I Am The Alpha And The Omega

It steadies me to remember what Revelation actually is. It is a letter, written to seven real congregations in the Roman province of Asia, in what is now western Turkey (Revelation 1:4). Those churches were small and pressured, unsure whether their faith was about to cost them everything. John calls himself their brother and “partner with you in the oppression” (Revelation 1:9), and he writes from Patmos, a rocky island in the Aegean, where he had been sent for the sake of God’s word. We so easily treat Revelation as a puzzle of beasts and disasters waiting to be decoded. But the people who first heard it read aloud were ordinary believers trying to hold their nerve under an empire that did not care about them. Before a single vision unfolds, before any seal is broken, God interrupts with one plain sentence about who he is. I find that order quietly pastoral. Frightened people do not first need a map of the future. They need to know who is holding it. That is what verse 8 hands them, and hands us.

The thing I keep turning over is how odd this self-description is. God does not say he is the strongest or that he sees everything. He reaches for two letters, the very things a reader is using in that moment to take in his words. Every sentence John writes, every fear those churches could put into language, is built from letters that begin with one and end with the other. So God is the boundary inside which all our speech happens: our prayers, our arguments, even our complaining. There is a careful little phrase here too, “who is and who was and who is to come”. Listen to the middle of it. We would normally say is, was, will be. John writes is, was, is to come, as though God’s future is not a distant maybe but a settled arrival already on its way to us. It is the same wording he used back in verse 4, so he plainly meant it to lodge in the memory.

This is not a fresh slogan minted for a worried church. Centuries earlier Isaiah heard God name himself the first and the last (Isaiah 44:6), and he said it to people terrified that their God had been outmatched by the gods of Babylon. John is deliberately laying Revelation 1:8 on top of that older word. What I cannot read past is where the title travels by the end of the book. In Isaiah and here in chapter 1, it is the Lord God, the Almighty, who is the first and the last. Then in Revelation 22:13 the risen Jesus says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” and takes the whole title on his own lips. The name God keeps for himself alone becomes the name Christ owns. Set that beside Hebrews 13:8 on Christ unchanged through all time, and Colossians 1:17 on everything held together in him, and the comfort sharpens to a point. The One who bounds all of history is the One who was crucified and is alive.

I will be honest about where this lands for me. It is rarely in the grand moments. It is when I am awake at three in the morning running the same worry round and round a track, or when an old failure surfaces uninvited in the middle of a perfectly ordinary Tuesday. The line that holds me is the unglamorous middle clause, “who is”. Not only the God of the beginning, the One who set things going long ago. Not only the God of some tidy ending I cannot picture. The God who is, present tense, in the unsleeping now. I have sat with people in hospital corridors where the future was genuinely frightening, and what helped was almost never a promise about what came next. It was the sense that they were not alone in the corridor. “The Almighty” at the close of the verse is not God showing off his strength. It is the assurance that nothing in your past, present or future is too strong for the hands already holding it. Your worry is real. It is simply not sovereign.

• Of my past, my present and my future, which one do I find hardest to believe God is already in, and why that one in particular?
• The verse names him “the Almighty”. Where am I quietly living as though something else has the final say over my life?
• If God himself is the beginning and the end, what does that change about the one worry I am carrying into today?
• Jesus takes this very title in Revelation 22:13. What does it do to my fear to know the First and the Last is also the One who was crucified for me?

If you would like to keep going, you could sit with more of this book or find a verse for exactly how you feel today.