not merely that He has existed and shall exist forever, but also that in the forever of the past and of the future He is eternally Christ, that the special nature in which He relates Himself to us as Saviour never had a beginning and shall never have an end.
Jesus sets Himself above all time-relations. His earthly life was but a brief one — not one half of the allotted space of man. He counted only thirty-three of our human years; and thirty of these were silent years. But somehow we feel as if our usual time- conditions did not fit in with His earthly life — as if some element of the eternal had dropped into the problem, giving to the figures wider spaces and larger meanings. He says to the Pharisees, " Before Abraham was, I am " — borrowing the language, and even the very name, of Jehovah. Again He says, as He dismisses His Apostles to their task, " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world," indicating that His " I am " is not as ours, shut in and narrowed by these brief moments, but spreading itself out to the farthest reaches of time, and over into the great eternities. So does Jesus set Himself above and outside our time-relations, and as He claims a conscious existence with the Father " before the world was " — that is, before our earth had begun its revolutions round the sun, and so before days and years had begun to be — Jesus sets Himself clear of all earthly years, back in the silent eternity.
^ By this title God describeth His own being, and distin- guisheth it from all other : — " I the Lord, the first, and the last ; I am he " (Is. xli. 4). " I am he ; I am the first, I also am the last " (xlviii. 12). " I am the first, and I am the last ; and beside me there is no God" (xliv. 6). But Christ is expressly called Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. This title is attributed unto Christ absolutely and universally, without any kind of restriction or limitation, without any assignation of any particular in respect of which He is the first or last ; in the same latitude and eminence of expression, in which it is or can be attributed to the Supreme God. . . . Where- fore seeing Christ hath so immediately, and with so great solemnity and frequency, taken the same style upon Him, by which the Father did express His Godhead, it followeth that He hath declared Himself to be the Supreme, Almighty, and Eternal God. And being thus the Alpha and the first, He was before any time assign- able, and consequently before He was conceived of the Virgin; and the being which then He had was the Divine essence, by
368 THE ALPHA AND THE OMEGA
which He was truly and properly the Almighty and Eternal God.i
^ A great variety of objects have been found with A and n inscribed upon them ; it figures on tombstones, as well as on other monuments, on mosaics, frescoes, and bricks, also on vases, cups, lamps, and on rings ; it appears also on coins, its earliest occur- rence on these being of the time of Gonstans and Constantius, the sons of Constantine the Great. These all belong to different ages and different countries ; in its earliest known form (Kome, A.D. 295) it appears as " w et A," but this is exceptional, and is perhaps of Gnostic origin. The symbol in its usual form is found on objects belonging to the 3rd cent, in Eome and N. Africa ; on objects belonging to the 4th cent, it has been found in Asia Minor, Sicily, Upper and Lower Italy, and Gaul ; by the beginning of the Middle Ages it must have become known in most of the countries of Central Europe.^
i. Christ's Past Eternity.
1. Are we not in the habit of talking as if the redemption which called for an anointed Kedeemer were a late thought in the universal history? Untold ages after the dateless time when God began to be. His almighty word was spoken, and a new world with a new race to live on it shaped- itself out from the void. In that new world a new experiment of moral life brought a catas- trophe unknown before, to meet whose terrible demands the great Creator came Himself and took the nature of this last creature living in His last creation. God was made man, and Christ the God -man was made manifest before the worlds. Here we make man a late thing in the history of the universe ; and how is it possible, then, that Christ, who is God with the element of human sympathy, should be eternal? And just here comes in one of the key-passages of the Bible, which we are always far too apt to overlook. It is that verse in Genesis, " In the image of God created he man." God made man like Himself. Ages before the Incarnation made God so wonderfully in the image of man, the creation had made man in the image of God. Now, if we can comprehend that truth at all, it must be evident that before man was made the man-type existed in God. In some part of His