The first inkling we have that something big is coming down—the pre-gospel, if you will—comes from some angels, as recorded in the Gospel of Luke. First, an angel called Gabriel appears to a young girl named Mary, and gives her some startling news. She is to become miraculously pregnant with a boy she is to name Jesus.
32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. 33 He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” (Luke 1:32-34)
Okay, so this is pretty major. But wait, there’s more:
35 The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born[d] will be holy; he will be called Son of God.”
I’ve always wondered about the qualification “he will be called son of God.” Does that mean that he really isn’t, he’s just called that? In thinking about this, it occurs to me that he is not the son of God in a human, genetic way. But, “son” is probably the best way to understand it. He will be holy (meaning “set apart”), but also he will have the actual nature of God. We know that later on, Jesus often referred to himself as the “son of man,” which was an Old Testament reference to the coming Messiah; in incarnational terms, he was God who was human-born. But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
So first, Mary is told he will be the king of Israel and that he will reign forever. Then on top of that, he will be recognized as being the son of God. Of course, it’s doubtful that Mary grasped all of that at the time, but I’m sure she understood that this was a big, Godly deal. I mean, just the angel appearing indicated that much.
Looking back from our modern-day perspective, we can notice a couple of things. First, we have the aforementioned “son of God” title. It means something specific to us today, but didn’t necessarily have the same understanding at the time. The next thing we notice is the reference to Jesus’s eternal reign of the throne of David. While we now can seen this referred to Jesus’s personal eternal reign, at the time it was probably understood to reference the reign of the lineage of Jesus, whether literally or metaphorically. The Jews of that time were no stranger to spiritualizing prophecies to make them fit their current realities.
Either way you choose to look at it, this is certainly “good news” that more good news is on its way.