The Gospel of God’s Son

Romans 1:3-4

Romans 1:3–4 …concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh 4 and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord…

Introduction

Last time, we met Paul. Paul serves and was called and is set apart for the gospel of God, which was proclaimed in the Old Testament and has now begun to find fulfillment in the New Testament—that is, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

And that’s Who we meet next. We meet the One Paul serves. Verses 3-4 explain the substance of the gospel of God mentioned in verse one. They define the subject matter of that gospel. This gospel for which Paul has been set apart— what is it about? Who does it concern? It is clearly stated there at the beginning of verse 3: it concerns God’s Son.

Why is Paul, in his introduction to these people in Rome, declaring to them these truths about Christ? Why here?

One day we’ll get into the meat of this letter. There are 16 chapters packed full of deep theological instruction. So why does he take these sort of half sentences and discontinued phrases and stitch them together here at the beginning? Why is Paul declaring these truths about Christ here in this way? It is simply this: Paul is making clear his purpose for the whole of the book—to remind them and encourage them of the gospel that they have believed.

Paul is declaring to them in these half sentences, in these brief but rather punchy phrases, that Jesus is the King. He is the One Who has come to save His people from their sins. And in particular, here in verses three and four, Paul is declaring to us that Jesus has done all things necessary for your salvation. Think about that good news—you don’t have to save yourself. Jesus has done it all. Paul reminds us in 3 and 4 that Jesus has done everything necessary for salvation.

Jesus the Substance of the Gospel

Paul really does pack it in tight. Verses 3 and 4 may actually be some kind of ancient confession or creed that was at use in the churches that he planted. This may be a common phrasing of the doctrine that he proclaimed as he ministered and planted around the region. These two verses are intended to point the readers to the substance of the gospel of God, which is Jesus Himself.

Notice that there is a distinction between verses three and four. The reference in verse three to Jesus’ ancestor, King David, and the reference to his resurrection in verse four—each point to one of two stages of his gospel work.

Verse three refers to the time that Jesus spent on earth until His death. It’s referred to by theologians as his humiliation—that humble estate in which He found Himself when He became a man and dwelt among us.

Verse four, about the resurrection of Jesus, refers to everything that happened from that point onward: His exaltation: His resurrection, His ascension, His current reign in heaven, and His some-day return in triumph to bring His people home. We might say that verse three is pre-resurrection and verse four is post-resurrection.

Paul is drawing a dividing line down the middle of the ministry of Christ. Some of it happened before He died and was raised, and some of it happened after He was raised.

Our catechism speaks about these two stages of Christ’s work. They call them the humiliation of Christ and the exaltation of Christ. At one point, in His earthly life, Jesus was in a humble, lowly condition. He was under the law. He suffered pain unto death. But at another, future point, Jesus became victorious over the grave. He ascended into the highest heaven to rule His church, and He is waiting for that one day some day, when He will return in triumphant glory and declare sin dead forever, never to return again.

Paul’s use of this perhaps ancient creed is meant to remind us, in these two parts, of the whole of the gospel— pre-resurrection and post-resurrection. We get the idea from verse one into verse three. The gospel of God, that gospel Paul was set apart for, jumps to the beginning of verse 3 concerning His Son. The gospel is all about Jesus, the Son of God. And Paul offers these short phrases to draw our mind to just what Jesus has done in the gospel. He wants us to remember the substance of this good news message that God has communicated to us through his Son.

Here are four headings for us to help our remembrance—four things that Paul draws our attention to that are summarized in this statement of verses three and four.

One, Jesus became a man.

Two, Jesus died.

Three, Jesus rose.

And four, Jesus reigns.

Jesus a Man

In the first place, you see in verse 3 that Jesus is the one who was descended from David according to the flesh. That is to say, Jesus, the Son of God, became a man. There’s actually language in verse three of Him being descended from the seed of David. He is biologically connected to David. There’s a very important reason why Jesus became a man and why He’s biologically connected to David. It’s all the beforehand promises of verse two.

Think back to the very earliest pages of Scripture. Mankind fell from communion with God. Adam and Eve rebelled against their Creator and plunged the whole world into a wreck of sin and misery. Yet, the Lord, almost immediately, there in Genesis chapter 3, promised to send one who would redeem his people from this sin. One day, someday, the Lord said, yes, the serpent may bruise his heel, but my servant will crush the head of the serpent, symbolizing the death that would come to sin and the life that would come back to God’s people.

Over and over again, God has promised in the Old Testament to send someone. Remember that part of verse two: He promised beforehand. Over and over and over again, God promised to Abraham that he would send someone. He promised to Israel in the wilderness that He would send someone. He promised to David that He would send someone. He promised through the prophets that He would send someone. God continually promised, continually pointed them forward to remember that He was still going to fulfill this promise.

This is why Paul refers to Jesus as the one descended from David. Jesus is the answer to all of those beforehand promises that he references in verse two. Martin Luther says it this way: “The gospel centers in the Son of God, but not merely in the Son of God as such, but in as much as He became incarnate of the seed of David. That is to say, in as much as He emptied Himself and became a weak man.”

You see, Paul is using the phrase “descended from David” as a reference to what Jesus did in order to accomplish the salvation of His people. And so, in that small little phrase, we are reminded that Jesus was born a fragile, helpless baby. He needed parents to take care of Him and to raise Him. We’re reminded that He increased over time in wisdom and stature and that He grew up into a man of God. Think of it—the very one through Whom all of creation was made became a part of that creation He made. He became a man. He took on flesh, John says, and He dwelt among us.

More than this, He was made under the rule of the law. Again, the Lawmaker became a law keeper. He kept it perfectly. He didn’t need to do it for Himself. He wasn’t trying to show off. The law was made for sinners, and it was the epitome of humility for Him to come and put himself under it. More than this, Jesus was conflicted, as the Westminster Standards say, with the indignities of this world. So not just the temptations, and especially that which He suffered at the hands of the devil in the wilderness, but much more than that.

Do you know that Jesus was human, and He got tired, and He suffered hunger and sadness, and He experienced sorrow, that He even endured the pressure of intense temptation much more than any one of us has ever felt before?

This is what Paul means when he writes in Philippians 2: “Though he,” referencing Christ, “was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but he emptied himself by taking the form of a servant.”

So much heresy has been driven out of this passage. In the garden, Adam and Eve grasped after God-likeness. Do you remember what the evil one told them? If you eat this, you’ll be like God. And then they thought, “Oh, well, then that’s what I want.” They grasped after God’s glory. They had no right to it. It was not theirs to go out and take.

But the very Son of God, who had every right to it, in His own self, in a moment at His incarnation, chose not to grasp at the glory of God, but instead to become like us in order to save those who once sought after the glory that belongs only to Him. Jesus became a man. The Son of God became a man. His name is Jesus.

Jesus Died

And He also died. This is implied in the text. Do you know how we know that He died? Because He had to be resurrected. Why did Jesus die? Well, let’s go back to those beforehand promises of verse two. In the Old Testament, over and over again, God tells his people that their sin deserves death. He gives them pictures of it. He states it to them outrightly. Sometimes He even brings that death upon them by His own hand. The wages of sin is death. What we think and what we say and what we do—apart from the work of God in us—all of it goes against Him. All of it displays our rebellion to our Creator, and it earns us the penalty of death.

One of the clearer pictures of this is in the earlier chapters of Exodus. The Lord declares that all the firstborn children in the land will die in a single night. It was His final judgment on the land of Egypt. If Pharaoh would refuse to let His people go, then death would come on all the land. And apart from the work that God gave for them to do, apart from the provision that He made, even Israel’s firstborn children would die.

But to His people, He gave a sacrament, a sign, that would remind them again and again into the future of the mercy and grace that God had extended to them, and it would point them forward to the way of salvation. You remember what it was? “Every family, take a lamb and kill it, and paint its blood all over your doorpost, so that when that angel comes by in the night and it sees the blood on your doorpost, it will know that death has already occurred here, and it will pass over. No need for the child to die, for one has already shed blood for him.”

This is why Jesus died. You remember Isaiah 53: “He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and by His wounds”—mark it, not your own—“by His wounds you are healed.” This is why Jesus died. Because God chose, as Paul says in Romans chapter 5, to show His love for you, in that while you were still a sinner, Christ died for you.

Just before that, Paul makes this point: who would die for someone? I told my girls the other day, I’d die for any one of them, including their mother. But after that, it’s sort of a gamble. Maybe for my brother. Probably not for any of y’all—I’m not very fast. I don’t know if I could get there in time to save your life. But think of it: are you worth dying for? Jesus died for you so that you won’t have to. Jesus bore and felt God’s wrath. He endured the painful, shameful, mocking, cursed death of a cross. He died there so that you never have to.

Jesus Rose

And then He rose. That’s verse four: “He was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by His resurrection from the dead.” What does Paul mean here? Was Jesus not the Son of God until His resurrection? No, certainly not. Jesus is the Son of God. He never became the Son of God. What Paul means here is just what he means in Philippians 2:8–9, when it says He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God has highly exalted him.

That’s what Paul is talking about here in Romans 1:4—that when Jesus had finished this work that He’d been given, He came up from the grave, and it was a declaration to the world of His true and full identity. Where He had previously lived in that low, humble estate and suffered death, now by His resurrection, the truth of who He is is declared in power to the whole world that He has made.

John Fesko says it like this: “God bellowed from the heavens that Jesus is His only begotten Son by His resurrection from the dead.”

That’s what it means. He was declared to be the Son of God in power. How? By His resurrection from the dead—by that Holy Spirit work of bringing him up from the grave.

Jesus Reigns

He rose, and now, fourthly, He reigns. It’s that last bit of language at the end of verse four as Paul connects the beginning of verse three to the end of verse four of this inclusio “concerning His son,” and he identifies Him there as “Jesus Christ our Lord.” This is language of exaltation. Jesus isn’t just some guy that rose from the dead. There were other people that did that. Jesus is Christ our Lord.

This is why it says in Philippians 2: “Therefore God has highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name that’s above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Jesus ascended up into heaven, and there, through the ministry of His church, He gathers and defends His people and subdues their enemies. He will furnish His ministers and His people with gifts and graces. He makes intercession for them. And one day He will come again in glory. Sin will be no more, and all will be made right.

This is the gospel: that Jesus became a man, and Jesus died, and Jesus rose, and now He reigns. This is the gospel. John Murray says it like this: “Everything antecedent in the incarnate life of our Lord moves toward the resurrection, and everything subsequent rests upon the resurrection and is conditioned by the resurrection.” This is the subject matter of the gospel of God, and it is that with which prophetic promise was engaged. This is what Paul has written Romans to be about. It’s a preview of what’s to come. This is what he’s writing about—the gospel concerning God’s Son.