The End Of The End Times • Revelation, Chapter 22

Twenty-two chapters in, and Revelation ends not with a sword or a smiting but with a river, a tree, and the word grace. The New Jerusalem has the tree of life lining its streets — the one humanity was exiled from in Genesis 3, now accessible to everyone — bearing twelve kinds of fruit, its leaves for the healing of the nations. The gates are never shut. The water of life is offered freely. And the very last line of the Bible, for most Christian denominations, is a blessing.We dig into why this ending is more radical than it gets credit for. John is told explicitly not to seal this book, because the time is at hand — meaning his readers' lifetimes, meaning Rome, not a distant future someone will decode with a timeline chart. The angel corrects John a second time for trying to worship him, and we spend real time on what that means for a style of faith that quotes Revelation fluently while ignoring everything it actually says. The warning against adding to or taking away from the book lands differently when you've just spent a season watching two thousand years of theology do exactly both.We also sit with the fact that this chapter is landing in a specific moment — reports of US military commanders framing the current war in the Middle East as divinely ordained End Times fulfillment — and what John, who spent twenty-two chapters saying "Babylon is Rome, stop applying this to whatever you're afraid of right now," would make of all that.The Devil's Details show page/archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X ---Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:Every Minute of Everything Everywhere All at OnceThe Exorcist Minute