Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated to the gospel of God which He promised before through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures, concerning His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead. (Romans 01:01-04, NKJV).
The amazing thing about the Father's plan of salvation is how unbelievably old it is, and how early he made it known to fallen man.
From Genesis 3 onward, the Bible speaks to us of the Promised One, the Seed of the Woman - the Messiah. Over and over again throughout the Old Testament He reminded us that the One Who Saves is coming, and His name will be called Wonderful, Mighty God, Counselor, Prince of Peace, and Everlasting Father.
Then in the gospels, we are told that His name will be called JESUS, which means God is Salvation.
There is nothing about the human condition that comes as a surprise to our God. He knew Adam would sin, and that mankind would need a Savior, and that the Savior would be His Son, and that Jesus would have to die on the Cross to save us from the penalty of sin. Yet, He created us anyway.
In Romans Chapter 1, Paul reminds of us of all these things in his introduction and greeting.
You see, His prophets in the Holy Scriptures wrote about Jesus long before He was born to Mary. Some of them may not have even understood all that they were told by the Holy Spirit about this Promised One, but a few, very easily proven things were written more than once so that we could believe it all.
Who His ancestors would be was one of these things. We were told that He would be a Jew and be descended from the line of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David. In fact, God chose Abraham, and made a nation out of his descendants so that the Jewish people would be recipients of His Word, and be the nation from which Messiah would come.
Paul also reminds us that Jesus would be the only God-Man in the universe, meaning that He would be a human Son of David according to the flesh, while at the same time being the Son of God. This is a great mystery the details of which are hard to explain and understand.
God knew that our smallish human minds would have trouble in this, so Jesus did many signs and wonders to prove who He really was, with power according to the Spirit of holiness. The Lord said many times that He did only what the Father told Him to do, and said only what the Father told Him to say.
All the wonderful miracles He performed were done by the power of the Holy Spirit, who is God, just as Jesus and the Father are God (another mystery hard for our brains to understand). The Lord Jesus never did anything by His own power when He lived on the earth, even when Satan tempted Him in the wilderness to use His power as God to do things.
He needed to live and die as a Man in order for His death to pay for mankind's sins. Otherwise, we could not be saved.
But He did one thing, beyond all His other miracles, that proved that He was the Promised One - He rose from the dead. That's what Paul meant when he wrote that Jesus was declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.
You see, because the Lord never committed any sin, death could not hold Him, because only sinners can die. Jesus voluntarily offered Himself on the Cross for us, dying in our place, so His sinlessness and death paid the death-debt for our sin.
He loved us very much to do that, even before we knew and loved Him.
Being resurrected from the dead is not the only thing Jesus did for us, but it is one of the greatest things that He did, and it showed that He was who He said He was: the Son of God, the Savior.
It is very important to understand that He was born exactly according to what was written about Him beforehand in the Scriptures, and that He died according to the Scriptures, and that He rose again on the third day, according to the Scriptures.
All just as God had planned before the Universe and everything in it was created.
That is how great our God is, and that is what Paul is reminding us of here in the beginning of his letter to the Romans.
