richard2

Hi, friends,

In the Book of Revelations 22:13, Jesus said, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End."

I don't understand this statement. God is an eternal being, which means that He never had a beginning and will never have an end. How is the above statement in the Book of Revelations possible for God? I can think of a few ways, but I will let the Christians chime in first to give us a fuller understanding of this passage.

Thanks,

Richard

Anitra

There has been quite a lot of historical, linguistic, and textual analysis of the Bible, and I think it has cast a lot of doubt on whether the man Jesus actually said that. Most liberal Christians including myself, in fact, are heartily of the opinion that Christian history would have been much better off if the Book of Revelations had been lost entirely.

The same critical scholarship, btw, has made a good case that Jesus did not claim to be God and none of His original followers claimed He was God and the whole God/Man thing was a later development that came in from Greek traditions.

If one does want to speculate on what this might mean if God really did say it, it is simply saying that God is eternal, without a beginning or end.

In my own personal theology, God and the universe are coterminous and coeternal. It seems to me logically null to speak of anything being before existence, after existence, or outside of existence, therefore God did not come "before existence" nor does God come "after existence," nor can existence itself be said to have a "beginning" or an "end" or limits with something "beyond" them. The whole is a system with all parts both affecting and being affected.

Human minds are finite, and in order to solve problems we delimit them and model them in terms of cause-and-effect; it is wise to remember that the model is not the world. If all things have a cause it is an infinite regression with no First Cause. Emergent Order is a more workable model; Shit Happens, but even random interaction of random shit is a relationship, and relationships generate patterns, and patterns extend themselves and interact and generate more complex patterns, and so on and so forth and you've got a universe. This is how human bodies grow; matter becoming organized until at a certain level of organization it generates self-awareness and self-direction. Perhaps imagining the universe as a growing body that generates a self-awareness at a certain level of organization is more poetic than scientific, but then, I regard religion as more poetry than science.

Revelations may be read as poetry, for that matter, if one has a taste for apocalyptic poetry.

ichabod crane

I am a very liberal Christian, and a student of theology, and I couldn't disagree with this statement more. First of all, the name of the book is Revelation singular, not Revelations plural (from the first word in the book, apokalupsis, nominative singular). Secondly, the book is a literary masterpiece and one of the finest examples of the genre of apocalyptic in existence. Our understanding of the ancient world would be poorer if the book had not survived.

The book of Revelation is not historical, but apocalyptic, a genre of writing that emerged in post-exilic Judaism. The Jesus portrayed in it is entirely an imaginative creation. In this case, the allusion is to Isaiah 41:4b, "I, the LORD, am first, and will be with the last". It seems that the author of Revelation expanded on the "first and the last" formula in Isaiah with "Alpha and Omega" and "beginning and end".

As for its theological significance, I don't think it's meant overly literally. But in any case there is no concensus amongst Christian theists about God's relationship to time; some think he is a temporal being and others insist he is atemporal. The verse in Revelation is not meant literally and I think it would be a mistake to read either view into the text. There are also all manner of explanations about the divinity or otherwise of Jesus and what this verse might imply in that regard.

Anitra

You are very right, and I apologize for slipping on that myself.
Okay, I acknowledged it's great apocalyptic poetry, okay? The problems have been created by folks who took it literally. It is wrong-target to blame the book for all that literalists have done with it, but it is awfully tempting to wish it had been tossed with the Apocrypha, nevertheless.

ichabod crane

Fair enough! Of course you can't blame the author of Revelation for its canonization. I don't believe in a canon at all; there are just a bunch of writings related to a religion which became known as Christianity, each of which has to be assessed historically and theologically on its own merits.

Anitra

Amen, bro;!

Magus55

God is the beginning and the end. Before God there was nothing, and there is no after God. Everything starts and stops with Him. He spans all eternity, beginning to end.

Magus55

For the most part, even most conservative Christians don't take all of Revelation literally. Even I thoroughly agree its very symbolic. The woman described in Revelation is Israel. The elders under the altar are believers watching over God's judgement. Now, I do think some of the stuff in Revelation is literal, for example John's vision of Heaven. I'm undecided as to whether the 4 horseman are literal, or just symbolic for their respective judgements becoming greatly magnified on Earth. I do believe the judgements will take place though.

Revelation is the most difficult book in the Bible. Its an incredible book, but very prophetic and visionary.

Chili

I see this slightly different and would say that the Revelation is no more apocalyptic than the Gospel and it is no more a genre than the Gospels. The difference is that the Gospels give an overview of what to expect after rebirth and the Revelation of what to expect after the Resurrection of our mind and body.

The Alpha is given at rebirth and the Omega is our own contribution and therefore Jesus WAS (as oposed to "will be" the last) the beginning and the end. This same can be true for us and the apocalypse can be ours. Note, "will be in the OT and "was" (had become) in the NT (or there would be no NT).

Without the Revelation the mythology would not be complete and that would mean that there could not be a Genesis either. After that the whole bible would crumble and we should be gratefull that at least some of us have made it to heaven and were able to tell us about it.