Ordinary Means · The Things Concerning Himself · A Genesis Study
We begin something new today. We turn to the Old Testament — and to the first and most foundational book in the Bible, Genesis. But before we reach Genesis 1:1, a word about how we are going to read, because how you read the Old Testament determines almost everything you will find there.
If you have ever tried to teach an Old Testament book in an adult class, you know the problem. Nearly all the available material falls into one of two camps. The first reads the Old Testament through a dispensational lens: Israel and the Church on separate tracks, the promises quarantined for a future earthly kingdom, and Christ largely absent from the Old Testament except in a handful of "predictive" verses. The second reads it through a Reformed-covenantal lens: Christ is genuinely everywhere — which is good — but He arrives bundled with a great deal of theological baggage you never signed up for. For a confessional Lutheran, or for anyone who simply wants to know what their Bible is saying, there is a real void. This series, The Things Concerning Himself, exists to fill it — four volumes (Genesis, Psalms, Isaiah, and the Twelve), reading the Old Testament the way Luther, Chemnitz, and Walther read it.
The name comes from the road to Emmaus. On the afternoon of His resurrection, the risen Christ fell in beside two grieving disciples and, beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself (Luke 24:27). The Scriptures He opened were the Old Testament. Four commitments, drawn from that scene, will shape every page that follows.
First: Christ is in the Old Testament — not merely predicted, but present. The apostles do not say Christ was forecast from a distance; they say He is the substance of the whole thing. He is the rock that followed Israel (1 Corinthians 10:4); He is the One Abraham rejoiced to see (John 8:56); the Scriptures themselves, Jesus says, bear witness about me (John 5:39). Luther had a phrase for reading this way — was Christum treibet, "what presses Christ forward." So we will resist turning these stories into moral lessons. Be like David is not the point of David; the point of David is the One greater than David. We read for Christ, because Christ is what is there.
Second: Law and Gospel run through the whole Bible. The common notion that the Old Testament is law and the New Testament is gospel — a stern God who softens after Malachi — is simply false, and our Confessions reject it. Law and gospel are not eras; they are the two ways God's word always addresses sinners. Both run through both Testaments, often through the same chapter. Watch Genesis 3: the law convicts — Where are you? Have you eaten? — and then, in verse 15, the first gospel promise in all of Scripture is spoken, the seed of the woman who will crush the serpent's head. Before Adam and Eve are sent from the garden, God Himself clothes them with skins — the first death in Scripture, an animal slain to cover their shame. Law and gospel, in one chapter. We will read Genesis asking those two questions on every page.
Third: the narratives are history. The story that runs from Genesis 1 presents itself as real people in real places — Adam, Noah, Abraham — and we read it as it presents itself. This is not wooden literalism; Hebrew poetry is still poetry. But Adam was a real man, the fall a real event, the flood a real flood. Why insist? Because our Confessions presuppose it — there is no doctrine of original sin without a historical Adam — and because typology requires history. There is no Second Adam if there was no first; Peter cannot call the flood a type of baptism if it never happened. Typology runs on the rails of history; take away the rails and the train does not move.
Fourth: typology, kept on guardrails. We will find Christ in Genesis by typology — real persons and events that, by God's design, point forward to and are fulfilled in Him (Adam in Romans 5, Melchizedek in Hebrews 7, the Passover lamb in 1 Corinthians 5). But typology is not allegory. Allegory cracks the surface for a hidden code and discards the literal event; typology keeps both — Israel really crossed the Red Sea, and that crossing prefigures our baptism. Four guardrails keep it honest: the historical reality is preserved; the correspondence must be real, not merely verbal; the antitype must exceed the type; and the safest types are the ones the New Testament itself names. These let us read Joseph as a figure of Christ without pretending his coat secretly encodes the dispensations.
That is the lens. Over this volume we will read Genesis — creation, fall, flood, Babel, the call of Abram, bread and wine — watching for Christ, dividing law from gospel, taking the history as history, and following the types along their guardrails. Once you learn to read this way, you will not be able to unsee it.
Next time we begin where the risen Christ began: on the Emmaus road, learning to read the Old Testament with risen eyes.
Lord Jesus Christ, who on the day of Your resurrection opened the Scriptures to Your disciples and showed them the things concerning Yourself: open our eyes as well. Teach us to read the Old Testament not as the religion of an ancient people, nor as a quarry of moral examples, but as the book that has been about You from its first verse. Divide for us the law and the gospel rightly, and let every page press You forward into our hearing. Amen.