Canaan
Typological treatment in the corpus
The land of Canaan — the promised land that Israel received after the exodus from Egypt — is identified in the corpus by Nee/Lee and Noordzij as a type of Christ. In Nee/Lee, Canaan is the type of the all-inclusive Christ as the ultimate destination of the believer; in Noordzij, the promised land is the type of the kingdom of heaven that must be actively claimed by the Jabez-types.
Biblical anchoring
| Reference | Context |
|---|---|
| Gen. 12:1-7 | Promise to Abram: “To your offspring I will give this land” |
| Deut. 8:7-10 | Description of the promised land as a land of abundance |
| Josh. 1:2-6 | Commission to Joshua: “Cross over the Jordan into the land that I am giving to the Israelites” |
| Ps. 95:11 | ”They shall not enter my rest” — cited in Heb. 3-4 |
| Heb. 4:1-11 | The sabbath-rest as the true Canaan: the believer is called to enter |
Typological exposition by author
Nee / Lee
The entire work The All-inclusive Christ (AIC) is built on the thesis that Canaan is the type of the all-inclusive Christ. Lee introduces this on the opening pages:
“According to the Scriptures all physical things, all material things which we see, touch, and enjoy, are not the real things. They are merely a shadow, a figure of the genuine. […] The real things are nothing else but Christ Himself. Christ is the real food to us. Christ is the real water to us.”1
The three-part salvation-historical trajectory — Egypt → wilderness → Canaan — corresponds to three levels of Christian experience:
“I deeply feel that most of the Lord’s children are still remaining in Egypt. They have only experienced the Passover; they have just taken the Lord as the lamb. They have been saved by the lamb, but they have not been delivered out of this world.”2
The Lamb (Passover/Egypt) is the starting point, not the goal. Manna (wilderness) is a temporary provision. The land is the rest: “The lamb was not the rest. The manna was not the rest. But the land is the rest.”3
Lee describes Canaan as the “all-inclusive Christ” — Christ not exclusively as Redeemer but as the fullness of God’s reality for humanity:
“We must realize that Christ as the Redeemer is not the all-inclusive One. We are told in the Scriptures that Christ is all and in all, that Christ is the all-inclusive One. Everything is in Him and He is in everything.”4
The riches of Canaan — grain, wine, oil, milk, honey — are for Lee types of the individual riches of Christ that the believer can experientially enter. The wheat type (Christ who falls into the earth and bears fruit, John 12:24) and the barley type (Christ raised first as firstfruits, 1Cor. 15:20) are sub-elements of the Canaan typology.
Noordzij
In The Inheritance of Jabez (EJ), Noordzij works out the promised land as a type of the kingdom of heaven that must be actively claimed. Not all tribes took the land fully; Judah and Simeon alone fought through while other tribes left the Canaanites undisturbed. This is for Noordzij the type of a spiritual selection within the congregation:
“The promised land that Judah and Simeon alone occupied while the other tribes left the Canaanites undisturbed is the type of this spiritual selection: Are we earnest about acquiring the inheritance in our ‘new land’, the kingdom of heaven? And do we, like Jabez, desire more?”5
The “Canaanites” (the remnants of self-will and soulishness in the believer) must be actively driven out — without that battle, heirship remains nominal. The Jabez-types are those who desire more than merely entering the land, and who actively lay claim to the full inheritance.
Related types
- Connected: saul (failing to enter the land = type of the sinful kingship that forfeits the inheritance)
- Via glossary: apokatastasis
Footnotes
Footnotes
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Nee/Lee, b1 (The All-inclusive Christ, 1962/1967), ch. 1 — shadow and reality. ↩
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Nee/Lee, b1 (The All-inclusive Christ), ch. 5 — Egypt, wilderness and the land. ↩
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Nee/Lee, b1 (The All-inclusive Christ), ch. 5 — the land as the rest. ↩
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Nee/Lee, b1 (The All-inclusive Christ), ch. 2 — Christ as land, not merely as Lamb. ↩
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Noordzij, b4 (The Inheritance of Jabez), eschatology chapter — the promised land and the Jabez-types. ↩