Paul approaches the climax of his sermon by bringing together the word of promise and its fulfillment. On the one hand he tells the good news (5:42; 8:4, 12, 25, 40; 10:36; 11:20) that in raising up Jesus—bringing him into the arena of human history—God has fulfilled what he promised to the fathers. On the other hand Paul quotes Old Testament texts that articulate the promises and their means of fulfillment.

Paul begins with the divine declaration to the Lord's anointed: You are my Son; today I have become your Father (Acts 13:33/Ps 2:7; compare 2 Sam 7:12-16). The Jews and early church did take this psalm messianically (Psalms of Solomon 17:21-23; Strack and Billerbeck 1978:3:675-77; Heb 1:5; 5:5/Ps 2:7; Acts 4:25-26/Ps 2:1-2). Jesus is God's Son in the fullest sense of the word, for he shares his very nature (see comment at Acts 9:20). For this reason he can be the means by which God completely fulfills the promises made to the fathers.

The crowning good news is that God raised him [Jesus] from the dead, never to decay. Isaiah 55:3 undergirds this assertion by setting Jesus' resurrection within the larger context of the covenant blessings that flow to God's people because of God's "pledged mercies" to David (Kaiser 1980:227-28; Bruce 1988:260). They are "the unassailable proofs of grace which Yahweh will give in faithfulness to His promises" (Hauck 1967:491; 2 Sam 7:8-16; 2 Chron 6:42). If the "pledged mercies to David" centered on the promise that he would reign forever, they are given to God's people in the form of the blessings of life under that "forever reign."

The link between the "pledged mercies" and Messiah's resurrection involves this interpretational reasoning. If the Messiah has to undergo an atoning death for the sins of the people but is to reign forever, a resurrection must decisively intervene. If that "forever reign" is to happen at all, the king must experience a resurrection that will so transform him that "his flesh will never return to decay," the normal destiny of humans (Ps 16:10/Acts 13:35). In fact, Paul's hermeneutic for identifying the risen Jesus, not the dead David, as the reference of this assertion depends on this distinction. Using the same interpretational tools as Peter—the question of identity and a literal understanding of You will not let your Holy One see decay—Paul establishes that the Messiah rises (compare 13:30; see comment at 2:25-31).

If we would receive the divinely intended spiritual good from the Old Testament, we must fix our eyes firmly on the fulfillment, Jesus Christ, and ask of each passage of promise, What does it teach us of Christ? What can we learn about the salvation that is appointed for the last day?