Here’s the text:
Now to strengthen this faith, God promised this Gospel and testament in many ways, by the prophets in the Old Testament, as St. Paul says, in Romans 1:1, “I am separated to preach the Gospel of Christ, which He promised before through His prophets in the Holy Scripture, concerning His Son, who was born of the seed of David, etc.”
To indicate some of these places: — He gave the first promise, when He said to the serpent, in Genesis 3:15, “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; he shall tread on thy head and thou shalt sting his heel.” Christ is the seed of this woman, and He has trodden upon the devil’s head, i.e., sin, death, hell, and all his power, for without this seed, no man can escape sin, death, or hell.
Again, in Genesis 22:18, He promised Abraham, “Through thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” “Christ is the seed of Abraham,” says St. Paul, in Galatians 3:16, and He has blessed all the world through the Gospel, for where Christ is not, there is still the curse that fell upon Adam and his children when he had sinned, so that all of them together are guilty of sin, death, and hell, and must belong to them.
Against this curse the Gospel blesses all the world by the public announcement, “He that believeth in this seed shall be blessed,” that is, rid of sin and righteous, and shall remain alive and be saved forever; as Christ Himself says, in John 11:26, “He that believeth in me shall never die.”
Again, He made this promise to David, in 2 Samuel 7:12, when He said, “I will raise up thy seed after thee, who shall build a house to my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.” That is the kingdom of Christ, of which the Gospel speaks, an everlasting kingdom, a kingdom of life, salvation, and righteousness, and all those who believe shall enter into it from out of the prison of sin and death.
There are many more such promises of the Gospel in the other prophets also, for example, in Micah 5:2, “And thou,: Bethlehem, Ephratah, though thou art small in comparison with the thousands of Judah, out of thee shall come for me Him who is Lord in Israel”; and again in Hosea 13:14, “I will redeem them from hell and rescue them from death; death, I will be to thee a poison; hell, I will be to thee a pestilence.”
The Gospel, then, is nothing but the preaching about Christ, Son of God and of David, true God and man, who by His death and resurrection has overcome all men’s sin, and death and hell, for us who believe in Him.
More on Luther’s Prefaces to the Books of the Bible here.
