Nielsen’s Nook

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.