A thirty-two-session study of the first book of the Bible for adult Sunday school teachers, lay Bible study leaders, and any reader who wants to hear Genesis speak of Christ.
On the evening of the resurrection, on the road to Emmaus, the Lord Jesus opened the Scriptures — “beginning with Moses” — and expounded to two of his disciples “the things concerning himself.” They walked seven miles beside him before they recognized who he was. Their hearts, they told each other afterward, had been burning the whole way.
That road runs backward, too.
To read Genesis with risen eyes is to notice, at last, that the Lord Jesus had been in the text all along. Not merely predicted there. Not merely foreshadowed. Present. The one through whom all things were made, walking in the cool of the day; the one who wrestles Jacob at Peniel and refuses to give his name; the Angel who stays Abraham’s hand on Moriah; the Judah whose scepter the Lord Jesus takes up as the Lion of that tribe. Luther called this reading was Christum treibet — “what shows forth Christ” — and he was clear that it is not a technique to be applied but an inevitability to be seen. If the whole Scripture is one book, and if the Lord Jesus is its subject, then Genesis is his book from the first sentence forward.
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That is what this volume is for.
The Things Concerning Himself is a four-volume confessional Lutheran study of the Old Testament, and Volume One takes us through Genesis in thirty-two sessions — the full book, from “In the beginning” through the closing scene in Egypt of a coffin waiting on a promise.
The volume works from three commitments, held all the way through.
Genesis is real history. The garden, the flood, Abraham’s call, the wrestling at Peniel, the coffin at the end — these things happened. The volume treats them accordingly.
The Lord Jesus is genuinely in the text, not merely predicted by it. Where the apostles show us that a person or event in Genesis is a type of Christ — Adam, Melchizedek, Isaac on Moriah, the seed of the woman — we read it that way, on their authority, not ours. Where a churchly reading has found further resonances (Cana echoed in Genesis 24, the wine of Judah’s blessing), we mark those as churchly resonance rather than apostolic warrant, and we say so. There are no uncontrolled allegories in this book. There are no missing Christs, either.
Law and gospel are distinguished throughout — and both are already at work in Genesis. This is not a New Testament imposition on an Old Testament text. It is what the text has been doing since the third chapter of the Bible.
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Each session is written for the adult Sunday school hour or the lay-led Bible study around a dining room table. Substantial enough to sustain a serious discussion; readable enough to prepare on a Saturday evening. A companion Teacher’s Guide will follow, with the full pipeline of hermeneutical questions and discussion prompts already tested in a Lutheran adult class.
The audience is not the seminary; it is the pew. Any reader willing to sit with a Bible open and think slowly is a reader this book was written for.
The remaining three volumes — Psalms, Isaiah, and the Twelve — are complete in draft and will appear over the coming months.
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Volume One is available now at larryherzogjr.com/genesis.
Read it slowly. Read it with a Bible. And when you find yourself, somewhere in the Joseph cycle or at the foot of Moriah, saying to whoever is sitting next to you — “Wait. Was that always here?” — you will have understood the point.
Grace and peace,
Larry