4. 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--21:4. This passage was the fulfillment of the promise in chapter 7:14-17 which was vouchsafed by Christ himself that the faithful through tribulation would become recipients of the blessings signified in the symbolic phrases of these two texts. The same figures of speech are employed by Isaiah in the descriptions of the blessings that should come upon Israel when freed from exile and returned to their land. It could not reasonably be argued that the metaphors of no more weeping and crying in Isaiah 65:19 referred to heaven. Israel had been weeping with their harps hanging on the willows in Babylon; but upon return to their land the weeping and tears of exile would be wiped away. It was the same metaphorical representation in Revelation 7:17; Revelation 22:4 --no more death referred to the martyrdom of the saints as in chapter 2: 10; neither sorrow nor crying referred to the sorrows of persecution; and neither any more pain was just another phrase for no more tribulation. The rider of the red horse of death had been conquered by the Rider of the white horse of deliverance from the scenes of tribulation, and these descriptions were in the continuity of the vision. The mourning of Israel in exile was pictured as having been ended in the return to their own land in several references in the prophecies of Isaiah, examples of which are in chapters 35:10; 51:11 and 65:19. Here it was declared by the prophet that after the return from exile their sorrow and mourning should then flee away. The same application must be made of the death (martyrdom) and the sorrow, crying and pain (of the tribulation) in the continuing vision of Revelation which referred to the exclusion from their new heaven and new earth the experiences of the tribulation period. The threefold army and horsemen of the woes had been banished, defeated by the conquering Rider of the white horse; and in the same metaphors employed by the prophets to represent Israel’ s deliverance from exile, the Seer of Revelation adapted that imagery to signify the deliverance of the spiritual Israel, the church, from the period of tribulation. It falls into the complete harmony with the Lord’ s discourse in Matthew 24:1-51 and with all of the visions of Revelation as a whole.