NOTES for Rev 22:3-4
As is well known, the Greek word 'apocalypse' means 'revelation'. When people use this word, they often mean the corresponding biblical book. Still more often, however, they mean a catastrophe, a universal cataclysm, the end of everything. This view is widespread today even among Christians, let alone everyone else.
The Book of Revelation ends with a description not of a catastrophe at all, but of the complete and final renewal of the world, the triumph of the Kingdom of which the first generation of Christians dreamed, hoping it would come about within their own lifetimes. And what of the human being in this renewed world? Physically, a person is evidently renewed like the rest of creation; but spiritually? It is precisely this spiritual dimension that John speaks of when he describes the new quality of the faithful's inner life in the Kingdom fully revealed. There is nothing 'accursed' in the Kingdom. Nothing and no one there opposes God. In the present age, the age of the advancing Kingdom, opposition is plain to see, and it becomes all the more visible and acute as the Kingdom is revealed in an environment hostile to it. After the world's complete transformation, however, it seems there is no longer any room in it for any power hostile to God.
But this is a picture of the new world as a whole; what of the individual? The individual's relationships with God and with Christ appear to change qualitatively, to be renewed; in John's visions the Saviour often appears as the Lamb. Now the faithful see the Saviour face to face, see Him all the time rather than occasionally, as before, when the world was being transformed but had not yet been transformed completely. And they see Him clearly and distinctly, unlike the way it often was before, when His face emerged as though through a mist. Of course, this is not merely a matter of a change in human physical nature. It is above all a matter of the renewal of spiritual life, of the relationships that bind a person to God and to Christ, of that renewal of the covenant of which Jeremiah spoke long ago.
These new relationships, no longer darkened by any sin, constitute the spiritual foundation of this new covenant. For the Kingdom itself is founded precisely on relationships: those of its inhabitants with God and with one another, those they have with Christ, and, finally, that of Christ Himself with His heavenly Father. When these relationships reach their fullness, the Kingdom is revealed to the world in all its transforming fullness.