THE GOD IN WHOM WE TRUST<\/p>\n
Revelation 1:8<\/p>\n
I am alpha and omega, says the Lord God, he who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.<\/p>\n
HERE is a tremendous description of the God in whom we trust and whom we adore.
\n(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 \u2018the boundless life which embraces all and transcends all\u2019.
\n(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:<\/p>\n
Nor death nor life, nor earth nor hell,
\n nor time\u2019s destroying sway,
\n Can e\u2019er efface us from his heart,
\n or make his love decay.<\/p>\n
Each future period that will bless,
\n as it has bless\u2019d the past;
\n He lov\u2019d us from the first of time,
\n He loves us to the last.<\/p>\n
(3) God is the Almighty. The word for Almighty is pantokrat\u00c5\u008dr, which describes the one who has dominion over all things.
\nThe 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 \u2018the panting, huddled flock whose crime was Christ\u2019? 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\u2013God the pantokrat\u00c5\u008dr, in the grip of whose hand were all things.
\nIt is this word which in the Greek Old Testament describes \u2018the Lord of Sabbaoth, the Lord of hosts\u2019 (Amos 9:5; Hosea 12:5). It is this word which John uses in the tremendous text: \u2018The Lord our God the Almighty reigns\u2019 (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\u2019s hymn has it:<\/p>\n
My times are in thy hand:
\n I\u2019ll always trust in thee;
\n And, after death, at thy right hand
\n I shall for ever be.<\/p>\n
Barclay, W. (2004). The Revelation of John (3rd ed. fully rev. and updated., Vol. 1, pp. 43\u201445). Louisville, KY; London: Westminster John Knox Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"twitterCardType":"","cardImageID":0,"cardImage":"","cardTitle":"","cardDesc":"","cardImageAlt":"","cardPlayer":"","cardPlayerWidth":0,"cardPlayerHeight":0,"cardPlayerStream":"","cardPlayerCodec":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/purposedriven.ca\/wiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/purposedriven.ca\/wiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/purposedriven.ca\/wiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purposedriven.ca\/wiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purposedriven.ca\/wiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/purposedriven.ca\/wiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11021\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/purposedriven.ca\/wiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purposedriven.ca\/wiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purposedriven.ca\/wiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}