Revelation 22

Today’s Passage: Revelation 22

We have come to the last chapter of the last book, and John’s final vision takes us back to the first garden. An angel shows him a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing out from the throne of God and of the Lamb, running straight down the middle of the main street. On either bank stands the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, a fresh crop every month, and its leaves are for the healing of the nations. Then one short sentence that undoes the oldest wound in the world: no longer will there be any curse. The throne is inside the city now, and His servants worship Him, and then comes the highest promise in all of Scripture, four words that Moses himself was not permitted to have. They will see His face. After that the chapter turns and speaks to us. The angel says these words are faithful and true. Jesus says three separate times, I am coming soon. John, who ought to have known better, falls down to worship the angel and is stood back on his feet with a rebuke that is almost affectionate. The scroll is not to be sealed, because the time is near. And then the book that has thundered for twenty-two chapters ends the way a father ends a letter, with an open door: the Spirit and the bride say come, and whoever hears is to say come, and anyone who is thirsty may come and drink freely. The last words are a prayer and a blessing. Come, Lord Jesus. The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints.

As you read, hold this: The Bible ends where it began, at a river and a tree of life, with the curse gone and the servants of God seeing His face, and the last word of Scripture is not a warning but an invitation to come and drink.

Revelation 22:1–5 (BSB)

¹ Then the angel showed me a river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb ² down the middle of the main street of the city. On either side of the river stood a tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit and yielding a fresh crop for each month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. ³ No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be within the city, and His servants will worship Him. ⁴ They will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads. ⁵ There will be no more night in the city, and they will have no need for the light of a lamp or of the sun. For the Lord God will shine on them, and they will reign forever and ever.

Take a moment before we go a step further, because something quiet and enormous is happening here. Sixty-six books ago the Bible opened in a garden with a river flowing out of it and a tree of life standing in the middle, and man was put there to live. He rebelled, and the ground was cursed for his sake, and he was driven out, and God set cherubim and a whirling sword of flame to guard the way to that tree. Every page since has been written east of that gate. And now, on the last page, here is the river again, and here is the tree again, and there is no sword and no cherub and no gate to be kept out of. The circle closes. Do not let that pass as a pretty symmetry; it is the deepest structural fact in Scripture. God did not abandon what He made in Genesis and start something else. He went and got it back.

"Out of the ground the LORD God gave growth to every tree that is pleasing to the eye and good for food. And in the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." Genesis 2:9 (BSB)

"So He drove out the man and stationed cherubim on the east side of the Garden of Eden, along with a whirling sword of flame to guard the way to the tree of life." Genesis 3:24 (BSB)

And notice that it is not simply Eden restored. It is Eden brought into a city and multiplied. There was one tree in the garden; here the tree stands on either side of the river, so that whichever bank you walk on you are in reach of it. It bore its fruit in season; here it bears twelve kinds and yields a fresh crop every month, which is to say that the abundance never has an off season and there is no hungry gap and no waiting. And the source of the river is named with great care: it flows from the throne of God and of the Lamb. Not from a spring in the hills, not from a reservoir that can run dry. Life in that city comes straight out of the place where God rules, and the Lamb is named on that throne beside the Father as naturally as breathing. All this water, and it comes to us because He was slain.

Then the leaves, and this is one of the most tender lines in the Bible. The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. John takes it almost word for word from Ezekiel, who was shown fruit trees on both banks of the temple river whose leaves would not wither and would be used for healing. The nations in this book have raged and warred and been deceived and shed the blood of the saints, and there is a long, bitter history among them that no treaty ever settled. And the last picture we are given of them is not a courtroom. It is a hospital ward with the windows open, and leaves enough for every wound any people ever gave another. Whatever has been broken between peoples, and whatever has been broken in you, there is a tree for it.

"Along both banks of the river, fruit trees of all kinds will grow. Their leaves will not wither, and their fruit will not fail. Each month they will bear fruit, because the water from the sanctuary flows to them. Their fruit will be used for food and their leaves for healing.”" Ezekiel 47:12 (BSB)

And then five words that finish a story begun in the third chapter of Genesis: No longer will there be any curse (κατάθεμα) katathema, pronounced kah-TAH-theh-mah. Strong's G2652, an accursed thing, something placed under the ban of God's judgment. The word is katathema, and it is unusual and heavy. Behind it stands the Old Testament idea of a thing devoted to destruction, placed under the ban, put outside the camp because God’s judgment rests on it, and no one may touch it or trade in it or bring it home. Jericho was under such a ban. Achan’s household came to ruin because he carried a piece of it into his tent. That is the weight of the word John chooses, and he says of the eternal city that not one such thing will be in it. Now hold that beside what Paul wrote to the Galatians, using the near neighbor of this word. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree. There is the exchange, and it is the reason this verse can stand. The curse did not evaporate. It was not overlooked, and God did not simply decide one day to stop minding. It was taken, absorbed, and carried off by the Lamb who hung on a Roman stake outside the wall of a city, in the dark, with the sin of the world on Him. Every thorn, every grave, every ruined thing you have grieved over was answered there. And so the last city has no curse in it, and the receipt is nailed to a cross. . Think of what that sentence removes. The ground that yields thorns to a man who works it all his life. The sweat on the face. The pain in childbirth. The enmity, the shame, the hiding among the trees, the long, patient corruption in everything, so that the strongest body wears out and the finest work crumbles and every good thing we build has to be built again by somebody else. All of it gone, not suppressed, not managed, gone at the root. Nothing under that curse ever fixed itself, and no generation ever made a dent in it. It took the blood of the Lamb, and He bore it Himself, hanging on a tree outside a city so that we could come back to a tree inside one.

And now the summit. Of everything promised in this book, of everything promised anywhere in Scripture, nothing rises higher than verse four. They will see His face (πρόσωπον) prosōpon, pronounced PROSS-oh-pon. Strong's G4383, face, countenance, the presence of a person turned toward you. Prosōpon is built from the preposition pros, meaning toward, and a form of the word for the eye, so at root it means what is toward your eyes, the part of a person that faces you. That is exactly right, because a face is not merely an arrangement of features; it is where a person is present to you. You can know a great deal about someone from a distance and still not have seen their face. In the Greek Old Testament this word carries the whole drama of Israel’s life with God: the plea that He would not hide His prosōpon, the blessing that He would make His prosōpon shine upon you, the longing of the psalmist to behold His prosōpon in righteousness and be satisfied when he awakes. It is the language of intimacy and of favor, and it always ran into the same wall, that no one could see Him and live. Paul used the word for what is coming: now we see a dim reflection as in a mirror, then face to face. So did John in his letter, saying that we shall be like Him because we shall see Him as He is. Understand, then, what heaven finally is. It is not chiefly a reunion, or a rest, or a reward, though it is all of those. It is a face. The end of the Bible is the end of hiddenness, and the servants of God look full into the countenance of the One who made them and loved them and bought them, and no one has to look away. . Stop and let the weight of that come down on you slowly, because to understand it you have to remember how impossible it has always been. Moses, who spoke with God as a man speaks with his friend, asked to see His glory and was told plainly that he could not, and was hidden in the cleft of a rock and shown only the back of God as He passed by.

"But He added, “You cannot see My face, for no one can see Me and live.”" Exodus 33:20 (BSB)

That has been the settled fact of our race. Isaiah saw the hem of a robe and cried out that he was undone. The priest went behind the veil once a year and did not linger. John himself, in the first chapter of this very book, saw the risen Christ and fell at His feet like a dead man. And now, on the last page, ordinary servants of God stand in the open in the light of that face and look at it, and live, and are not consumed. Do you understand what must have happened for that to be possible? Not that God has become less holy, but that His people have been made clean by blood and given bodies that can bear the sight of Him. This is what all the aching of the Psalms was reaching for, one thing asked of the LORD, to gaze on His beauty; this is what the priestly blessing hoped for, that the LORD would make His face shine upon you; this is what every believer has wanted without quite having words for it in a thousand quiet moments of worship when the singing got close to something and then stopped short. It does not stop short there. And His name will be on their foreheads, the mark of ownership and belonging, so there is no possibility of mistaking whose they are or of ever being sent away. Look at what a first-century believer would have heard in that. In the world they lived in, a mark on the forehead meant a slave, or a captured soldier, or the brand of a temple. This mark says: this one belongs to God, and God is not ashamed of it.

And then the light again, and the reigning. No night, no lamp, no sun, because the Lord God will shine on them. And they will reign forever and ever, which takes us all the way back to the beginning once more, since man was made to have dominion and to keep a garden, and here he is at last doing the work he was made for, under the God he was made to love, and doing it without weariness and without end.

Revelation 22:6–9 (BSB)

⁶ Then the angel said to me, “These words are faithful and true. The Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, has sent His angel to show His servants what must soon take place.” ⁷ “Behold, I am coming soon. Blessed is the one who keeps the words of prophecy in this book.” ⁸ And I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. And when I had heard and seen them, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who had shown me these things. ⁹ But he said to me, “Do not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers the prophets, and with those who keep the words of this book. Worship God!”

The vision is over, and now the book turns and speaks to the room. “These words are faithful and true,” says the angel, which is the very thing the One on the throne said one chapter ago, and it is said twice because we need it twice. And the God who sends this word is called “the God of the spirits of the prophets,” which quietly ties this scroll to the whole long line before it. The same God who spoke to Isaiah and Ezekiel and Zechariah is the one speaking here. This is not a stray book at the back of the Bible. It is the last word of one long conversation.

Then Jesus speaks: Behold, I am coming soon. He will say it twice more before the chapter is done, and each time it is followed by a word of blessing or reward rather than a threat. And notice what the blessing is attached to. Not to understanding the book, not to charting it, not to being able to explain the beasts and the numbers to your friends. Blessed is the one who keeps the words of prophecy in this book. Keeps them. Guards them, lives by them, holds on to them when the pressure comes. This is the same blessing pronounced in the first chapter over the one who reads it aloud and those who hear and keep it, and the two blessings hold the whole book between them like bookends. If you have finished these chapters without settling every question, you have not failed. Keep the words.

And then John does a very strange thing, and I am glad the Holy Spirit left it in. He falls down to worship the angel. This is John. The apostle who leaned against Jesus at supper, who stood at the cross, who has been standing in the throne room for twenty-two chapters watching the elders cast their crowns down, and he has already done this once before, in chapter nineteen, and been corrected then too. So he knew better, and he did it anyway, and he wrote it down for us instead of quietly editing it out. That is honesty of a rare kind. And the angel’s answer is wonderful. Not a lecture on the sin of idolatry, but the plain protest of a fellow worker: I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers the prophets, and with those who keep the words of this book. The mighty being who has been shepherding John through the end of the world says: we are on the same staff, you and I. And then two words that could be carved over the door of every church on earth: Worship God! After all these visions, after the trumpets and the bowls and the city of gold, the last instruction the angel gives is the simplest one in the Bible. Every glory in this book was only ever pointing somewhere. Do not stop at the messenger. Do not stop at the vision. Worship God.

Revelation 22:10–13 (BSB)

¹⁰ Then he told me, “Do not seal up the words of prophecy in this book, because the time is near. ¹¹ Let the unrighteous continue to be unrighteous, and the vile continue to be vile; let the righteous continue to practice righteousness, and the holy continue to be holy.” ¹² “Behold, I am coming soon, and My reward is with Me, to give to each one according to what he has done. ¹³ I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.”

Do not seal it up. That is worth pausing on, because Daniel was told the opposite. He was told to shut up the words and seal the book until the time of the end, and Daniel went away not understanding. John is told to leave it open, and the reason given is that the time is near. This scroll was never meant to be locked in a cabinet for the experts. It was to be unrolled and read out loud in a room full of tradesmen and slaves and widows who needed to hear it that week. Anyone who handles this book as though it were a private code for the initiated has already disobeyed its plainest instruction.

Verse eleven is a solemn word and it should be read the way a doctor reads a chart, without flinching and without cruelty. It is not saying that people cannot change; the next six verses will invite anybody at all to come and drink. It is saying that at some point the time for changing runs out, and that what a person has been becoming is what a person will finally be. Every day of a life is a day of settling into a shape. That is a frightening thought and it is meant to be, and it is placed here immediately before an open invitation for exactly that reason. The door is standing open. It will not stand open forever. That is not a threat; it is the ordinary honesty of anyone who loves you.

Then Jesus again: Behold, I am coming soon (ταχύ) tachy, pronounced tah-KHOO. Strong's G5035, quickly, soon, without delay. Tachy is an ordinary adverb meaning quickly, at speed, without delay, and it turns up three times in this final chapter on the lips of Jesus. Now be honest about the difficulty, because thoughtful believers have felt it for two thousand years: it has not felt quick. Christians read that word in different ways and always have. Some hear it as soon, meaning that the next great act of God is the very next thing on the calendar and no further event stands in the way. Some hear it as suddenly, describing the manner of His coming rather than its distance, since He said elsewhere that He would come like a thief and like lightning that flashes across the whole sky. Some point to Peter, who dealt with this exact objection in his own lifetime and answered that with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and that what looks like slowness is patience, because He is not willing that any should perish. Manna Praxis will not settle that for you, and it does not need settling for the word to do its work. Whatever tachy means about the clock, it means everything about how you live. He is at the door. Do not build as though He were far off, and do not despair as though He had forgotten. , and My reward is with Me. He brings the reward with Him, which is a lovely detail. He does not arrive and then send for it. And He gives to each one according to what he has done, which is exactly what the whole New Testament teaches: we are saved by grace through faith and not by works, and our works are nonetheless real and seen and answered for. Nothing done for Him in obscurity has been forgotten. Then He names Himself with three titles stacked one on another, the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End, and every one of those titles belongs in the Old Testament to the LORD God alone, and one of them He has already spoken over Himself in chapter one to a terrified old man lying on the ground on Patmos. This book will not permit you to admire Jesus as a great figure. He is God, and He says so in the last chapter with His own mouth.

Revelation 22:14–17 (BSB)

¹⁴ Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by its gates. ¹⁵ But outside are the dogs, the sorcerers, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood. ¹⁶ “I, Jesus, have sent My angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, the bright Morning Star.” ¹⁷ The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” Let the one who hears say, “Come!” And let the one who is thirsty come, and the one who desires the water of life drink freely.

Blessed are those who wash their robes. That is how a person gets in, and notice the strangeness of the picture, because it is the same one this book gave us in chapter seven, where a great multitude no one could number stood in white robes and we were told they had washed them and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Blood does not whiten cloth. Nothing about that sentence works except in the gospel, where the death of the Innocent is the only thing in the universe that takes a stain out of a life. And the washing is something the person does, actively, and it is nonetheless entirely a gift, because the basin was filled at Calvary and no one contributed a drop to it. So they have the right to the tree of life. The word means an authority, a legal standing, and it is granted, not earned. Adam lost that right for us all. It is handed back at a wash basin filled with blood.

Verse fifteen names those outside, plainly and without embroidery, and it is the last of the three sober lists this book gives us. Read it and do not linger over it. John does not linger either; he does not describe their state or dwell on their suffering. He simply says where they are, and then he immediately opens the gates as wide as they will go. That is the pattern of Scripture and we will follow it.

Because now Jesus speaks for the last time in the Bible, and He signs His name to it: I, Jesus, have sent My angel to give you this testimony for the churches. Not to scholars. To the churches, the seven ordinary struggling congregations of chapters two and three and every church since. And He gives Himself three names. The Root of David, which means He is David’s origin, existing before him, the source from which that whole royal line grew, and no mere descendant can be called anyone’s root. The Offspring of David, which means He was born into that family, a real man with a genealogy and a hometown. Root and Offspring at once, David’s Lord and David’s son, God and man in one breath. And then the bright Morning Star, which is the star that rises last and lowest in the darkness, when the night has gone on longest and coldest, and its arrival means one thing to anyone awake to see it: the night is nearly over, the sun is coming.

And then, at the very end, the invitation. The Spirit and the bride say, Come (ἔρχομαι) erchomai, pronounced ER-kho-my. Strong's G2064, to come, to go, to arrive. Erchomai simply means to come or to go, and it is one of the commonest verbs in the Greek New Testament, which is exactly what makes its use here so moving. It is not a technical or a sacred word. It is the word you would use to call a child in from the yard. And look at how this chapter runs it in both directions at once. Three times Jesus says erchomai tachy, I am coming soon, and three times a voice on earth answers with the same verb: the Spirit and the bride say come, the one who hears says come, the thirsty one is told to come. He is coming down and we are coming in, and it is one word for both, the whole traffic of redemption on a single ordinary verb. That is what the end of the Bible sounds like. Not a verdict being read out, not a door slamming, but two parties calling to each other across the last of the distance. And when He says it for the third and final time in verse twenty, the book answers with the shortest prayer in Christendom, the one the earliest believers prayed in Aramaic before there was a New Testament to read. Come, Lord Jesus. If you learn nothing else from these twenty-three days, learn to say that, and mean it. ! The Holy Spirit and the church of Jesus Christ, speaking with one voice at the close of the canon, and the word they say is the warmest word in any language. Then the circle widens: Let the one who hears say, Come! That is you. Whoever hears this read is drafted into the inviting. And then it widens once more and takes in the whole world: let the one who is thirsty come, and the one who desires the water of life drink freely. No price, no qualification, no examination. Thirst is the only ticket. Seven hundred years earlier a prophet had stood in the street and shouted it in almost the same words, and God has not changed His terms since.

"“Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you without money, come, buy, and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost!" Isaiah 55:1 (BSB)

Revelation 22:18–21 (BSB)

¹⁸ I testify to everyone who hears the words of prophecy in this book: If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. ¹⁹ And if anyone takes away from the words of this book of prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and the holy city, which are described in this book. ²⁰ He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! ²¹ The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.

Understand what these two verses are and what they are not. In the ancient world, before printing, a book survived only because somebody copied it by hand, and a scribe with an opinion could quietly soften a hard line or add a flourish of his own, and nobody would ever know. So it was a known and respected practice to place a warning at the end of a document forbidding exactly that, and Moses had already done it for the law, warning Israel that they must not add to or subtract from what God commanded them. This is a seal on a scroll that was about to be copied and carried around a circuit of seven cities, and it is a solemn one. God will not have this word tampered with. Now, that is a warning about this book of prophecy, and it should be taught as such, not stretched into a general theory about which writings belong in a Bible; John is not settling questions of canon here, he is protecting a scroll he has just been given. But the principle behind it is worth carrying into how you handle all of Scripture. Do not add to it. Do not trim it. It is a very great temptation with this book in particular, where a reader may be tempted to add a certainty the text never gave, or to quietly take away the parts that unsettle. Leave it as it is. It is not ours.

And now the final exchange, and I want you to notice its shape, because it is not the shape most people expect from Revelation. The last voice from heaven in the Bible is not a sentence of judgment. It is a promise: Yes, I am coming soon. And the last voice from earth in the Bible is not an argument or a boast or a claim to have understood it all. It is a prayer, four words long, from an old man on a rock in the sea who wants to see his Lord again: Come, Lord Jesus! That is how the Scriptures end. A promise and a prayer, calling to one another across the dark. And then the last line of all, and it is grace. The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. All of them. The frightened ones at Smyrna, the compromised ones at Pergamum, the half-dead ones at Sardis, the lukewarm ones at Laodicea, and every believer since who has read this book at a kitchen table and closed it not quite sure what to make of it. Grace be with all the saints. The Bible does not end with a warning. It ends with a gift, given away for nothing, to people who could never have earned it.