22 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. 3 No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. 4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign for ever and ever.
None of the descriptive and symbolic excellencies that we have thus far touched upon exhaust the meaning of the new creation, however, or say the deepest word about it. For the kingdom of God centres upon the King Himself, and consequently no merely impersonal categories can fully unfold its glories in the consummation. This is why the simple statement in 4, 'They shall see His face', is the best and most profound in all the final section of the book. Almost the whole of Christian theology can be adduced from what it says. We have already pointed out that in the vision of the new heaven and new earth what we have is the complete reversal of the tragedy of the Garden of Eden, and this in fact is the key to the whole picture, and must be the starting point for a true understanding of John's words. Sin compels separation, and Adam's disobedience brought about an estrangement between man and God which, contrary to Satan's beguiling promise, meant that a great darkness came upon man's spirit. Sin put out his eyes, and the good things of God were hidden from him; he could no longer 'see' the kingdom of God, and became blind to spiritual values, blind to eternal things, to the higher values of the spirit. And from that point man is seen stumbling and groping down the long ages of history. The German Goethe enshrines this very movingly in words immortalised by Brahms in the Song of Destiny: 'But man may not linger, and nowhere finds he repose; We stay not but wander We grief-laden mortals, Blindly, blindly, from one sad hour To another, Like water from cliff to cliff Ever dropping, Blindly at last we do pass away.' This would indeed have been the fate of mankind, but for the gospel. God was not willing that any should perish, and even thus early in the Garden gave the hope that the darkness would not last forever. That is the background against which we can best understand John's final words here.