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Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Yahweh - Scripture's Grand unending Finale

Revelation 1:8 "I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, "who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty."

Yesterday we saw how Jesus revealed to us the depths of the meaning of the name Yahweh as He revealed in seven sayings Himself as Yahweh in human flesh.  We've already noted that in the Old Testament the name Yahweh is shown in its breadth.  It is among God's most common names and the immenisty of its meaning takes over 1000 years to unfold in the more than 22,000 verses of the Old Testament.

With that said, we today want to see to what Heights we can gain as we gaze upon this most sacred of names.  By now in the text of scripture we have discovered Christ Himself to be inseperably linked to this name.  It was not that He never was Yahweh - for truly there never was a time He was not Yahweh.  Rather in the New Testament His coming and taking upon Himself a human nature meant that we could truly know Him in the fulness of flesh and blood.

The author of the Gospel in which we saw the depth of the name Yahweh is the writer of Revelation.  Lets look today at the "Height" of the name of Yahweh as revealed in the glorified Christ.

The Heights of "I AM" or "Yahweh"
John begins and ends this final book of the Bible with this most exalted references to the Beloved God/Man - Jesus Christ.  Revelation 1:8, quoted above, uses the name "Alpha and Omega" in conjunction with the term "Yahweh".  As a Jew, though John was writing in Greek (those letters being the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet) He would had been thinking in Hebrew. 

The "beginning" reminds us of the Hebrew name for the first book of the Bible, the book of beginnings, Genesis.  Christ is the one "through Whom and by Whom" all things came into being. (Colossians 1:16).  Then the term "Omega" would had referred to the end, which in the Jewish mind signified the only one who could bring all of history and Eternity to its completion - Yahweh Himself. (Psalm 72:19-20 for instance; also Isaiah 65-66)

What John is doing here by the Holy Ghost is taking us up the vertical ascending mountain range of Christ's Divine character.  He is Omnipresent, all places at all times (as seen in the title "the one who was, is and is to come").  Then verse 8 ends with the title "The Almighty".  in the Greek, we could translate this as "The Omnipotent One". 

Yahweh in His Grandfinale
But now we travel to Revelation 22:13 where Jesus says: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” The Exalted Christ makes this statement in the context of the revelation of the New Heavens and New Earth.  He is the fulness and completeness of God's revelation in terms of His Person and His Purposes.  All the glory of the Triune God will be displayed before our eyes in the Person of the Son. 

Truly Yahweh spoke through a burning bush to Moses and spoke further through the Theophanies (manifestations of God) throughout the Old Testament.  In the Four Gospels we beheld Yahweh in human flesh, concealing the uncreated Light of His presence while He walked here on earth.  What we see going on in Revelation 22 is the combination of both those motifs - a fully Divine Christ speaking as the glorified human Jesus - the Height of the biblical revelation of Yahweh.