... which He promised beforehand 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 1:2-4, Modern English Version (MEV)
It is all too easy for us to forget that this Good News about God, the Good News, which was brought to us by God, was a result of promises he made many years previously. Over and over, throughout the Old Testament, God had provided hints and glimpses of the glorious Good News that was to come. For that reason alone, the Old Testament deserves our study, appreciation, and understanding. How can we hope to understand how God has fulfilled his promises if we don't even know what his promises were?
And who is this Gospel, this Good News about? It is Christ Jesus who, according to human reckoning, was a descendant of King David, thus fulfilling the Scriptures concerning the coming Messiah. This is crucial and must be firmly established in everyone's mind. We may not understand all the mechanics of how this all works, we just need to be assured it does work. To claim that Jesus is not a descendant of King David, the promised descendant, would be declaring that Jesus is not the promised Messiah and everything we believe is utterly false.
While taking great pains to establish the credibility of the claims concerning Jesus, Paul is following an established and well-known process at use withing the Jewish community, one which Matther and other writers used in varying degrees of detail. The entire Bible of that time, what we commonly refer to as the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament, are full of ancestral lists and genealogical pedigrees to establish many different things, including who is qualified to be a priest or Levite. It isn’t something we often see today, but being able to recite one’s ancestry was a primary means of identifying who you were and where you belonged.
Of course, determining who Jesus was in the overall scheme of things with Israel only laid the foundation. Paul now had to take his readers from that familiar ground to a place that was wholly unfamiliar. In this introduction, Paul does this with rapid fire speed, like ripping off a bandage. He will spend the rest of Romans explaining in greater detail what he means in these verses.
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