The Old Testament Scriptures are literally full of allegorical illustrations of various features of the Divine Plan. And there is an order to the allegories. Allegories illustrating God's covenants, for example, are not randomly distributed throughout the Old Testament, but are concentrated in the history of the lives of the patriarchs to whom God's covenant of blessing was expressed. To Abraham, Isaac and Jacob [...]

God promised Abraham that his seed would be multiplied greatly. To illustrate this God likened Abraham's seed to the stars of heaven, the dust of the earth, and the sand of the seashore - each multitudinous. But Bible Students have long seen that these terms convey a deeper meaning than just of a vast number. The stars picture the heavenly seed of Abraham, the [...]

Some time ago a brother directed our attention to a passage of Jeremiah which prophesied the destruction of Babylon, and suggested that it paralleled the 7 plagues, which are a seven-staged destruction of mystic Babylon during the Gospel Age Harvest. The prophecy is in the 50th chapter of Jeremiah. That chapter opens: "The word that the Lord spake against Babylon and against the land [...]

A reader points us to Numbers 18:9-10, inquiring how this accords with our comment regarding Hebrews 13 that sin offerings were not to be eaten. (As in "Beasts Whose Blood is Brought into the Sanctuary," May 1981 BT.) The answer is that some sin offerings were eaten, and some were not. The kind referred to by Paul in Hebrews 13 could not be eaten [...]