Friday, September 25, 2026
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
Historical Context
John wrote this from Patmos, a small, rocky island off the coast of what is now Turkey. Rome used such islands to exile people it wanted out of the way. John said he was there because he had spoken about Jesus. Scholars are not certain when this happened. Most place it near the end of the first century, under one emperor. A smaller number place it decades earlier, under another. Either way, John was cut off from the churches he loved. He could not travel to them or stand before them to preach.
That isolation underlies the opening line of this letter. Before John describes the visions that fill the rest of the book, he first names the speaker. It is the Lord God, here at the start of everything, here now, and here at whatever comes next. A man stuck on a bare island, writing to churches he could not reach in person, opens with a God nothing had managed to cut off.
Reflection
Alpha and Omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. Calling him that is the writer’s way of saying that God stands at both ends of everything and at every point in between. This is not a claim that God is simply old or strong. It is a claim that whatever is happening to you right now, God was already there before it started and will still be there once it ends.
That is worth sitting with when your own life feels as if it has slipped beyond anyone’s control. John wrote this from exile. He could not fix a single thing about his situation. The first comfort he wrote down was not a promise that things would improve. It was that the one speaking held every part of the story, including the part John could not yet see.