A new series: Reading the Old Testament with Lutheran Eyes

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 — almost all of which 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, then surfaces again in the Gospels. The second camp reads the Old Testament through a covenantal lens shaped by Reformed theology. Christ is 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 moral law and the Christian life.

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 Things Concerning Himself is a four-volume series covering Genesis, Psalms, Isaiah, and the Twelve (what most English Bibles call the Minor Prophets). Each volume comes 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.

Not predicted from a distance. Present. He is the one who spoke through the prophets. He is the rock that followed Israel. He is the one Abraham rejoiced to see. When Jesus walked with two disciples toward Emmaus, he did not tell them they would find him in the Old Testament if they waited a few centuries and learned to read 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). Luther had a German phrase for it: was Christum treibet — what drives, pushes, presents Christ. That is the touchstone of true reading of any text of Scripture.

This commitment cuts in three directions. We resist moralistic readings that turn Old Testament narratives into ethical lessons starring biblical heroes — the point of David is not "be like David" but the One greater than David. We resist purely critical-historical readings that treat the Old Testament as ancient Near Eastern literature, interesting for its development but mute on Christ. And we resist uncontrolled allegory — a problem serious enough that the fourth commitment is built around it.

A common misunderstanding — sometimes implicit in study Bibles, sometimes explicit from pulpits — is 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. Both are present in Genesis 3 — law in "Where are you?" and gospel in the promise of the seed who will crush the serpent's head, before Adam and Eve are even sent from the garden. Both are present in Psalm 32. Both saturate Isaiah 53. Both meet at Jeremiah 31's new covenant. 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?

The Old Testament contains many genres — poetry, law, wisdom, lamentation. We read each as what it is. But the historical narratives present themselves as history. Adam. Noah. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. Moses and Joshua. The kings and the prophets. Genealogies, place names, dates and reign lengths. We read these texts the way they present themselves.

This is not naïve literalism. It does not require Hebrew poetry to be prose, or apocalyptic imagery to be courtroom transcript. It does require that Adam was a real man, that the Fall was a real event, that the patriarchs walked the land they are said to have walked. Two reasons matter most. First, our Confessions presuppose it — the Augsburg Confession on original sin is incoherent without a historical Adam. Second, typology requires it. If Adam is not historical, Paul's argument in Romans 5 collapses. If the flood is a literary device, Peter's appeal to it in 1 Peter 3 becomes incoherent. Typology runs on the rails of history. Take away the rails, and the train does not run.

If we say 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. The technical term is typology. It is not the same as allegory. Allegory treats the surface of the text as a code; once cracked, the historical events become irrelevant. Typology says: yes, Israel really crossed the Red Sea. And by God's design, that real event prefigures our deliverance from sin and death through baptism. Both readings stand. Neither cancels the other.

Four guardrails keep our typology honest: the historical reality of the type is preserved, the connection between type and antitype is more than verbal, there is real escalation (the antitype always exceeds the type), and apostolic warrant or close theological warrant grounds the reading. These four will not prevent every disagreement, but they will keep us from reading Joseph's many-colored coat as a secret representation of the seven dispensations.

The four volumes, in this order:

Genesis, because it is the foundation — 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.

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

In Christ,
Larry