To Encourage You

Revelation 22:13 “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”

I listened to a testimony today of a man and his wife who had come out of a false teaching ministry.  It was a very popular ministry in the Word of Faith movement.  There are many such preachers and teachers today. They’re all over the television, their books are best sellers, and their churches and conferences are filled to overflowing.  They talk about Jesus, salvation, and other related things all the time. So how is their teaching false?  How is it heretical?

Well, there are many reasons, but at its heart is these teachers’ view of who Jesus is.  As this couple came to find out, they were raised in a belief system that, in essence, taught that Jesus is a means to an end. In other words, they had come to believe that following Jesus was a way to become wealthy and to have good health.  They were taught to visualize whatever they wanted, typically in terms of material prosperity in this world, and if they had enough faith, they would one day acquire that thing.  While they might not admit this outright, what they were doing was treating Jesus like a genie.  Again, they viewed Him as a means to the end.

So, is that who Jesus is? Is that a description of the true Jesus, the One Who is the subject of the entire Bible?  Well, the answer is clearly “No,” and to believe in such a “Jesus” is to believe in something other than the true God.  You see, Jesus describes Himself in the verse above with three phrases that mean essentially the same thing. He calls Himself “the Alpha and the Omega (i.e., the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, which is the language in which the New Testament was written), the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”  In using this form of speech, Jesus is expressing a form of emphasis that the Bible sometimes uses to express terms in the superlative.  In biblical language, to repeat a term twice is a form of great emphasis. For example, often in Jesus’ teaching He would begin by saying “truly, truly I say unto you.” In doing this He was telling us to pay close attention, for what He was about to say was critically important.  In Isaiah 6, as in the passage from Revelation 22 above, we have even a higher form of the superlative, where we are told that the seraphim who are in the presence of God never stop saying “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God Almighty.” With these words they are expressing the truth that there is no being in the universe who can come close to approaching the holiness, the purity, the righteousness of God. He is set apart from His Creation in these ways. He is high above all.  A similar thought is being conveyed by Jesus when He tells us that He is the beginning and the end, repeated in so many words, three times as a superlative point of emphasis. 

You see, Jesus is everything.  He began everything because He was before everything.  He is God. He will end everything as well, as He will one day destroy the earth and create a new one. Charles Spurgeon preached on this topic in 1863 in a sermon entitled “Alpha and Omega.”   In that sermon he explains that Jesus is the beginning and the end of the Scriptures, from the first letter in Genesis to the last letter in Revelation, for it’s all about Him. He is the beginning and end of the Law of God, for He alone fulfilled every single part of it. He obeyed its every command in perfection.  Jesus is the beginning and end of every promise of God, for it’s in Him alone that these promises are fulfilled.   And He is the beginning and end of our salvation.  He is the initiator, as He came to earth to seek and save those who were lost, and He alone completed the work of salvation as He proclaimed, “It is finished,” from the cross. 

So, who is the Jesus you are following? Is it the false Jesus that so many of the false teachers are preaching today, nothing more than a means to an end, or is He your everything, your very life, the Beginning and the End? Is He someone you are following to acquire treasures on this earth, the very things that the real Jesus told us not to focus on, or is He your treasure, and to have Him is all you seek and all you need, both in times of “plenty and  hunger, abundance and need” (Philippians 4:12)?

May God help us to distinguish the true Jesus from the false, and the God of the Bible from the gods of this world, for our very eternity depends on knowing the difference.