Are you worshipping the one true God?

Revelation 1:8

“‘Iam the Alpha and the Imega,’ says the Lord God, ‘who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.'”

June 21, 2022

Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet, and it looks much like our A. Omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet and the capital letter (called uncial) looks much like a horseshoe, while the lower case (called miniscule) looks like a “w”. What does all of this matter? We will get there.

Before we do, let me quickly start out with a short story. Once, in listening to a Christian comedian portraying what he is glad God is not like, he employed the Bill Cosby humor from the early 1980’s, saying, “I made you boy, I’ll take you out and make 600,000 just like you.”

Whether we realize it or not, the statement of “I made you . . .” is a recognition of one coming before another. The difference between a father saying this to a son and God saying this to His creation is that the father had a beginning, whereas God did not. Likewise, in the Christianized version, the comedian is saying that he is glad that God is not like the father in the Bill Cosby sketch, given that the father is seemingly capricious. God is benevolent and merciful. Even in God’s proclamation that Adam and Eve would surely die after eating from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, He provided for their atonement, just as He continues to do.

In coming before us, God alrleady knew what we (humanity) would do with the freedom that He gave. In stating that He is present in between as well. This is where the idea of “omnipresence” comes into play. God is always present; therefore, we can always address Him.

Now this is where things get a bit more interesting. Some atheists argue that if God knows everything that will happen, do we have any free will at all, if indeed everything is predetermined? That thought, but its very nature assumes that God is confined to the same timeline to which we are confined. Yet, God stands outside of time and therefore sees all things as they are throughout all of time, just as if I were standing across a room looking at the opposite wall. There would be nothing on the surface that I could not see or approach. God, by His very nature, can interact with any point in history at any moment, because He stands outside of it.

To this point, things have been very “heady,” cerebral, or intellectual. Yet now it is time to move into the practical. Is it not amazing to you that God, with all of His infinite knowledge, power and presence chooses, knowing how we would violate His divine will, to forgive and interact with us, and subsequently use us in His story for subsequent generations? Oh, Great Alpha and Omega, thank You that knowing me, You still choose me and all of your people, in the midst of our failings, for your own purposes. Glory be to You, God!