“For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or one stroke of a letter will pass away from the law until all things are accomplished (until everything prophesied to take place has reached its fulfillment).” (Matt 5:18)

“It is only when we recognize the typical character of God’s dealings with Israel that we can rightly appreciate the wonderful history of that people, or understand why their history, in preference to that of all other nations, is so particularly recorded by the Prophets and the New Testament writers. In them, as the New Testament writers show, God has given striking illustrations of his plans, both for the Church and for the world.

Their Tabernacle service, so minutely prescribed in the divinely given Law, with its bleeding beasts and all its peculiar appointments, their festivals and holy days, their Sabbaths, and all their ceremonies, as types pointed forward to antitypes, larger, higher and grander far than those shadows.

The Apostle Paul assures us that those antitypes will be laden with blessings for mankind, when he says that the Law foreshadowed “good things to come” (Heb. 10:1; 8:5; Col. 2:17); while our Lord, in the opening text, likewise assures us that all the good things foreshadowed (in its jubilee arrangements and time features) are sure of fulfillment.

However, in considering types, we should carefully avoid the error of many well-meaning people, who, when they begin to see that there are significant types in the Scriptures run to the extreme of treating every Bible character and incident as typical, and are thus led into error by mere curiosity and ingenuity. On no such unsafe ground do we build when examining the ceremonies of the Jewish Law, given specially as types and declared by the apostles to be such. Nor can we afford to let these types pass without due consideration and careful study of the lessons they teach, any more than we can afford to spend time in speculating, and in building faith upon mere conjecture.

When our Lord said that not one jot or tittle of the Law should pass away until fulfilled, he referred not only to the fulfilling of its covenant obligations for all under that Law Covenant, finishing its hold upon them, by meeting its demands against them in full with his own life, but he meant more than this: He meant, further, that all the blessings expressed in it typically would also be sure of fulfillment upon an antitypical scale.

In all the Jewish ceremonies, God caused no type to be made which will prove meaningless, or pass unfulfilled; and the observance of all types was kept up until their fulfillment at least began. All types must be continually repeated until their ANTITYPES appear; for the keeping of a type is not the fulfilling of it.

The fulfilling is reached where the type ceases, being displaced by the reality, the antitype.

Thus, for instance, the slaying of the paschal lamb was fulfilled in the death of Christ, the “Lamb of God,” and there began the special blessing upon the antitypical firstborn, the believers of the Gospel age. The blessing, foreshadowed in that type, is not yet completely fulfilled, though the fulfillment began with the death of Christ, our Passover Lamb. In like manner, every ceremony prescribed in the Law proves to be full of typical significance. And the particularity with which the observance of every detail of the types was enforced throughout the Jewish age gives emphasis to our Lord’s words quoted above–that every minute particular, every jot and tittle, must be as particularly fulfilled as it was carefully enforced in the ceremonies of the Law.

In this study we propose to examine that typical feature of the Mosaic Law known as the Jubilee, and to show that it was intended to foreshadow the great Restitution, the recovery of mankind from the fall, to be accomplished in the Millennial age; that in its character it was an illustration of the coming Restitution; and that in the manner of its reckoning it furnishes time regulations which, when understood and applied, indicate clearly the time for the beginning of the antitype, the “Restitution of all things.” Acts 3:19-21

Since the Jubilee was a part of the Law, and since repeating does not fulfill it, and since our Lord declared that the type could not pass away without fulfillment; and moreover, since we know that no such restitution of all things as that foretold “by all the holy prophets since the world began,” and prefigured in this type, has ever yet occurred, we know that it must be fulfilled in the future.” (B173-175 edited)

Continued with next post.