Fulfillment and Typology

FULFILLMENT AND TYPOLOGY

Prophecy is a declaration of something to come, a prediction forth telling by God to man. When God speak He set in motion spiritual activities and the destiny of all things. Many of things which God in the past prophesied have already come to pass with perfect accuracy, other things spoken forth by God are yet to be fulfilled in the course of God’s timing.

Old Testament prophecy contains exciting expectancy of the coming Christ, the Anointed One while the New Testament contains the manifestation of him. There have been described in the old testament 300 prophecies of the first coming of the Messiah and 500 of His second coming, all of them made hundreds of years before the birth and fulfilled to the letter in Jesus, the Messiah. Prophecy recorded in the Old Testament binds the Old and New Testament inseparably together.

In this term paper I will focus on two major methods that New Testament writers used to connect the Hebrew Bible with Christian New Testament which is Fulfilment and Typology.

Fulfilment deals with the very words of the prophets who, according to New Testament writers, verbally predicted events that the Messiah would accomplish. Typology is similar, yet it is not a prediction, nor does it directly correlate to future events in the manner that fulfilment does. Rather, it is simply an event from the Hebrew Bible that is said to foreshadow another event in the Christian New Testament.

Regarding fulfilment, the New Testament writers have identified Jesus Christ as the Messiah. They believed that the prophecies from the Hebrew Bible have been performed by Jesus and that He was sent by God. Some of the prophecies could have been easily fulfilled by someone that knew then well, while others could not have been fulfilled by being self aware.

First of all, God told Abram in Genesis 12:3 that the world would be blessed through him. A Messianic prophecy was that the Messiah would be a descendent of Abraham, from the tribe of Judah, and also from King David. The genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1:2-6 reveals