The Gospel of God the Son

by Andrew Wilson
Eastbourne, UK

‘…the gospel of God, which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning His Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh 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’ (Rom. 1:1-4).

The gospel is news about a person. Strange, isn’t it? Most of us think of the gospel as news about an event or perhaps an idea – a system whereby God rescues dead people like us and gives us life.
 
Paul’s summary of the gospel in the opening verses of Romans 1 says that it is about a person. He describes it as ‘the gospel of God…concerning his Son.’ So the news that we proclaim and live out and build our churches on is not primarily about things, events or ideas, but about God the Son. The God-man we call Jesus Christ is actually God’s gospel in human form.

Promised beforehand

To get a sense of how God the Son is the gospel, we need to work through these short, dense verses at the start of Romans to see all that Paul says about him. To start with, let’s consider the fact that the gospel was ‘promised beforehand through prophets in the holy Scriptures’ (verse 2). The news about God the Son, Paul says, was promised beforehand. The gospel is not, and never has been, a new thing; it is the fulfillment of an old thing, the culmination of thousands of promises and prophecies given through dozens of people across at least four millennia. I don’t know if you’re into whodunits, but in a well-written mystery there is always a moment at the end when the detective explains how the murder was done and how all the puzzling strands you had been wondering about come together in one solution. Paul is saying that the gospel is like that: the denouement, where all the puzzling strands you had been wondering about – exodus and exile, priests and sacrifices, kings and servants, suffering and victory – come together into one mind-blowing person. That person is God the Son, the gospel in human form. It is Romans 1:1-4 that explains how passages like Isaiah 2:1-4 and 53:1-4 can be reconciled.

Concerning His Son

The sentence pivots on the next phrase, ‘concerning His Son’. You cannot overstate the centrality of Jesus to the gospel. Ultimately, God’s gospel is not ‘concerning His salvation’, or ‘concerning His love’, but concerning His Son. Remember, Paul is writing the opening sentence of a letter which is all about the gospel and in which he is going to go into great detail about justification by faith, being in Christ, life in the Spirit, and so on. Paul is passionate about those things. But they, in themselves, are not what the gospel is about. They are like planets in orbit, large and sizeable in themselves with many smaller teachings built around them, but still revolving around a massive centre of gravity far bigger than they are. In the middle of this theological solar system is the Son: his identity, his life, his death, his resurrection and his reign. The gospel hinges on Jesus.

This thought is explored a bit further in the next two clauses which show both the humanity and the divinity of God the Son. First, we read that Jesus was ‘descended from David according to the flesh’. You might think this is a slightly peculiar thing to put in your summary of the gospel, but to Paul, Jesus’ descent from David according to the flesh is hugely significant. It means at least three things. It means Jesus was a man, a real person who had a descent ‘according to the flesh’, with real parents and ancestors. It means he was a Jewish man, a man who was circumcised and kept the law, and who could fulfill God’s promises to Israel. And it means he was the rightful king, the heir of the throne of David, the one that the prophets had said would come and rule over the nations on behalf of Yahweh. The gospel is concerning a man.

The Son of God in power

Second, though, this man was ‘declared to be the Son of God in power’. What a statement. This Jewish carpenter with a northern accent, who had brothers and sisters, who had a job and paid taxes and who went to the toilet and slept and ate fish and cried and cracked jokes and washed feet, was declared to be the Son of God in power. If you’ve lost a sense of how shocking this is, just explain it to a Muslim for a minute and you’ll quickly realise how explosive this declaration originally was. This Jew from Nazareth was God’s Messiah, described later in Romans as ‘God over all, blessed forever’ (9:5). The Son of God in power.
This declaration happened ‘according to the Spirit of holiness, by his resurrection from the dead’. The third member of the Trinity finally joins the fray, as the Holy Spirit loudly announces to the world the authority now given to God the Son by his resurrection out from among the dead. Jesus was not raised by necromancers, mediums, séances or any other unclean spirit – he was raised according to the Spirit of holiness, in all his perfection and purity. The resurrection, fundamentally, was the Father’s proclamation of the Son’s lordship by the Spirit’s power. If you worry that the Trinity is an impractical and theoretical idea, you just need to look at the empty tomb.

Lord and Christ

The result of all these things – God the Son’s humanity, Messiahship, power, resurrection by the Spirit and fulfillment of the Scriptures – is summed up in the phrase ‘Jesus Christ our Lord’. Again, you could write books on those four words, but the headline is that Jesus is the ‘Christ’, the promised king of Israel; that he is ‘Lord’, the ruler of the whole world, worthy of worship and obedience; and that he is ‘our’ Lord, the one whom we, of all people, can know and praise and love and follow. There may be other, more popular, ways of telling people the gospel in three seconds but, if Paul was into that sort of thing, I think he would have said what he says here.

So the gospel is primarily a person, not an event. It’s not ‘of Andrew, concerning his salvation’, which is hard to believe for those of us who think we are the centre of the universe, but ‘of God, concerning his Son’. When the early morning papers come out with their front pages screaming, ‘Gospel of God!’, and you search for the subtitle to tell you what the news is about, you get three simple words, accompanied by a picture of a Middle-Eastern construction worker. They read: ‘God the Son.’