A number of animals—red heifers, lambs, goats, turtledoves, bulls, pigeons, and a bronze serpent—serve as symbols of Jesus Christ’s atonement or sacrifice.
A great number of righteous men and women from the Old Testament and Book of Mormon, including prophets, priests, kings, and others, served as types and shadows of Jesus Christ. Their personal purity and righteousness, as well as events in their lives, foreshadowed Jesus’ righteousness and his works. The parallels between these individuals and Christ are so striking that these persons “were types and shadows of our Lord’s coming; they were living, walking, breathing Messianic prophecies.”1 Elder Jeffrey R. Holland wrote: “Jehovah used an abundance of archetypes and symbols. Indeed, these have always been a conspicuous characteristic of the Lord’s instruction to his children. Examples of those figures—especially prefigurations of Christ—are present throughout the pre-Messianic record. . . .
