12“Listen to me, O Jacob, Israel, whom I have called: I am he; I am the first and the last.”
The God of the Scriptures has a way of calling a spade a spade. The LORD never tries to shy away from the Truth. We see in this passage the He claims a position in the universe and in the life of the world that is unique. This gets emphasized in the contrast with idols of stone and wood that we have previously discussed. But here Isaiah says simply “I am he.” The LORD simply is. He didn’t come from somewhere else, or change over time (unlike the god of the Mormons), but simply is. WE, by contrast, became. We had a starting moment. There was a time when we did not exist. This cannot be said of the LORD. The LORD spoke and things happen. He made us and He carries us. But these are things that He did in the realm of space and time. But He is not limited by space and time. He is “the first and the last.” He was here before there was anything, and He will be here even if everything stopped existing, because He is not a thing. He exists apart from all things. This is a hard concept for us who are trapped by our material perceptions. We think that the objects we can taste, hold and test are the only real things, and that this is all there is to reality. We search for “dark matter” in hopes of explaining existence apart from the LORD. We do this because to acknowledge the LORD would be to acknowledge His claim on our lives, a moral and ethical claim. And we don’t want to admit that we are owned.
The Arnold Journey 