We have said that our method will be to identify the “third day” passages of the Old Testament and examine them to see if they mark a pattern foreshadowing the “suffering and glory” of the Christ. But we should say a word about what we are likely to see. The hermeneutic of the Lord and his apostles was largely figural in character, requiring a poetics that is not widely practiced today in Protestant interpretation. Modern evangelicals in general are much more comfortable with theological propositions and analysis of epistolary discourse.
They are often far less secure in the parables of Jesus, for example, or in the typology of the apostles.
Now it should be conceded that the discursive parts of the New Testament are generally much clearer, and as such should control less clear parts of Scripture (Num 12:1-8). But we cannot concede that the more figurative parts of the Bible are any less authentically true if rightly understood. This is why we need a robust poetics when interpreting the Scriptures, and why apostolic interpretation of the Bible is so necessary.
An illustration of apostolic figural interpretation of the Old Testament will be helpful here to demonstrate that the death and resurrection pattern of the suffering and glory of the Savior may be found in passages that are taken to be analogies of salvation; namely, they are figures of death and resurrection that require nothing less than a complete rethinking of the customary way the Old Testament is read. That should not surprise us, for it is altogether possible to read the Old Testament and quite miss the resurrection entirely. Something like this was apparently characteristic of the sterile Torah hermeneutic of the Sadducee school (Matt 22:23), and this should give us much pause when we must likewise confess an inability to read the Old Testament to speak of the resurrection. But if we are to read the Bible like the apostles, we will need to respect the poetics of analogy which so richly “opens” the Scriptures and enables us to see our Savior’s suffering and glory in new and remarkable ways, ways that will cause our hearts to burn within us as we see his death and resurrection throughout Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms.