“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
“Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel, for which I am suffering, bound with chains as a criminal. But the word of God is not bound!” (2 Tim. 2:8-9).
Paul’s next exhortation is to remember the resurrection of Jesus the Christ. He did not come back from the dead in His capacity “as God,” but rather as the offspring and seed of David. Of course Christ is fully God, as we confess, but it was Jesus in His humanity that died, and it was as the True Man that He was raised again to life. The resurrection is for humans. The preaching of the resurrection is essential to the gospel — without it we are all still in our sins. Paul identifies with this gospel, calling it “my gospel.” Because he preaches the resurrection of the whole human race, as evidenced by the resurrection of its prototype, he gets into a lot of trouble. He is clear that he is suffering for the gospel, which is the gospel of the True Man raised from the dead. Because He was descended from David, He was a true man. Because He was raised to life forever, He is the True Man. The reason Paul is chained up like a criminal is because prisons and chains traffic in the old way of managing crowd control — they use death, and the threat of it. But Jesus told us not to fear the ones who could put the body to death.
The Word of God is not bound, and the Word of God centers on the message of the resurrection. Not only can prisons and chains not hold this message, or execute it, but we also see a hint of why prisons and chains keep trying to. Life forever cannot be threatened or constrained by the ways of death, but death can be threatened and destroyed by life forever. The message of the resurrection is a message that says that that way of “doing business” is doomed, and that the day is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the gospel command to rise.