“What You Do with Me After This Shall Be As a Type and a Shadow of Things Which Are to Come”

Alan C. Miner

Jeffrey R. Holland writes that the Book of Mormon prophet who probably thought about scriptural symbolism and taught it more effectively than any other is Abinadi. Very early he warned King Noah that whatever Noah would do to him would be "a type and a shadow of things which are to come" (Mosiah 13:10), and indeed it was.

Abinadi also stressed that the performances and ordinances of the law of Moses "were types of things to come" (Mosiah 13:31) and shadows "of those things which are to come" (Mosiah 16:14). But the most striking symbolic statement Abinadi ever made was his own living pre-figuration of Christ.

Consider these foreshadowing links and parallel possibilities between Abinadi, the first Book of Mormon martyr, and Christ, the great and last sacrifice.

Abinadi

Type/Shadow

Christ

Mosiah 11:20

Called to preach repentance to those sinning

Matthew 9:13

Mosiah 11:21-23; 12:1-8

To deny message was to be afflicted by the hand of enemies and brought into bondage

Matthew 23:37-38; 24:3-51

Mosiah 11:20-25

Denounced unbelievers in public discourse

Matthew 2:39

Mosiah 12:9

Stood alone against accusers

Matthew 26:56

Mosiah 12:17-18

Bound and taken before religious priests and political ruler

John 18:12-40

Mosiah 12:19

Cross-examined

Matthew 26:59-60

Mosiah 13:1

Dismissed as mad

John 10:20

Mosiah 13:6

Spoke with power and authority

Matthew 7:28-29

Mosiah 13:7

Could not be slain until message / mission was completed

John 10:17-18

Mosiah 17:6

Three-day imprisonment (entombment)

Luke 24:4-8, 46

Mosiah 17:8

Condemned for blasphemy

Matthew 26:63-66

Mosiah 17:9

Would not recall words

Matthew 27:12-14

Mosiah 17:10

Innocent blood

Matthew 27:24

Mosiah 17:11-12

Leader tempted to release him but yielded to detractors and delivered him to be slain

John 18:4-25

Abinadi is the most extensively developed prophetic prefiguration of Christ in the Book of Mormon and one of the most conspicuously developed types in any of the scriptures. And it is yet another conspicuous irony that he, like Christ, died lamenting that those who claimed a belief in the law of Moses could not recognize the Messianic teachings--to say nothing of the Messiah himself--toward which that law in its purity had always been directed. [Jeffrey R. Holland, Christ and the New Covenant, pp. 171-173]

Step by Step Through the Book of Mormon: A Cultural Commentary

References