No More Death, Mourning, Crying, or Pain

In brief#

Revelation 21 promises that death, mourning, crying and pain will be no more, because the former things have passed away. The question is what passing away means, and the passage supplies its own control: three verses earlier the same verb is used of the first heaven and the first earth.

Nobody reads that first use as relocation. The old order is not moved somewhere else and kept running out of sight. If death and pain pass away in the same sense in which the first heaven and the first earth pass away, then they do not continue elsewhere either.

Conditional immortality (CI) holds that unending life is a gift given in Christ; eternal conscious torment (ECT) holds that the finally unrighteous exist for ever in conscious suffering.

The passage#

How ECT interpreters read it#

The traditional reading is that this is a promise, and promises have addressees.

John is describing the new creation and the people who dwell in it. The tears wiped away are theirs. The pain that ends is theirs. On this reading the passage is not a survey of every location in the created order; it is a description of what the city is like for those inside it, given in the warmest terms Scripture has. Read that way, it says nothing one way or the other about what is happening outside the city, and it would be an overreach to make a promise of comfort do the work of a cosmological statement.

Defenders of the traditional view would add that Revelation trades in vision and image throughout, and that pressing the logical extension of a comforting promise is not how apocalyptic is meant to be read.

The verb#

The conditionalist response turns on a feature of the text rather than on the logic of promises.

The same verb stands behind the passing away of the first heaven and the first earth in verse 1 and the passing away of the former things in verse 4. The first use is not a relocation. The first heaven and the first earth are not moved out of the way and maintained elsewhere; they are gone, replaced by a new heaven and a new earth. Verse 4 gives the reason for the absence of death and mourning and crying and pain in exactly those words: the former things have passed away.

So the question is not whether verse 4 is addressed to the redeemed. It plainly is. The question is what grounds the promise, and the ground John gives is that the former things have passed away in the same sense the old order has, which is not relocation.

Paul's language points the same direction. In 1 Corinthians 15:26 the last enemy to be destroyed is death itself. An enemy that has been destroyed is not an enemy still operating in another region.

Whether anyone is present outside the city in the first place is a separate question, taken up in S28, on whether the wicked are still present after Revelation 20.

A pastoral observation, not an exegetical one#

The source document raises a further question. On the traditional view, will the redeemed remember the people they loved who are lost? It is hard to picture no more mourning or crying if those people are consciously suffering without end.

This is a pastoral observation rather than an argument from the text. It reports how the two pictures feel rather than what a passage says, and there are serious traditional answers to it, including the answer that the redeemed will see God's justice as good and will not grieve over what God has rightly done. Feelings about a doctrine are not evidence either way, as the preface says directly. The observation is preserved here because it is in the source, and it is labelled for what it is.

God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked#

The source document draws an argument from lesser to greater: if God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, how much less would he take pleasure in their unending conscious torment.

Two things should be said about that. It is a genuine statement about God's disposition toward judgment, and it belongs in any discussion of final punishment, because it rules out any picture in which God relishes what he does to the wicked. But it is not a discriminating argument between the two views, because defenders of eternal conscious torment agree entirely that God takes no pleasure in it. The verse is an appeal to Israel to repent and live, and both sides of this debate can and do make that appeal.

What this argument establishes#

• The same verb describes the passing of the first heaven and the first earth and the passing of death, mourning, crying and pain.
• Passing away in the sense the passage uses is not relocation.
• The reason John gives for the absence of these things is the passing of the former order, not the shielding of the redeemed from a state that continues elsewhere.

What it does not establish by itself#

• That the promise in Revelation 21:4 is addressed to anyone other than the redeemed. It is addressed to them.
• That the argument settles what happens outside the city, which depends on the separate question of whether anyone is there.
• Anything from Ezekiel 33:11 that the traditional view would dispute, since both views affirm it.

Related sections and passages#

• S28, on whether the wicked are still present after Revelation 20
• S25, on how the language of all in all fits after final judgment
• S03, on the lake of fire and the second death
• Primary passage: Revelation 21:1-4. Related: Ezekiel 33:11, 1 Corinthians 15:26.

Sources and notes#

The observation that the same verb is used in Revelation 21:1 and 21:4 is the source document's. The question about the redeemed remembering the lost is also the source document's, and it is marked on this page as pastoral rather than exegetical.