So, after eight years and one month, and a very leisurely walk, I come to the last chapter in the Bible. It’s impossible for us to imagine now, but in the ancient world before the Hebrews, ancient people themselves couldn’t imagine that history was going somewhere, to some end or conclusion, to some purpose for which it existed. Life was to them cyclical, an endless array of events happening over and over going nowhere. But while the Hebrews introduced teleology in history, they couldn’t finish it. That would be left to Jesus of Nazareth who told them, and us, that the whole story of history is His Story. And here in the last chapter of Revelation and last chapter of the Bible, God’s revelation of his purposes for humanity, we see where it is going. All of the ideas and images adumbrated in the Old Testament are symbolized in fulfillment in Revelation, and in chapter 22 we see the fulfillment of all that came before. First, John tells us of a river:
Then the angel showed me the 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 great street of the city.
The direct biblical antecedent for this vision comes from Ezekiel 47 and his vision of a last day’s temple out of which flows life-giving water. The water flows into a river that gets ever deeper until it flows into the Dead Sea making it alive with an abundance of fish. In addition, fruit trees grow along its banks and bear fruit as will happen along the banks of this river. Jesus promised in us “a spring of water welling up to eternal life,” and here is the eternal fulfillment of that promise. The water is as clean and pure as our experience can imagine, and it flows from the authority and power of God, symbolized by his (the two are one divine essence) throne, something we’ve seen throughout Revelation. God is directing all to his appointed salvific end. Then we see that we are back to the restored garden:
On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every 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 in the city, and his servants will serve him.
In the garden the tree of life was in the middle of the garden, while here it extends to both sides of the river. We’re not to think of one literal tree somehow on two sides of a river, but that this tree abounds with the fruit of life flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb. In Ezekiel’s vision there are “a great number of trees on each side of the river,” and they grow all kinds of fruit for food and their leaves are for healing. Here John numbers the crops at twelve pointing us back to the fullness of God’s people in the twelve tribes (Chap. 7) and 144,000 which are in fact “a great multitude no one could count.” Before the days of modern worldwide agriculture, having fruit every month was an impossibility, but here in the restored garden nothing is impossible.
The leaves for healing do not imply there will be sickness, but point again to the fulfillment of the promise we read in 21:4: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” All of that is possible because the curse of sin is no more. As we know, this curse entered the world when Adam and Eve decided to listen to the lies of the serpent, and ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the one tree in the garden from which they were told not to eat. It is fascinating that at the heart of sin was epistemology, or a kind of knowing that man was not allowed to have, or everything would go to hell, which it promptly did. The curse entered man into a spiritual war he could not win, and marred creation so it would work against everything he (and she) would try to do. From that moment, we would all be born into the gravitational pull of sin that is always weighing us down, and making all things difficult. Most importantly it alienated man from God, thus Adam and Eve hid from him, like all sinners do by nature. God, however, had a plan to address this curse, and that plan was him! In the person of the Lamb:
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree
The curse has finally been wiped out from all of creation, and God can dwell with man, male and female he created them, and now they are recreated. We no longer hide or run away because we are reconciled to him, and we can serve him perfectly as we tried to do on this fallen world in our fallen bodies, very imperfectly. The extent of this reconciliation is shown by what we could never do on this side of eternity, or we would die:
4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.
We’ll remember in Exodus 33 that when Moses asked God to show him his glory, God replied: “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.” There seems to have been a couple exceptions to this rule, though. Jacob in Gen. 32:30 says he saw God face to face, but if you read the passage, it says Jacob wrestled “with a man” (a theophany). In Exodus 24 Moses and the elders “saw the God of Israel,” but what exactly that looked like, we’re not told. Likely this was another theophany, just as the Lord appeared to Abraham in Genesis 18 in the form of “three men.” Jesus told us, though, that God is spirit, so he certainly doesn’t have a “face,” and we can’t “see” him. He is also omnipresent, so how can we “see” an omnipresent being. But in one sense we can “see” God. When Philip asked Jesus to show them the Father, he replied that if they’ve seen him they have “seen” the Father. The point is God’s presence, who he is, and he can only be “seen” in Christ.
For the rest of Israelite history, however, all 1,500 years, seeing “God’s face,” i.e., living in intimate communion with him, was an eschatological hope. He was wholly other and unlike the pagan so-called gods. They knew his presence would mean death for sinful human beings without a mediator, and the temple was a literal picture of that. Only one man, and that one time a year, could enter his presence in the Holy of Holies. Now, not only can we see his face, but his name, who he is, will be implanted upon us, on our being. He purchased us, and we are now fully and completely his.
We’ve seen the contrast throughout Revelation, that we are either for the world, or for the Lamb. It is a binary choice, one or the other, the mark of the beast, or the mark of the Lamb, the world and its deceitful pleasures, or God and eternal fellowship with the author of life. We saw throughout the book that marks on foreheads are an important indicator of who belongs to whom. Jesus told the church in Philadelphia (Rev. 3:13) those who overcome will have written on them the name of his God and the name of the city of his God, as well as his new name. The symbolic picture is of complete possession and blessing, and of rescue from all the horrors of the curse of sin, forever. We’ll have to continue to see what’s in store for us in the next post.
My Walk Through The Bible 
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