating the Shadow as the Substance

There is a warning embedded in the typological structure of scripture itself. When Israel was given the manna, they were not supposed to hoard it - those who tried to keep it found it rotten by morning (Exodus 16:20). When the pillar of cloud led them forward, they were supposed to follow - those who stayed in the old camp were left behind. The types had authority and life for their season. The danger was clinging to the provision of one season when God was moving to the next.

The writer of Hebrews makes this explicit. He addresses a community of Jewish Christians who are tempted to return to the Levitical system - to the temple, the priesthood, the sacrifices - under pressure and persecution. His response is not a gentle suggestion. It is a sustained theological argument that returning to the types when the substance has arrived is not safety. It is retreat. It is preferring the copy to the original, the shadow to the light, the preliminary sketch to the completed work.

The Hebrew Roots Movement, whatever its sincere intentions, makes the same mistake in a new form. It calls believers back to the shadow when the substance is standing in plain sight. It trades the Passover lamb for the Lamb of God. It substitutes the annual Day of Atonement for the once-for-all atoning death of the eternal High Priest. It replaces the type with its own inferior copy - a Torah observance that lacks the temple, the priesthood, the genealogical records, and the sacrificial system, and therefore does not even succeed as a reconstruction of the type it is attempting to restore.

The Old Testament is a magnificent, divinely crafted anticipation of Christ. Every sacrifice, every feast, every priest, every exodus points forward. To read it any other way - to treat it as a flat code of permanent obligations rather than a forward-pointing, Christ-saturated story - is to misread it at the level of genre. It is like reading a birth announcement as a biography, or a map as if it were the territory.

Christ is the territory. The Torah is the map that leads there.

For all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory. - 2 Corinthians 1:20