NOTES for Rev 22:17
This call has already sounded in the Gospel: let the thirsty come and drink the water of life freely. Now everyone can be joined to the Kingdom - not by merit, not by earning the right to such participation, but simply because he wants such participation and seeks it. But then there will also sound the warning that "the time is near." This can look strange if one remembers that the book was written almost two thousand years ago, and the end of history has still not come. Yet nearness here most of all means not chronology, but the inner logic of the process. The time is indeed near in the sense that history as such, history defined by its own purely historical laws, has truly ended.
What seems to us to be a continuation of the former historical process is in fact already metahistory, which is defined by the dynamic of the Kingdom's entry into the world. Of course, the projection of this dynamic onto our time is unpredictable in its dates, which can shift in either direction - and that is why the Savior says that only the Father knows the day and hour of His return in glory and of the end of times.
The issue here is not that the Father is deliberately hiding something, still less from the Son, but that according to our time, according to the time of the fallen world, there truly is no certainty about dates; they can change. But there is no longer anything that still has to happen in order for the Savior's return to become possible. Strictly speaking, all present history is the final stretch and direct preparation for His return, and therefore one can speak of the nearness of the times.
This, however, does not cancel the processes of spiritual self-determination of particular people, and sometimes of whole communities, taking place in the fallen world. It is precisely in this sense that the righteous, who are being sanctified still, and the unrighteous, who continue to do their unrighteous deeds, are spoken of. The age of the approaching Kingdom is an age of direct spiritual choice, which can already now be made for all eternity.
But one can, of course, postpone it to the very end, to the last day, to the moment when there will no longer be anywhere to go and one will still have to choose - for then refusal to choose will itself become a choice, and by no means a choice of the Kingdom. That is why the angel commands John not to hide the contents of the book, not to seal it: everyone must know about the present spiritual situation, about the spiritual meaning of our age and about its completion. Not for the sake of curiosity, but because this is a question of salvation, of the Kingdom and the "lake of fire," of life and death.