Come To Pass
He said unto me, They are come to pass. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
Revelation 21:6
“They are come to pass.” At long last God’s eternal purpose has been realized. How has this happened? Why does Scripture so confidently affirm it? Surely because he is the Alpha and the Omega. Gods has begun a work, and he will perfect it. He can do no other than finish what he has set his hand to, for this is his very nature to do so. He is not only the beginning, he is also the end. Hallelujah! Our God is the Omega as well as the Alpha. This assures us that nothing he has begun to do in us will be left unfinished. God cannot be withstood by man’s incompetence or by Satan’s enmity. Sin is too much for us, but it is not too much for him. His Name, which is his own nature, is our guarantee that he will see his work in us through to its perfect completion.
Watchman Nee
Paul captures this idea in his letter to the Philippians:
“I am convinced and confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will [continue to] perfect and complete it until the day of Christ Jesus [the time of his return.
Philippians 1:6
This is the promise of God. Every promise has begun for us by the action of God. Even when we fail and all seems lost, we can rest assured that since God initiated the promise, He will also bring it to pass. The very day that Adam sinned, God too the initiative to give a promise- the redemption of humanity. In this dark moment of human history it was God who begun the work of redemption and Revelation 21 records its completion. In the long history of humanity, there have been moments when it appeared that the end-completion would never come to pass, but here in the next to the last chapter of Revelation we read those words: “They are come to pass.”
In the day of their rebellion, Adam and Eve stood before God guilty and ashamed. No excuse they could find would remove the consequences of their conduct. They had deliberately disobeyed God and ate from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil. No doubt they were aware of their evil and their lack of goodness, but that knowledge wasn’t sufficient to deliver them from the sentence of death. That day as they stood guilty and condemned, God began His plan of redemption. His justice demanded they receive the penalty of death and the sentence could not be set aside. Disobedience carried the penalty of death for that was what God had so determined and both Adam and Eve were aware that such was the penalty. They chose to eat anyway. After all they’re blaming someone else and making excuses in their feeble attempt to escape imminent death, God steps to begin His plan of redemption by shedding an innocent animal’s blood as a substitute.
That day He revealed His eternal plan of redemption had begun but the ultimate act of redemption would be the seed of the woman.
“And I will put enmity (open hostility)Between you and the woman,And between your seed (offspring) and her Seed;He shall [fatally] bruise your head,And you shall [only] bruise His heel.”
Genesis 3:15
That day God made the promise that He carried out on Calvary as His very own Son would give up His life and shed His blood to redeem(buy back) humanity from the slavery of sin. Throughout generations God has worked to bring His plan fully to pass. Though often it might seem that sin, evil, disobedience and the devil have the upper hand. It may seem in the light of the current environment where the number of professing Christians is declining and hundreds of churches are closing their doors or being turned into clubs and such, that the work God began on Calvary is failing. But we must remember that His work of redemption has suffered setbacks in the past. None of those setbacks have been able to stop the plan of redemption. True only eight people survived the flood because they found grace and the family of Abraham found themselves again and again disobeying God, serving idols and false gods, but God kept right on working, raising up deliverers and prophets to call the people back into the plan of redemption. The early church was persecuted intensely and hundreds if not thousands of Christians were executed for their faith, but God kept working. Dark times and heresy along with purposeful attempts to eradicate the church by means of making it appear to be irrelevant and the work of fools, yet God kept moving along toward the completion of His work He had begun.
This beginning work of God was not and is not a mere reaction to crisis. God didn’t wait until Adam sinned before He instituted the plan of redemption. Paul tells us that even before God created humans, the Lamb was slain, the sacrifice prepared and offered and the price of redemption was paid.
“But God clearly shows and proves His own love for us, by the fact that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Romans 5:8
And then Revelation tells us that Christ who is now King of Kings and Lord of Lords is the Lamb given as sacrifice for our redemption.
“All who dwell on the earth will worship him, whose names have not been written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”
Revelation 13:8
We can see in the big picture how it is Christ-the Alpha who has begun the work and Christ- the Omega who will finish it. But that truth is true for the individual as well.
It is Christ through the Holy Spirit who first convicts us of our sins. As we stand guilty and condemned, it is Christ who takes the penalty of our sins upon Himself and offers us pardon and forgiveness through His sacrifice on the cross. We confess-He forgives and cleanses. It is Christ who gives us the gift of the Holy Spirit to dwell within us, guiding and teaching us as we grow in faith. It will be Christ, who through the power of the Holy Spirit, that will resurrect us from the dead. It will be Christ who perfects us and presents us to the Father as His joint-heirs. As Paul says, “He who has begun a good work in you will complete it.”
If you’re struggling in your faith today, remember it wasn’t you that started the work, it was Christ and while you may feel helpless, weak, and hopeless, wondering whether you will ever become all that you want or need to be, remember that Christ is also the One who will finish His work which He has begun. Today hold fast to the promise that John writes in the third chapter of 1 John:
“See what an incredible quality of love the Father has shown to us, that we would [be permitted to] be named and called and counted the children of God! And so we are! For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. Beloved, we are [even here and] now children of God, and it is not yet made clear what we will be [after His coming]. We know that when He comes and is revealed, we will [as His children] be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is [in all His glory].”
1 John 3: 1-2
And it came to pass!
Dr. John Thompson