Alpha and Omega

The OT background is the divine first-and-last self-designation that runs through the second half of Isaiah. Isaiah 41:4 — "I the LORD, the first, and with the last; I am he." Isaiah 44:6 — "I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God." Isaiah 48:12 — "I am he; I am the first, I also am the last." Henry, on Isa 44, reads this self-designation as one of the strongest monotheistic claims in the prophets: the first-and-last formula is exclusive — there is no place outside the divine self for any rival god to occupy. Bullinger, in The Apocalypse, presses the OT background as decisive: when the Revelation places the same formula on Christ's lips, it does so in deliberate continuity with these Isaiah passages. Seiss, in The Apocalypse (1865), treats the OT first-and-last claim as one of the divine prerogatives that the early church recognized as transferred to the risen Christ — a transfer the church reads not as innovation but as recognition.

Revelation 1:8 — "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty." Henry, on Revelation, takes this opening verse as the book's setting of the stage: the divine speaker is named in OT terms before any of the visions are described. Revelation 1:11 has Jesus repeating the formula in some manuscripts, though textual critics note the verse appears in shorter form in the earliest witnesses; the substance is preserved by 22:13 regardless. Revelation 21:6 repeats the formula at the new-creation moment: "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end." Revelation 22:13 seals the book with both formulas paired: "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last." Seiss notes the deliberateness of the placement — first chapter and last chapter, framing the visions, ensuring the reader cannot misplace the speaker. Bullinger's commentary identifies Rev 22:13 as the climactic moment where Christ explicitly takes to himself the Isaiah self-designation that the OT had reserved for YHWH alone.

The PD tradition holds two readings of the title in genuine parallel. Henry leans ontological: the first-and-last formula is not chronological but exhaustive — Jesus is the encompassing reality of which all created things are interior, the one before whom nothing precedes and after whom nothing succeeds. Seiss in his Apocalypse commentary leans eschatological — "He is the source whence all things proceed, and the end to which all things tend" — pressing the formula as the historical sweep of God's purposes from creation through new creation. Bullinger, working from a more dispensationally-shaped framework, reads the formula similarly as bracketing not just being but the entire arc of the divine plan. The two readings need not exclude each other — Henry's ontological frame and Seiss's eschatological frame can both be honored without resolution. Calvin, who comments only briefly on Revelation, treats the formula's transfer to Christ as one of the strongest NT claims to deity — a claim the church was forced to take with full weight as it formulated Trinitarian doctrine. The title therefore stretches across two registers at once: the eternal Son is the encompassing reality of all that is, and he is also the goal toward which the historical drama bends.