Nielsen’s Nook

My God, I love Thee;
Not because I hope for heav’n thereby,
Nor yet because who love Thee not must die eternally.

Thou , O my Jesus, Thou didst me upon the cross embrace;
For me didst bear the nails,
The nails and spear, and manifold disgrace.

Why, then why, O blessed Jesus Christ, should I not love Thee well?
Not for the hope of winning heav’n, or of escaping hell;
Not with the hope of gaining aught, not seeking a reward;
But as Thyself hast loved me, O ever loving Lord!

E’en so I love Thee, and will love, and in Thy praise will sing;
Solely because Thou art my God, and my Eternal King.

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Taken from the March 26, 2006 Order for the Worship of God at Park Cities Presbyterian Church (Dallas, Texas), p. 4. You should have heard this sung. I still hear the reverberating beauty.

Revelation 21:6-7 (NA26) 6 καὶ εἶπεν μοι· γέγοναν. ἐγώ [εἰμι] τὸ ἄλφα καὶ τὸ ὦ, ἡ ἀρχὴ καὶ τὸ τέλος. ἐγὼ τῷ διψῶντι δώσω ἐκ τῆς πηγῆς τοῦ ὕδατος τῆς ζωῆς δωρεάν. 7 ὁ νικῶν κληρονομήσει ταῦτα καὶ ἔσομαι αὐτῷ θεὸς καὶ αὐτὸς ἔσται μοι υἱός.

6) And he said to me, “These things have come into being. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the Completion. I will give freely to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life. (7) The one who is overcomes will inherit these things and I will be his God, and he will be my son. (author’s translation)

The Bible begins with Paradise and ends with Paradise, and in this way it functions as a kind of merism.¹ In the Genesis account that paradise is lost, while in the Revelation account it is restored. The Garden of Eden and the New Jerusalem stand as cosmic bookends to the voluminous story of God in Human History. The one who orchestrated the end from the beginning is the one who composed the entirety of the prose of History which lies in between, thus emphasizing God’s sovereignty over all that is, was and will be.

Alpha and Omega

This same God declares himself to be the Alpha and the Omega at the beginning of the book of Revelation (1:8) and then at the end of the book in 21:6 and 22:13. He also refers to himself as the Beginning and the Completion (τέλος) in 21:6 and as the First and the Last (εσχατος) in 1:17 and 22:13. By using these merisms as bookends in the book of Revelation, John is emphasizing the sovereign rule of God over all things.² He is also emphasizing that the End or Completion of all things, is not εσχατον, but rather εσχατος.³ The significance being that the Beginning, the End and all that lies in between is not some impersonal neuter but rather a Person working his will in time and space, a phenomenon commonly called History.

Beale suggests that Isaiah 41-48 also contains similar merisms, which may have also given rise to the one in view in Rev. 21:6 (e.g., Isa 41:4; 44:6; 48:12). Interestingly, although there are small differences in the LXX and the BHS in these passages, the nature of the merism is conceptually preserved in both. However, in light of those differences John apparently had in mind the Hebrew variation.

It is on this all encompassing sovereign basis, seen in this merism pair, that the Lord declares that all his promises, particularly those in view in 21:1-5, “have come into being” (γέγοναν). The significance of the perfect aspect of this plural verb seems to be under emphasized in most of the English translations, which generally translate it as “It is done” (e.g., NIV, NRSV, NASB). It is not the abstract that has been checked off, but the promises of God which have come into being as reality.⁴ All things will have been made new and the record is written down because God’s word is “faithful and true” (c.f., 21:5).

Further, these statements of all encompassing sovereignty are set forth as definitive of God’s person in light of the εγώ είμι phrase which precedes them. This hearkens back to the Gospel of John in which the Apostle seeks to identify Jesus with the burning bush theophany found in Exodus 3:14.⁵ This is to say that “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the Completion” is a statement which drives the reader to both the Christotelic nature of history and the Divinity of Christ, who just as YHWH declares himself to be the First and the Last in Isaiah so also Christ, the second person of the Trinity, makes the same statement about himself here in Revelation 21:6.

In summary, the Alpha and Omega merism is paralleled by the Beginning and the Completion merism. These literary devices serve to fix Revelation firmly in the context of biblical history and to establish the basis for hope in the promises of God therein revealed to the church of all ages.

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¹ A merism is a grammatical device by which two poles are taken as representation of the whole.
² Beale, Gregory K. The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text. in The New International Greek Testament Commentary. Edited by I. Howard Marshall and Donald A. Hagner. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) p. 1055.
³ Caird, George Bradford. The Revelation of St. John the Divine. 1st ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1966) p. 266. Caird makes the statement that “the word εσχατον (neuter) does not occur in the New Testament.” While the neuter form occurs in Luke 12:59 in the singular accusative and in other neuter forms – in Mt. 12:45; Lk 11:26; Acts 1:8, 13:47; 2 Pe 2:20; and Rev. 2:19 – his statement per context seems to mean that whenever the End (εσχατον) is in view it is always spoken of as a person rather than an impersonal event.
⁴ Kistemaker, Simon J. Exposition of the Book of Revelation. Vol. 20 of New Testament Commentary. (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2001) p. 559.
⁵ ibid.

For those of you interested the seven part series entitled “Essential Righteousness”, feel free to listen to the mp3 of the sermon. It is about 25 minutes long and was preached in February 2006 to the North Texas Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church of America for my licensure exam.

What is freely offered in the gospel? Matthew 11:28 among other verses gives us the Lord’s answer:

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Christ offers himself, with “the whole gamut of redemptive grace … included.” (Collected Writings, vol 1. p 82). This is of course in the context of Union with Christ, which is a triune union.

It is thus union with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the particularity that each person sustains to men and in the distinguishing grace that each bestows in the economy of salvation. To nothing less are sinners invited in Christ’s overture of himself. (ibid)

And so if it is Christ who is offered then we may only speak of an atonement that has in fact wrought redemption. It is not an opportunity for salvation that is offered but Christ himself, who is salvation. Further, while the general love of God for humanity is not to be discounted, the offer is of the Gospel which is distinguished by God’s particular love for His sheep, His church (John 10:10-29; Ephesians 5:25-27). Thirdly, it is only in Christ that the wealth and love of the Gospel are existential. (ibid, p. 83).

Murray then concludes in his typical economy of precision. The free offer of the Gospel demands faith and commitment - not to a proposition (e.g., believe and be saved) but commitment to the Salvation, to Jesus Christ. The whole Christ is freely offered and “faith is first of all commitment to him. It is receiving and resting upon him alone for salvation.” (ibid, p. 84).

For me Murray moves me towards contemplation here, away from purely propositional thoughts, though not removing the place of the thought from the thing being contemplated. There is sort of sigh that I can hear in my soul, “Oh God, thank you that you have saved me on the basis of Christ Jesus and not on my ability to articulate the intricacies of all that you have done in History to accomplish this!” Indeed, “wherever there is faith as slender as one strand of the spider’s web, there the fulness of redeeming grace is active. ‘Him that cometh unto me,’ said Jesus, ‘I will in no wise cast out.’ (John 6:37).” (ibid, p. 85).

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Murray, John. Collected Writings of John Murray. Volume 1: The Claims of Truth. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1976. Reprinted 1989.