What did Jesus mean when he said he was the Alpha and Omega? Why does John call him The Word? All this and more on this episode of The Theonauts
Alpha and Omega
“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”
-Revelation 22:13 (ESV)
What is Jesus saying here? We hope to show how Jesus is claiming to be God. After all Isaiah stated:
Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel
and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts:
“I am the first and I am the last;
besides me there is no god.
-Isaiah 44:6 (ESV)
John also makes some claims about Jesus being God in John 1:
So what “word” is John referring to here? Going back to Revelation 22, Jesus said, “I am the Alpha and the Omega.” This is the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, but Jesus didn’t actually speak Greek, he spoke Aramaic. So the first and last letters of the Aramaic and Hebrew alphabet is Aleph and Tav. Which oddly enough is a word found in the Old Testament. This word goes untranslated because we really don’t know what it means. Even stranger is the fact that this word appears exactly where John said it would… in the beginning.
So if Jesus is The Word (Aleph Tav), then Genesis 1:1 completely translated would read: In the beginning, God, Jesus, created the heavens and the Earth. It is also a neat study to look for this word in the Old Testament, for example, Zechariah 12:10 uses it in a prophecy about the Messiah. But if we look at this word even closer in the original pictographic version of the Hebrew alphabet, there are even more insights. Aleph used to be drawn to look like an ox and Tav was drawn like a cross. So this word looks like this:
This is just the tip of the iceberg… In this episode, we also discuss how the first word of the Bible is an important prophecy, how the name Jesus or Yeshua is significant to him being God, and how the very name of God, YHWH is a pictographic image of Jesus.