The Alpha and the Omega

Comprehensive is a comforting word. It feels like a promise; it feels like perfection. If you pick up a book with the word "comprehensive" in the title, you feel guaranteed that whatever you need to know about the subject of the book will be in there. And you sigh as you realize all you have to do now is find it.

A popular slangy way to say "comprehensive" is "A to Z". If a book or website or person claims to have or know such-and-such "A to Z!" (the exclamation point seems to be a mandatory part of the phrase) it is claiming that nothing has been left out and no stone has been left unturned - indeed, not even one letter of the alphabet has been left in peace during the creator's exhaustive search for and organization of information on the topic of interest.

As tacky and commercial as the term "A to Z" seems compared to a solid, Latin-derived word like "comprehensive," it is more expressively visceral. It reaches more people at a level easily understood since their childhood. Just as Jesus Christ is our justification and sanctification, so does expressiveness justify and sanctify grammatically improper terms. The Bible, translated into language even a child could understand (for good reason; see Luke 18:16, Matthew 19:14 and Matthew 18:3) has always been a book of the people and the people's language.

It is not surprising then that in the last book of the Bible we find that familiar comforting guarantee, as contemporary and apropos of the moment as A to Z filing systems, that God is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. It is a simple statement of truth in simple terms anyone can understand. It speaks to the common sense in humanity which is so unpretentious that language with its rules shuns it as too common. Yet the Bible does not deal with pretentious rules, airs and propriety. God speaks to people, not ideas. His words to us tell us who He is, and in no uncertain terms.

"I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last." I am everything! God is saying. I am all you will ever need. Not only am I all you will ever need, I am all you are able to need. Everything leads back to Me. Without Me there is nothing, not even a void-of-space nothing, because that's a definable concept and therefore is something. Nothing.

God is everything. He was here before us and he will be here after us. The buck stops here, right back where it started. There is no escaping God. He's comprehensive. Nothing is left out; nothing is left undone. Here is God's guarantee: whatever you are looking for, it is in Him. All you have to do now is find it, so start looking.

And... feel free to quote me!