On keeping the Prophecy of Revelation

Rev. 22:1-7 (ESV)
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb [2] through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. [3] No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. [4] They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. [5] And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.
[6] And he said to me, "These words are trustworthy and true. And the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, has sent his angel to show his servants what must soon take place. "
[7] "And behold, I am coming soon. Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book."

“And behold, I am coming soon. Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book.”
This book would mean the Book of Revelation. At the time Revelation was written the New Testament did not exist as the New Testament. The letters we have in the New Testament were around, but had yet to be collated into the collection we call the New Testament. Perhaps there was some wisdom to placing the book at the end of the New Testament with this admonition, but that is speculation. There is good reason to believe that Revelation was in fact the last of the New Testament documents to be written. But I for one think it a bit unhealthy to think of the New Testament as one book and the different books as mere chapters. Each book needs to stand on its own. Each book needs to breath on its own that is. That is not to say that we can’t let the other books of the New Testament inform us as to the intent of other books in the usage of language and so on. But we need to recognize that they weren’t written to be successive chapters in a book.
Then there is a whole different topic as to whether all these books were written by someone qualified to write scripture at all, And this question has loomed particularly large over Revelation from the earliest days of the church. Did John really write it? I tend to believe he did, but the evidence is inconclusive, and the question remains. The early church recognized this. They allowed Revelation to remain recognizing that it had a legitimate interpretation that stood in line with what is said elsewhere in the writings of the Apostles. And that if read in that manner it was a helpful book filled with the gospel and comfort. In fact they found this book to be particularly comforting if you allowed the other letters of Paul, Peter and John to have sway in your interpretation of it. But they were also aware that it had a destructive interpretation, one that gave rise and life to Jewish myths concerning the apocalypse, the same Jewish Myths Paul warns Titus about. And for this reason it remained in scripture as antilegomena, scripture that was to remain subordinate to that which was sure, the legoumena, the Pauline corpus, the four gospels, 1 Peter, and 1 John.
This is the way I have tried to read and interpret it here. But the other way is much more popular in these days of apocalyptical fantasy, and that is to let the Jewish Myths hold sway, and to subordinate the rest of scripture to revelation. And read this way it becomes a fearful book, which should tell one it is the wrong way. “For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” (2 Tim. 1:7 (ESV) But then fear grabs hold of a person. Our society loves fear, we celebrate it at Halloween, we wait for it in movie lines. This is just the “Christian” version of macabre, the religious version of a horror story. But it isn’t right. At least with movies and Halloween the kids are let to believe that it is just good fun, and make-believe. This other version though, that of the religious, that so-called Christian version of the macabre, is truly satanic.