Easter in the Old Testament

Micah Stefan Dagaerag

Honest Engagement

And he said to them, “O foolish and slow in heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken!
Was it not necessary that the Christ suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning
from Moses and from all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things concerning himself in
all the scriptures. (Luke 24:25–28)

This passage is from the account of when Jesus, post-resurrection, walks with a couple of his
followers along what is known as the Emmaus Road, with neither of them being able to
discern at first that it was actually Jesus who was with them.

The takeaway I want to focus on is that Jesus here is teaching us that both his crucifixion and
resurrection were already revealed from Moses and all the prophets, that is, the Old
Testament.

Theologians throughout the centuries have since called this phenomenon typology, the study
of persons, events, and things in the Old Testament that give prophetic glimpses of the
promised and coming Messiah. For example, Joseph is a type of Christ when he was also sold
and betrayed for a sum of silver but who afterwards rises to the right hand of the king. Moses
is a type of Christ in that his birth immediately put him in danger and that he eventually leads
his people from slavery into the promised land.

Sometimes the Scripture itself declares when something is a typology, such as when the
Apostle Peter writes in 1 Peter 3:21 that Noah’s flood in Genesis 6 prefigures the saving
sacrament of baptism. Sometimes it is less explicit such as when in Genesis 22 a ram “caught
in the thicket” is sacrificed instead of the young Isaac, foreshadowing how Christ the lamb of
God will be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Typology, however, must not be mistaken with allegory. The symbols and hidden meanings
with allegory can vary and may even run independent of the author’s original intent.
Typology must and always point to Christ, who alone possesses and purifies all meaning and
truth out of the Old Testament. Also, allegory can go backwards and forwards in time.
Typology always looks forward to realities revealed upon the arrival and ministry of Christ.
It is always prophetic, albeit less verbal than the usual prophecy and more existential or
“lived-out” in its demonstration.

Joseph had metaphorically died in the mind of his father Jacob before Joseph was “restored”
to Jacob many years after. The exile Daniel in Babylon was thrown into a den of lions and
assumed to be dead before morning broke, the entrance opened, and he came out unscathed.
Daniel’s three friends, in similar fashion, had been sentenced to die in a fiery furnace, but
instead of dying they were unharmed in the presence of a mysterious fourth figure who had
joined them. Jesus, however, cites the prophet Jonah expressly as typology for the
resurrection. In Matthew 12:40, he says, “For just as Jonah was in the belly of the huge fish
three days and three nights, so the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth three days and
three nights.”

Physical resurrections had occurred in the Old Testament occur but only rarely, in fact no
more than three times in centuries: the widow of Zarephath’s son in 1 Kings 17:22, the
Shunammite woman’s son in 2 Kings 4, and the corpse that was raised when it came into
contact with the prophet Elisha’s bones in 2 Kings 13. These resurrections, however, were
also shadows of the reality that was to come. For although they were raised, they were not
into the new resurrection life of Christ, so that death still caught up with all of them
eventually. But the Easter resurrection of Christ is one of permanence, of true freedom, and
of glory, even as Christ himself is now clothed in a body that will never again face death or
decay.