Scripture Daily

Context No. 569 of 4322 · Revelation

Context · Reflection

Revelation 1:7-11: in context

7Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, including those who pierced him. All the tribes of the earth will mourn over him. Even so, Amen. 8“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” 9I John, your brother and partner with you in the oppression, Kingdom, and perseverance in Christ Jesus, was on the isle that is called Patmos because of God’s Word and the testimony of Jesus Christ. 10I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice, like a trumpet 11saying, “What you see, write in a book and send to the seven assemblies: to Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and to Laodicea.”

Near the opening of Revelation, in the middle of a book about upheaval and persecution and the end of history, God speaks a self-description that anchors everything that follows. I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. Alpha and Omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, the A and the Z, and God takes them as his name. He is the beginning and the end, the first word and the last, the one who was there before anything started and will be there after everything finishes, and who fills all the time in between. Before the story opened, he was. After it closes, he will be.

That name is placed here on purpose, because John is writing to Christians under pressure, people for whom the present felt chaotic and frightening and out of control, and he introduces them first to a God who holds the whole of time in his hands. Whatever they were in the middle of, God was already standing at the end of it, and had been there at its beginning. He is not a God caught up in history alongside them, hoping it turns out well; he is the Alpha and the Omega, the one who bounds and encloses the entire span, so that nothing that happens falls outside his beginning and his end. History is held between his first word and his last.

That is an anchor I need when my own present feels chaotic and beyond my control. I get lost in the middle of things, unable to see how any of it resolves, as though the story were running loose with no one holding either end. Revelation opens by placing me in front of the God who is the Alpha and the Omega, who was there before my story began and waits already at its end, holding the whole of it. When the middle of my life feels like formless chaos, can I rest in the One who is its beginning and its end, who holds the entire span I can only see a fragment of?

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