Click on image to purchase at Amazon.comSeeing Jesus in Genesis by Nancy Guthrie.

The Promised One is intended for use in a study for group of women. It’s purpose is to help us see pointers to Christ in Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament. “You search the Scriptures,” Jesus said to the Jewish religious leaders, “but the Scriptures point to me!” He was, of course, referring to our Old Testament. So we should expect to see Jesus in Genesis, and this study was written to help us do that.

Guthrie’s goal is an important one. The Jewish leaders missed the Messiah because they did not see that Scripture was pointing them to a redeemer who would suffer. They were familiar with Scripture, but failed to see the big picture. We don’t want to be like them, and yet, too many of us read the Bible piecemeal (if we read it at all), and don’t have a good grasp of the whole storyline. 

Included in The Promised One are ten studies made up of three parts each. First, each study has a workbook section with questions on the section’s passage to be filled out by each participant in preparation for the group study. Then there is a teaching chapter to explain and apply the passage, including, at the end, a few paragraphs that show us how the themes in the passage that point us to Christ will be fulfilled completely at his second coming, when all the threads that begin in Genesis are tied up into a perfect whole cloth. Finally, there is a discussion guide with questions for use in group discussion.

I’ve not used this book in group study, but I have worked through each section, filling out the questions, reading the teaching chapter, and thinking about the discussion questions. I asked myself, as I worked through it all, how it would work in a group of the women I know. 

As I worked through The Promised One, I saw more of Jesus in Genesis than I’d seen before, more of the patterns that begin at the beginning and are eventually fulfilled in Christ. For instance, I saw the story of the tower of Babel as an explanation for the diverse people groups that fill the earth, which it is, but I’d never thought of it as a parallel (or reverse parallel, really) for Pentecost, when people from all different nations heard the gospel in his own language. What’s more, it’s a reverse parallel for the what happens in the consummation, when there will be the “great multitude that no one can number, from every nation … crying out with [one] …voice….” These two events, Pentecost and the great multitude of every nation, come only through the redemption accomplished by Jesus. In this way, even Babel points to Jesus, whose work reverses the results of the dispersion that happened there. Jesus makes the many nations into one when he makes one people from every tribe, people and language.

 I’m sure almost anyone who takes the time to do this study will become aware of more ways in which Jesus fulfills the patterns set first in Genesis. No one who wants to learn is going to do this study and come away saying, “Ho-hum. More of the same old stuff.”

This brings us to a potential problem with using this book in a study for a group of women. It took me about two hours to work through each of the lessons. I love that this study expects women to work hard to discover what God’s word is teaching us; however, I know many women who either couldn’t or wouldn’t spend that much time each week preparing for a Bible study. A group could, as Guthrie suggests, divide each lesson into two parts and take two weeks on it, working through the personal study questions together the first week, and doing the rest of the lesson the second week. If I were leading a study using this book, this is the way I’d approach things, but that makes it a twenty-week study rather than ten, something you’d want to plan before you began. And even at the slower pace, there are women who would find the study difficult, so if you are thinking of using this study for a particular group of women, you will want to work through some of it first to gauge whether it will suit them. 

There are other changes I would make if I were using this book for a study group. Some of the discussion questions seemed pointless to me, like the one in the section on Abraham that asks the participants about the pros and cons of either continuing to live near family or moving away to make a new life elsewhere. It may be that these kinds of questions are included to try to get everyone involved in the discussion, but I’d skip sidetracking questions. There are places, too, where I found the connections between the Genesis story and Jesus to be strained, or where things are taught (mostly minor) that I disagree with.

These are all small things, the kind of issues I’d expect to have with any Bible study manual, and they don’t take away from the value of The Promised One. There is nothing else like it, as far as I know—no other study set up to help woman see the big story of the Bible, to help them recognize that the Old Testament is always pointing forward to the coming of our Saviour. 

Nancy Guthrie has at least one more study like this in the works, one on seeing Jesus in the Old Testament’s wisdom literature, and a whole series of studies is planned. I am very pleased that we will eventually have a set of resources like this, because we need them.