NOTES for Rev 22:5
The presence of God in Yahwism was often revealed to God's people and to individual representatives of it as light or as radiance. The shining cloud marked the place of God's presence already in the days of Moses, who saw it at Horeb, where he first met the God of his fathers. From a distance Moses took this radiance for fire, but when he came closer he realized that he was mistaken: real fire would have burned the bush on which the cloud had descended in an instant. Later this shining cloud was seen over the Tabernacle, in the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem Temple, leaving the Temple where there was no longer room for God (this is how it was revealed in Ezekiel's vision), and on the day of the Ascension (it is in just such a shining cloud that Jesus disappears from the eyes of the astonished disciples). And in the poem of creation, in the first chapter of Genesis, the description of the first day of creation mentions the world created by God on that day, wholly flooded with light, pierced through by the radiance of God's presence. It is no surprise that in this world shining with God's light there is no place for darkness: God separates light from darkness, establishing the distinction between light and darkness. Later, however, when chaos invades the world and God resists the forces that allowed it into the world, later, when God's creation becomes such, or almost such, as it appears to us, day and night, light and darkness begin to alternate in the world. And so it will be until its complete transformation, until the day when its very nature changes qualitatively. Of course, it will not change by itself; God changes it by His breath, by that breath of the Kingdom which burst into the world on the day of Pentecost. And when this happens, the world again proves to be pierced through by the light of God's presence, as on the first day. Thus the world becomes the Kingdom: for the Kingdom of God is not a world where God hides behind the veil of nature, but a world where He is visible from everywhere, clearly and distinctly visible. And the radiance is only the consequence of this nearness. Without it there is no Kingdom, just as there is none without the breath of God that permeates the Kingdom to its very limits. For it is precisely this breath that gives the Kingdom both light and life. Beyond its limits there is only what the Savior calls outer darkness.