Berean Standard Bible
‘He will wipe away every tear from their eyes,’ and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the former things have passed away.”
King James Version
And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.
About this verse
The verb is startlingly personal: "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes." Not "tears will cease" — someone wipes them, and the someone is God. It is the gesture of a parent with a crying child, performed individually, tear by tear, at the consummation of all things. Then the inventory of what is abolished: "no more death or mourning or crying or pain" — a list that reads like Genesis 3 being run in reverse, the old curse unwound item by item.
John received this vision in exile on Patmos, under Roman persecution, writing to churches that were burying their members for the faith. The line itself reaches back to Isaiah's ancient promise that God would swallow up death and wipe tears from all faces. It sits in the vision of the new heaven and new earth, where God's dwelling is with humanity — the Bible's final chapter answering its third.
Read at funerals, this verse does two things at once. It takes grief seriously — the tears are real; they exist to be wiped, not denied. And it gives grief an expiration date: "the former things have passed away." Christian hope is not the claim that loss doesn't hurt. It is the claim that loss doesn't get the last word.
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