Alpha and Omega….and the gate-crashers called prophets

Alpha and Omega are the first and last letters in the Greek alphabet, with 22 letters in between, unlike our 24 letters in between A and Z.

In the New Testament, Jesus is described as the ‘Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end’ (Rev 1v8, 21v6, 22v13). He is, therefore, equated with God, consistent with the trinitarian description of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit throughout the NT.

In our society, we are linear in our thinking about time; we divide time into the past, present, and the future as if the universe is travelling towards an end from a beginning. Just as all living things are born and die, or a book starts with a word and ends with a full stop, so the Universe started and will end. In terms of science, the universe is bookended by the Big Bang, the beginning, and Entropy, an end state of disorder, things falling apart.

The Bible looks at this quite differently.

In the Bible Jesus IS the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end; not was the beginning, and will be the end, but IS the beginning and the end simultaneously. All of what we call time is contained in Christ.

One of the effects of this is to redefine our normal understanding of prophets and prophecy.

A purely linear approach to time views prophecy from the perspective of fulfilment, nailing it to a linear timeline; it either has been fulfilled or will be; it belongs to the past or the future, but a true biblical perspective views prophecy as a gift from an eternal heavenly realm brought into our temporal realm of space and time.

Linear thinking makes mistakes.

For example, the Immanuel prophecy in Isaiah ch7. Isaiah predicts that King Ahaz has only a few years left in his reign before ‘the Lord will bring the king of Assyria upon you’, the sign being a baby called Immanuel. This will occur, Isaiah prophesies, before he’s able to distinguish between good and bad food, the political pendulum will swing against Ahaz i.e. he only has a few years left.

A few years later, Israel was destroyed by Assyria; the prophecy fulfilled.

But the prophecy had a more profound fulfilment in the birth of Christ, so Isaiah 7 wriggles free from its timeline ("The Virgin Shall Conceive": Why Isaiah 7:14 Confuses People - Jean E. Jones for further reading).

‘The wind blows where it wills and you hear the sound of it but cannot tell where it comes from or where it goes. So is everyone born of the Spirit’

When Jesus spoke to Nicodemus at night, he said ‘The wind blows where it wills and you hear the sound of it but cannot tell where it comes from or where it goes. So is everyone born of the Spirit.’

Christian believers are those in whom the Holy Spirit lives. They are not predictable. They move in step with the leading of the Spirit, where and when the wind blows. Some are prophets, who are charged with ‘the word of the Lord’.

Imagine a party in full swing. There are drinks, music, people chatting, interacting, some dancing perhaps, somebody spills a drink, one or two have made it to the loo, most know each other, some feel comfortable, others not so…the usual mix. It’s fairly predictable. It’s begun, it will last, and it will fade to the last cheerio, and the clearing up.

And then, midway through, a man or a woman, or a child, appears. The host and a few of his/her friends don’t recognise this person – they weren’t invited. The gate-crasher. How will it go from here?

The gate-crasher and the host end up talking. The host offers the gate-crasher a drink. The gate-crasher answers by saying, ‘No, it’s you that needs a drink. You’re really thirsty. You’ve run dry. I am here to tell you…’.

The bible says the word of God is sharper than a two-edged sword; it divides.

There are two possible outcomes. The host could react, ‘You can leave now, how rude…’ or he/she is stopped in his/her tracks. Maybe there are tears, all the external pretence drops away, and the real issues of her spiritual aridity are laid bare, not before the prophet, but before the love of God, who loves the host enough to send someone…a prophet.

Play that scenario in a church setting: the church is well organised, and people have their roles. Sunday by Sunday is similar. It’s a popular destination. The preachers are engaging, the musicians motivate the people to worship, and those behind the scenes do their admin duties with joy…this is a smoothly run gathering. And in walks a prophet. The person on ‘welcoming’ duty speaks to the prophet, ‘Welcome, let me show you where you can sit’. ‘No’, comes the reply, ‘You need to know where you are sitting. You are an invited guest. Highly honoured. He’s waiting for you to take your seat’.

What will happen? The same two options. Either acceptance or rejection. Such is the experience of the prophet.

Accept or Reject?

There are plenty of secular versions. Gordon Ramsay’s ‘Secret Service’, Fiver in Watership Down, John Anderston in Minority Report, come to mind.

Any individual, family, community, or even a nation, can either accept or reject the word of the Lord, whether it comes from a gatecrashing prophet, unknown to the community (an extreme example) or from within. ‘Now in the church in Antioch there were certain prophets and teachers.’ Clearly, this church had identified some as teachers and some as prophets and knew how to distinguish between the two; the ‘gate-crashing prophets’ had been incorporated into the life of that community.

In Demos Shakarian's book The Happiest People on Earth, Efim Klubniken, an illiterate Russian who lived in the Armenian village of Kara Kala near Mount Ararat, received a vision after a seven-day fast when he was eleven years old. The prophecy warned that a period of immense tragedy and mass murder was coming to the region and that all Christians must flee to the west coast of the United States. Demos Shakarian's grandfather and other Pentecostal families heeded this warning, sold their property, and emigrated to America in the early 1900s. Those who remained behind, including the entire population of Kara Kala, were massacred in the Armenian Genocide that began in 1914.

Christ, the Alpha and Omega, loves the church. He is the bridegroom, and we are His bride. The church is His body. Prophets bring the ‘word of the Lord’ to woo the church back to its first love, to warn, to encourage – it’s the language of love, and, even if the prophetic word has a sharp edge, it finds its origin in same love that took Christ to the cross.

Remember Jesus’s tears, ‘He saw the city (Jerusalem) and wept, ‘If only you had known the things that make for peace…but they are hidden from your eyes’