This chapter speaks of the winding up of God's dealings with the world, and of the final outcome of that process of trial and discipline which has been going on throughout the long ages of human history. Consider
I. The promise: "He that overcometh shall inherit all things." Those who long for the knowledge of God and for the enjoyment of God, those who consider God the highest good, to be obtained at all risks and at any cost, will be of necessity involved in a contest with the forces of this world. Their longing makes them warriors; their determination to find their way into their proper spiritual element, which is God, compels them to encounter and to overcome the intervening obstacles which lie between them and the object of their desire. Self wishes to be lord, and forbids Christ to be Lord. We have to resist self. We have conflict, too, with the outer world, with the society in which we move; conflict with the devil, with many a misgiving about God, with many a perverted thought about the Gospel, with many a dark surmising, all of which have their origination with the father of lies.
II. But it is not enough to be engaged in this conflict: we must be victorious in it. The promises are to him that overcomes. We must not fight and be beaten; we must fight and overcome. Our thirsting for God must make God everything to us. To serve Him, to please Him, to be like Him, must be our paramount desire, overriding every other feeling and carrying us triumphantly through all the opposition that stands in the way. It is something to find at last, when all is over, when the life-task is completed, that we have achieved a success. Such is the statement of the passage. We have not missed our aim; we have not made a great miscalculation. There is a result, and a great and magnificent one, to the course upon which we have entered. We have aimed at the possession of God, and have gained it. "I will be his God, and he shall be My son."
III. We pass on now to consider the opposite side of the picture. Look at those who lead the van of this black company. In the forefront we notice persons whom perhaps we should not have expected to find there: the "fearful" and the "unbelieving." The saved are the men of courage. They have feared nothing but God, and displeasing God. The fearful are the moral cowards, who have shrunk from what is displeasing to flesh and blood, and who have not been willing to take up the cross to follow Christ. The one class were athirst for God; they longed for God, for the possession and enjoyment of God, and this strong, irrepressible longing led them into conflict with the forces of evil, and in the end brought them triumphantly through. But the others cared nothing about the possession of God. The world, in some shape or other, was what they really were anxious to secure, and so they had no more strength to sustain them in the controversy with evil; and hence, instead of overcoming, they were overcome: instead of being courageous on the side of God, they were fearful, and fell under the power of evil. And notice into what fearful companionship their moral cowardice has brought them. They are linked with the bloodthirsty, and unclean, and impure, and false, and cast with them into the pool which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.
G. Calthrop, Penny Pulpit,New Series, No. 987.
Reference: Revelation 21:7. P. Brooks, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxii., p. 1.