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Exodus

Typological treatment in the corpus

The departure of Israel from Egypt is identified by Jones, Nee/Lee, and Noordzij as the most fundamental type of redemption: deliverance from the power of sin and the world as the starting point of the spiritual journey. For Nee/Lee, Egypt is the type of ‘the world,’ the Lamb is the type of Christ’s redemptive work, and Canaan is the type of the fullness of Christ. Noordzij sees the Exodus as a type of the redemption leading to sonship. Jones describes the Passover age as the first redemptive-historical epoch, completed at the Cross.

Biblical anchoring

ReferenceContext
Ex. 12:1-51The Passover and the Exodus: the blood of the lamb, crossing the Red Sea
Ex. 14:21-30Crossing the Red Sea: redemption and deliverance from Egyptian pursuers
1Cor. 10:1-11”These things happened to them as types for us… written for our admonition”
Heb. 10:1”The law is a shadow of the good things to come”
John 1:29”Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world”

Typological interpretation by author

Nee/Lee

Witness Lee describes in The All-inclusive Christ a three-stage model of the Christian life based on the Exodus typology. Most believers have only experienced the first stage:

“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.”1

The goal of the Exodus is not deliverance itself but entering the Land — the type of Christ as the fullness of God’s gift:

“In Egypt was the lamb, in the wilderness was the manna, and ahead of the people of Israel was the land of Canaan. That is the goal; that land is the goal of God. We have to enter in. It is our portion.”2

For Nee/Lee, redemption from Egypt (new birth/justification) is necessary but not the endpoint. Soteriology is embedded in a progressive logic of salvation: from deliverance-out-of-Egypt via the wilderness to the fullness of Christ as the Land of Canaan.

Noordzij

Noordzij formulates in Moses and the Way to Sonship his typological hermeneutical principle directly in terms of the Exodus:

“The law is a shadow of the coming good things (Heb. 10:1). And everything that happened to the natural people of Israel has been recorded for our instruction (1 Cor. 10:11). The deliverance of Israel from Egypt then symbolizes the deliverance to sonship now. Israel was therefore a sign and Moses a forerunner of the ‘male child,’ of Jesus Christ the Head and of Christ’s complete body of sons (Matt. 1:16-17).”3

Moses functions as a threefold type — forerunner of Christ as antitype and of the believer as application:

“Moses’ life is therefore a foreshadowing of the path to sonship. Jesus walked that path first. And whoever is in Christ walks that path too.”4

Noordzij extends the Exodus typology to the spiritual condition of the new covenant people: ‘Egypt’ stands typologically for the fleshly:

“In the new covenant everything applies to spiritual, heavenly realities. With that people He concludes a ‘new’ covenant to deliver them from the true ‘Egypt’ (the ‘fleshly’) and to bring them into a better ‘promised land,’ the kingdom of heaven.”5

Jones

Jones describes in Secrets of Time the Exodus as the beginning of the first redemptive-historical epoch — the Passover age:

“We stand today at the threshold of the Tabernacles Age. The Passover Age began with Israel’s Exodus from Egypt on the day of Passover and ended at the Cross. The Pentecost Age began in the 2nd chapter of Acts and ended 40 Jubilees later on the day of Pentecost, May 30, 1993.”6

Moses is for Jones a prophetic type of the 120-Jubilee pattern of salvation history:

“In fact, the life of Moses is one of the most profound and striking prophecies of the 120 Jubilees of history leading up to 1986 A.D. […] Moses lived through three distinct phases in his life, each of which was 40 years. Finally, he died at the age of 120.”7

“Even as Moses led ‘the church in the wilderness’ (Acts 7:38) for 40 years, so also did Jesus lead the New Testament Church into the wilderness for a period of 40 Jubilees. So also in our day, after 40 more Jubilees, Jesus (whose Hebrew name is Joshua) will lead us into the greater promise of the inheritance lost by Adam at the beginning.”8

  • Connected: feast-of-tabernacles (the Exodus opens the Passover age; the Feast of Tabernacles closes the whole)
  • Connected: day-of-atonement (feast structure: Passover → Pentecost → Day of Atonement → Tabernacles)
  • Via glossary: sonship

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. Nee/Lee, b1 (The All-inclusive Christ), ch. 1 — three-stage soteriological model (Egypt/wilderness/Canaan). ↩

  2. Nee/Lee, b1 (The All-inclusive Christ), ch. 1 — “The Center of God’s Eternal Plan”. ↩

  3. Noordzij, b1 (Moses and the Way to Sonship), section “Typological Hermeneutics” — statement of method. ↩

  4. Noordzij, b1 (Moses and the Way to Sonship), introduction. ↩

  5. Noordzij, b5 (Taking Hold of the Plow), section on the new covenant and spiritual Egypt. ↩

  6. Jones, b3 (Secrets of Time, 1996), foreword — redemptive-historical epoch scheme. ↩

  7. Jones, b3 (Secrets of Time, 1996), ch. 3 — Moses as prophetic type. ↩

  8. Jones, b3 (Secrets of Time, 1996), ch. 3. ↩

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