Day 366: Revelation 22:1–21

I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things (v. 8).

Face-to-face. I can’t think of a more fitting focus for our last few moments together. I don’t want you to miss the most beautiful statement in the final chapter of Scripture: “They will see His face” (Rev. 22:4 hcsb). For many of us, the very sight of Christ’s face will be heaven enough. Everything else is the river overflowing its banks.

Until then we who are redeemed are like spirit-people wrapped in prison walls of flesh. Our view is impaired by the steel bars of mortal vision. We are not unlike Moses, who experienced God’s presence but could not see His face. To him and to all confined momentarily by mortality, God has said, “You cannot see My face, for no one can see Me and live” (Exod. 33:20 hcsb).

When all is said and done, we who are alive in Christ will indeed see His face and live. Happily ever after. I can hardly wait!

Yet right this moment I am absorbed by the thought of someone else seeing that face. Someone I’ve grown to love and appreciate so deeply through the months of study for this book. Several of the early church fathers plant the apostle John back in the soil of Ephesus again after the conclusion of his exile on the Island of Patmos. I wonder what kinds of thoughts swirled through his mind as the boat returned him to the shores of Asia Minor. I’ve made this trip by sea, and though it is beautiful, it is not brief. As his thinning gray hair blew across his face, he had time to experience a host of emotions. We have gotten to know him well. What kinds of things do you imagine he thought and felt on the ride back to Ephesus?

John lived to be a very old man. We have no idea how many years he lived beyond his exile. The earliest historians indicate, however, that the vitality of his spirit far exceeded the strength of his frame. His passionate heart continued to beat wildly for the Savior he loved so long. John took personally the words God poured through him. They did not simply run through the human quill and spill on the page. John’s entire inner man was indelibly stained by rhema ink. In closing, read some of the words obviously inscribed on his heart from that last earthly night with Jesus:

This is My command: love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, that someone would lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you slaves anymore, because a slave doesn’t know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have heard from My Father. You did not choose Me, but I chose you. I appointed you that you should go out and produce fruit and that your fruit should remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in My name, He will give you. This is what I command you: love one another (John 15:12–17 hcsb).

John lived the essence of these verses. He ended his life a true “friend” of Christ, for he took on God’s interests as surely as Elisha took on the cloak of Elijah. Early church fathers reported that long after John lacked the strength to walk, younger believers carried the beloved disciple in a chair through crowds gathered for worship. His final sermons were short and sweet: “My little children, love one another!” He poured his life into love. Christ’s love. The focus of his final days captures the two concepts I’ve learned above all others in this journey:

• Christ calls His beloved disciples to forsake ambition for affection. John moved from his “pillar” position in the Jerusalem church to relative obscurity. Better to pour out our lives in places unknown than to become dry bones in the places we’ve always been.

• Only disciples who are convinced they are beloved will in turn love beyond themselves. Actively embracing the lavish love of God is our only means of extending divine love to injured hearts. We simply cannot give what we do not have.

Don’t think for a moment the Savior wasn’t nearby when the sounds of an old Son of Thunder grew faint and then silent. After all, John was the solitary remaining apostle who could make the claims of his own pen: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). “We” had turned to “I,” and soon “I” would turn to “they.”

Somehow I picture him in his death much like he had been in his life. To me, the scene that captures the beloved disciple most is recorded in John 13:23. The event occurred at a certain table decades earlier. The Amplified Bible says it best. “One of His disciples, whom Jesus loved [whom He esteemed and delighted in] was reclining [next to Him] on Jesus’ bosom” (John 13:23). Yes, I like to think that John died just as he lived. Nestled close. Reclining on the breast of an unseen but very present Savior, John’s weary head in His tender arms. The Spirit and the bride said, “Come!” And in the distance could be heard a gentle thunder.