Canter Bridge

The language of ‘first and last’, of ‘before and after’, lies near the spinal column of Isaianic dialect. It is deployed throughout the book, though it comes into its own only after the pivot towards redemption that famously occurs in chapter 40.

In the midst of YHWH’s unanticipated cooption of the pagan monarch Cyrus and his ongoing astonishment of the nations, chapter 41 gives us this rendition of the expression to which I refer:

Perhaps owing to the work’s preference for creative reiteration over redundant repetition, chapter 41’s fourth verse tosses in the preposition את in the second of its two temporal affirmations. Thus, we have ואת־אחרנים // ‘(I am) with the last’ rather than the anticipated ‘I am the last’. There is an alternative view that sees את as a kind of deictic particle rather than the well-known preposition, but let us leave that possibility on the margins for now.

What does YHWH accomplish with this kind of first-and-last assertion of his existence, presence, and activity? It would seem that the claim asserts his mastery over history and therefore the creative privilege that generates the astonishment and marveling which ensue. Theologians might find ‘sovereignty’ preferable to ‘mastery’, though the two affirmations do not lie far from each other.

What it asserts on YHWH’s behalf is not so much the staccato claim that he is ‘in control’, which arguably is fueled more by modern concepts of automation. Rather, YHWH is present in creative orchestration of the events of history, more prone than anyone would expect to introduce unknown instruments, unfamiliar melodies, and unexpected rhythm in the execution of a continually self-enriching kind of artistry.

It would be difficult to exaggerate how noisily this notion of YHWH’s mastery over history collides with pieties that render him predictable and schematizable on the assumption that his future can be mapped out in concrete fashion. Such a reduction of prophetic imagination evacuates YHWH’s purpose of the astonishing and marvelous qualities that prophetic literature and particularly the Isaianic vision claims for it.

YHWH is present from before our retrospective vision fades to the vanishing point and until after our ability to imagine the future’s course evaporates into thin air. This, it seems to me, is the burden of the ‘I am the first and I am the last’ discourse. It urges us to trust in YHWH’s good presence and redemptive activity, while waving us away from the presumption that we know with any precision his ways and means.

The slight variation I have mentioned—which we might gloss as ‘and I am the one who will be with the latter things’—lays the stress on his presumed accompaniment of future events or, more properly, generations. Those events, those generations, are here glimpsed with a curious degree of independence. ‘They will be what they shall be’, we are encouraged to understand, ‘but I will be there, still orchestrating, baton still firmly in hand’.

I find this dynamic and profoundly theocentric view of history and of future, of retrospect and of prospect, a potent theological foundation for theological assessment of the past and for faithful expectation of the future. Like most affirmations that approach credal status, it is generative both in what it says and in that which it refuses to say.

In its shadow, its emaciated imitators look faintly ridiculous.