Revelation 22:6

Revelation 22:6. And he said unto me, These words are faithful and true (comp. on chap. Revelation 21:5). There is no ground to think that we have here a recapitulation by St. John himself of the things that had been spoken to him. We hear rather the words of the angel who has been throughout the whole book the medium by which the revelations contained in it have been communicated. Nor are we to confine the ‘words' to which reference is made to those connected with the vision of the New Jerusalem. They refer, as appears especially from Revelation 22:7, to all the visions of the book.

And the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, sent his angel to show unto his servants the things which must shortly come to pass. It is doubtful whether by the expression ‘the spirits of the prophets' we are to understand the spirits of the prophets themselves, which belong to God and which He uses for His own purposes, or the Spirit of God, that Spirit by which of old ‘men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Ghost' (2 Peter 1:21). The latter appears to be the true interpretation, for it directs us more immediately to that Divine inspiration to which it is the object of the Seer to trace all the revelations which he had enjoyed, and it connects us more closely with that Prologue of the book which is at present in his mind. In chap. Revelation 1:4 we have read of the ‘seven Spirits which are before His throne,' that is, of the one Spirit of God in the completeness and manifoldness of His gifts. Here, in like manner, we are led to think of the varied gifts of prophetic power with which God had been pleased to endow the commissioned servants of His will. The things revealed in this instance were those already spoken of in chap. Revelation 1:1, where the same words are employed to describe them. It is curious to find the word ‘servants' in this verse, when in chap. Revelation 1:1 we had only one servant spoken of. Yet we cannot suppose that under the plural form are included those Christians for whose behoof the revelations had been given. It can only include those to whom they had been made. Perhaps the explanation may be that, as ‘the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy' (chap. Revelation 19:10), St. John here unites with himself the prophets of God in all past ages. All of them, though ‘in divers portions and by divers manners' (Hebrews 1:1), had had one revelation to proclaim; and, although that revelation had now reached a fulness which it had not previously attained, the last stage in the unfolding of God's will was only the completing of what had gone before,