The passage: John is shown a clear river of the water of life flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb. Along it grows the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit each month, its leaves healing the nations. There will be no more curse; God’s throne is there, his servants serve him, they see his face, and his name is on their foreheads. There is no night, no need of lamp or sun, for God gives light, and they reign forever. The angel tells John these sayings are faithful and true, that God sent his angel to show his servants what must soon happen, and that Christ is coming quickly—blessed is the one who keeps these sayings. When John falls to worship the angel, the angel forbids it, calling himself a fellow-servant, and tells him to worship God, and not to seal up the prophecy, for the time is near. Let the unjust and filthy stay so, the righteous and holy stay so; Christ comes quickly with his reward, to repay each according to his work. He is Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. Blessed are those who keep his commandments, who may have right to the tree of life and enter the city; outside are dogs, sorcerers, and the rest. Jesus has sent his angel to testify to the churches; he is the root and offspring of David and the bright morning star. The Spirit and the bride say, Come; whoever is thirsty may take the water of life freely. A warning follows against adding to or taking from the book. Christ says he comes quickly; John answers, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” Grace be with you all.
The last chapter of Revelation has often been compared to the second chapter of Genesis. There is reason for the comparison, but, as I tried to show you in an earlier sermon, the reason is not that the Bible’s final revelation shows a return to the state it described at the beginning. The man formed from the dust, who became a living soul, ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Everyone in his race has been eating from it ever since, and the evil has produced its natural results—strife, degradation, death. Meanwhile God, the true God, has been offering himself to the knowledge of his creatures; and those creatures, so far as they have known him, have been able to rise above the evil and to see that they were made for fellowship, for continual improvement, for eternal life. When people follow the tendencies of their separate, individual, Adam-nature, they fully experience the curse: they sink into themselves and are solitary even in the midst of society. Claiming their rights as those made in God’s image, they have found a second Adam, who is not a living soul but a life-giving spirit. They have left the garden and all its delights as a state fit for infancy, not for maturity. They have seen that labour is better than mere enjoyment, that conquering the thorn and thistle is better than eating everything good and pleasant. They have learned that the way to the tree of life is through death; that when death takes the shape of the Cross, the flaming sword can keep no sinful mortal from approaching it. They see the river that watered the garden turned into a river of the water of life, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb.
So it is all progress. There is no falling back to that first condition which, in our weakness and godlessness, we dream about and long for. From the beginning God has been educating his creatures through material things, through signs and sacraments, through the experience of toil and sorrow, through the anguish of sin, through the horror of death, so that they might understand they were born for an inheritance that is incorruptible and never fades—for a kingdom of righteousness, peace, and truth. The son of Zebedee was one of the chosen instruments in carrying on this education. He was taught how all things were created by the Word, for in him was life; how he came to baptize with the Holy Ghost; how those who would see his kingdom must be born of water and of the Spirit; how he would be lifted up as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so that those who believed in him should not perish but have everlasting life; how he would give living water, so that those who tasted it would not thirst again; how it would become in them a well of water springing up into everlasting life; how those who thirsted might come to him and drink; and how, when he said this, he was speaking of the Spirit that believers would receive after he was glorified.
I. Those who ponder these passages in St. John’s Gospel, and connect them with all that his Epistles say about eternal life, will be ready for the opening words of this chapter. What was shown to John earlier was not a garden but a city, the city of God—that society of men and angels, that union of heaven and earth, presented to us as the new Jerusalem. And now, when we return to the symbols of Eden, it is to remind us that as mere symbols they have passed away, and that we have arrived at the realities they stood for. “He shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.” We do not need to find the equivalents for this language; St. John has translated it himself. We know that the Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, is this River of Life. We know that it does not nourish trees, seeds, and flowers, but the hearts, wills, and reasons of human beings, the mystical body of Christ. And in case there is any doubt about this, we are at once brought back to the city: “In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.”
The river of life is what quickens, strengthens, and unites a society of men made to share God’s likeness. The tree of life is the one they behold, in whom they see the perfection of their own condition, from whom all living power comes down upon them. Throughout his Epistle and Gospel St. John has been explaining how the Son of God is the source of the various graces that all have received, grace upon grace; how he distributes his twelve kinds of fruit in the proportions and at the times suited to each society and each person; how he shades with his leaves those who do not yet know the taste of the fruit; and how he makes all the outward ministries of his Gospel and Church serve to cure the miseries that selfishness has brought on the nations.
- “And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him; and they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads.”
Men are cursed not because they eat bread by the sweat of their brow, but because they live under a government other than that of God and the Lamb—because they have handed themselves over to tyrants who separate them from the true Master. Where the throne of God and the Lamb is, there is no curse. When people understand that this is the kingdom in which they are living, and are allowed to know what he is—to see him, to become like him—there is no curse. Christ has taken it away. Christ has bound the children forever to their Father in Heaven. So again I say, brothers, we are not reading about some city to be set up on this planet at some distant day; nor about a city on another planet. We are reading of the city whose Ruler is Christ, and therefore of one whose citizens are all who, anywhere, confess him. Our grasp of its nature may be very poor; we must pray God by his Spirit of revelation to deepen and enlarge it. We ourselves, or others, may not admit that any such city exists at all; we must ask that the same Spirit will remove that unbelief. But the truth of things is not changed by our opinion of them. The Apostle was shown what is, not what is not. The muddy garment of decay, which keeps us from knowing our surroundings and ourselves, was stripped from him; and what was uncovered was not some private mansion for him, but that Father’s house with many mansions that has been opened to us all, and in which we are all invited to dwell.
- “And there shall be no night there; and they shall need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.”
I have pointed you to a few of the familiar sentences in which the Evangelist St. John speaks of Christ as the Life and the Giver of Life. I hardly need remind you of the equally numerous ones in which he speaks of him as the Light of Man, the Light of the World, the Light that shines in darkness which the darkness has not understood. All his other teaching is bound up with this. The condemnation of sin is that light has come into the world and men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil. The one who witnessed to the Lamb that takes away the world’s sins is said to have witnessed to the Light, so that all men through him might believe. Our Lord heals the blind man because he is the Light of the World. His charge against the Pharisees is that they will not admit they are blind so as to receive his light. How well the text agrees with this language! Where the Son of God and the Lamb is, there is no night. Those who are actually confessing that throne and kneeling before it are not in darkness but in full noonday. Whenever a human being can scatter some cloud from a neighbour’s sky, or show him his path across the earth more clearly; whenever the moral world is cleared of any of the mists that make it dismal; whenever the physical world yields any of its secrets to the humble and faithful seeker—there is a pledge that the visions of this book are not deceptions. And the more thoroughly we are convinced they are not deceptions—the more we act as if God’s throne were set up among us, and as if we might turn to him sure that he does not want us to live in darkness but to see the light of life—the more we ourselves will move beyond the circle of night, and draw fallen men out of it; the more we will persuade them that they do not need the candle or the sun, though they may be grateful for both; that whatever brightness comes from either, he sends it, and we may receive it from him through whatever channel it reaches us. Why does he add, “they shall reign for ever and ever”? Is it not because there is an essential, inseparable link between light and rule? The sun and stars were the rulers in the eyes of the old Eastern sages; they are so for the English peasant. Oh, that sages and peasants might learn how much grander and nobler they are than the most glorious objects they can look at! Oh, that they might believe that the Light which made those outer orbs shine can shine inwardly in their hearts and reason—and that when it does shine, and they are willing that it should, they possess an imperishable, ever-growing royalty! The kingdom of darkness must pass away; the kingdom of light is the one Christ established when he rose from the grave.
- “And he said unto me, These sayings are faithful and true; and the Lord God hath sent his angel, to shew unto his servants the things which must shortly be done. Behold, I come quickly: blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book.”
We have met this testimony often before: these “sayings are faithful and true.” Why should such repetitions be needed? We can all know why. You and I are constantly tempted to think these are not faithful and true sayings. We suspect they belong to a region that is at least half fanciful; we take them not as explanations of the world’s parables but as themselves parables. And we adopt this view all the more readily because, among these solemn statements, there are others we suppose cannot be taken literally: “These things must shortly come to pass. Behold, I come quickly.” My chief aim in these sermons has been to show that these sayings too are faithful and true; that if we read them together with the rest, their apparent contradiction disappears. The old Jerusalem did not pass away until the new was revealed. From the beginning of the world all things had been moving toward the revelation of him in whom heaven and earth are joined. That is the revelation granted to the Apostle John—to be, as he says it was, a blessing to the men of his own day, and no less a blessing to men of every later day. Those who kept it would understand what was meant by the earlier movements of the world, and what was meant by the crises and agonies they were passing through. More than that, they would accept the divine kingdom God had set up among men; they would walk in its light; they would not invent some wretched counterfeit of it, nor tear it to pieces. If they “did not keep the saying of the prophecy of this book”—if they treated these sayings as idle tales, or pushed them off into an imaginary future—they would be at the mercy of impostors who would try to do for the world what God had not done; of dividers who would say his Church is only a human creation and so may be pulled down by humans; of unbelievers who would claim he takes no care of his own earth; and of tyrants who would say that what he has neglected they may trample at will.
V. “And I John saw these things, and heard them.” The language of the senses is the only real language—the only language—that presents spiritual things to us as they truly are, not altered and disturbed by our reasoning, not as though our perceptions of them were the ground of their existence. So it has been throughout Scripture, and the lesson is pressed home in this closing passage. And there is another lesson we need just as much. The Bible has been throughout a witness against idolatry—and, at the same time, a witness of every man’s proneness to idolatry. We speak of Semitic races that had some special leaning toward the worship of the invisible; yet the teachers of that branch of the Semitic race which carried the weightiest and most enduring protest against worshipping the visible declare that their own people were ready to fall into it at every moment. The old Jewish Apostle, seeing and hearing the most divine truths, entering the very heart of the spiritual world, tells us twice that this temptation had not been overcome in him: “And when I had heard and seen, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel which shewed me these things. Then saith he unto me, See thou do it not: for I am thy fellow-servant, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them which keep the sayings of this book: worship God.”
Triumphant and secure Protestant—you who scorn idolatry, and trample on those who fall into it—has it ever occurred to you that you might not be wholly out of reach of a danger that pursued the beloved disciple to the very end? Has it ever struck you that he might say to you: judge not, that you be not judged; be not high-minded, but fear.
Here, as I noted in an earlier chapter, there is no obvious change of persons. It is not by formal phrases and words that we are taught to tell the angel apart from the one who sent the angel. God himself enabled the prophet to distinguish them; it is he who enables us to distinguish them.
- “And he saith unto me, Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for the time is at hand. He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still. And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be.”
The Apostle was told not to store up his prophecy as if its contents belonged to another age rather than his own. “The time was at hand.” I do not want to press this statement further than he presses it; but when he is taught that he must draw our attention to it, we must listen. The proof of its fulfilment would not depend on those who understood and received it. The Judge’s voice would make itself heard; the unjust and the filthy, the righteous and the holy, would hear it. How would they show they had heard it? The unjust will remain unjust. The sentence would go out: “You have chosen your path, stay in it. You love wickedness—feel and know what wickedness is. You love what is right, pure, and good—feel and know what the right, the pure, and the good is.”
When the light of the world shines out fully, each person will be found to have the very thing he has worked for. The wages of sin, and the gift of God—each will be received in full. We keep imagining that this law will somehow be reversed, that somehow we will not reap what we have sown. This delusion clings to us all; we try to convince ourselves that God’s grant of pardon licenses it. But God does more than pardon in our poor sense of the word. He gives repentance. All our attempts to measure and limit that grace of his are weak and impious. Yet it is the grace of turning us from darkness to light—not the cruel mercy of letting us go on in darkness, nor the impossible mercy of giving us the blessing of a light we hate. Good and evil were set before man at the first; they are set before him to the last. From the beginning the divine will has been acting on man’s will, that he might choose the good and reject the evil. We pray—Christ prays—that this will may prevail entirely. But as long as there is resistance to it, so long there is misery. There has been no change in the divine order, no turning of anything into its opposite. We are reading of a revelation, not of a scheme. God is bringing all contrasts into the open, just as he is bringing everything he has made into harmony.
For the old refrain of the prophecy comes back once more: “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.” The Revelation to St. John is the revelation of a Person who has been, and is, and is to be—of him who is the living centre of God’s universe, in whom past, present, and future meet. Does such a revelation carry us off into some far-off region away from our ordinary tasks and duties? Listen to the next words.
“Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city. For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.”
Those who remember God’s commandments in order to do them; those who live day by day as if under the government of a gracious Father, and as if he were working in them to will and to do according to his good pleasure; those who shun their own evil and turn to him as the source of all good—these gain power over the tree of life. The Apostle’s own words are stronger than the more grand-sounding phrase our translators put in their place. In one sense all have a right to the tree of life, since Christ has been set forth as the Life of the world, and has proclaimed himself, in death, the deliverer from death. What we need is not to claim a right but to acquire the capacity to taste and enjoy the tree’s fruit. We need the power to give up craving what is our own, the power to stop eating the fruit that grows on our own poor stock. This power is gained in the daily discipline of sorrow, in the effort to do what has to be done, in the struggle not to do the things our evil nature prompts. For there is a constant urging toward what it wants us to do. Around the best man who is striving to live as a citizen of God’s city live those who refuse to be its citizens, who would rather be animals, who prefer lying to truth. And the man who keeps God’s commands cannot say, like the Pharisee, “I thank thee that I am not one of these.” He is continually taught that he has in himself everything that has degraded them into dogs or sorcerers. Only by turning to the tree of life, taking in the food of its fruit, and enjoying the shade of its leaves, can he overcome these temptations, or hope for the day when the city of God will utterly defeat whatever in him or in the universe despises its invitation and lives as a stranger beside it. Thus, in the very middle of the description of the heavenly inheritance—of the highest blessings we can receive or God can give—we are still reminded of what is dark, foul, and terrible. If the highest state were one of mere innocence, with no knowledge of good and evil, this could not be. But if the countless company of angels, and the spirits of just men made perfect, can find no more glorious object of contemplation than the Lamb that was slain; if the Cross is the true tree of life; then the blessedness the New Testament reveals is not one that can ever be separated from the memory of a triumph won over selfishness, and from the desire and hope to share in the battle against whatever remains of it in God’s universe.
- “I Jesus have sent my angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.”
In this complete unveiling, nothing is lost from all the earlier revelation. Jesus the Saviour, born of the Virgin, the root and offspring of David, recalling all that belongs to Jewish life and the old dispensation; the bright morning star, whom the Magi sought in their faithful ignorance—the Light of the whole earth—all these names needed to be repeated, so that the Churches of Asia might receive the testimony sent to them about their King and Brother; that they might send it out into the world; and that we might receive it not as an heirloom handed down from them, but fresh from the lips of the one who is with us as he was with them. Only because they believed he was truly among them could they deliver his message to mankind; only while we believe he is with us can we deliver it. It is a grand, all-embracing message, meeting all the needs of men, both social and individual, reaching beneath all that is evil. “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst say, Come. And whosoever will, let him come and take of the water of life freely.” If we could, in even a small measure, believe these words—if we truly owned that the Spirit of the Eternal God was himself speaking them to the thirsty and broken spirits of men in every part of the earth—if we heard them echoed by the Church of all ages—then we might be allowed, each in his own small sphere, and each by the strength and encouragement he can give his brothers in theirs, to take part in the work of breaking the chains that bind our race. And we shall be taught, brothers, in wonderful ways, that this power is given to the weakest, if only they will credit it to the Spirit and the Bride and not to their own might or wisdom. Very feeble words will enter into human hearts and seem to die, and when they have died will bear fruit. For the words are not ours but his, in whom is life, and whose life is the light of men. And this makes the sentences that follow very awful indeed to those who have dared to open their lips in delivering and interpreting the lessons of the Apocalypse or of the Bible.
X. “For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.”
That this message is aimed especially at us, the ministers of God’s word and sacraments; that it tells us he will plague us if we add our own fancies and theories to what he has revealed of himself and of his character and purposes; that he will hide his truth from us—the very truth that is our deliverance—if we rob those we are sent to of what they need for their deliverance: this I cannot doubt. I am sure that whatever is written here must mean far more than I can see in it. But I am also sure that it is unsafe to turn this language into a condemnation of any other man. I am sure that every man needs to ask that the one who spoke it will use it for his own testing and cleansing. If we do ask that, I cannot doubt that the next words will be dearer and brighter to us than ever before.
- “He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly; even so, come, Lord Jesus.”
If in these sermons I have managed to show you that the Lord Jesus Christ did, in real deed and truth, reveal himself in the last days of the old dispensation—that the apostles and saints were not mistaken in expecting that an age was ending and a newer, more glorious one was to follow—then I trust I will have given you fresh strength and warrant for believing these warnings and for praying this prayer. Suppose the Apostle was disappointed—suppose what he looked for did not happen—then the same calamity may be waiting for us. But grant that the revelation of Jesus Christ, the Son and Word of God, was real for him, and it is real for us too. We shall then blame the darkness that hides the Friend, the King, the Judge of the World from us on ourselves, not on him. And then the clouds gathering about our own steps, or about the destinies of the earth, will become reasons for asking him to come and scatter them. And every mist that has cleared in the past will be a pledge for the future, because we shall recognise and accept it as a sign of the Son of Man—a token that daylight was breaking through our night.
- And the revelation to us will not be chiefly a revelation for us. It will be a revelation of the firstborn of the dead, of the Prince of all the kings of the earth, of the Lamb that was slain, of the brightness and glory of the Father. That brightness and glory will at last fill the whole earth. So, every day, to the one watching alone in his own sadness and despondency, to every one of God’s Churches in the midst of the world’s gloom, and to all human beings: “Come, Lord Jesus.”