The suffering messiah
It took me a while to realize the emphasis of the Gospel in Romans 1, it says it’s about the suffering Mesaiah. People usually connect with messiah with someone with power and might and not someone with suffering. It’s amazing that God used that theme to define the gospel. There are others that define gospel like grace, redemption , etc, but it’s the suffering messiah .

This is counter culture and counter initiative. That’s how God wins the world , not by what he used to do in the OT where he would send an angel and slain 200,000 Assyrian soldiers over night, or slain all the forst born of Egypt over night on Passover. That mighty power of God in the physical sense is gone, but the way God saves the world now as the messiah is through suffering.

The story of God Man suffering is well known for Christ died on the cross and resurrected after 3 days. That’s how he redeemed the world or whoever believes in him.

So why why did God do that? It’s a very dehumanizing and demeaning humiliating and painful suffering Kesus went though. The question should rather be how much does God love us for doing that.

It’s shocking that the path to glory , the path to redemption is suffering. There is really no choice because that’s the law of God that those who sin against him must die and forgiveness is only found in the shedding of blood as life is in the blood. That should hopefully wake us up from the laze affair laid back Christinaity where comfort and goodness and blessings reign supreme. This is be hard to sell as it’s so contrary to the path our Lord and Savior took. Therefore I would suggest we look at the call of God for discipleship in Christ.

If Christians today grasp the concept of sufferings to glory as led by the Lord Jesus, there will be a huge turn around from the lethargic indifference by so many nominal Christians. Or the materialistic Christians who look rather for material comfort blessings of God like in Deut 28, hence we lack the fire of God. What the early church folks went through was electrifying and that’s what we can learn. We need electrifying power of God that will help us rise above our lethargy and material seeking so to seek the Kingdom of God first.