In communicating divine truth to human understanding, God employs types. As Edwards declared in his “Types” notebook, “Types are a certain sort of language, as it were, in which God is wont to speak to us.” While this divine speaking is paradigmatically put forth in Scripture, it is not exclusively confined there. Like a grammar teacher who writes out the conjugations of only a few paradigm verbs, God “han’t expressly explained all the types of Scriptures, but has done so much as is sufficient to teach us the language.” As God’s pupils, believers are to acquire an ear for this divine language in the rest of Scripture, but also in other arenas in which God’s voice is still sounding. For Edwards, “very much of the wisdom of God in the creation appears in his so ordering things natural, that they livelily represent things divine and spiritual…” “’Tis very fit and becoming of God, who is infinitely wise, so to order things that there should be a voice of his in his works instructing those that behold them, and pointing forth and showing divine mysteries and things more immediately appertaining to himself and his spiritual kingdom.”
–Amy Plantinga-Pauw, The Supreme Harmony of All (pp. 39-40)
