In “other” Words: Alpha and Omega

“If we could under­stand every­thing God does, then He’d have to be a small god — small enough to fit in our lit­tle minds.” ~ Randy Alcorn ~

I remem­ber sit­ting in church as a young child, hear­ing the pas­tor read Rev­e­la­tion 1:8 and being totally mys­ti­fied:
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.”

Alpha and omega. Begin­ning and end. And every­thing between. I recall mar­veling at how far back the begin­ning must have been and con­tem­plat­ing how far into the future the end would be. Even­tu­ally, I would decide that those con­cepts were beyond any­thing I could under­stand and busy myself with some­thing else.

As I grew, I stud­ied math, of course. We learned the con­cept of infin­ity. From time to time we would attempt to solve an equa­tion, only to learn that there was no defin­i­tive answer because the result was infi­nite, i.e., “the assumed limit of a sequence, series, etc., that increases with­out bound.” Invari­ably, I would be the stu­dent who tried to take the oper­a­tion of the equa­tion a cou­ple more steps, only to real­ize that yes, there was no end in sight.

In col­lege, I ful­filled a lower divi­sion sci­ence require­ment by tak­ing a basic astron­omy course and again was con­fronted with the con­cept of infin­ity when try­ing to quan­tify the universe’s com­po­si­tion. There are infi­nite stars, galax­ies, atmos­pheres … I was always intrigued by the idea that you could get into a space­ship and fly in any direc­tion for­ever, never reach­ing the end of space.

When I think about how bound­less and lim­it­less the Divine Cre­ator is, I real­ize that those mem­o­ries form the basis for my con­cept of Yah­weh, Jeho­vah, God … even the num­ber of descrip­tive names we use is vir­tu­ally end­less, demon­strat­ing yet again that the Spirit is not sub­ject to any sort of limitation.

Have you ever told some­one, “I just can’t get my head around” a con­cept or idea? When I’ve found myself feel­ing over­whelmed, con­fused, shocked, I have from time to time expressed my feel­ings by say­ing that or sim­i­lar phrases such as “I can’t process it” or “it’s too much.” Because such a bound­less life force can­not be con­strained by our lim­ited abil­ity to appre­ci­ate and under­stand its inher­ent qual­i­ties, we can­not under­stand the ratio­nale for all of the Divine’s actions. To fully under­stand every­thing the Divine does, we would have to be famil­iar with and ana­lyze all aspects of the Divine’s exis­tence which is, of course, impossible.

This is where the con­cept of faith comes into play. And that is, of course, not only a sub­ject about which we could research and write infi­nitely, but for all of us in vary­ing degrees at par­tic­u­lar times in our lives, the most dif­fi­cult to under­stand of the core pre­cepts of belief. Like the apos­tles, we cry out, “Increase our faith!” (Luke 17:5) We are admon­ished that liv­ing by faith is a sign of right­eous­ness (Romans 1:17) and through faith we will be jus­ti­fied (Romans 3:28). And encour­aged not to lose heart because what is unseen is eter­nal. (2 Corinthi­ans 4:18)

I don’t know about you, but it is extremely dif­fi­cult for me to just accept things on face value, on faith. We live in the world and spend our days con­form­ing to the world’s rules: Obtain­ing ver­i­fi­ca­tion, proof, doc­u­men­ta­tion, memo­ri­al­iza­tion of events, facts, sit­u­a­tions, circumstances.

Can you imag­ine going into a bank and secur­ing a loan by merely telling the loan offi­cer to have faith that you will repay the money? Or expect­ing a teacher to give you credit for tak­ing a class by hav­ing faith that you learned the lessons pre­sented, rather than requir­ing you to demon­strate your knowl­edge of the con­cepts cov­ered? Would you want your doc­tor to per­form surgery on you with­out first per­form­ing diag­nos­tic tests and for­mu­lat­ing a diag­no­sis, telling you to sim­ply have faith in his/her assess­ment of your con­di­tion and belief that you need surgery? How absurd is the idea that a pros­e­cu­tor could secure a con­vic­tion in a crim­i­nal pro­ceed­ing by ask­ing the jury to have faith in his/her con­clu­sion that the defen­dant com­mit­ted the crime rather than pre­sent­ing unas­sail­able evi­dence of his/her guilt?

Yet we are com­manded to have faith in a God that we can­not see, can­not under­stand, can­not con­cep­tu­al­ize using any famil­iar method­ol­ogy. And to believe that, in all things, God works for the good of those who love him (Romans 8:28).

Whew! I can’t wrap my head around all of it.

The good news is this: I don’t have to!

I ques­tion, I seek knowl­edge, I strive to under­stand, but do so within this con­tex­tual frame­work: The Divine Cre­ator is the alpha and omega, the begin­ning and end, who is, who was, who is to come, the Almighty — not a small God at all, inca­pable of fit­ting into my lim­ited con­scious­ness. Life is frus­trat­ing and over­whelm­ing at times, but my faith is renewed daily through grace and the con­fi­dence that “[n]ow we see but a poor reflec­tion as in a mir­ror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (1 Corinthi­ans 13:12)

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