Catholic Commentary
The Unsealed Prophecy and the Finality of Human Choice
10He said to me, “Don’t seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is at hand.11He who acts unjustly, let him act unjustly still. He who is filthy, let him be filthy still. He who is righteous, let him do righteousness still. He who is holy, let him be holy still.”
Revelation 22:10–11 contains a command to proclaim the prophecy openly because the end time is near, followed by a declaration that moral choices have become irreversible and determinative of identity. Those who have chosen injustice and those who have chosen righteousness will remain in their chosen states at the final judgment.
At the end of time, God publishes the full truth and human freedom becomes permanent—the person you're becoming now is who you will be forever.
The verse also functions as the narrative hinge between the command of verse 10 (proclaim now, urgently) and the coming words of Christ in verse 12 ("Behold, I am coming quickly, and my reward is with me"). The urgency of proclamation in verse 10 is grounded precisely in the reality of verse 11: once the end arrives, the moment for conversion closes. The open book of verse 10 is the last merciful act of a God who wills "that none should perish, but all should reach repentance" (2 Pet 3:9). Verse 11 is the solemn corollary: that mercy, once refused to its final limit, passes into judgment.
Catholic tradition uniquely illuminates this passage through its robust theology of human freedom, final perseverance, and the possibility of definitive self-determination before God.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "God predestines no one to go to hell; for this, a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end" (CCC 1037). Verse 11 does not portray God arbitrarily fixing souls in their states; it portrays human freedom reaching its ultimate, irreversible expression. The Church's teaching on the "particular judgment" (CCC 1021–1022) affirms that at the moment of death, the soul's fundamental orientation — toward God or away from him — is permanently sealed. Verse 11 renders this doctrine in apocalyptic imagery.
St. Augustine, commenting on the related passage in Daniel, noted that the sealing of prophecy corresponds to the hardening of the human heart that refuses conversion — a hardening that is itself the judgment. In his City of God (XX.14), Augustine explicitly engages the eschatological structure of the Apocalypse and argues that the separation of the just and unjust is not an imposition from without but the revelation of what each soul has become.
St. Robert Bellarmine, in his Controversies, drew on verse 11 to argue against the Protestant notion of extrinsic justification: if a person can be declared righteous while remaining inwardly filthy, the sharp contrast of this verse — where the filthy remain filthy and the righteous remain righteous — loses all force. The verse presupposes that righteousness and holiness are real interior conditions, not legal fictions.
Pope Benedict XVI, in Spe Salvi (§45–47), reflects on final judgment as the moment when the full truth of each life is made transparent before divine Love — a Love that both purifies and reveals. The verse's stark parallelism reflects exactly this: the divine gaze neither improves the wicked by fiat nor diminishes the holy. It simply sees, and in seeing, finalizes.
For contemporary Catholics, verse 10 is a call to resist the temptation to treat the Apocalypse as a sealed, impenetrable, or politically dangerous book — something to be left to fundamentalists or avoided as too alarming. The Church commands it open. Parish homilists, catechists, and laypeople are called to engage it, not spiritualize it into irrelevance or sensationalize it into a newspaper decoder ring. Read it, preach it, let it form your imagination about history and eternity.
Verse 11 speaks with uncomfortable directness to a culture — including much of Catholic culture — that assumes conversion is always available later, that the spiritual life can be deferred without consequence. The verse is not a counsel of despair but a call to seriousness: the person you are becoming now is the person you will be forever. Every act of justice or injustice, every choice for or against purity, is not merely a behavioral event but a small crystallization of the self. The practical application is the ancient Catholic practice of the examen — the daily review of conscience popularized by St. Ignatius of Loyola — which is nothing other than a daily reckoning with whether one's trajectory is bending toward holiness or away from it, while there is still time to change.
Commentary
Revelation 22:10 — "Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is at hand."
The angel's command to John stands in deliberate, typological contrast with Daniel 12:4, where the seer is told, "Seal the book until the time of the end." The sealing of Daniel's vision signified remoteness — the fulfillment lay far in the future, and the scroll was to be kept closed until the appointed hour arrived. Here, at the end of the entire canon of Scripture, the command is precisely inverted: do not seal it. The book stands open because the time (ὁ καιρός, ho kairos) is no longer a distant horizon but an imminent threshold. This is not merely chronological urgency but eschatological urgency — the kairos of the New Testament is the charged, qualitative time of God's decisive action, as distinct from mere clock time (chronos).
The implication is deeply missiological. An open prophecy is a prophecy meant to be read, proclaimed, heeded, and acted upon now. The whole of the Apocalypse — its visions of suffering, its unveiling of cosmic spiritual warfare, its portraits of martyrdom and of the Lamb enthroned — is not esoteric knowledge reserved for initiates. It is public testimony. The Church is commanded to preach it in the open square. This verse is the warrant for the Church's unceasing proclamation of the Gospel as an eschatological word, a word that presses upon every generation with the weight of finality.
Revelation 22:11 — "Let the unjust still act unjustly… let the holy still be holy."
This verse has disturbed commentators in every age, and rightly so. On a surface reading, it appears as a divine permission — even an encouragement — of ongoing wickedness. But this misreads the rhetorical mode. The Greek uses the imperative form (ἀδικησάτω, ῥυπανθήτω, δικαιωθήτω, ἁγιασθήτω) not as moral prescription but as a solemn declaration of eschatological fixity. The sense is: at this final hour, the trajectory of each life has reached its terminus. Those who have chosen injustice have, in the moment of final judgment, become injustice; those who have chosen holiness have become holiness.
The fourfold structure is chiastic and deliberate: unjust / filthy / righteous / holy. The first pair describes moral and ritual corruption; the second pair describes moral and cultic faithfulness. The symmetry is not accidental — Revelation consistently presents moral choices as total, constitutive acts of the self. One does not merely do unrighteous things; one becomes unrighteous. This is consistent with the Apocalypse's portrayal of the Beast's followers being marked on their foreheads and hands (Rev 13:16) — the mark is the visible seal of an interior identity already chosen.