The OT types of the removal

As I know God, He does nothing new without first rehearsing it. That was the principle of the shadows (chapter 5): what God will do fully on the Day, He has already done in bursts throughout history. And if the keeping of His people through or before the Day is real — the three modes of the previous chapter: kept away from, kept-through, led out — then it may be expected that the Torah bears the templates of them. It does bear them, and more abundantly than many a reader suspects. The Old Testament is thick with images of rescue-out-of-judgment, and they fall precisely into the same three forms that Revelation later draws. This chapter runs through them — not to press a timeline out of them (typology cannot bear that, and this book does not do it), but to show that the removal and the keeping are no late-introduced strangers, but old acquaintances: patterns God has sketched from Genesis on.

Begin with the three men at the beginning of the world, for together they draw the three modes in their purest form. The first is Enoch, and he stands for the removal before the judgment. Of him it stands written, surprisingly brief and surprisingly deep: "and Enoch walked with God, and he was no more, for God took him away" (Gen 5:24).1 No deathbed, no grave — he was there, and then he was there no more, "for God took him away" (laqach). Hebrews explains it: "by faith Enoch was taken away, that he should not see death [...] for before his removal he received the testimony that he pleased God" (11:5). And note where he stands in the timeline: Enoch is "the seventh from Adam" (Jude 14), and he is taken away before the flood comes — the generation of his son Methuselah runs out upon the year of the flood. The man who, according to Jude, prophesied precisely the coming of the Day ("behold, the Lord has come with His holy myriads," chapter 17), is himself taken away before the judgment he announced broke loose. That is the first mode, in flesh and blood: kept away from, taken up without seeing death — precisely what Paul says of the living church ("we shall not all fall asleep, but we shall all be changed," 1 Cor 15:51).

The second man is Noah, and he stands for the keeping through the judgment. He is not taken away before the flood; he is carried through the midst of it, in the ark, on the waters of the judgment itself. The judgment rages around him and beneath him, and precisely through that judgment he is brought to the new world. That is the mode of Israel, of the wilderness-woman, of the sealed remnant (chapter 25): not taken out, but kept through. Peter therefore sets Noah and the ark beside baptism — saved "through the water" (1 Pet 3:20-21).

And the third man is Lot, and he stands for the being-led-out just before the fire falls. The angels seize him by the hand and pull him out of the city, and then falls the word that sums up this whole mode: "hurry, flee there, for I can do nothing until you have arrived there" (Gen 19:22).2 The judgment waits for the righteous. The fire cannot fall while Lot is still inside; the righteousness of God binds His own hand until His servant is in safety. Peter draws here the explicit lesson, and it is the sharpest summary of this whole part: "the Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptation, but to keep the unrighteous for the day of judgment to be punished" (2 Pet 2:9). Two keepings, oppositely directed: the godly is kept out, the unrighteous is kept for — reserved for the judgment. And it is no accident that Jesus sets precisely Noah and Lot side by side as the two models for His coming: "as it happened in the days of Noah [...] and as in the days of Lot" (Luke 17:26-30, chapter 5). The two great rescues of the primeval age — kept-through (Noah) and led-out (Lot) — are His own chosen images for the Day. And Enoch, taken away before both, completes the threefold pattern.

But through the Torah runs yet a second series of types, and it touches not the mode of the rescue but the identity of who is rescued: the gentile-bride. It is a pattern that repeats itself with striking regularity, and that illustrates precisely the hinge of chapter 24 — the Bride out of the nations, taken during the interval in which Israel does not recognize its redeemer. Joseph draws it most sharply. Rejected by his brothers, sold, hidden in the land of the gentiles, and there — while his brothers have no idea that he is still alive — exalted to beside the throne and given to a gentile-bride, Asenath, the daughter of an Egyptian priest (Gen 41:45). Only later, after years in which they do not recognize him, does he reveal himself to his brothers: "I am Joseph, your brother" (45:4), and there is weeping and reconciliation. Read that pattern with the eyes of the New Testament, and it is almost impossible to miss: Christ, rejected by His brothers (Israel), hidden, exalted, takes during the interval of their non-recognition a bride out of the gentiles (the Church) — and reveals Himself only thereafter to Israel, which will then recognize Him "whom they have pierced" (Zech 12:10) and mourn as Joseph's brothers were dismayed. The same pattern returns with Moses: rejected by his people at his first appearance ("who made you a ruler?", Exod 2:14), he withdraws to Midian, takes there a gentile-bride (Zipporah), and returns only at his second appearance to deliver Israel. And with Ruth: the Moabitess, the gentile woman, who is taken as bride by the kinsman-redeemer Boaz — the gentile-bride grafted into the people and even into the line of the Messiah. And with Rebekah (Gen 24): the servant (a classic type of the Spirit) is sent to a far land to fetch a bride for the son, and he brings her across the wilderness to the bridegroom, who goes out to meet her in the field — an image of the Spirit who gathers the Bride and brings her to Christ. Four times the same ground pattern: a bride from outside, taken in the time that the son is not acknowledged by his own or has not yet returned. The gentile-bride of the Torah is the shadow of the Church of chapter 24.

And there are still two removals that complete the picture. Elijah is bodily taken away without dying — "and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven" (2 Kgs 2:11) — the second man in Scripture, after Enoch, who did not see death but was taken up; together they form the pair that inscribes the possibility of a removal-without-death twice into history. And the caught-away child of Revelation 12 (chapter 25), "caught away to God and His throne" with the verb of the rapture (hērpasthē / harpazō), adds to the Old Testament types the New Testament hinge-image: the removal upward, away from the dragon.

See the richness of all this, and see at the same time its limit, for this book draws both sharply. The richness: the removal and the keeping are no doctrines that were first devised in the nineteenth century and laid upon the text; they are patterns God has sketched from Genesis 5 on — Enoch taken away, Noah kept, Lot led out, the gentile-bride fetched, Elijah taken up. Whoever sees the Day coming sees nothing new: he sees the full execution of rehearsals the Torah has already held. But the limit: a type illustrates and confirms; it does not date and it proves no point in time. That Enoch was taken away before the flood shows that "removal-before-judgment" is in God's repertoire; it does not prove on its own that the Bride is taken away before the sixth seal. The types bear the plausibility and the form; the question of timing itself must be decided on other grounds — the texts that speak outright of the order (chapter 27). This book thus uses the types as types are meant to be used: as confirmation that the pattern is real and of God, not as proof of a scheme. So read, they are worth their weight in gold — for they show that the God who on the Day takes away His Bride and keeps His Israel is the same who did so from the very first pages. He rehearses His rescues. And whoever knows the rehearsals recognizes the performance.