In part one, I argued that “figural” and “typological” are adjectives that describe the nature of God’s revelation, not a proper strategy for reading or interpreting the Scriptures. In a related Christ Over All article, I argued that interpretation is neither literal nor figurative. Because figural and typological are species of what is properly called figurative, it is improper to use these adjectives to describe interpretation.
In this article, I will argue that typological and figural are species of God’s revelation. Types are aspects of the organic development of biblical revelation, woven into the fabric of Scripture itself. God reveals himself and his mission in the unfolding drama of Scripture, liberally employing figures and types—persons, events, places, and institutions—as earthly shadows of heavenly realities, all prefiguring and typologically foreshadowing the climactic finale achieved in and by the Coming One, Christ Jesus, the Last Adam.
A Corrected Orientation On Typology: Types as Written Revelation
God’s revelatory story of redemption is the original mystery that all others imitate. The characters in this story lived within the unfolding drama of God’s promised redeemer. They saw only the episodes of their own lifetimes. We see their whole lives on a larger timeline in the entire biblical record. They recounted God’s faithfulness to his promises that preceded them while looking for the climactic fulfillment of those promises (Heb. 11). They were called to believe in the God who promises. Thus, Abraham believed, and God reckoned righteousness to him (Gen. 15:6). As the story unfolds through covenants, a hope that the promised Seed of the woman will bring salvation builds. On the way up the mountain, Isaac asks a question that reverberates throughout the Old Testament, “Where is the Lamb?” (Gen. 22:7). Expectation escalates and subsides with the births of male children who disappoint. Fulfillment awaits. The promised redeemer will come at the appointed time. Hope builds around God’s appointed earthly events, characters, settings, institutions, and conflicts, all suffused with representational heavenly significances as typological prefigurements, foreshadowing what is to come, enlivening and adding to the anticipation that intensifies toward the plotline’s climax.
So, when the time is fulfilled, and the Coming One emerges from the shadows, born in Bethlehem and reared in Nazareth, John the Baptist points to him and announces, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). Throughout his ministry, Jesus sustains the Old Testament’s pattern of revelation by simultaneously revealing and concealing himself with parables, with signs and wonders, and with riddle-like teaching. All this angered the religious officials. They were seeking to be rid of him, and so they crucified him—failing to realize that this prophesied murderous act thrust the mystery of God’s plan toward its denouement. In the crucified Jesus, the typological annual slaughter of the Passover Lamb reaches its finale, as the Apostle John presents with his multiple Old Testament allusions—the eldest son, the hyssop, no bones broken (John 19:23–37)—all signifying that Jesus dies as the final Passover Lamb.
Jesus’s post-resurrection conversation with two disciples on the road to Emmaus is highly instructive. Jesus purposely prevented their eyes from recognizing him, and he did this to show them how the Messiah is revealed in the Scriptures, from the Pentateuch through the Prophets. Jesus masterfully expounds the Scriptures, showing that the Old Testament is the authoritative prequel for understanding Messiah’s identity and mission. He does not project himself as Messiah onto the Old Testament by reading backward, by reinterpreting the Old Testament, or by typological interpretation. He does not retrofit the Old Testament to his messianic role. Jesus demonstrates that the Messiah is progressively revealed forward, beginning with the Pentateuch, and progressing through the Prophets. Word of the coming Messiah, given prophetically and typologically, was always there in Scripture, in plain sight to be seen by all who have eyes to see, which Augustine succinctly expresses: “The Old is in the New revealed; the New is in the Old concealed.” At the end of the journey, when Jesus dined with the two men, he “took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them,” purposely repeating his act from the night he was betrayed to situate the instant their eyes would open to recognize him (Luke 24:30–31, 35).
With the two disciples, Jesus dramatizes this blessing—“Because you [Thomas] saw me, you believed; blessed are those who do not see but believe” (John 20:29). Without their realizing it, Jesus situated these two disciples as representatives of subsequent generations of believers who would believe in Jesus by recognizing him in God’s word. Jesus’s apostles and other eyewitnesses like Peter and John “saw and believed” even though they “still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead” (John 20:8–9). What they and 500 others saw they could not unsee, for they were eyewitnesses of the resurrected Christ (1 Cor. 15:6). Indeed, they believed that Jesus was raised from the dead, but they lacked what Jesus did for the two disciples on the Emmaus road. Jesus’s apostles still needed to have their faith grounded in the Scriptures, which foreshadowed and prophesied the Coming One. John expresses this: “When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken” (John 2:22; emphasis added).
How blessed we are! “Though we have not seen the Lord Christ, we love him. Though we do not now see him, we believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of our faith, the salvation of our souls” (1 Pet. 1:8–9). So, like the Bereans of old, who received the word with all eagerness and examined the Scriptures daily to verify the truths preached to them (Acts 17:11), we trace the New Testament writers’ appeals to the Old Testament with its treasure trove of explicit prophecies and veiled typological foreshadows of things to come in the messianic age where we now dwell.
Conclusion
When the Apostle Paul identified Adam as a type of Christ, he could do so because he no longer read the Scriptures as a Pharisee. The Old Testament no longer terminated on itself, but on Christ Jesus (cf. John 5:39–40). Certainly, Paul benefited from reading the mystery of the coming Messiah from the climactic vantage point when the mystery was finally revealed. So, he could trace the storyline’s progress from beginning to end as the drama builds toward the Messiah’s reenactments of Old Testament foreshadows, which doubtless brought to light, within the early chapters of Genesis, numerous telltale clues concerning the origins and first things of the grand unfolding drama. He saw the 
Creator’s placement of Adam as the first human from whom an entire race of sin and death-plagued people should descend due to his disobedience. Yet, there, early in the story, is the semi-veiled promise that the Seed of the woman would emerge to crush the deceiver but not without receiving a wound (Gen. 3:15). He recognized the divinely embedded analogy of Adam’s earthly shadowing of the heavenly reality which is Christ. In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul expands on his brief assertion in Romans 5:14, that Adam was a type of the Christ (see the chart that contrasts Adam with Christ from 1 Cor. 15:21–22, 42–49).
When Christ revealed himself to Paul on the road to Damascus, the revelatory brilliance temporarily blinded Paul’s physical eyes, but it opened the eyes of his heart to see that the Scriptures reached their climactic fulfillment in Jesus of Nazareth. So, he did not pull rank by appealing to “privileged apostolic insight” nor engage in “radical reinterpretation” of the Genesis text to identify Adam as a type of the Coming One. Nor did he simply recognize and report a historical “analogical pattern,” or engage in “figural reading” or “typological interpretation” by “reading backward.” He rightly read the typological pattern God had Moses write in the scriptures themselves.
