Every Tear Wiped Away

Today's Reading

Read Revelation 21:1-7 — the closing vision of the Bible: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.'"

Read Revelation 22:1-5 — the river of the water of life, the tree of life on either side, no curse, no night, no need of sun, the servants of God seeing his face.

Read Romans 8:18-25: "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God... that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God."

Read Isaiah 25:6-9 — the Old Testament's parallel vision: "And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces."

Read 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14 — Paul's pastoral charge: "But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope."

Reflection

We end where the Bible ends. Not with an explanation of why suffering happens. Not with a philosophical theodicy that closes every loophole. The Bible ends with a vision. The seer John, exiled on the island of Patmos under the persecution of Domitian, is shown the future — not the immediate future of his own embattled churches, but the long future, the future at the bottom of all futures, the place where the story of the world is finally going.

It is a city. It is a wedding. It is a feast. It is the dwelling of God among men. And at its center, in one of the tenderest images in all of Scripture, God himself bends down and wipes the tears from his people's eyes.

Read that detail again. He does not announce that there will be no more weeping. He does not abolish, in some abstract way, the pain. He kneels — if we may speak humanly of this — and he wipes the tears off the faces of the people he has brought home. The tears are real. They were really wept. They mattered enough to him that he is not going to pretend they did not happen. He is going to take them, personally, off your face. Every tear. Not selected ones. Not the ones we are willing to admit. Every one.

Then he says, "death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." The Greek behind "have passed away" is apēlthan — they are gone, they have departed, they are no longer the present. The pain that has defined some of your years will be the former things. The grief you cannot now imagine surviving will be one of the former things. The diagnosis, the betrayal, the dead child, the disabled body, the ruined career, the lost faith, the unanswered prayer — former things. The voice from the throne is not minimizing them. The voice from the throne is announcing their end.

This is the only Christian answer to suffering that has ever held all the way down. Not that the suffering was small. Not that the suffering had a point we can now articulate. Not that the suffering was a stage in some abstract pedagogy. But that the suffering will end, and the world will be remade, and the people who have suffered will find that they have been brought, against every expectation, to a feast.

N.T. Wright has spent his career insisting that the New Testament's eschatology is more concrete and earthier than most Christians realize. "The Christian hope is for God's new creation — for new heavens and new earth — and that, in the meantime, we shall be raised from the dead to take our place in that new creation." Note: new earth. Not just heaven, in the sense of an immaterial spiritual realm to which we go when we die. The Bible's promise is that this earth — the physical creation Romans 8 says is groaning — will itself be remade, with us in our resurrected bodies inhabiting it. "Heaven, for the Christian, is not so much a place as a state. The point of new heavens and new earth is that they are the redeemed, restored, renewed version of the old." The world will not be discarded. The world will be raised, the way Christ was raised: the same world, transformed, glorified, freed from the bondage to corruption.

This matters because it means the things you are losing in this life are not, finally, lost. The body you are watching fail will be raised. The relationships you have grieved will be restored — not in some pale spiritualized way, but in the new creation, with the same people, more themselves than they were here. The city of New Jerusalem is not an abstraction. It is the place where the saints walk, eat, talk, work, worship, and never grow tired. The vision in Revelation 22 — river of life, tree of life, no curse, no night, the face of God — is not a metaphor for an invisible state. It is the description of where the story is going.

Tim Keller, again, on the upshot for the sufferer: "Resurrection means God will literally restore everything that was lost. Whatever has been lost or stolen or destroyed will be restored." And the deeper claim, which is C.S. Lewis's claim before it is Keller's: "every horrible thing that ever happened will not only be undone and repaired but will in some way make the eventual glory and joy even greater." Lewis put it most starkly in The Great Divorce: "They say of some temporal suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for it,' not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory." Read that twice. Lewis is not saying the suffering was secretly good. He is saying that on the other side of the resurrection, the redeemed will look back at what they suffered and find that the suffering itself has been transmuted — not erased, not minimized, but taken up into a glory that uses every last detail of it. The wound becomes a scar that ornaments. The Lamb in Revelation 5 is described as standing, as though it had been slain — the marks of crucifixion still visible, glorified, not hidden. The wounds remain. They are now the throne.

This is the end of the plan, and it is also a charge. We have spent twelve days on the question where was God? The answer, as best as the Christian church has been able to give it, is now in front of you.

He was in Habakkuk's complaint, allowing the prophet's accusation to stand without striking him down. He was in Job's argument, calling the arguer righteous and the explainers wrong. He was in the whirlwind, ending the argument not by answering it but by appearing. He was in Augustine's slow recognition that evil is not a thing but a wound. He was in the freedom he gave creatures who could love and could fall. He was in the shouting through pain that woke Lewis from a deafness he did not know he had. He was on the cross, hidden under the appearance of his opposite. He was in Gethsemane, on the ground, sweating blood, praying the prayer that did not get the answer the prayer asked for. He was in the empty tomb on Sunday morning, alive, eating fish on the seashore, showing his wounds to a doubting friend. And he is in the future — already moving toward you with a towel in his hand, ready to wipe away every tear from your eyes.

The question has not been answered in the way modern philosophy demands. It has been taken up — into a story so much larger than the question that, in the end, the question stops being the question.

So here is the charge. Live now in the light of that day. Pray honestly, the way Job and the Psalms and Christ in Gethsemane prayed. Sit with sufferers without offering Eliphaz's formulas. Trust the cross to make God present where his presence is least obvious. Trust the resurrection to break the grip of death over what you love. And let the last image of the Bible — God's own hand on your face, drying the tears that he watched you weep — be the picture you carry into whatever you have to carry tomorrow.

The plan ends with two words from the second-to-last verse of the Bible. He says: "Surely I am coming soon." We say, with the church across two thousand years: "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus."

And until he comes — keep watch. The story does not end here.

Going Deeper

For your final day, do this. Take a piece of paper. Write down one suffering you have been carrying through this plan — yours or someone else's. Then, beside it, write Revelation 21:4 in full. Sit with the two together for ten minutes. Pray, in your own words, the prayer that the suffering and the verse make possible. Then end by praying, aloud if you can: Come, Lord Jesus. Wipe away every tear. Make all things new. Carry the paper in your Bible until the day comes when you no longer need it.