Celui Qui Est, Qui Était, et Qui Vient — The Coming One

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Order of the Three

Le names the three tenses, and she is right. But look at the order John puts them in, because it is not the order anyone would expect.

Not who was, who is, and who will be. John writes: who IS, and who was, and who is to come. Celui qui est, qui était, et qui vient.

The present tense comes first. Not because the past matters less, but because that is where God is met. A God who was is history. A God who will be is a hope. The first thing John says about Him is that He is — now, in the room, while the letter is being read.

Which is the right emphasis for people in the middle of something. The past is settled and the future is unseen. The tense a traveller actually lives in is the present — and that is the one John leads with.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Third One Is Not a Tense

Now the detail that changes the verse. Having said who is and who was, John should say who will be. The grammar is sitting there waiting for it.

He does not. He writes ho erchomenos — the One who is coming. The Segond keeps it exactly: qui vient.

That is not a tense. It is a direction. John refuses to place God at a distant point on a timeline and instead describes Him as in motion toward us. The future is not a place we travel to and find Him waiting. It is a Person arriving.

Le read the same reversal four days ago in Philippians 3. Our citizenship is in heaven, from which we eagerly wait for the Savior. The note that morning was that the traffic runs from heaven toward earth, not the other way. Paul and John, independently, both turn the future around.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Burning Bush Name

The Greek behind who is is ho ōn — literally the being One, the One who simply is.

And that phrase has a history. When Moses stood at the burning bush and asked for a name to give Israel, the answer was I AM WHO I AM. And in the Greek Old Testament that John's readers used, God's self-naming is rendered with these very words: ho ōn.

So John opens Revelation by putting the burning-bush name at the front of the formula. Celui qui est. The same One who spoke to a fugitive shepherd in a desert is the One addressing seven churches under pressure — and the name has not needed updating in fifteen hundred years.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Alpha and Omega

I am the Alpha and the Omega. Je suis l'alpha et l'oméga.

He does not say the beginning and the end of time. He names two letters — the first and last of the alphabet John was writing in. Which is a larger claim than it looks.

Every word ever written in Greek is made of what lies between those two letters. Every sentence, every argument, every accusation, every promise. He is not merely standing at the two ends of the story. He is what the story is spelled with.

And the title Almighty — le Tout-Puissant, the One who holds all things — is used nine times in Revelation and almost nowhere else in the New Testament. John is writing to people who were about to see power used badly, and he keeps reminding them who actually holds it.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Where He Was Sitting When He Wrote It

It is worth knowing where this sentence was written. John says it himself, a few verses later: I, John... was on the island that is called Patmos for the word of God and for the testimony of Jesus Christ.

He was exiled. An old man, removed from his church, put on a rock in the Aegean because of what he preached. No home, no congregation, no freedom of movement.

And from there he writes that God holds the past, the present, and the future, and is called the Almighty. Not from a position of security. From a place of total displacement, to churches that were about to lose a great deal.

Which is a fitting page for a household reading it in a motorhome, between a country sold and a country not yet reached. The men who wrote the strongest lines about God's rule were rarely the ones with the most control over their own circumstances.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Hand Before the Title

Nine verses later Jesus takes the same title for Himself — the First and the Last — and the manner of it should be noticed.

John collapses. And before a single word of explanation, there is a hand. Il posa sur moi sa main droite. Touch first, then ne crains point, then the title.

The One who holds all things put a hand on a frightened old man before telling him who He was. Which is entirely in keeping with what Le read on the thirteenth: I am gentle and lowly in heart.

And the title is expanded in a way only He could expand it: I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. The Alpha and Omega has a past tense that includes a grave. J'étais mort; et voici, je suis vivant.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Blessed Assurance

Le's own two words for it: blessed assurance.

And they are the right ones, because assurance is precisely what the three tenses produce. A God who holds only the past would be a memory. One who holds only the future would be a gamble. Holding all three, He is the only thing in a person's life that is not in motion.

Which is worth saying plainly on this particular morning. The address has changed. The car is gone. The apartment belongs to somebody else. The Benimar has been in three towns in three days.

And the sentence in front of her this morning has three tenses in it, and not one of them has moved.

Two days ago the psalm said it in property language — c'est toi qui m'assures mon lot. Today Revelation says it in the language of time itself. Le's word — assurance — is the same word.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Parked at an Olive Press

A lagar de azeite is an olive press. And the Hebrew name Gethsemane means precisely that: oil press.

The garden where He prayed the hardest prayer of His life was named after the machine that crushes olives. Nobody planning the story would have chosen it. But the oil that lights a lamp, anoints a king, and heals a wound does not come off the tree ready. It comes from what happens after the fruit is taken off.

Which is a strange and fitting place for this household to be parked this morning — two days after signing away a home, beside the trees and the press together.

And Le's own observation is the thing worth keeping. We would never enjoy this beautiful place living in an apartment.

She is not consoling herself. She is reporting a fact. The olive grove was not available to a woman with a flat in Caldas da Rainha — not because it was far away, but because she would have had no reason to be standing in it. This morning was opened by the leaving.

Which is what the psalm said two days ago, before there was any way to check it. The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places. Un héritage délicieux m'est échu. She wrote that from a van on a street she had lived on for five years. Today she is under olive trees, and the sentence has not needed changing.