THE GOD IN WHOM WE TRUST

Revelation 1:8

I am alpha and omega, says the Lord God, he who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

HERE is a tremendous description of the God in whom we trust and whom we adore.
(1) He is alpha and omega. Alpha is the first letter and omega the last of the Greek alphabet; and the phrase alpha to omega indicates completeness. The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet is aleph and the last is tau; and the Jews used the same kind of expression. The Rabbis said that Adam broke the law and Abraham kept it from aleph to tau. They said that God had blessed Israel from aleph to tau. This expression indicates that God is absolutely complete: he has in himself what the biblical scholar H. B. Swete called ‘the boundless life which embraces all and transcends all’.
(2) God is he who is and who was and who is to come. That is to say, he is the Eternal. He was before time began; he is now; and he will be when time ends. He has been the God of all who have trusted in him; he is the God in whom at this present moment we can put our trust; and there can be no event and no time in the future which can separate us from him. As the Scottish Paraphrase has it:

Nor death nor life, nor earth nor hell,
nor time’s destroying sway,
Can e’er efface us from his heart,
or make his love decay.

Each future period that will bless,
as it has bless’d the past;
He lov’d us from the first of time,
He loves us to the last.

(3) God is the Almighty. The word for Almighty is pantokratōr, which describes the one who has dominion over all things.
The significant fact is that this word occurs in the New Testament seven times. It occurs once in 2 Corinthians 6:18, in a quotation from the Old Testament; and the remaining six instances are all in Revelation. This word is characteristic of John. Think of the circumstances in which he was writing. The embattled might of Rome had risen up to crush the Christian Church. No empire had ever been able to withstand Rome; what possible chance against Rome had those whom the English poet Sir William Watson described as ‘the panting, huddled flock whose crime was Christ’? Humanly speaking, the Christian Church had no chance at all; but, if people thought that, they had left the most important factor of all out of the reckoning–God the pantokratōr, in the grip of whose hand were all things.
It is this word which in the Greek Old Testament describes ‘the Lord of Sabbaoth, the Lord of hosts’ (Amos 9:5; Hosea 12:5). It is this word which John uses in the tremendous text: ‘The Lord our God the Almighty reigns’ (Revelation 19:6). If we are in the hands of a God like that, nothing can pluck us away. If behind the Christian Church there is a God like that, as long as the Church is true to its Lord, nothing can destroy it. As William Freeman Lloyd’s hymn has it:

My times are in thy hand:
I’ll always trust in thee;
And, after death, at thy right hand
I shall for ever be.

Barclay, W. (2004). The Revelation of John (3rd ed. fully rev. and updated., Vol. 1, pp. 43—45). Louisville, KY; London: Westminster John Knox Press.

On this day...

• Lamentations 1 - 2022
• Our Dowry of Everlastingness - 2009
• Greatness Has Its Price - 2009
• HAVE YOU EVER BEEN ALONE WITH GOD? - 2009
• Something Right In The World - 2007
• Proverb 20:15 - 2007
• Christ's Blood Covers All Sins - 2007
• First Things First - 2007
• The Action Of Obedience - 2007
• Debt Paid In Full - 2007