What Does Revelation 21:4 Mean?
And God wipes away every tear from their eyes, and there is no more death, nor mourning, nor crying, nor pain, for the first things have gone away.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
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.THE KEY
The word for God wiping away tears also means erasing what is written: grief is met with complete removal, not dismissal.
THE MEANING
The verse gives you a future in which God himself wipes every tear. Death, sorrow, crying, and pain are named plainly, then declared gone; the former order passes away.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that every tear must remain unanswered and that death gets the last word.
THE ROOT
ἐξαλείψει
exaleipsei
GROWS FROM
ἀλείφω
aleiphō
To rub or smear; with ἐκ, “out,” the compound means to wipe off or erase.
“wipes away” in this verse is exaleipsei. The Greek verb ἐξαλείφω carries the force of wiping away and erasing. The image is not that tears are minimized, but that God personally removes them, as the verse also declares death and pain gone.
ALSO GROWS
aleiphō: Rub, smear, or anoint.
ἀλείφω
This is the base verb within the compound, whose action is directed outward and away in the verse.
aleimma: Ointment; something applied by rubbing.
ἄλειμμα
It preserves the root’s sense of rubbing across a surface, which helps make the wiping image concrete.
exaleipsis: Wiping out or erasure.
ἐξάλειψις
This noun makes explicit the removal sense that the compound verb carries when God wipes away tears.
THE PATTERN
God’s promised wholeness removes the causes of grief while meeting every tear directly.
He will swallow up death forever, and the Lord GOD will wipe tears from all faces, and he will remove the taunt of his people from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken.For the Lamb that is in the midst of the throne shepherds them, and guides them along the way to springs of living waters, and God wipes away every tear from their eyes.And I will spin in Jerusalem and leap in my people, and the voice of weeping will no more be heard in her, nor the voice of crying.THE THREAD
Wiping away the handwriting of decrees against us, which stood opposite us, and lifting it out of the midst, nailing it to the cross.The Greek verb translated “blotting out” here is the same verb used for God wiping away tears in Revelation 21:4. In both verses, the image carries the force of removal; it does not make the tears unreal.
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