1:2
“which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures”. Jesus did not appear out of nothing, He was not a radical new departure, rather He was and is the complete fulfilment of all that was promised in the Old Testament. Romans is the one of Paul’s letters that contains the greatest use of Scripture, and no doubt he was thinking about this, looking forward to what he was going to say later, when he wrote this bit. God promises what He is going to do before it happens. Notice also the implicit statement that the Old Testament is the word of God. Prophets here obviously does refer to the people we think of as prophets, like Isaiah, Daniel etc, but it also includes people like Abraham, Moses and David.
1:3
The good news is the good news about Jesus Christ, His Son. The Old Testament had promised that David would have a descendent on the throne forever. David’s natural descendants radically failed to fulfil this. Solomon did well for a time, then became a disaster. Most of the kings after that were just a disaster, there some good ones, but they all ultimately failed. Now for many years Israel had not had a king at all. In human terms Jesus was descended from David. Now ask yourself this “would you be bothered if Jesus was not a descendant of David?” I suspect the answer for most of us is no, it really doesn’t matter to us. Yet God had said the Messiah would be a descendant of David, and so He is. This has implications for the Old Testament prophecies concerning Israel and Israel’s current place in God’s plans. There are those who see Israel as having no place other than that of any other people group (“replacement theology”). I can see no support for this in Scripture at all, Israel still does have a place, and a special place, but their salvation will come only through faith in Christ, as it does for anyone else. Paul deals with this matter very fully in chapters 9-11.
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