“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
Alpha and Omega are just the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet — it's like saying "A to Z." But the claim being made is much bigger than a literary device. This is a claim to encompass everything: the beginning, the end, and everything in between, plus a name for what's true right now — "who is and who was and who is to come."
That's an enormous statement to make about anyone, and Revelation opens with it deliberately, before the strange visions and symbols that follow. Whatever else this book is doing, it starts by anchoring everything to someone who claims to already be present at both ends of time and everywhere in the middle.
You don't have to make sense of the rest of Revelation to sit with this opening claim on its own. It's either wildly overstated, or it's describing a scale of presence and permanence that puts your own current moment — whatever it looks like right now — inside something much larger than it appears to be from the inside.
If your current moment feels like the whole story, this verse is worth reading as a claim about something far bigger surrounding it.
A short video on this is coming soon — for now, read on.