Reading the Psalms with Lutheran Eyes

This is the second of four volumes in The Things Concerning Himself, a confessional Lutheran study of the Old Testament. The first volume, on Genesis, opens with a full introduction that sets out how we read these books and why. That introduction is available free online as part of the Genesis study; if you can, read it before you go further here. What follows on this page is a deliberate compression of it: the same framework in miniature, kept short so the ground rules are in front of you without reprinting the whole, with a word at the end about how it all lands in a book of poetry and prayer.

The need is real. A confessional Lutheran who wants to teach or study the Old Testament finds the shelves full and the help thin. Most popular material reads these books either through a dispensational lens, where Christ all but vanishes from their pages, or through a Reformed-covenantal lens that finds Christ everywhere but brings along commitments a Lutheran never signed for. Material that reads the Old Testament the way Luther, Chemnitz, Gerhard, and Walther read it, in plain language, for the person in the folding chair, is not easy to find. That is the gap this series means to fill.

Four commitments govern every page that follows. They are stated, defended, and shown at work at length in Volume One. Here they are in brief.

The Four Commitments in Brief

Christ is in the Old Testament. When the risen Lord walked the Emmaus road on the afternoon of His resurrection, He did not promise the two travelers that they would find Him in the Old Testament someday, if only they learned to read it cleverly enough. He opened the Scriptures they already held and showed them the things concerning himself (Luke 24:27 ESV). Christ is not merely predicted in these books; He is their substance. Luther’s test of any true reading was was Christum treibet, what shows forth Christ, what drives and presses Christ upon the reader. So we set ourselves against the moralizing reading that turns the text into a gallery of heroes to imitate, and against the merely historical reading that treats it as an ancient people’s religious literature. We read instead for the Christ who is genuinely there.

Law and gospel run through the whole Bible. It is a common mistake to suppose the Old Testament is law and the New Testament gospel, as though God changed His manner of speaking somewhere around Malachi. He did not. Law and gospel are not two eras but the two ways God’s word always addresses sinners: the law exposing our sin and demanding what we cannot do, the gospel announcing what God has done for us in Christ, free and by grace. Both run through the Old Testament, and often through the same chapter: the LORD’s searching question in the garden and His promise of the seed who would crush the serpent; David’s bones wasting under unconfessed sin and the word of forgiveness that lifted it; the suffering Servant of Isaiah 53. To read the Old Testament well is to keep asking, relentlessly, where the law is doing its work here, and where the gospel is doing its.

The Old Testament’s narratives are history. We read each genre as what it is (poetry as poetry, law as law, prophecy as prophecy), but where the Old Testament tells its story, it tells it as a record of real people in real places, not as myth dressed up to carry a lesson. This is not wooden literalism; it is simply taking the text at its own word. And it matters more than it first appears, because typology runs on the rails of history. If there was no first Adam, there is no Second; if Abraham is a character rather than a man, the gospel preached to him in Genesis 15:6 is not the gospel preached to us. Take away the rails, and the train does not run.

Typology, with guardrails. If Christ is truly in these books, if Adam and Melchizedek and the Passover lamb point forward to Him, then we owe the reader an honest account of the method. A type is a real person, event, or institution that, by God’s design, prefigures and is fulfilled in Christ. Typology is not allegory: it never sets the literal sense aside, never treats the history as a code to be discarded once decoded. Four guardrails keep it honest: the historical reality of the type is preserved; the correspondence must be real and theological, not merely a shared word; the antitype always exceeds the type; and the safest readings are the ones the apostles themselves have already made. Where the New Testament has read Christ, we follow with confidence. Beyond that we move by careful analogy, and where we cannot, we hold our peace.

A Word About the Psalms

These four commitments meet a particular kind of book in the Psalter, and it is worth saying how. The Psalms are not narrative; they are poetry, and above all they are prayer. So the first commitment takes a sharper form here than anywhere else in the Old Testament. The Psalms are not only about Christ; they are prayed by Him. He learned them as a child, sang them at the festivals, and prayed them from the cross. The book the church has always called simply the prayer book is, first of all, His prayer book. The opening session takes up that claim in full; it is the key that turns in every psalm we will study.

The second commitment is nowhere easier to watch at work, because the Psalms do not merely describe the soul under law and gospel. They pray it. Psalm 1 sets a blessedness before us that accuses every reader who measures himself against it; Psalm 32 hands that same reader the words of confession and the announcement that his sin is forgiven. The penitential psalms are law and gospel set to music. The laments pray the gospel into the teeth of trouble that has not yet lifted. A reader who has learned to hear the two words will hear them on nearly every page.

Even the commitment to history finds its place in a book of poetry. The Psalter is anchored in a real king and a real throne; without a historical David, the LORD’s promise to David’s house has nothing to stand on, and You are my son (Psalm 2) and Here is the LORD’s proclamation to my lord (Psalm 110) become poetry about no one in particular. And the Psalter gives us the firmest typological footing in the whole Old Testament, because the apostles quarried it more than any other book: Psalms 2, 16, 22, 110, and 118 are read of Christ on the New Testament’s own authority, again and again. When we read these psalms of Him, we are not being clever. We are walking where Peter and the writer to the Hebrews have already walked.

Before We Begin

The study keeps the same voice throughout: conversational where the subject allows, doctrinally serious always, pastoral because the people in our classes are real sinners who need a real Savior, not theology students. We lean on Lutheran sources warmly and without apology (Luther above all, the Augsburg Confession and its Apology, the Formula of Concord, Chemnitz and Gerhard, Walther), and we say plainly where our road parts from the Reformed or the dispensational one, not to score points, but to be honest about which way we are going.

One last word, and it is the most important on this page. This introduction is a summary, and a summary is no substitute for the thing it summarizes. If the Psalms are what drew you, and you have not yet read the Genesis volume’s introduction, do yourself the kindness of reading it in full before you go on; it is available free online as part of the Genesis study. The framework set out there, the four commitments unfolded, defended, and tested against the text, is the ground the whole series stands on, this volume included. This page will get you oriented. That one will get you grounded.

A Prayer to Begin

Lord Jesus Christ, who prayed these psalms before us and prays them still as our great High Priest, teach us to pray them in You. Where the law in them exposes us, drive us to You; where the gospel in them sounds, give us faith to hear it; and open this prayer book to us as You opened all the Scriptures on the Emmaus road, until our hearts burn within us. With the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.