Reading the Old Testament with Lutheran Eyes

Why This Series Exists

If you have ever tried to teach an adult Bible class through an Old Testament book, you know the problem. You walk into your church library, or you search your favorite online retailer, and you get a flood of material. Scratch the surface, and almost all of it falls into one of two camps.

The first camp reads the Old Testament through a dispensational lens. Israel and the Church are kept on separate tracks. Old Testament promises are quarantined for ethnic Israel and a future earthly kingdom. Christ tends to disappear from the Old Testament except in a handful of scattered “predictive” passages, and then surfaces again in the Gospels. The second camp reads the Old Testament through a covenantal lens shaped by Reformed theology. Christ is genuinely everywhere — which is good — but the framework that puts him there often comes with baggage you did not sign up for: a particular doctrine of the sacraments, a particular ordo salutis, a particular reading of the covenant of works, a particular view of the Christian and the moral law.

For a confessional Lutheran teaching adult Sunday school — or for a layperson who simply wants to know what their Bible is saying — there is a real void. Material that reads the Old Testament the way Luther, Chemnitz, Gerhard, and Walther read it, in language a fifty-five-year-old in a folding chair can follow, is not easy to find.

That is the gap this series wants to fill.

The “Something Better” New Testament series (James, 1 Peter, 1–3 John, Hebrews) was a first attempt at this kind of work for the New Testament. This series, The Things Concerning Himself, picks up where that left off and turns to the Old Testament. Four volumes, in this order: Genesis, Psalms, Isaiah, and the Twelve — what most English Bibles call the Minor Prophets. Each in two pieces — a manuscript for the reader sitting in the chair, and a Teacher’s Guide for the leader standing in front of the chair.

Before we touch Genesis 1:1, four commitments need to be stated out loud. They shape every page that follows. Rather than smuggle them in implicitly, they belong at the top.

Commitment One: Christ Is in the Old Testament

When Jesus walked with two disciples toward Emmaus on the afternoon of his resurrection, he did not tell them they would find Christ in the Old Testament if they waited a few centuries and learned to read it allegorically. He said, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). The Scriptures here are the Old Testament. The interpretation is christological. The reading is direct.

John 5:39 says the same thing from the other direction: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me.” Again, the Scriptures referenced are the Old Testament, and they bear witness to Christ.

Or 1 Peter 1:10–11, where the prophets are described as searching their own writings to learn about the sufferings of Christ that the Spirit of Christ within them was already pointing to.

The apostolic position is not that Christ was predicted in the Old Testament. The apostolic position is that Christ is the substance of the Old Testament. The whole thing is about him.

Luther had a German phrase for this kind of reading: was Christum treibet — what drives, pushes, presents Christ. That, he said, is the touchstone of true preaching and true reading of any text of Scripture. Show Christ. Push Christ. Bring Christ to the hearer. If your reading does not, you have missed the point, however accurate it may be at the surface level.

This goes beyond saying Christ is predicted in the Old Testament. He is. But he is also more than predicted. He is present. He is the one who spoke through the prophets (1 Pet 1:11). He is the rock that followed Israel (1 Cor 10:4). He is the one Abraham rejoiced to see (John 8:56). The Old Testament is not a religion that ended at Malachi and was replaced by a new one at Matthew. It is the same God, the same gospel, the same Christ — spoken in a different key.

A careful word here. To say Christ is in the Old Testament is not to say the saints who lived under the Old Covenant could have given a creedal account of the Holy Trinity, or that Abraham could have named the village in Galilee where the Word would become flesh. The substance of Old Testament faith was Christ; the form of Old Testament knowledge was promise. They believed the promise; we believe the fulfillment. They saw the dawn; we stand in the noon. They are saved by the same Savior we are, by the same gospel we are, but through a knowledge that was real, saving, and yet by design incomplete. Revelation is progressive. Christ is what was being revealed throughout. The two affirmations belong together; collapsing either one distorts the other.

This commitment cuts in three directions for our reading.

We resist moralistic readings, which turn Old Testament narratives into ethical lessons starring biblical heroes. “Be like David” is not the point of David. The point of David is the One greater than David. “Be a courageous leader like Joshua” is not the point of Joshua. The point of Joshua is the greater Joshua — Jesus, the same name — who leads his people into the true rest. If we walk out of a Genesis class talking about how we should be more like Joseph and less about how Joseph reveals Christ, we have read the chapter as ancient Near Eastern moral literature, not as Scripture.

We also resist purely critical-historical readings, which treat the Old Testament as the religious literature of an ancient people, interesting for its development but mute on Christ. The historical-grammatical sense matters; we will work hard to honor it. But the historical sense is not the whole sense. Scripture has one Author, and that Author wrote with Christ in view from Genesis 1:1.

And we resist uncontrolled allegory — a problem serious enough that the fourth commitment, below, is built around it.

Commitment Two: Law and Gospel Run through the Whole Bible

There is a common misunderstanding — sometimes implicit in study Bibles, sometimes explicit from pulpits — that the Old Testament is law and the New Testament is gospel. The God of the Old Testament is a stern lawgiver; the God of the New Testament is a gracious savior. We move from one to the other as we turn the page from Malachi to Matthew.

That is not what Lutherans believe. It is not what our Confessions teach. And it is not what the Bible actually shows us.

Law and gospel are not eras. They are the two ways God’s word always addresses fallen humanity. The law shows us our sin, demands what we cannot perform, and exposes our need. The gospel announces what God has done in Christ for sinners — free, unconditional, by grace through faith.

Both are present in the Old Testament. Both are present in the New. They are often present in the same chapter; sometimes the same sentence.

Consider Genesis 3. The law convicts: “Where are you?” “Have you eaten of the tree?” The judgment falls. And then, in verse 15, the gospel — the first gospel promise in Scripture — is spoken to the serpent in the hearing of Adam and Eve: the seed of the woman will crush the serpent’s head. Before they are sent from the garden, gospel has been preached. Before they wear any clothes of their own making, God himself clothes them with skins — the first death recorded in Scripture, an animal slain to cover their shame. Law. Gospel. Both. Genesis 3.

Or Psalm 32, where David has been silent under the weight of unconfessed sin, his bones wasting away. That is law working. And then: “I acknowledged my sin to you… and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.” That is gospel.

Or Isaiah 53, an entire chapter of gospel so concentrated that the apostles will quote it for centuries.

Or Jeremiah 31, where the new covenant is announced inside the Old Testament itself, with the promise that God will write his law on the heart and remember our sins no more.

If a reader cannot distinguish law from gospel in the text, they cannot read the Old Testament for what it actually is. They will collapse the two, and they will end up either preaching law-as-gospel (“if you will just be obedient like Abraham, God will bless you”) or a gospel that has no real need for the cross.

Lutheran reading of the Old Testament is, in a profound sense, the relentless asking of two questions: where is the law operating here, and where is the gospel? What does this passage say to me as a sinner under the law? What does it announce to me as a sinner Christ has died for?

Doing that consistently throughout the Old Testament is one of the most useful contributions this series can offer. Many readers will never have been taught to read the text this way. Once they learn, they will not be able to unsee it.

Commitment Three: The Old Testament Narratives Are History

This third commitment is about the kind of book the Old Testament actually is.

The Old Testament contains many genres. Some sections are poetry — the Psalms, much of Wisdom literature, the oracles of the prophets. Some are law in the formal sense — legal codes, ceremonial regulations, covenant stipulations. Some are wisdom sayings, songs, prayers, lamentations. We read each genre as what it is, not as something else.

But the historical narratives of the Old Testament are presented as history. The story that runs from Genesis 1 through 2 Chronicles 36 — from creation through exile — presents itself as a continuous account of real people doing real things in real places at real times. Adam and Eve. Noah. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. Moses and Joshua. David and Solomon. The kings and the prophets. Genealogies. Place names. Dates and reign lengths. The toledot formula that structures Genesis is the formula of historical record-keeping, not the convention of myth.

We read these texts the way they present themselves. They are history.

This is not naïve literalism. It does not require us to pretend Hebrew poetry is prose, or that apocalyptic imagery is a courtroom transcript, or that every cosmological detail in Genesis 1 must answer questions modern science asks. It does require us to hold that Adam was a real man, that the Fall was a real event, that the flood actually happened, and that the patriarchs walked the land they are said to have walked.

Why insist on this in a hermeneutical introduction? Two reasons.

First, because our Confessions presuppose it. The Augsburg Confession on original sin (Article II) is incoherent without a historical Adam. The Apology argues from Genesis as history. The Formula of Concord on original sin (Article I) assumes Adam’s actual fall as the source of inherited corruption. To dismantle the historicity of the foundational narratives is to dismantle the doctrinal structure that has been built on them for two thousand years.

Second, and more directly for this series: typology requires history. The christological reading we committed to in Commitment One depends on real correspondence between real events and the real Christ. If Adam is not a historical individual, Paul’s argument in Romans 5 collapses — there cannot be a Second Adam if there was no first one. If the flood is a literary device, Peter’s appeal to it as a type of baptism (1 Pet 3:20–21) becomes incoherent. If Abraham is a literary character rather than a man, the gospel preached to him in Genesis 15:6 cannot be the gospel preached to us. Typology runs on the rails of history. Take away the rails, and the train does not run.

We will encounter places where the historical reading is harder to defend in our cultural moment than it once was. We will not pretend those pressures do not exist. We will also not pretend they have produced compelling arguments against the text. The text presents itself as history; we read it as history; we let it do its work.

Commitment Four: Typology with Guardrails

The fourth commitment is methodological. If we claim that Christ is genuinely present in the Old Testament — that Joseph prefigures him, that Melchizedek prefigures him, that the Passover lamb is fulfilled in him — we have to be honest about what method we are using and why.

The technical term is typology. A type is a real historical person, event, institution, or office in the Old Testament that, by God’s design, points forward to and is fulfilled in a New Testament reality (the antitype) — usually Christ himself or some aspect of his work. Adam is a type of Christ (Rom 5:14, where Paul uses the actual word typos). Melchizedek is a type of Christ (Heb 7). The Passover lamb is a type of Christ (1 Cor 5:7). The exodus is a type of baptism and of our deliverance from sin and death (1 Cor 10).

Typology is not the same as allegory.

Allegory, in its bad form, treats the surface of the text as a code to be cracked. The literal sense is set aside in favor of a hidden, “spiritual” meaning. In the worst examples — and the early and medieval church produced some bad ones — the literal events become irrelevant. Did Israel actually cross the Red Sea? Doesn’t matter. What matters is that we cross from sin to grace, which is what the Red Sea “really” means.

Typology refuses to do that. It says: yes, Israel really crossed the Red Sea. The historical event is real. And, by God’s design, that real event prefigures a deeper rescue — our deliverance from sin and death through the waters of baptism, into Christ. Both readings stand. Neither cancels the other.

Four guardrails will keep our typology honest.

First, the historical reality of the type is preserved. We are not going to read Genesis as a code that, once cracked, releases us from caring whether Abraham was a real man who really left Ur. The text presents these events as history; we honor that. The type sits inside real, actual redemptive history.

Second, the connection between type and antitype must be more than verbal. Just because the word “tree” appears in Genesis 2 and the cross is called a tree in 1 Peter 2 does not, by itself, make every Old Testament tree a Christ-type. There must be a real theological correspondence — in structure, function, or office. Adam stands as the head of his people; Christ stands as the head of his. That is correspondence. Both happen to have brown hair is not.

Third, there must be escalation. The antitype always exceeds the type. Joseph saves his family from famine; Christ saves the world from sin and death. Melchizedek is a king-priest of Salem; Christ is the eternal King-Priest. If a proposed type and antitype are merely parallel, with no fulfillment-and-exceeding, the correspondence is almost certainly accidental.

Fourth, apostolic warrant, or close theological warrant. The safest typology is the one the New Testament itself identifies. When Paul calls Adam a type, when Hebrews calls Melchizedek a type, when Peter calls the flood a type — we are on solid ground. Beyond what the New Testament explicitly identifies, we work by analogy: does this proposed type follow the same pattern of fulfillment the New Testament establishes elsewhere? If yes, we proceed cautiously. If no, we hold our peace.

These four guardrails will not prevent every disagreement. They will keep us from the worst excesses. They will let us read Joseph as a Christ-type without claiming that his many-colored coat secretly represents the seven dispensations.

What You Should Expect from This Series

Each volume follows the same shape as the New Testament series. Two paired books per volume: a manuscript and a Teacher’s Guide. The manuscript is for the lay reader and for the participant in a Bible study — the person sitting in the chair. The Teacher’s Guide is for the person standing in front of the chair, with discussion questions, teaching notes, common questions you will hear from the class, and confessional or historical sidebars where helpful.

The voice is the same voice as the New Testament series. Conversational where the topic allows. Doctrinally serious always. Pastoral, because the whole reason we read the Bible is that real sinners need a real Savior, and the people in our classes are real sinners, not theology students.

We engage Lutheran sources unapologetically and warmly — Luther himself; the Augsburg Confession and its Apology; the Formula of Concord; Chemnitz and Gerhard; Walther’s Law and Gospel; and modern confessional voices like Bo Giertz, Hermann Sasse, and contemporary Lutheran biblical scholars. We also note where we depart from common Reformed or dispensational readings — not to score points, but to be honest about which roads we are taking and which we are not.

We do not pretend to be neutral. Confessional Lutheranism is a definite position, and this series is written from inside it. But we mean to be honest about our reasons, fair to those who disagree, and never simply combative.

A Word on the Whole

The four volumes are: Genesis, Psalms, Isaiah, the Twelve.

Genesis, because it is the foundation — the soil in which every promise that follows is planted. Every major theme of the rest of the Bible is seeded somewhere in Genesis.

Psalms, because it is, in Luther’s words, the “little Bible” — and the prayer book of Christ himself. Christ prayed these psalms. The church has prayed them after him. They are gospel, law, lament, praise, and prophecy in a single book.

Isaiah, because it is the Old Testament book the New Testament quotes most, and the book where the Servant of the LORD comes most clearly into view. The four Servant Songs alone are worth a year of study.

The Twelve, because these twelve short books are often skipped, often mishandled, and together carry the gospel forward across centuries — from Hosea to Malachi, from the eighth century BC to the silence before John the Baptist.

We start here. Genesis 1:1.

A Prayer to Begin

Lord Jesus Christ, the substance of all the Scriptures, the One whom Moses and the Prophets foretold, the One whom Abraham rejoiced to see — open our eyes as we open Your Word. Where we are tempted to read these pages for moral examples, give us instead the eyes to see You. Where we are tempted to set aside the Old Testament as another people’s book, give us boldness to claim it as our own: the same God, the same gospel, the same Savior, spoken in a different key. Teach us to distinguish the law that exposes us from the gospel that saves us. Show us Your shadow in the types and Your substance in Yourself. And let us walk through Your Old Testament with the joy of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, our hearts burning as You opened to them the Scriptures concerning Yourself. To You, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.