I will start reading at the beginning of the chapter through verse six. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, behold, The dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more. Neither there shall be mourning or crying or pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. And he who is seated on the throne said, behold, I am making all things new. Also, he said, write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true. And he said to me, it is done. I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty, I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment. This is the word of God. Please be seated. I will acknowledge it only once or twice, I promise, but we are aware on this evening that the majority of Americans are partaking in the exercise of the great American religion, which is American football, and it occasions me to remember my own exceedingly mediocre football career. I am a native son of Phoenix. I attended Sunny Slope High School, which is maybe 10 minutes south and west of here. I played for two seasons before getting cut. At the end of the year banquet, the coach who still teaches there is a kind man, was giving out awards, and he told the whole school that his nickname for me was The Professor. And that sounds like a compliment, but I assure you it was not. He called me up and said that he appreciated having me on the team, but he said, I've always called Dave the professor because he looks like he should be somewhere writing poetry instead of being anywhere on a football field. I was not that insulted because I would often spend time riding the bench all year thinking about poetry. He was a very observant coach. I like poetry a great deal. There is no poetry reading event that gets 80 million viewers on TV. That would be something to see. But I do think that there is something of surpassing value when we as humans use the language that God himself made for us, that God himself used to reveal himself to us in, to strive for something higher, something greater, something more noble, work deserving of men, that are called to strive with God. And this is why the book of Revelation has long been one of my favorite books of the Bible, because although it is not poetry in the classic sense of it, there are these beautiful expressions of the character of God and his work among our people, which I think call us to strive to something even more noble and even more powerful. And so this is indeed my favorite verse in the Bible, and I was hoping we could examine it this morning, that we might also be lifted higher by meditating on God, his character, and what he is doing. And we have, therefore, only two points in this verse. The first we will examine is the Lord of Time, as he calls himself in this chapter, the Alpha and the Omega. We will examine the Lord of Time, and then the end of time. Now, if you are a parent of children, you are constantly searching for ways in which your children might be entertained that are both appropriate and instructive. And if you are like me, that leads you to despair very often for the state of children's entertainment today. And you have maybe come across what I have come across, which is a very cheesy, poorly made, but well-meaning movie series called Alpha and Omega. And it's about these two dogs, these two wolves, and eventually you learn that you're supposed to love your neighbor and you're supposed to care for people around you. And what strikes me about it is how quickly we as humans will settle for really the bare minimum of what we're looking for. The minute I, as a parent, am able to find entertainment that's not offensive or inappropriate, it doesn't matter how very, very bad it is, as long as I have it. C.S. Lewis remarked on this much more eloquently than I, that we're like children who have gone on vacation, and rather than seeing the beach that's laid before us, we make mud pies in the water in front of us. But so rather than a cheesy and chalky children's movie, this title of Alpha and Omega calls us to see something so much more beautiful and profound. It calls us to meditate on the eternality of God, which is one of his incommunicable attributes. Now you don't need seminary categories to understand that the eternality of God is hard to understand. And that's what we mean by incommunicable. There are things that we live with, love and righteousness and wrath that we experience. And so those are the communicable attributes of God. But we as human beings do not understand eternity. We simply do not have the ability to grasp it in its fullness. And so of all the attributes of God, that he is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, that he is eternal, is often not only something we don't study, but something we are afraid of. And so we settle for mud pies instead of God's beauty. And let me encourage you today to say that this is a very, very important truth for us to meditate on. It is not mere speculation, it is not theologians with their books coming up with unsolvable problems, but it is core, not only to the character of God, but what he's doing with us. Hear the Puritan Stephen Charnock say this, the eternity of God is the ground of all religion, and so the eternity of Christ is the ground of the Christian religion. That is how foundational the eternity of God is. He goes on to explain, could our sin be perfectly expiated had he not an eternal divinity to answer for all of the offenses committed against an eternal God? And so although we might balk at searching the depths of God's eternity, we see that it is essential to our understanding of him. And the Bible talks about this frequently. This is how the Bible starts, isn't it? In the beginning, there was God. It's how John's gospel starts. In the beginning, there was the word. We know that time can never move too slow for God, nor can it move too fast. Because we hear a thousand years are like a day to the Lord. We also hear that a day in the Lord's courts are like a thousand elsewhere. Time is not an object to him because he is the Lord of time. Time happens exactly as he wants it to happen, as we see in Galatians 4.4, and it happens on his authority in Acts 7.1. Even the Westminster Shorthandicism, when it defines God for us, puts his eternity at the beginning of the understanding. What is God? God is spirit. infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, wholeness, justice, goodness, and truth. Those are the attributes that we should cling to. It is an amazingly, amazingly important truth that God is true, that he's good, but the catechism helps us see that he is eternal in all of those things. His goodness is eternal. His truth is eternal. His power is eternal. And so this doctrine is core, and yet, we can admit, it's frightening. It can be frightening to meditate on eternity and to God's eternality. And here is why, I believe. Eternity scares us because time masters us. As human beings living in this world, we are constantly enslaved to time. We are worried that we do not have enough of it. for our jobs, for our families, for our friendships, for our churches. We are constantly enslaved to time, and yet we look at a Lord that not only is not confined to time, but to whom which time itself is enslaved. And so for God to exist before it and to be over it eternally scares us. And I want to say this evening that when we think of eternity and eternality of God and it scares us, I say to you, good. Good. We heard an excellent sermon this morning that the fear of the Lord is a necessary part of existing as humans in this world. We do not want to worship a God who is even remotely related to time in which the same way as we are. God is the Lord of time. He commands the very thing that we are afraid of. Every day when we go to sleep, we are worried about what tomorrow brings. And yet the Lord not only knows what tomorrow brings for you, but invented time to bring it to pass. Every time we look at time slipping away from our families and from our jobs, we know that the Lord has specifically appointed that passage of time to either bring to completion what you have planned or to stop it. And he has already planned it. That kind of surpassing and overwhelming authority is a little scary, but it is not bad. And that is a very important difference. Again, C.S. Lewis captures this better than I do, and it's frustrating that he always seems to capture things better than I do, but I'll be humble enough to accept it. In the silver chair, a young woman is going to meet Aslan. She says, oh, I thought he was a man. Is he safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion. To which Mr. Beaver replies, safe? Who said anything about safe? Of course he isn't safe. but he's good. When we come to a God who invented and is the Lord of time, we do not come to a God that is simply confined to our own understanding, but whose very being shatters the cage of understanding that we try to place around his character. And that is a good thing. It is good that God is overwhelming and beyond us and more powerful than us, because that's who we have to trust in. and you do not want to trust a God that is confined by your own reason and by the time that you and I are enslaved to. I think there is an excellent illustration in this, in a very famous saying from Augustine, who I know, I've mentioned this quote before and I know you've heard it before, but Augustine says, Augustine says that our hearts were made for God and therefore they will be restless until they rest in him. But when it comes to our understanding of God, we have to take Revelation 21 six into account. Our hearts were made to rest in a God who never rests, in whom time is a servant. And until we accept that this God is eternal, the Lord of time and not subject to our own terrors, we cannot rest in him as fully as he wants us to. We have to accept this overwhelming majesty of a God who controls time, I believe, to rest in Him fully. And that's what Charnock is capturing in this quote. Our sins can only be forgiven by a God who is over time, otherwise we are without hope. So we confess that God is alpha and omega, that He is beginning and end, and then He tells us what He is using His eternal power to accomplish. And I say he tells us because, interestingly, in Revelation 21, is one of the few times in Revelation, and you'd think there'd be a lot, but it's only a few times in Revelation that God speaks authoritatively directly from his throne, where we are quoting him directly. And one of them is in the beginning. And now here in Revelation 21, the voice from the throne says, I am Alpha and Omega. I am beginning and end. The thing that you are scared of that you do not have enough of, I invented it. I control it. Everything that's ever happened happens according to my calendar, to my timeline. The very things that you use to measure time, the sun and the moon, I control them. I can stop them in the sky if I want to. I am the Lord of time. I have always existed. I will always exist. I am Lord, and as the Lord who has created time, here is what I am using time for. Here is what the Lord of time is using time for. Here is the end, or telos of time, and it is this, to give to the thirsty the water of life without payment. And so now the overwhelming magisterial fear of God turns into the overwhelming question Do we really believe that God invented time and uses every minute of it so that he can give us the water of life? Or do we really believe that there is something more important in our calendars than what the Lord of time has purpose to do? And I come to you confessing that I am trapped every morning, believing that the terrors of the day are the most important thing in existence. If I do not get my sprinkler system fixed by the end of the week, my plants will die, and then life as we know it will all be over. You might have all had plans for next week, but I apologize, my sprinkler system is broken, and if I can't fix it, then life has no meaning. That might be a small picture, but how many things in our life do we assume are the definition of time? It might even be very serious things, like dangerous and scary sicknesses. It might be struggles with our children. It might be challenges at work. It might be the relationships in our communities. And we are sure, we are sure that this trial in front of us is the most momentous occasion in time and in our life. And that time itself might not very well continue might not continue unless our challenge is met. And yet here in Revelation 21 6, God says this, I am the Lord of time and I invented it for this purpose, for this purpose to give to the thirsty the water of life. You do not need to take my word for it. And again, as a reformed Christian, you should not take my word for it. This is a promise that exists throughout scripture. Isaiah 49, 10, he who has compassion on his people will bring them to springs of living water. The definition of Israel's sin against God in Jeremiah two is that they have abandoned the one who would bring them to water and hewed out their own cisterns. Again, in Isaiah 55, God's invitation, the invitation of time, come everyone who thirsts, come to the waters, he who has no money. The book of Psalms are replete with this promise. Psalm 36, you give them drink from the river of your delights for with you is the fountain of life. And then extremely powerfully we see in John chapter four, Jesus' own words to the woman at the well who asks, Why am I here? What's the purpose of life? God's revealed her sin before you. She's got that fear that we all have when we think about eternity. She realizes she's talking to someone who has the answers, and she says, what then? What then? Why life? What are we supposed to do? What are we here for? And that comes when Jesus says to her, everyone who drinks of the water in front of you will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I give will never be thirsty. And that promise changes her life forever. That promise, that promise changes her life. Now here's the encouragement. If you are here tonight, it is because that promise has changed yours. And so the question is, do you see yourself as the thirsty one to whom God will delight, delight in giving water? And do you see the momentous amount of time that exists in this universe is so that God can give water to thirsty sinners? Or do we put something else at the top of our calendar? Even in our relationship of God, we make demands of ourself. If I was but more powerful, I could accomplish what God wants me to do. If He is the Lord of time, He is powerful enough. If I was more righteous, if I was more righteous, then I could be a servant of God. Then I could accomplish what He really wants to get accomplished in this world. If He is the Alpha and Omega, then He is righteous enough to accomplish what He wants. If I was only more skilled and more gifted, if I had more tools in my hands, I could fix what God wants me to fix in this world. He has invented everything that will come to pass. The Alpha and the Omega can fix what he wants to fix. Revelation 21.6 says, this is your role, which is to be thirsty. Because it is to the thirsty, it is to the thirsty that the potentate of time will give water that quenches forever. Now that is, in one sense, a very small ask. You might say, you might recoil. I obviously have to do more than that. to which I say lovingly as a rebuke to you and to the sinner I see in the mirror every morning, you are not nearly thirsty enough. Now, are you thirsty enough to receive the water? Yes, because our Lord himself, who gives this water, says, faith aside of the mustard seed, a mustard seed and I will save you. If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is the Lord and believe in your heart that God rose him from the dead, God will give to you without payment, without your righteousness, without your works, he will give you that living water. But if we ask ourselves, are we thirsty enough for a water that will always satisfy, the answer is always no. And so, to please my college football quote, I will now quote poetry to you and bring to pass his prophecy that I enjoy poetry more than football. One of my favorite poems is the poem Ulysses by Sir Alphalord Tennyson, and it ends with this great encouragement to all of us, that although we are not that strength which in days of old moved heaven and earth, that which you are, you are. That which you are, you are. One equal temper of heroic fates, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, and then this is his challenge, to strive, to seek, to find, and never to yield. If Yahweh is the Lord of time, then every moment of time we spend pursuing him cannot be wasted. And yes, Yes, that has application for Sunday and for Super Bowl Sunday. Because we have to readily confess, even if we are not given to a game tonight, that we are a people who constantly seek to find awe and majesty and wonder anywhere in this world, in some movie that comes out next week, in some sporting event. And I rejoice that mankind, made in the image of God, is capable of such amazing works. And let me say this as a poetry fan, even poetry does not begin to capture the awe and wonder that we were made for, as Augustine says. So this is this first great encouragement of Revelation 21.6. If he is the Lord of time, every moment that you spend knowing him better will be repaid by knowing him better. And in the knowledge of God, there is hope. There is hope and there is life and there is water that will always satisfy. Even something as difficult as the eternality of God, we're having an excellent Sunday school series through the image of God. There are enough books written on the image of God that if you threw them at a person, that person would die. Is it worth studying? Ask yourself then for what purpose has God made time? Because John 20 says that these things are written that you may know that he is God. and that by knowing you would have life. So if he is the potentate of time, if he is the Alpha and the Omega, and the Lord of time itself, and the time you spend knowing him better will be worth it. And here is the next thing. If God himself has decreed to use time to save sinners, to call not the righteous, not the righteous, but sinners to repentance, to come not for the healthy, but for the sick, to not those who believe they are satisfied, but those who are thirsty, to give water, if God has appointed time for this purpose, can we take some small increased measure of devotion to ourselves, strive and seek and find and never yield in pursuing the lost. Never yield in pursuing the lost. And that's what's so great about this passage. It is not the work of your hands that will accomplish this thing. It is God's promise, because this purpose of time, to give the thirsty water, comes amid God's great promise and His great prize. In Revelation 21, earlier, He says that He has promised to make all things new. That was His promise from the beginning, and now it will happen. On the other side, both sides of this verse, we read this great prize that God will have, that He will be their God and they will be His people. That's in verse four and then that's in verse seven. On either side of this purpose of time is the prize of time, that we will be with God and he will be with us. But the people who will be with him are currently, many of them, lost souls. Lost souls who think they can find enjoyment, who think they can find enjoyment in 22 grown men playing a game. They cannot. But they might even think they can find that enjoyment in their wife and their husband, and they cannot. And there is no spouse in this world that can carry that burden. They think they can find enjoyment in their children. I love my children, but they can't carry that burden. Their hearts were made for God. Their hearts were made to rest in the Alpha and the Omega. And until their hearts rest in Him, they will be restless. And if God has made time that those thirsty sinners would have water, then our encouragement, brothers and sisters, is that God will accomplish it. He will have His people. He will be with them. And so we can be devoted. We can be devoted to striving and seeking and finding those sinners who live in houses across the street. who sit in cubicles across the way from us, who come to Thanksgiving and to Christmas because they are our dad and they are our sister and they are our sons, because God desires to give them water and he will do it. Let us be the same mind of the God who loved us and has brought us here together. Please pray with me. Father, what a joy it is to hear of your purpose for us. We were thirsty, we were broken, we were still sinners and yet you died for us. And we confess the unfathomable majesty that before the foundations of the world you chose us to be in Christ before the foundations of the world you chose to love us and you have loved us you have brought it to pass you have given us the water that satisfies and we know what awaits for us we know what awaits for us as described in revelation 21 lord we look forward to that day when the tears will be wiped from our eyes, when we will see you with our eyes, not the eyes of another, even though our flesh fails, we will see you with our own eyes. And Lord, we rejoice at that. Even as now, this evening, we ask to be filled with the fullness of your glorious purpose to give living water to thirsty sinners. If you had not purposed this, Lord, we would not be here. And so now, Lord, I pray that you would deepen our understanding of you, even in different and difficult doctrines like your eternality, that we would grow in our understanding of you, and that by knowing you better, we would love you more, and that by loving you more, we would serve you. One of your servants said, if it's an honor to know a worldly king, then how can we consider a responsibility of our heavenly king a sacrifice? It is not a sacrifice, Lord, it is a glorious, glorious joy to work with you in your purpose for time to save sinners. Strengthen us to that purpose tonight. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.