…the
Gospel of God,… 3concerning His Son, the One becoming out of [the]
seed of David according to [the] flesh, 4the One marked out to be
[the] Son of God in power according to [the] Spirit of holiness and out of
[the] resurrection of [the] dead ones – Jesus Christ, our Lord…
Looking particularly at verse 4, a lot of people have
written commentaries through the years. In understanding the Greek, the theologians
have all had to express their opinions on practically every word in the verse. Because
so much has been written on those questions, I don’t intend to record much, if
at all. I think the basic, normal English translations are generally accurate
and I’m just going to go with them.
Jesus was born a man, a descendant of David, but He was so
much more than a man. He was born Immanuel, “God with us.” He is the Son of God
and God the Son. As Paul will later say in Romans, “Theirs (the Jews’) are the Patriarchs,
and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all,
forever praised! Amen” (9:5).
During His life, He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with
grief. He got tired. He got hungry. He got thirsty. He appeared in many ways to
be just as weak as the rest of us. He even ended up the victim of a very cruel
and unjust murder. No doubt, as Joseph of Arimathea laid Jesus’ body in the
tomb, Satan and his minions cheered ecstatically. The Seed of the woman is
dead! The great Messiah who was supposed to crush Satan’s head, who was
supposed to save the world was Himself killed before He could do any such
thing. Now Satan was the unchallenged ruler of this world!
Then something happened to totally upend everything. Jesus
got up out of the tomb. He was dead, but now He is alive and lives forevermore!
In case anyone questioned just who Jesus was, His resurrection shouted a
definitive answer: “He is the Son of God, God the Son.” “Destroy this temple,
and in three days I will raise it up,” Jesus had told them. “No one takes my
life from Me. I have the power to lay it down and to take it up again.” In some
places we read that God raised Him up again. In other places, it was the Spirit.
Jesus said He did it Himself. How could all three be true? Because He is God.
No one less than God Himself could raise Himself from the dead.
What Paul is doing particularly in vv. 3,4 is informing us
that the Gospel is Jesus. I would suggest we need desperately to
consider this simple fact today. It is very easy to say things like, “The Gospel
is the message of salvation,” and it certainly is, but, if we stop there, we’re
missing the whole point of it all – which is Jesus Himself. “For this is
eternal life, that they might know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ,
whom You have sent” (John 17:3). “That they might know You.” The Gospel is not
just a set of facts to be believed. It is a Person, it is a personal
relationship. The Gospel is Jesus Christ our Lord – Jesus, the Savior man;
Christ, the promised Messiah; our Lord, the King of kings. To be saved is to
meet Jesus.
I believe this is the fundamental difference between real
Christianity and every other human religion: our “faith” is not about a set of
rules or participating in some particular religious system. Our faith is Jesus.
It is a real, personal, minute by minute, day by day relationship with Him, with
this One who came not to condemn our world, but that the world would be saved
through Him, who came not to harm us but to do us good, to give us a future and
a hope, who spared not His own life, but delivered it up for us all, who loves
us with an everlasting love, and who has gone to prepare a place for us, that
where He is, there we may be with Him.
May we all go about our lives today filled with the wonder
of who He is, knowing our Savior is the Son of God and God the Son, and may His
spirit of holiness shine out of our hearts, not because of who were are, but
because those hearts are filled with the God-man, Jesus! The world doesn’t need
a new and improved “religion.” They need Jesus. He is the point of it all.
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