Expositor's Greek Testament (Nicoll)

Revelation 22:4

The ancient ideal of intimate confidence is also to be realised (cf. on Matthew 5:8 and Iren. Adv. Har. Revelation 22:7). With this phrase and that of Revelation 21:22 compare Browning's lines: “Why, where's the need of temple when the walls | O' the world are that … This one Face, far from vanish, rather grows | Becomes my universe that feels and knows.” The idea here is that reproduced in the seventh and supreme degree of bliss in 4 Ezra 7 :[78] where the saints “shall rejoice with confidence, have boldness undismayed, and gladness unafraid, for they shall hasten to behold the face of him whom they served in life”. By Oriental usage, no condemned or criminal person was allowed to look on the king's face (Esther 7:8), In the ancient ch. 64 of E. B. D. (papyrus of Nu) the “triumphant Nu saith, ‘I have come to see him that dwelleth in his divine uraeus, face to face, and eye to eye.… Thou art in me, and I am in thee,' ” The Apocalypse, however, shuns almost any approach to the inner union of the individual Christian and Christ which distinguished both Paul and the fourth gospel; it also eschews the identification of God and man which was often crudely affected by Egyptian eschatology. No allusion occurs to the supremacy of the saints over angels (Ap. Bar. 51:12, etc.), though John is careful elsewhere to keep the latter in their place (see on Revelation 21:17; Revelation 22:9). He also ignores the problem of different degrees in bliss, ὄψονται. In Chag. 5 b there is a story of a blind rabbi who blessed some departing visitors with the words, “Ye have visited a face that is seen and sees not: may ye be counted worthy to visit the Face which sees and is not seen”. The Christian prophet has a better hope and promise. Compare, however, Plutarch's touching faith (Iside, 79) that the souls of men after death will “migrate to the unseen, the good,” when God becomes their king and leader and where “they, as it were, hang upon him and gaze without ever wearying, and yearn for that unspeakable, indescribable Beauty”.

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Expositor's Greek Testament (Nicoll)

Revelation 22:4

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