We have been visiting a picture gallery in the Gospels, looking at those self-portraits hung there by Jesus, sketched in with sayings of His that begin with the words "I AM ..." In every case there follows a little word picture which presents us with some aspect of His character and His work. In turning to the last of them this morning, reflect again that each of them constituted a claim to deity.

"I am the Light of the World," He said.
To a people who from their earliest days had associated the presence of God in their midst with the 'Shekinah Glory,' the wondrous luminescence that had shone above the Ark of the Covenant, there was no mistaking what He meant. In Christ, the glory of God Himself had shone forth, casting its light across the whole face of human life. Psalm 27, 104:2, Isaiah 60:19

"I am the Good Shepherd," He said.
In the Scriptures of His people that was how God represented Himself to them. Only He could so guide, protect and care for them as to bear that title. Psalm 23, Ezekiel 34

"I am the Bread of Life," He said.
It belongs to God alone to give us the 'Bread from Heaven' to nourish the deepest reaches of personal life. Exodus 16:15, Lev 21:22

"I am the True Vine," He said.
Only He can sustain the deepest springs of community life. Apart from Him, all our striving after a fruitful life together is vain endeavour. If this is not to claim that Christ is to us what only the Creator and Redeemer God can be, then language has no meaning at all. Psalm 80:8-13, Isaiah 5:1-7

"I am the True and Living Way," He said.
As surely as mankind's journey is to go home finally to God, so surely was Jesus claiming to be both the inspiration and the goal of that journey. Psalm 27:11, 67:2, 25:10 57:3; Isaiah 43:16, 19; Rev 15:3

"I am the Resurrection and the Life," He said.
An extraordinary claim, which no man could have invented. It can mean nothing less than that the power to hold us in eternal and joyous being beyond the reach even of death is His alone. It belongs to Him as it belongs only to God to "have life in Himself," and the power to give it. Genesis 2:7 (John 5:26), Psalm 16:11, 36:9, Proverbs 8:35

All these statements are so startling, falling as they do from human lips, that you are obliged to say, "Either this man was the most self-opinionated lunatic that ever drew breath, or else He is what He claimed, so calmly and confidently, to be." You cannot say the silly thing so often said, "He was a great religious teacher, perhaps the greatest of them." From the things He said, that is an opinion of Him you cannot hold; it is not an option, for on that level the claims He made for Himself are outrageous. If the life that lay behind these utterances was that of a lunatic, one can only say that it was a lunacy far, far better than our sanity!

It is strange (or is it?) how irresistibly men are drawn - even the most stubbornly unbelieving of men - to acknowledge Him.

George Bernard Shaw: "I am ready to admit that after contemplating the world and human nature for sixty years, I see no way out of the world's misery but the way of Christ's will."

Bertrand Russell, that giant among the champions of humanistic rationalism said (and I heard him say it, in that squeaky piccolo voice he had, on the B.B.C. in my college bedroom): "The root of the matter is a very simple and old-fashioned thing, a thing so simple that I am almost ashamed to mention it, for fear of the derisive smile with which wise cynics will greet my words. The thing I mean - please forgive me for mentioning it - is love, Christian love, as seen in Jesus. If you feel this, you have a motive for existence, a guide in action, a reason for courage, an imperative to intellectual honesty ..."
The conclusion to which a life time contemplating history and the world finally drove Bertrand Russell was, rather more happily, the same conclusion to which the disciples were driven within a very few years of their encounter with Jesus in the days of His flesh.

Even so, it is an extraordinary thing that before His human life in Palestine could fade from the memory of those who walked and ate and slept with him, they had claimed for him the timeless, cosmic status which can belong only to God. Those who believed this had known him as a man - as a flesh and blood human being like themselves; yet in the space of a decade they had set this Man of Nazareth, who stirred earth's dust under his sandals, on the very Throne of God ... and worshipped Him. By His power, they believed, all things had come to be ... from Him, as its source, all life had sprung ... He it is Who will bring all history to its climax, drawing the torn threads of our disordered universe into a redeemed and enduring harmony. It is simply fantastic that sane men could be so persuaded. But so it was.

No plainer statement of that conviction can be found than this last of His "I AMs", the saying attributed to the risen Christ whom John saw in vision as recorded in Rev. 1:8 and 17: "I am the first and the last, and the living One. I am alpha and omega." Alpha and omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, as A and Z are of ours. There is a difference between this saying and the others: the others were all said during the Lord's earthly life; this was made after He was risen and ascended into Heaven.

THE SETTING OF THE SAYING

Try to envisage the setting in which John heard this. Imagine this ageing man, John, exiled and alone on the sea-girt island of Patmos.

It is the Lord's Day, the day on which his brothers and sisters in the faith are gathering for worship on the mainland in his beloved Ephesus, across the waters of the Mediterranean Sea to the east. He stands on a spit of sand in the growing light before the dawn, gazing out across the sea that separates him from them, sandy inlets sweeping away on either side of him. (My wife and I have stood there together.)

A longing to be with them swells in his heart. (No wonder he hated the sea - the sea that cut him off from the blessedness of fellowship with his brothers as they gathered in the presence of their risen Lord to worship and adore: in his heaven, "there was no more sea"!)

But on this morning, the separating sea becomes a vehicle, so to speak, on which the Lord comes strangely to him, and draws him into mystic union both with Himself and with his brethren as they behold His face. "I was in the Spirit," he says, "on the Lord's Day."

The dawn is beginning to break as he stands looking out to sea. Above him the stars flash like gems in the dark velvet of the sky.

And then the splendid pageant draws slowly on. Colour begins to steal into the sky: a luminous grey turning to daffodil with wispy gleams of green, then a faint pink deepening swiftly to crimson and gold. A great wave crashes down on the beach and draws the shingle after it in a sound like the sound of a long-drawn sigh, as of a Great Presence ... and then another, and another ... until it seems to him that in the ceaseless surging of the surf a mighty voice is speaking, a voice "like the sound of many waters."

A strange excitement stirs in his breast.
As he faces eastward across the sea, the golden lip of the rising sun flashes a path across it that sparkles and dances to his very feet; and it seems to him - filled as his mind was with the imagery of his people's ancient scriptures - like the "Sun of Righteousness arising with healing in his wings".

The ascended Lord is strangely near, marvellous in His risen splendour. The spectacle takes on a dream-like quality; a vision of the Son of Man seems to be shaping itself against the sky, a vision awesome and majestic. The paling stars seem at his very finger-tips, as though a host from distant heaven bearing torches were moving forward behind Him. The fleecy clouds at the sky's zenith, white now in the sun's light and flowing in long silken skeins down the sky, seem like a crowning glory of silver hair.
The eyes flash beneath the noble forehead.
As His feet catch the yellow glory of the sunrise, they seem to shine like burnished brass.
His face is as the sun in its full splendour now above the long, white gold-edged garment whose train sweeps the wide sea; and His mighty voice mingles with the breaking waves upon the seashore.

The Lord is come - the risen Lord in awesome glory; and John tells us that he fell at His feet as though dead.

The first stirring of the dawn breeze seemed like the touch of a hand on his shoulder, and through the thunder of the surf, the voice spoke to him: "I am alpha and omega. Be not afraid. I am the first and the last, the living One." For John that day Jesus had indeed become the "Christ Whose glory fills the skies."

By the words He spoke, He was claiming as His own the entire universe of space, the whole range of time, the complete world of human experience, and even the world beyond the grave.

The alpha of it is lost in the mystery of that eternal glory which the Son enjoyed with the Father before the worlds were made ...

The beta of it was shrouded in swirling mists that lifted from the face of a new-born planet to reveal the first pair standing in a garden...

The gamma of it was the drawing out from the stream of humanity's life a man, Abraham, and after him a long line of patriarchs and prophets, all with their eyes fixed on a distant horizon, their hands outstretched toward it, to whom it was given that they should spell out, syllable upon syllable, the recovering of the lost knowledge of the world's Creator and the promise of the redemption He will bring ...

The delta of it was the moment when this God "touched nature with an ungloved hand", and there was conceived in the womb of a virgin Him Who was born to be the Saviour of the world ...

The epsilon of it was the deeds of mercy wrought and the words of truth spoken by this Son of Man Who was the Son of God ...

The zeta of it was the cross upraised on a green hill where the sin of man and the love of God were locked in mortal combat ...

The eta of it was the victory that was won when the Christ arose in triumph from the dead and ascended into heaven, the reigns of government there given into His pierced hands ...

The theta of it was the release of God's own Spirit into the hearts of believing men, and their streaming in - a multitude none can number - through the gates of the City of God that is a-building ...

The iota of it will be the return to earth in unimaginable power and glory of this same Jesus, when the world as we know it will be transfigured into something marvellously new ...

But even all this, wonderful as it is, is but the 'ABC' of all that Christ Jesus is and will accomplish. The full splendour, as John was to perceive in his vision, went on and up through ever-mounting levels until the glory of it passed beyond the range of human eyes to see, beyond any singing of it, until exalted over all there reigned in uncreated Light the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Here is the most breath-taking vision ever to capture the imagination and win the heart's consent. The half has not been told, even yet, of the full story of "the redemption of the world through our Lord Jesus Christ." There lies before us a store of wonders we cannot yet conceive.

But of this we are confident: our Lord Jesus Christ, at present the world's hidden king, will one day soon show Himself openly by stepping on to the stage of this world.

The prospect should fill us with both fear and great joy.

With fear - because it will be a time of endings.
Those who ask with curt disdain why God, if He exists, does not intervene directly in the tragic tangle of human affairs, have forgotten that when the author steps on to the stage the play is over; the curtain has been rung down.
It will be a time of lamentation for the loss of all those false gods to which men have given their hearts. Many will go down into final perdition with them, for there is an end of all those things that despoil the life of mankind.
Do any of us have the least idea what it will be really like when God in Christ breaks in upon our world, His Presence unshielded by the protective barrier we call nature and the physical world?

But the prospect should fill us also with great joy - for the endings will usher in new beginnings; out of their grave the new will be born. "Behold," saith He Who sits upon the Throne, "I make all things new."

People ask what the new heavens and the new earth will be like.
We none of us know. The Bible offers us symbols, metaphors, pictures - all of them drawn from the old world we know, which then will be utterly swept away, rolled up like a scroll whose tale is finished telling, and none of these pictures can be adequate, therefore, to describe the blinding reality. As well try to describe to an unborn child what this world is like by reference only to his experience of the watery womb where he awaits his birth.
But of one thing we are assured: the reigns of government throughout the entire created order will be firmly in the hands of Him Who so loved us as willingly to have them fixed to a wooden cross, where He suffered to win for us eternal life and glory. He alone will rule. From first to last it is a "Lamb, as it had been slain" Who occupies the throne of ultimate power and authority. The Christ Whose glory fills the skies ... He Who was the alpha of it all, is also the Omega to which, if we trust Him, He will bring us all.

Jesus shall reign where're the sun
doth his successive journeys run.
His kingdom stretch from shore to shor
till suns shall rise and set no more.

His hands of love that were pierced for us will hold the reigns at last. In the meantime, the Christian sees this world (to quote C. S. Lewis) as enemy-occupied territory whose rightful king has already landed - in disguise, so to say - and is calling us to share in a great campaign of sabotage against the dark power that has usurped His throne.

When you go to church, it is as though you are listening in to the secret wireless that directs the underground resistance movement. Fanciful nonsense? Why then do we make such thin, weak excuses not to go?
When we study the Bible, we are reading our standing battle orders. Nonsense too? Why then do we avoid attending to it?

If all turns out in the end as Christians believe it will, how intensely many will wish they had enlisted sooner. In the hour of its triumph no cause lacks supporters. But it will hardly avail then to say to God, "I hadn't the time; I had more important things to occupy me ... but I sent my children to Sunday School."

Said Henry IV, King of France, to the cowardly Crillon who had not ventured into the battle of Arques, "Hang yourself, Crillon. We fought at Arques, and you were not there."

Christ the King of Kings will one day soon show Himself openly to the world in triumph as its rightful King. Then will be no time to choose whose side you are on. It is idle to say you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. The time to choose is now.

All eyes shall behold Him; and either we shall look upon Him who was pierced for us and rejoice, or we shall look on Him whom we have pierced and wail with a wail that will have never any ending.

If we are already serving in His ranks, then let John have the last word today: "Beloved, we are - here and now - God's children; and whilst it does not yet appear what we shall be, we know that when He appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. Everyone who has this hope before him purifies himself, as Christ is pure."