The Weekly Deep Dive - The Whole Bible Is Telling One Story (And People Have Been Reading Half of It)
There’s a reading problem in the church. And I don’t mean literacy.
People read Genesis and read Revelation and somehow never connect the dots between them. They read about the Passover lamb in Exodus and miss that Paul is screaming about it in 1 Corinthians. They read about Jonah in the belly of a fish and think it’s a story about a disobedient prophet and a creative fish. They read about Adam and don’t see what Paul sees every time he picks up a pen.
The problem isn’t that people don’t read their Bibles. The problem is that they’ve been taught to read each book in isolation, like a collection of short stories with a vague spiritual theme rather than one massive, intricate, God-authored narrative. And when you read the Bible that way, you miss something enormous.
You miss the architecture.
God doesn’t just speak through propositions and commandments. He speaks through pattern. He shapes history itself, using actual people, actual events, actual institutions as vehicles for revelation that would come later.
The theological term for this is typology. And understanding it doesn’t just make the Old Testament more interesting. It changes the way you understand Yeshua entirely.
What Typology Actually Is
A type, in the biblical sense, is a person, event, or institution that God providentially shaped to correspond to a greater reality to come. The earlier one is called the type. The fulfillment is called the antitype. The connection between them isn’t coincidence or creative interpretation. It’s intentional divine architecture.
Here’s the key distinction that often gets muddied: typology is different from allegory. Allegory takes historical events and reads symbolic meaning into them that the author never intended. Typology works within history. The events actually happened. The people actually existed. The institutions actually functioned. God shaped them to correspond to something that would arrive later.
The Passover wasn’t make-believe. Israel really did smear blood on doorposts. The lamb was really slaughtered. And it also pointed, with stunning precision, to something happening centuries later at a specific Passover in Jerusalem. Both things are true at the same time.
This is what makes Scripture so remarkable. God isn’t just the author of a text. He’s the author of history itself, and He uses both to speak.
Paul Tells Us This Is Real
The New Testament writers don’t introduce typology as some kind of theological novelty. They treat it as the obvious, shared framework through which to read Israel’s story. Paul is especially explicit about it.
In Romans 5:14, he writes:
“Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned in a manner similar to the violation of Adam, who is a pattern of the One to come.” (TLV)
That phrase “a pattern of the One to come” is doing ALL the things. The Greek word underneath it is typos, the very root of our word typology.
Paul isn’t saying Adam resembles Yeshua in a vague metaphorical way. He’s saying Adam functioned structurally in a way that corresponded to how Yeshua would operate. One man’s action affected everyone who came after him. That pattern is the point. Yeshua is the antitype who takes the same structural framework and reverses the outcome.
And in Hebrews 10:1, the writer is even more direct:
“The Torah has a shadow of the good things to come, not the form itself of the realities.” (TLV)
A shadow. Not a random one. A shadow cast by something real, something solid, something approaching. The entire sacrificial system, the priesthood, the tabernacle, the feasts… all of it is shadow-language for what God was building toward.
The writers of the New Testament weren’t reading symbolism into texts that weren’t there. They were doing what any first-century Jewish reader trained in Scripture would do: they were reading the whole story together.
Three Examples That Should Stop You in Your Tracks
Adam and Yeshua
Romans 5 develops this at length. Adam is the type. Yeshua is the antitype. Both function as representative heads whose actions have universal consequences. Adam’s one act of disobedience introduced death into the human story. Yeshua’s one act of obedience introduces life. The parallel is structural, not accidental. God shaped the Adam narrative to correspond to what the Yeshua narrative would accomplish.
This is why Paul can say in 1 Corinthians 15 that Yeshua is “the last Adam.” He’s not using Adam’s name poetically. He’s making a claim about divine design.
The Passover Lamb
In 1 Corinthians 5:7, Paul writes:
“Get rid of the old hametz, so you may be a new batch, just as you are unleavened — for Messiah, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed.” (TLV)
Paul doesn’t explain this. He says it as if his readers will immediately understand it, because they should! The Passover lamb in Exodus was without blemish. Its blood covered the household. The destroying angel passed over wherever the blood was applied. The lamb died in place of the firstborn.
Now look at Yeshua. Offered during Passover. Declared without blemish by Pilate himself. His blood applied as covering. His death functioning as substitutionary. The bones of the Passover lamb were not to be broken. John, watching at the crucifixion, notes specifically that the soldiers did not break Yeshua’s legs, and he quotes Exodus 12 to explain why.
This isn’t coincidence. This is a God who planned the ending before He wrote the beginning.
Jonah
Yeshua draws this one Himself, which should tell you something. In Matthew 12:40, He says:
“For just as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights, so the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.” (TLV)
Yeshua points to a prophet’s specific experience as a preview of His own death and resurrection. He’s not spiritualizing Jonah. He’s saying the Jonah event corresponded to His own story before it happened.
Jonah went down into the deep. He was, as far as anyone watching was concerned, dead. He came back up. That pattern prefigures the actual death, burial, and resurrection of the Messiah.
And Yeshua’s framing here is worth noting. He doesn’t say Jonah’s story reminds Him of something. He says it prefigures the Son of Man. Past event. Future fulfillment. Intentional correspondence.
Verse Mapping Aid: Typos (Greek: τύπος)
The Greek word typos appears in Romans 5:14 and in several other key New Testament texts. Its root meaning involves an impression made by a seal or a die… the kind of mark that a mold leaves in clay. The type is the mold. The antitype is what gets shaped by it.
That’s a useful image for understanding what God is doing across Scripture. He pressed the mold of the Passover into Israel’s history. He pressed the mold of Adam’s headship into human experience. He pressed the mold of Jonah’s descent and return into prophetic biography. And then, in the fullness of time, He brought the reality that all of those molds were shaped after.
This is why the writer of Hebrews can call the Torah a “shadow” without being dismissive of it. A shadow isn’t nothing. A shadow is proof that something real is coming. The shadow of a person walking toward you tells you that a person is, in fact, walking toward you. The Torah’s shadows told Israel that something real, something embodied, something ultimate was walking toward them.
Yeshua is what was walking toward them.
Why This Matters for How You Read Your Bible
If you’ve been treating the Old Testament as background information, you’ve been missing the preview. The Old Testament isn’t preamble. It’s not the extended metaphor section before the real content begins. It is revelation. It is intentional, structured, God-breathed revelation that was always pointing somewhere!
When you understand typology, the Exodus isn’t just a liberation story. It’s a template God would use again at Calvary. The tabernacle isn’t just ancient religious infrastructure. It points forward to what Yeshua's body and priestly ministry would accomplish. The sacrificial system taught Israel about holiness, atonement, covenant relationship, and the cost of sin. And in Messiah, many believers see those themes brought to their fullest expression.
God was teaching Israel what they needed to know so that when Yeshua arrived, those with eyes to see could recognize what they were looking at.
The disciples on the road to Emmaus didn’t recognize Yeshua after the resurrection until He opened the Scriptures to them and walked them through Moses and all the prophets. Part of what He did on that road was show them how the Scriptures pointed to Him: through prophecy, covenant, kingdom themes, and yes, through these patterns and correspondences we’ve been talking about. The text says their hearts burned within them while He did it.
That’s what typology does. It makes your heart burn.
Reading the Old Testament through typological eyes doesn’t reduce it into allegory or rob it of its historical weight. It does the opposite. It shows you that God was writing a story vast enough to span millennia, detailed enough to encode its meaning in real events involving real people, and coherent enough that a first-century Jew who knew his Torah could look at the man hanging on a Roman cross during Passover week and understand — this is the Lamb.
Want to Keep Exploring?
If this study lit something up for you, there’s a tool waiting for you over at She Opens Her Bible. I recently launched a Typology Study Tool at my site She Opens Her Bible specifically for this kind of exploration… so you can start tracing these patterns through Scripture on your own. It’s free. Go use it.
My Final Thoughts
One of the most profound things about typology is what it says about the character of the God we serve. He doesn’t improvise. He doesn’t course-correct. He doesn’t change the plan in the middle.
Every Passover lamb. Every Day of Atonement. Every high priest who entered the Holy of Holies with blood not his own. Every one of those was God saying, in advance, this is what I am going to do.
The whole Bible is one story. It has one Author. And He is very, very good at narrative structure.
If you’ve ever felt like the Old Testament and the New Testament are two different religions sitting awkwardly under the same cover, typology is the answer to that confusion. They’re not two religions. They’re one covenant story, progressing through types and shadows toward the substance… the reality, as Paul calls it in Colossians 2, which is Messiah.
Pick up your Old Testament. Read it like it knows what’s coming. Because it does.
Dig Deeper
Genesis 22:1-18 — Abraham and Isaac as type and antitype of sacrifice and resurrection
Exodus 12:1-14 — The Passover instructions, read alongside 1 Corinthians 5:7
Leviticus 16 — The Day of Atonement, read alongside Hebrews 9
Numbers 21:4-9 — The bronze serpent, read alongside John 3:14-15
Romans 5:12-21 — Paul’s full Adam and Yeshua typological argument
Hebrews 8-10 — The tabernacle as shadow and Yeshua as the reality
Colossians 2:16-17 — The feasts as shadow; the reality is Messiah
Luke 24:13-35 — Yeshua walks two disciples through the Scriptures on the road to Emmaus
Share & Discuss
What’s a passage in the Old Testament that hits differently for you now that you see Yeshua in it? Drop it in the comments. I want to hear what’s burning in your chest.
If this study stirred something in you, share it with a friend who’s been telling you the Old Testament “doesn’t apply anymore.” Because it does. All of it. Just not always in the way we thought.
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About the Author
Diane Ferreira is a Jewish believer in Yeshua, a published author, speaker, seminary student, wife, and proud mom. She is the founder of She’s So Scripture and She Opens Her Bible. She is the author of several books, including The Proverbs 31-ish Woman, which debuted as Amazon’s #1 New Release in Religious Humor, as well as Holy, Hormonal and Holding On.
She is currently pursuing her graduate degree in Jewish Studies in seminary, with her favorite topics being the early church and Biblical Hebrew. Diane writes and teaches from a unique perspective, bridging her Jewish heritage with vibrant faith in the Messiah to bring clarity, depth, and devotion to everyday believers.
When she’s not writing, studying, or teaching, you’ll find her curled up with a good book, crocheting something cozy, traveling, or playing her favorite video games.
Tree of Life (TLV) – Scripture taken from the Holy Scriptures, Tree of Life Version*. Copyright © 2014,2016 by the Tree of Life Bible Society. Used by permission of the Tree of Life Bible Society.