Understanding Life from A to Z

understanding life from A to Z

Message by Tom Cowan, Interim Lead Pastor Sunday Sermon for March 25, 2012 Scripture Passage Revelation 1:1-8 Vancouver Chinese Baptist Church Vancouver, Canada

Revelation 1:1-8 1 The revelation – the apocalypse - from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant J o h n , 2 w h o t e s t i fi e s t o everything he saw—that is, the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ. 3 Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.

Greetings and Doxology 4 John, To the seven churches in the province of Asia: Grace and peace to you from him who is, and who was, and who is to come, and from the seven spirits before his throne, 5 and from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.

To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, 6 and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father—to him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen.

7 “Look, he is coming with the clouds,” and “every eye will see him, even those who pierced him”; and all peoples on earth “will mourn because of him.”

So shall it be! Amen.

21:6 - I Am the alpha and omega – the beginning and the end.

8 “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.”

Each builds on the other.

Lets see if you have been listening. What is my favourite TV show? Watching Jeopardy this past week, it was a college championship. Final Jeopardy question where everything stands or falls. You win or lose.

Question: from the third letter in greek alphabet this word means to cover everything, GAMUT. We might say something like, it goes all the way from A to Z. This is exactly how the apostle John describes Jesus. Three times in Revelation John declares who Jesus is. Everything we are looking for we will find in Jesus, and he uses two Greek letters, alpha and omega, which are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet.

This description comes 3 times and each builds on the previous one.

1:8 - I am the alpha and omega says the lord God.

2 | Understanding Life from A to Z

22:13 - I am the alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.

Alpha and Omega, first and last letters of Greek alphabet.

Beginning and end: beginning, word is arche, which gives us our word architect Hebrews 12:2 - Jesus is the author = architect. The one who sees the building completed even before anything is constructed.

End = telos. The final purpose.

English word is teleology. What is the final goal of something?

What are we trying to create?

Our son Peter when he was a little boy, loved to build things out of scraps of wood. A workman came to our house one day, asked him, what are you building? Peter looked at him very seriously and said, how do I know? I’m not finished yet!

That is a lack of teleology. I have a sense that we are often like that when it comes to things. We are not sure what we are doing, but when it comes to life, we need teleology. Steven Covey says everything is created

twice. Once in the mind and then in action, he says we start at the end and work backwards.

First and last First = protos – prototype Last. The end. The finality.

As we have seen, each of the I AM statements that Jesus makes looks back into a definition or statement about God in the OT. Jesus is drawing on an OT declaration of who God is.

This one goes back to Isaiah 44:6 I am the first and the last; apart from me there is no God. Who then is like me? Let him proclaim it.

So Jesus as he always does is aligning himself with the person of God. So Jesus is saying that he is at the beginning and the end of life. And everything in between.

We will unpack this in three major movements. Each one nests inside the others, and will start with the largest perspective.

CREATION Creation is the landscape of the Bible. It sets the stage we walk on.

It begins. In the beginning, God we do not know how the

complex process all happened.

There was no TV crew there to bring the event to the 6pm news. We tend to think that God was standing all alone, looking over the chaos of whatever was there and ordering it from chaos to cosmos. But if we read more closely, we see that Jesus was also involved in creation.

John 1 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

It reminds us of the essential truth that Jesus also existed before the world was. He stood with the Father at the beginning of creation. He is in fact the agent of creation. Everything happened through him.

Aristotle called this the First Cause.

Jesus is also the one who holds everything together. It is the activity of the mind of Jesus always at work which creates and keeps creating cosmos order. The Universe is not r a n d o m . T h e l a w s o f t h e universe such as the law of gravity. Not work one day and don’t work the next. We could not live in such a random or arbitrary world. We need a

world that has order and Christ is the one who keeps everything in order.

Colossians 1: 15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Note: he holds all things together.

Jesus himself reminds us that his earthly life was a short time of humanity between two eternities. Jesus did not come into existence at his birth or even at creation. He lived with the Father.

John 17 4 I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. 5 And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.

So Christ stands as the bookends, the alpha and omega, of creation, giving it the order and stability of his being.

When God and Christ created, they created out of love and for love. Their desire

3 | Understanding Life from A to Z

was to move all creation in the direction of their love.

varieties is in conflict with God’s truth.

This is not just the words of good and correct theology. This is the language of praise and language of adoration. We are to join the chorus and the symphony of all creation and worship God and Christ.

The idea of reincarnation has its beginnings in India, 800 – 1,000 years BC. It is closely associated with the eastern concept of Karma. The law of Karma links the evil deeds of a past life to a present or future life. So we want to build up good karma in this life for the next life. The objective of all reincarnation is ultimately to fuse with God, to become God. Some religions talk about the wheel of life, and you find that in Disney’s the Lion King.

But the landscape of creation was empty, ready for some new occupants. So God said, let us make man/humanity in our image.

HUMAN HISTORY Nestled within creation is human history. And again it has a beginning/end.

G e n 1 : 2 7 – a r e s i m p l y 3 marvellous lines of Hebrew poetry. Three lines. Each with four beats.

27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

Here we have the creation. The conception of three great things that form us as human being: 1. Personality 2. Identity 3. Sexuality H i s t o r y i s l i n e a r . I t i s teleological. It means that it is going somewhere. It is not cyclical. So reincarnation in all its

4 | Understanding Life from A to Z

Christianity stands opposed to any kind of reincarnation. The idea of the wheel of life. History i s l i n e a r . I t i s g o i n g somewhere. There is still a final act to be played out.

Acts 17 – Paul’s sermon to this sophisticated city of Athens.

30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.31 For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”

A linear view of history also puts the triumphs and tragedies of the human experience into the context of the final act of God.

In human history there have b e e n m a n y t r i u m p h s , discoveries and exploits that have advanced the cause of h u m a n l i f e . M e d i c a l breakthroughs, expeditions to climb Everest, cross Antarctica, going to the moon. Large and small conquests that have moved us ahead in the human experience.

There have also been days of tragedy and darkness, world wars, the Holocaust, September 11th. Evidence of unimaginable cruelty in places like Cambodia.

This past week, terrorist in France who killed 3 soldiers and then 3 children and a Rabbi in France. That leave us wondering, how can one human being do such terrible things to another human being?

There are moments of splendor and victory, and there are dark stains of tragedy and cruelty. Each reminding us in different ways that we have not arrived, and so we should not become proud or arrogant.

History does not reach its climax or zenith because of our discoveries, and history does not end because of our evil.

History is simply bigger than us.

God is the one ... in whom we live and move and have our being. Acts 17.

We seen these two extremes as we soon enter what we call Holy w e e k . I t b e g i n s w i t h t h e

triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, and if that is all we read, his life would have been a great success. But it ends with his death, and if that is all we read, his life would have been a colossal failure.

These two events have to be seen in a larger context and framework of what God was doing and is doing in history.

Even as they hammered that last nails into the hands and feet of J e s u s . T h e y t h o u g h t t o themselves, well, that’s the end of that, but it was not over. God still had resurrection in his plan. History was not finished, and the one they nailed to the cross will still stand when everything else has fallen.

S o c r e a t i o n . T h e n h u m a n history, and nestled within that is our own story.

PERSONAL PILGRIMAGE Nestled within the grand sweep of history are our own small l i v e s . O u r p e r s o n a l s t o r y , p l a n t e d l i k e a t i n y fragment of time within the grand sweep of eternity.

We need another scripture to enlarge this idea of Christ being at the beginning and end of our own story.

Phil 1:6 that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of

Christ Jesus.

We should have an amazing breath-taking understanding of o u r s a l v a t i o n . I t s a y s i n Ephesians, God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world. That we would be holy and blameless...

God’s love for us and our faith in Christ did not begin the day we accepted Jesus. It was formed and born. Conceived in the heart of God before the very beginning of time. That is not to make us proud or a r r o g a n t , r a t h e r t h e v e r y opposite. It is to move us to humility and gratitude.

Jesus is nor only at the beginning, he is also the finisher, waiting for us to fall over the finishing line and fall into his arms.

Son has run the Ironman several times. When you manage to cross the line, you get a t-short that says FINISHER. So these two pictures of Jesus, author and finisher, alpha and omega, form a rainbow over our lives, inviting us to live under the arch of their safety and protection.

This is not just a theological truth. It is a truth to be applied and lived out every day. It means that:

about. He is the one who is ahead of me every step of the way.

There is nothing I will face in a day that I will have to face alone. Jesus has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you.

There is nothing I will face in a day which is beyond the strength God gives me and which is beyond his love for me.

So Jesus stands as the bookends to our own lives, giving our lives an axis for purpose and meaning, giving our lives direction, the certainty that they are going somewhere.

Without this sense of beginning and end, we are doomed to be little more than a wanderer, adrift, living without a map and without a destination. This is whet at best leads to existentialism, and at worst nihilism. We have nothing to live for and nothing worth dying for.

It is this sad conclusion that sadly leads some people to suicide.

So as Alpha and Omega, Jesus answers some of the deepest questions of the human heart. How to understand life form A to z.

What is the first chapter of our history as the human race? What is the last chapter? What is our

There is nothing I will face in a day that God does not know

5 | Understanding Life from A to Z

beginning and origin? What is our destiny?

Jesus says that these critical questions are wrapped up in who he is. He stands at the beginning and he will stand at the end. He is both arche and telos, and this bit in between which we call life is not a random haphazard jig-saw puzzle. It can be lived with meaning and purpose, with direction and with hope.

The final act of our lives is to finish well. Paul wrote, 7 I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.

8 Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.

6 | Understanding Life from A to Z