It can be a person

A simile is a comparison that uses like or as. It’s a description of something that says, “If you understand this, well, this works just like that works. This is as that is.” If you have a comparison that does not use like or as, it’s a metaphor. A metaphor is where one object stands for another.

Psalm 102: 6-7 says, “I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert. I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.”

Jordan asks, “What’s He saying? At the end of verse 7 He spells it out. The psalmist is describing his loneliness; his isolation. And if you know anything about a pelican, owl or sparrow, you know they are isolated kind of birds.

“A pelican is a coastal bird who holds regurgitated fish in his pouch in the hot sun, and one you probably don’t want to be around that much as a result. A pelican lives sort of an isolated life.”

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In Isaiah 28 is a prophecy about the “last days” and Israel’s connection with the Antichrist. Verse 15 says, “Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves.”

Jordan says, “There’s that covenant with the Antichrist and the covenant with death and hell. If you compare that with Revelation 6 you can know where you are because with that fourth rider, hell and death follow him.

“Verse 21 says, ‘For the LORD shall rise up as in mount Perazim, he shall be wroth as in the valley of Gibeon, that he may do his work, his strange work; and bring to pass.’ Here comes the Second Coming of Christ. He’s going to arise.

"Notice how he says when the Lord comes it’s going to be ‘as in mount Perazim.’ That’s II Samuel 5 when David heard the goings in the tops of the mulberry trees and Isaiah says the Second Advent is going to be like what happened back there with David. So in II Samuel you’re reading a prophetic fore view of what’s going to happen when Christ comes at the Second Advent.

“ ‘He shall be wroth as in the valley of Gibeon.’ Now that’s Joshua 10. All those things back there in Samuel and Joshua; they’re not just old dead history. The reason they’re in your Bible is because they are pictures, prototypes, prologues for some things in the future. That simile helps you
understand that and see that.

“You have types, parables and allegories and emblems and symbols and all these things and sometimes the kind of run together and it’s a little hard to decide what’s this and what’s that.

"In your mind, if you just remember the similes and the metaphors, and remember metaphors can be types. Now a type is something that happens in the past that is a prefigure or a picture, or a prologue, for something that’s going to happen in the future. It can be an event; it can be a person.

“In Genesis 22 is one of the greatest pictures of the crucifixion of Christ found anywhere in the Bible. Abraham is told to take his son and sacrifice him. Abraham knew that his son was the promised seed so even if he killed him God would raise him up and Hebrews 11 says that he received him as from the dead. It’s all a picture.

“By the way, when Abraham comes down off that mountain, Isaac, in the text of Scripture, doesn’t come down with him and you don’t see Isaac again in the Scripture for two more chapters. There’s some wonderful typology going on there.

“The history’s real, but what you find in the Scripture is that God will put things in that will prefigure; they’re prologues, or metatypes of things that are going to come. Woven into the fabric of Scripture are things back here that prefigure future events that nobody could have known about at the time they were written.

“There’s no way Moses, when he wrote that down, or Abraham when he was doing it, could have understood that the events they were being orchestrated there were picturing the Crosswork of Christ and the resurrection and His ascension into heaven.

“The writer of the Book of Hebrews wasn’t simply Moses; it was someone who had knowledge of the future that couldn’t have been known because some of the stuff he writes we look back at now and we say, ‘Well we understand what that is: ‘God shall provide himself a lamb.’ Don’t you love the way it says that?

“When you come to II Corinthians 5:21 and you read ‘For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.’ You say, ‘Wow! That’s just a real kind of a whoa! How did Genesis know how to say it that way so it would match II Corinthians and Galatians 3?!’

“That’s because God wrote all that and the Author of Scripture was outside of time, not bound by time, so typology is not just a great demonstration of the authority and validity of Scripture but a type is an object or event that is used to prefigure another event—something coming in the future and consequently what you have to have is an antitype. It’s the fulfillment.”