As I listen to that sad recital on
the part of our brother Woodhouse describing his
degenerative processes that have set in already and
brought him almost to the point of debilitation,
I could just think of an incident that
occurred down in Boca Raton.
We have down there what they call a
donut club.
It's not a club, and they don't eat
donuts.
So where they got the name, I don't
know.
But every Monday morning, in the wintertime at
least, some 75 or more men meet, and
they happen to meet in the Boca Bible
Chapel now.
And over the years, they've had some of
the very finest speakers come and give their
testimonies or minister the word.
One day, I was there, and a dear
old fellow came in, and he kind of
collapsed in his chair.
And I said, well, how are you feeling?
He really didn't look that hot.
But he said, I want to tell you
something, brother.
He said, this getting old ain't for kids.
I'm sure there's a lot of amens inside
of that.
And then not long ago, we were in
a hotel somewhere up in New England, and
I saw a bumper sticker.
Some of them are horrid, you know.
But I thought, man, I should buy this.
Now I wish I'd bought a half a
dozen.
If I did, I would have given one
to Ernie here.
It says, it's better to be over the
hill than under it.
I'm sure you may have noticed this yourself,
but there's a rather strange feature about the
King James Version of the Bible.
I need not do more than remind you
that what we hold in our hands, in
our mother tongue, is a version of the
Bible.
It is a translation of both Old and
New Testament scriptures from other languages.
Old Testament almost exclusively from the Hebrew language,
with a few exceptions here and there.
The New Testament, obviously, is a translation into
English out of Greek.
And this is the reason why every now
and again you hear a preacher say, now
it says in the Greek.
All he's doing is trying to get back
to the original language in which the revelation
of God was given to men in order
to get a little clearer sense of what
the text may be saying.
Well, with that in mind, it's a rather
strange phenomenon that scattered throughout the Bible, there
are some expressions that have not been translated.
And you will recognize them.
You may have the answers to what they
mean right off.
Take, for instance, the word Selah, which occurs
in the book of Psalms and only one
other place in the Old Testament, oddly enough,
in the book of Habakkuk.
The word Selah.
I've heard all kinds of explanations as to
what that word means.
They say it's a musical term.
And it's most interesting when you get an
audience to read aloud the scriptures, what happens
when they hit that word in the Psalms.
There are some who are dead certain that
it should be read and with emphasis.
If it's there in the Bible, they say,
I'm going to read it.
I even read the commas and the dots
and everything else.
All inspired.
So they say Selah.
But then there are some who say, no,
I'm not so sure about that.
And they have another idea.
They say you wouldn't expect a singer to
stand up.
That's a rest sign in music.
You wouldn't expect a singer singing a solo
to stand up and sing a phrase like,
heaven came down, rest, and glory filled my
soul.
Rest.
You'd say, what kind of a soloist is
this?
They're actually singing the symbols of the page.
You wouldn't expect that, I suppose.
So these people say, you're not supposed to
say those words there.
That's meant for the choir.
So they don't read it at all.
And then there are some folks in between
the two, and they start by saying sit,
and then they stop.
So it's fun to watch an audience when
they read the scriptures aloud.
But there's that word.
Then, you know, you've run across the expression
Urim and Thummim.
You read that in the Bible?
Now, that certainly wasn't, those words are not
English words.
They're Hebrew expressions.
What do they mean?
Oh, never mind.
You may be an erudite scholar of the
scriptures, and you can have the answer to
that right off.
But there it is.
It stands up right in the word of
God.
And we wonder, should we, what does it
mean?
Why is it there thus?
Or when you come into the New Testament,
you hear the words of Jesus, and why
did they put them in that way?
Talitha Kumi, when he spoke those words in
the death chamber of the little girl.
Now, I know that the writer also says
that is being interpreted, and then explains it.
Or you'll come to an expression like Abba,
Father.
We sing that a great deal in our
hymns.
What does it mean, Abba?
Whatever it means.
Why does it stand there that way?
Why didn't they, they were wrestling with all
the rest of the text, trying to tell
us what it means.
Why did they make exceptions here?
Or you can go on the jot and
tittle, Anathema Maranatha.
Great statement, that.
And then, of course, the Lord's words, Eli,
Eli, Lama, Sabachthani, with which we're so familiar.
Nahushtan.
Now, I've puzzled over all of these expressions,
time after time, and I've said, what was
it that led these translators, who were trying
to get the whole of the revelation into
another medium, another language, why were they constrained
to leave these expressions, shall I say, in
the raw, the way they found them in
the scriptures?
Now, there may be some better answers than
I'll give you, but it seems to me
that the main purpose behind this phenomenon is
that maybe God intended that we should, by
very curiosity about these expressions, give them a
little extra thought.
Maybe that's why.
Maybe we shouldn't hurry past these expressions so
rapidly, lest we miss an extra special blessing.
And so, maybe the Holy Spirit led the
writers to leave them as they found them,
in order that those of us who follow
will stop a second or two longer and
say, Lord, what does this mean?
And ponder it.
If you've got a better answer than that,
please tell me afterwards.
And if yours is not as good as
mine, I still will hang on to mine.
But at any rate, that's how I feel
about these expressions.
Now, especially do I feel that way when
I come to the last book of the
Bible, and I hear our Lord speaking.
Will you turn with me to the book
of Revelation, chapter 1?
Revelation, chapter 1.
And John, in the seventh verse of the
first chapter, calls to mind that he is
coming with clouds, and every eye shall see
him, and they also which pierced him, and
all kindreds of the earth shall wail because
of him.
Even so, amen.
And then our Lord speaks.
I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and
the ending, saith the Lord, which is and
was and which is to come, the Almighty.
And then verse 10.
I was in the Spirit on the Lord's
day, and heard behind me a great voice
as of a trumpet saying, I am Alpha
and Omega, the first and the last, and
what thou seest write in a book, send
it unto the seven churches which are here
named.
And I turned to see the voice that
spake with me, and being turned, and then
he follows that magnificent description of our glorious
Lord.
Well, there it stands.
I am Alpha and Omega.
This seems to be fairly understandable and very
simple to comprehend because we understand that these
two letters, these expressions, are the first and
last letters of the Greek alphabet.
Now, knowing that, and knowing that the translators
were working from Greek into English, I wonder
why they didn't say, I am A and
V.
Well, they couldn't really say A and Z
and be absolutely correct because that last letter
is not a Z, or as you friends
from over the border say, and some of
you from over the water, Zed, you know.
That is an O.
A and O.
Well, however, it has the force of the
first and last letters, say, of our alphabet.
Why didn't they just leave it that way?
Why did they keep these Greek expressions of
those first two letters?
I go back to my original reason and
say I believe it's because God wants us
to stand before this burning bush and catch
a fresh and new glimpse of the glory
of the one who bears this wonderful name.
I am Alpha and Omega.
I am, Jesus says, the alphabet.
I am the first and the last.
You know, the expression I am always prefaces
some wonderful revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
How my soul thrills when I read in
the word of God him saying I am
the bread of life because I came to
him once desperately hungry and I found perfect
satisfaction in him and I found his word
is true.
Having eaten of him, I've never hungered again.
I am the bread of life.
Or when he says I am the light
of the world.
I recall the darkness that once enveloped my
whole life and then when I came to
him I learned and saw for the first
time the light and I've never walked in
darkness since.
He shed the light of life upon every
step of the pathway and down it goes.
I am the door.
I am the true vine.
I am the good shepherd.
I'm the way and I'm the truth and
I'm the light.
But you know, my friend, never is our
Lord Jesus and this name I am this
alphabet that he talks about here I am.
Never is it more precious than when we
stand by a gash in the breast of
the earth and lay away for the last
time on this earth our precious loved ones.
We've encased them in a box and thrust
them out of our sight and then we
have to drop the earth upon them and
as we walk away from that gash in
the earth we hear him say I am
the resurrection and the life.
He that believeth in me though he were
dead yet shall he live and whosoever liveth
and believeth in me shall never die.
I tell you, never does my Lord sound
more precious, more wonderful than when he stands
by the edge of the grave and he
says I am.
I'm the resurrection and the life.
So we come to this last book of
the Bible and we have Jesus saying I
am the alphabet.
Now that leads me to think a little
bit about the alphabet itself.
Let me suggest to you the inexhaustibility of
the alphabet and thus the inexhaustibility of Jesus.
One of the big libraries of the world
certainly not the largest is the New York
Library.
I took a group of students there one
day and dropped them off.
For most of the day we had some
very old manuscripts we wanted to look at.
They examined them and then I found myself
looking for the index area.
I was just a bit curious.
You know that library as I recollected fills
a whole square, a whole block.
I've forgotten how many stories there are in
that library but one whole floor of the
New York Public Library is given over to
nothing but index cards to tell you what
else is in the library.
So if you want to find what else
is there you go up to that particular
floor and there it all is indexed.
And it's awesome to think of all those
volumes, those tiers, those tons of tiers those
hundreds of thousands of volumes those tons of
poems.
But listen to me for a minute.
Do you know that all of those books
in that library at least in our mother
tongue are nothing but the incalculable numbers or
arrangements of 26 letters of our alphabet.
That's all they are.
Now Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet
Macbeth.
Dickens wrote David Copperfield Oliver Twist and the
Pickwick Papers and so on.
But as a matter of fact Shakespeare and
Dickens and all the others really wrote nothing
but the 26 letters of our English alphabet
in amazing numbers of combinations.
Now they did a good job of it.
You try to do the same thing and
I and theirs immediately detected that these were
masters at the manipulation of those letters.
We are clumsy oafs at trying to make
them mean the same thing.
Every poet, every historian every novelist who's ever
written anything has simply juggled these same 26
letters of the alphabet.
Because they were masters they didn't have 30
to work with.
Nor did they have less than 26.
They had the same combination of letters with
which they labored.
And have all of these exhausted the alphabet?
If some writer today should decide to write
a book we had fellowship with our youngest
son yesterday down in Orlando and he was
just telling us by the way that his
third book is due off the press the
next two months and his fourth book is
ready to be published at the end of
the summer.
So I said to him, give it up
Leif no chance that you can write anything
at all.
Because it's all been the alphabet's all been
used up.
There's nothing left that you can find useful
in our alphabet.
Thousands upon thousands of authors have written ahead
of you they've drained the alphabet dry.
Dummy, don't you try it for a second.
Did I tell him that?
No indeed.
Because I couldn't.
I know that when he comes to that
same combination of letters to the alphabet he
will find it inexhaustible.
He will discover that it is as fresh
as if no one had ever used it
before.
And that's true of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Are you a sinner longing for forgiveness of
sin with a conscience that drives you to
the point almost of despair?
And are you saying to yourself but there's
so many that have come and drawn from
the fountainhead of Calvary's cross there's no mercy
left for me.
There's no forgiveness there can't be much.
Millions have drawn but listen I have good
news for you.
Come to the fountain of divine forgiveness.
Come to the cross and you will discover
that the one who says I am Alpha
and Omega is as fresh in his forgiving
strength and power and resource as if not
a single sinner had ever come to him
before.
He, like the alphabet, is inexhaustible.
There's another thought that I want you to
take with you and that is the indispensability
of Jesus.
Like the alphabet the alphabet itself is indispensable
to our understanding of literature.
One of the things that's hard to comprehend
is to believe that in our country there
are millions of people who can't read.
Obviously, therefore, they can't write either.
They can't read or write.
We call them illiterates.
I wonder, no, I don't suppose any of
us can imagine, even imagine remotely what it
would be like not to be able to
read or write.
We've known how to do it since days
way back in the dimness of our memory.
We had a boy once in our school
who was sent up by the committee.
They said, you know, when he got to
when the students get to me that's the
end.
I mean, they go through all the process
and then they finally come to the Supreme
Court.
And so when he hit my desk it
was all over.
The committees had made their recommendations.
He couldn't make it.
He was failing.
And yet he was a sharp fellow.
He had spent his time in the military.
He had graduated from high school, oddly enough.
And so he came into my office and
with his military training he stood as stiff
as a ramrod.
I had to say, at ease, soldier.
He had to sit down so he could
relax.
And then I said, look, I've got your
record in front of me and they're saying
you can't make it here.
You've got to go.
And so I suppose I have to sign
you out.
You'll have to leave campus maybe today or
tomorrow at the latest.
But before you go I want to know
why this is so.
As I look at your record you had
a fine record in the army and you
graduated from high school.
And suddenly this kid wilted and almost burst
into tears.
And he said, sir, I wish my mother
was here.
For one moment I thought, what have I
got now?
He wishes his mother was here.
He's a grown fellow.
He's 26 years old.
And then he proceeded to tell me this.
He said, you know, I can't read and
therefore I have much trouble writing.
I guess I can't write either but I
can't read.
I said, how'd you get through high school?
He said, my mother wrote all my papers.
My mother did all my homework.
I depended on her.
Really, she's the one who should have the
diploma.
I couldn't make it without her.
And obviously she's not here in this institution
so I'm not making it.
And the trouble with that lad was that
he didn't have the key that would unlock
all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
It was sad.
Argue with me if you want, you psychologists
and educationists and sociologists.
The fact still remains that this boy couldn't
make it because he didn't know how to
read.
What the alphabet is to literature, Jesus is
to life.
Without him, life is a hopeless enigma.
All the treasures that we'd like to unlock
from knowledge can only be done when you
have the key in your hand.
And the answers to life's problems is to
be found only in the Lord Jesus who
is Alpha and Omega.
I wish there were time for me to
show you the numbers of times this name
occurs in the last book of the Bible.
Most significant.
Only two other times besides the first chapter.
And at each occurrence it's a very significant
moment.
For instance, when you come to the end
of the book you'll find that as we
face eternity and there are mysteries that we
can't comprehend, it's at that juncture the Lord
Jesus once again is dubbed with the title
I am Alpha and Omega.
He is indispensable.
My friend, you'll never find the answer to
all of life's problems, any of them, until
you have Jesus Christ, God's answer.
You see.
Well, just one more thought for us to
take with us today.
May I speak to you about the adaptability
of the Lord Jesus Christ?
The most adaptable instrument we know is the
alphabet.
You know, if a lover wants to express
his love and passion toward his beloved, what's
he going to use?
The alphabet.
If a poet wants to enshrine his message
in a poem, what does he use?
The alphabet.
If you're a businessman and you're a toughie
and somebody owes you money, you may cut
your letter down to something like this.
Bill.
Anybody owes me money, I never say dear
Bill.
There's no dearness about it.
You owe me dough.
Bill.
You bum.
You owe me so much money.
Pay up or else.
My name.
Even if I'm as blunt as that, I
still use the alphabet.
I can't escape it.
I use the same letters.
It's adaptable, whether you're writing, as I said,
poetry or a love letter or a business
letter or whatever.
Oh, it's such an adaptable instrument.
Now, you know, no two of us are
alike, exactly alike.
Isn't that wonderful?
How marvelous.
We all only have one nose and two
eyes and two ears and a mouth and
little stuff sprinkled up on top and all
stuck together and kind of a roundish lump.
But isn't it marvelous that God put those
things all together so that we really don't
look like each other?
We once in a while think we do,
but we don't.
We're different.
And I need Christ in a different way
than you need him.
We need him alike, but in different ways.
When I was a boy in school, a
little more than a boy, I hated book
reviews.
Oh, how I did hate a book review.
Well, our teacher assigned us once to one.
It was a fascinating story, and that's why
I read it through and I was willing
to write on it.
It was called The Cruise of the Cashalot,
and it was about a man named Frank
Bullen, I think, and he went up to
New England to sign on a whaling ship,
and when he got to the dock and
he saw the cashalot, that was the name
of the boat he was going to take,
he writes in his book, me thinks I
never saw a filthier old scow.
Yeah.
So anyhow, he signed aboard, and they went
out into the North Atlantic in search of
whales, and he had to learn a few
lessons.
When a whale was sighted or a school
of whales was sighted, the alarm was sounded,
and then a boat was sent out, smaller
boat, men rowed out, and here's a fellow
in the front with a harpoon, and they
would sight these great denizens of the deep,
and finally when they got within striking distance
and safe distance, they would release the harpoon,
and the whine of that cable, that rope
or cable, as the whale would seek to
get rid of this thing that hurt it.
And so Frank Bullen got into a boat,
a small boat, and they said, now don't
get too close to this thing, because if
we get hit with its tail when it
thrashes about, he can smash this little boat
like a tinderbox.
Well, they got out there, and the boat
got too close to this whale who was
harpooned, and it went around and around and
around in ever smaller circles until at last
it got close enough to the small boat
that it thrashed about, and its tail indeed
struck the boat, smashed it to bits, and
tossed the men into the water.
And Frank Bullen said he went down, down,
down, he thought he was going right straight
down to Davy Jones' locker.
And then when he came back up, gasping
for air, to his utter horror, he discovered
that he was on the back of a
wounded whale.
Well, that's better than Jonah being down its
stomach, but he was on its back.
And as he lay there, the thing is
broad enough and it's slippery, he was sliding
around a bit, he had nothing to grab
hold of, but he lay on the back
of that wounded animal, he began to contemplate
how he might die.
Maybe it would swallow him, maybe it would
toss him out into the ocean and he
would drown.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Terrible thoughts.
And then he looked around to see if
there was anybody to help.
And he describes how suddenly he saw coming
up over the horizon the spars of the
cachalot.
And the boat, the mother boat, got closer
and closer.
And finally, Frank Bullen writes this, he thinks,
I never saw a more beautiful boat in
all my life.
You know what made the difference?
An awareness of his need.
And that's true of the soul outside of
Christ.
You'll find that the Lord Jesus Christ is
adaptable to your need, my friend, this morning.
Should you be sitting in this audience without
the sweet peace that comes from forgiven sins,
Jesus Christ can meet your need.
You may see no beauty in him at
first, but when God opens your eyes, you'll
see him as the most desirable and the
most beautiful one in all heaven and earth.
Let us pray.
How we love to hear thee say, Lord
Jesus, I am Alpha and Omega.
I'm the beginning and the end.
I'm sufficient for everything in between.
I'm sufficient for your need.
And if you have me, you have all
you need.
We love thee this morning because thou hast
become to us our Redeemer and our Savior.
And we worship thee as God's Alpha and
Omega.
Amen.