NOTES for Rev 22:3-4
As is known, the word "apocalypse" in Greek means "revelation." And when people pronounce this word, they often mean the corresponding biblical book. But still more often they mean catastrophe, a cosmic cataclysm, the end of everything. Such a view is widespread today even among Christians, not to mention everyone else.
The book of Revelation ends with a description not of catastrophe at all, but of the full and final renewal of the world, the triumph of the Kingdom, of which the first generation of Christians dreamed, hoping that it would take place while they were still alive. And what of the human person in this renewed world? Physically, he is evidently renewed just as all creation is; but spiritually? It is precisely this spiritual side that John speaks of when he describes the new quality of the spiritual life of the faithful in the Kingdom revealed to the end. In the Kingdom there is nothing "accursed."
There is nothing and no one there opposing God. In the present age, the age of the advancing Kingdom, opposition is evident, and it becomes more visible and acute the more the Kingdom is revealed in a hostile environment. But after the complete transformation of the world, as is clear, no force hostile to God will have any place left in it. Yet this is the picture of the new world as a whole. What about the individual person? For the individual person, as is evident, relations with God and with Christ are qualitatively changed and renewed (in John's visions Christ often appears as the Lamb).
Now they see the Savior face to face. They see Him all the time, not only occasionally as before, when the world was being transformed but had not yet been transformed to the end. They see clearly and distinctly, not as it often was earlier, when His face appeared as if through mist. And the point here, of course, is not only a change in the physical nature of the person. The point is, first of all, the renewal of spiritual life, the renewal of those relations that bind the person with God and with Christ, that renewal of the covenant-union of which Jeremiah had already spoken.
New relations, darkened by no sin, form the spiritual foundation of this new covenant-union. And the Kingdom is founded precisely on relations: its inhabitants with God and with one another, their relations with Christ, and finally Christ's own relations with His heavenly Father. And when these relations become full, then the Kingdom is revealed to the world in all its transforming fullness.