(3.) There remains a third, and perhaps preferable view, which may be called the typical view, maintained, as is well known, by Melanchthon, Calvin, and many later expositors.  This begins with the well-established principle that David (in a less eminent degree his successors also on the throne, so far as they were true to their office) was a divinely-constituted type of the Messiah, not only in his office as the earthly head of God’s kingdom, but in the events of his history also; that the psalms in question, whether they describe his victorious might or his deep suffering at the hand of his enemies, had a true historic origin; that their first and immediate reference was to the writer’s own situation and the events which befell him; but that, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, he was carried beyond himself to describe the office and history of the Messiah; that consequently these psalms have a lower fulfilment in David the type (the seventy-second in Solomon), and a higher in Christ the Antitype.

The second psalm, for example, which describes the vain conspiracy of the heathen rulers against the Lord’s anointed king, and God’s purpose to give him the uttermost ends of the earth for his possession, may have had its occasion in the combination of the surrounding heathen nations against David.  In the victorious might with which God endowed him, it had a lower fulfilment; and this was, so to speak, the first sheaf of the harvest of victories that was to follow.  It was an earnest and pledge of the complete fulfilment of the psalm in Christ, in whom alone the promise made to David:  “Thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever before thee:  thy throne shall be established for ever” (2 Sam. 7:16), could have its real accomplishment.  Luke 1:  32, 33.

The second class of psalms, of which the twenty-second is a well-known example, may have had, in like manner, a true historic origin.  When the psalmist began with the exclamation:  “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” he may have had immediate reference to his own distressed condition.  But since he was the divinely appointed head of the line of kings which should end in Christ, and was thus in his office a type of Christ, God had so ordered the circumstances of his history as to shadow forth in them the sufferings and final triumph of the Messiah.  Writing under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, he was led, through these circumstances, to say many things which applied to himself only in a lower and often figurative sense, but which were appointed to have a complete fulfilment in Christ his Antitype (Psa. 22:1, 7, 8, 14, 15, 16, 18; 40:6-10; 69:4, 7-9, 21; 109:1-20), and which point to Christ as the chief subject of the prophecies.

How far the psalmist understood this higher reference of his words is a question difficult to be determined.  With regard to the sixteenth psalm, the apostle Peter tells us that David, “being