In “Things I Find Fascinating.”

The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet is “Aleph.” However, it’s a silent letter, “barely a breath” as one gets ready to speak.

When I read this in two different places*, my mind started to work. When man was created, he became a living being when God breathed into his nostrils. (Gen 2:7).

Another little factoid I find interesting. In ancient Hebrew, the letter tau, the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet is written like a cross.

This is highly speculative, but I wonder if that’s why Jesus chose to die on a cross. He was not only saying “It is finished!” but showing it as well. The end of the alphabet, the end of sin’s domain. The end of the sacrificial system of the old covenant.

Isaiah 53 is a beautiful passage of Scripture, and it builds to that key verse:

Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him;
He has put Him to grief.
When You make His soul an offering for sin,
He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days,
And the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand.
He shall see the labor of His soul, and be satisfied.

Is. 53:10-11

Through the sacrifice of the perfect lamb, God’s wrath and judgment was satisfied. It is finished.

From breathing into man to dying on a cross. Jesus is the first and last. The beginning and the end.

Amen.

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* Richard Wurmbrand’s Alone with God, pg. 13 and Jean-Francois Lyotard “Being Done with Narrative by Cubism and Andre Malraux.”