1 COR. x. 11.
” Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples :
and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends
of the world are come.”

THE text more accurately translated reads thus: “Now all
these things happened unto them for a typical purpose,
and they were written for our admonition, upon whom the
ends of the ages (or ‘dispensation’) have reached.” The
apostle regards the incarnation, death and resurrection
of the Lord Jesus as bringing us to the “last ages” in
the history of the human race. He is thinking, not so
much of the end of the material world, as of the close of
a long series of God’s dealings with mankind, the final
revelation of God in Jesus Christ to the race, which thereby
enters on its last and most critical “dispensation or age.”
He sees in the Jewish history, in their spiritual blessings
and privileges, temptations and falls, not only “ensamples,”
but “types” of the vaster spiritual facts of the last dispen-
sation under which we live. The Old Testament prefigures
the New, as the first outlines of the artist’s study prefigure
the finished perfect painting.
I. This truth will add to the intellectual interest of the
Old Testament.
Christians, instead of regarding the history of the Jews as
dry and of no concern to them, would, grasping this truth,
that “all these things happened with a typical purpose,”
with new interest and delight trace the outlines of the
Gospel appearing in the imperfect shadows of the law.
II. This principle would guard against the error of
treating the Old Testament as God’s final revelation of
Himself.
One class of Christians find more spiritual profit in
ingeniously spiritualising the dresses of the priests or
vessels of the sanctuary, than in the Sermon on the Mount
or the Epistle of St. James. A type can never be as full
of meaning as that which it typifies; we must turn not to
Exodus or Leviticus, but to the Gospels and Epistles, for
the “substance of the things” shadowed forth in the Old
Testament.
III. This will suggest to us the “admonition” we may
gain from a devout intelligent study of the history of the
Jews.
Seeing how they, who chosen by God to be a peculiar
people to Himself, and entrusted with special revelations,
yet fell and were finally rejected, let us be warned that we
fall not “after the same example of unbelief.”
G. S. Barrett, B.A.