“Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God  —  which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures —  concerning his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who was a descendant of David according to the flesh and was appointed to be the powerful Son of God according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When I was getting my degree in chemistry, I was the weird kid in the department. This wasn’t because of personality (I was generally right at home in that sense as all chemistry majors are a little weird). It was because I was the one kid in the department who hated lab work. I vastly preferred classwork. I wanted all the theory and didn’t care two cents about the practice. My brain didn’t process information that way. Oh, I faked my way through it just fine, but I never really understood what I was doing. That included when I had to write lab report abstracts. Those were the introduction paragraphs for experiment write-ups. You had to pack a ton of information into a tiny word count. If you’ve been following this blog for long, you know that brevity isn’t really one of my strengths. It wasn’t really the apostle Paul’s strength either, but he could still pack a ton of information into a few words. His introductory statement for his letter to the believers in Rome is a great example. Let’s explore part of it as we begin a whole new journey in this new year.

If the Old Testament were to be described as having a Gospel of its own, Exodus would be that Gospel’s heart. Exodus is where we first learn of God’s incredible passion for His people. We witness His great love for them as He brings them out of slavery in Egypt and guides them faithfully on the first part of their journey to freedom. We see Him sketch out for them for the first time the boundaries of what a relationship with Him looks like and the means by knowledge of how to stay within those boundaries. This takes the form of a covenant which is revealed as a set of laws. If the people choose to live within these boundaries, if they remain faithful to this covenant, they will be right with Him.

Once told and once given, this story and this Law dominate the rest of the narrative of the Old Testament. Everything that follows is molded and shaped by this one event. If the New Testament events had never taken place, this would still be the story of redemption that dominated the world’s imagination. It would be the invitation to righteousness that haunted every human heart until it was received and embraced. It is a story worth studying carefully…which is why we have spent the last 18 months or so working through it. If you joined me for the whole journey, you can say you’ve read the equivalent of a several-hundred page devotional commentary on Exodus. You’re welcome.

Yet as good a story as it is, and as powerful an invitation to righteousness as it is, Exodus doesn’t exist on its own footing. It exists as a pointer. As we talked about again and again as we worked through it, it was always intended to be a placeholder that pointed the way forward toward an even greater story of redemption God was writing across the pages of human history. This story is revealed across the four Gospel accounts that form the first four documents of what we call the New Testament. They collectively tell the story of the incarnation of the second member of the Trinity as the baby Jesus. They introduce us to the person of Jesus whose life and teachings reveal the contours of righteousness, and whose death and resurrection inaugurate a new covenant rooted not in law, but in grace for all those who are willing to place their faith in Him as Lord.

While this new covenant, this new Gospel, is revealed in narrative form in the four Gospel accounts, the details are not fleshed out there the way they are in Exodus. That task is taken up most exquisitely by the apostle Paul in his letter to the church in Rome. Having never visited Rome himself, Paul couldn’t address personal issues with them the way he did with other churches like those in Corinth or Philippians or Colossae. Instead, he set about sketching out for them the contours of the basic Gospel message so they could make sure they were on track with his teachings about the way of Jesus which were themselves endorsed by the other apostles like Peter and John who were still the broadly recognized leaders of the Jesus movement.

The result of this effort on Paul’s part is that we now have preserved for us the most exquisite and clear statement of the Gospel message ever written. As I have thought and prayed through where we would go next in our journey through the Scriptures, having spent the last several months working through the most important background narrative for the Gospel, it only made sense to me that we shift gears and spend the next few months working through the most important statement of the Gospel itself. We have explored the pattern for the Gospel. Now we’ll turn our attention to the real thing. And so, Romans is where we’ll spend the bulk of our time together going forward.

Here out of the gate, Paul introduces himself first as was the custom in ancient letters, and then sets out the topic he’s going to tackle: The Gospel. These first four verses contain a surprising amount of important information about the Gospel message. There are three things here in particular worth observing. Let’s quickly look at these today, and we’ll come back to look at the rest of Paul’s greeting on Tuesday. (Tomorrow we’ll take a look at an episode from the final season of Marvel’s What If?… series.)

The first thing here is that the Gospel was proclaimed before it was revealed. It was “promised beforehand” through the prophets and in the Scriptures. What God did through Jesus did not come out of left field. He had been talking about it for a very long time before finally pulling the trigger on all of the action. The New Testament authors refer back to the Scriptures as evidence and proof of the things they say hundreds and hundreds of times. The new covenant in Christ was without a doubt a fulfillment and replacement of the old covenant of Law first revealed and given in the Exodus account, but it doesn’t make sense without the context of what came before it.

The second thing is that the Gospel is all about Jesus. Jesus is at the absolute center of the Gospel. Without Him, there is no Gospel. He is the heart of the new covenant. It was formed on the back of His death and resurrection. His spilled blood made it official. Verses 3 and 4 give us some important information about Jesus, most notably that He was both fully God and fully human. He was of the line of David which is consistent with the Hebrew Scriptures’ well-known assertion that the Messiah would be a descendant of David.

Paul also describes Him as appointed to be the Son of God. He doesn’t mean this in the sense that God found the appropriate human descendant of David and somehow appointed him to the task of being the Messiah. Instead, the first member of the Trinity, who we customarily identify as God the Father, appointed the second member of the Trinity, who we customarily identify as God the Son, to become human in order to achieve the task of our salvation. This appointing was done by the third person of the Trinity, God the Spirit, who Paul here calls “the Spirit of holiness.” In other words, the Gospel is all about Jesus, but Jesus is not just one person. He is the second person of the Trinity. Our salvation was a fully triune affair.

One last thing. The Gospel was made official by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The resurrection is the point on which all of the Gospel, all of Christianity hangs. If that didn’t happen, the rest doesn’t hold. Paul himself makes that abundantly and explicitly clear in 1 Corinthians 15. No resurrection, no Gospel. Period.

This means a lot of different things, but here’s one you can take home with you today. When it comes to defending the faith, there’s really only one thing to defend after the existence of God Himself: the resurrection. Everything else is secondary to that. Getting drawn into debates with unbelievers about points of Christian theology or doctrine is a generally fruitless endeavor. If the resurrection can be demonstrated as historical (and I think guys like Gary Habermas or Mike Licona have done a tremendous job of that), then the rest of the Gospel falls into place pretty nicely.

We could perhaps go into this more, but that’s enough for our first step in this new journey in this new year. The point to take as you go today is the point that we will come back to again and again over the course of this journey. The Gospel is all about Jesus. If we don’t understand that, we aren’t going to understand any of the rest of it. May you be assured that Jesus is not just the reason for the season, but the reason for everything. Blessings on you as you continue in your new year.