Rom.1:4 – who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord,

Jesus made some amazing claims during His ministry on earth. He said “I am the Bread of Life, I am the Resurrection and the Life, before Abraham was I am”. He also said things like “I have power to lay down my life and take it up again” and “if you drink the water that I have to give you will never thirst”. As C.S. Lewis said, “Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or the Son of God”. According to the Apostle Paul in today’s verse, the resurrection backed up all of these claims. The resurrection was the Father’s great declaration that Jesus Christ was His only begotten Son, there is no other conclusion that can be drawn. Maclaren speaks about God’s declaration in his comments on today’s verse.

“Still further, the Resurrection is God’s solemn ‘Amen’ to the tremendous claims which Christ had made….If the Cross and a nameless grave had been the end, what a reductio ad absurdum that would have been to the claims of Jesus to have ever been with the Father and to be doing always the things that pleased Him. The Resurrection is God’s last and loudest proclamation, ‘This is My beloved Son: hear ye Him.’….The old alternative seems to retain all its sharp points: Either Christ rose again from the dead, or His claims are a series of blasphemous arrogances and His character irremediably stained.”

In the first century, the power of the gospel being preached by the apostles was in the fact that they were eye witnesses, they had seen Christ physically after He had been raised from the dead. As a matter of fact, there were at least five hundred people who had seen Christ after He was risen. That was the power of the Apostle Paul’s words, Christ Himself, not a vision of Christ, appeared to Paul on the Damascus Road. Paul was instantly converted from being a strict Pharisee and a persecutor of the church. There is no other explanation for how the world was turned upside down by those first preachers. In the same way today, our testimony of Christ, when it comes from a personal experience with the Risen One, carries the power of the resurrection. The only conclusion; Christ is risen, He is risen indeed.