Isaiah 65:17-25 depicts the New Heaven/New Earth with death still present (infants dying, people dying at a hundred years old), while Revelation 21:1-4 says of the New Heaven/New Earth that death will be no more. Since both texts use the same phrase 'new heavens and a new earth' for what is claimed to be the same event, this is a direct contradiction.

This is a real, textually-grounded question, and the honest answer requires looking closely at what Isaiah 65:20 actually says rather than assuming it describes the identical horizon as Revelation 21. The verse reads (NRSV/MT): 'No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who fails to reach a hundred will be considered accursed.' Note the grammar: this is not a flat statement that death continues unchanged: it is a statement that PREMATURE death - the specific curse-pattern of infants dying and adults dying young - is abolished, replaced by extraordinary longevity treated as the new baseline ('dies at a hundred = mere youth'). This is longevity-blessing language, not a statement that mortality as such persists into the ultimate consummated state. John Oswalt (NICOT, *The Book of Isaiah 40-66*) makes exactly this point: Isa 65:20 draws on the same idiom as the patriarchal narratives (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob dying 'old and full of days') and Israel's own pre-fall covenant ideal - dying full of years as a blessing, dying young as a curse (cf. Deut 28-30's blessing/curse structure). It is describing a this-worldly, historically-inaugurated era of restored covenant blessing - what many interpreters (premillennial and non-premillennial alike) recognize as an intermediate or 'already' horizon of fulfillment, not necessarily the final, fully consummated eternal state depicted in Revelation 20-21. Structurally, Revelation itself places 'no more death' (21:4) explicitly AFTER the general resurrection and final judgment of Rev 20:11-15 ('Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire... this is the second death') - a later and more ultimate horizon in John's own sequence than anything Isaiah's oracle addresses. G.K. Beale (NIGTC, *The Book of Revelation*) argues at length that Revelation deliberately alludes to and escalates Isaiah 65-66's language: John is not quoting Isaiah as a flat prediction to be checked against a single moment, he is taking up Isaiah's inaugurated-blessing imagery and pushing it to its final, complete horizon - the pattern of a near/partial historical fulfillment followed by a final/ultimate fulfillment is the standard shape of OT prophecy generally (compare how the return-from-exile oracles of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel had a genuine but partial fulfillment in the actual 6th-5th century BC return under Cyrus, while the prophets' own language points beyond that partial return to something more ultimate still). So Isaiah 65 and Revelation 21 are not competing snapshots of the identical moment - they are two points on a single trajectory of progressively unfolding fulfillment, and Revelation is explicit that it is describing the far end of that trajectory.

Scripture's own pattern - visible already within the Old Testament, not imported later - is that God's redemptive promises unfold in stages: a genuine historical down payment followed by a fuller, final consummation (the exodus from Egypt anticipates and is escalated by the return from Babylonian exile, which itself is escalated by the New Exodus language of Isaiah 40-55, which the NT applies to Christ). Isaiah 65:17-25 sits in exactly this pattern: it describes a real, historically-oriented restoration of covenant blessing (rebuilt Jerusalem, longevity, agricultural abundance, animals at peace) using the vocabulary of ultimate renewal because it is a genuine foretaste of that ultimate renewal, not a separate or competing claim. Revelation 21-22 then completes the trajectory Isaiah's own language was already reaching toward, which is why John can quote Isaiah's phrases while pushing past their content (no death, no more crying, God's dwelling directly with humanity with no temple needed, Rev 21:22). This is not special pleading invented to dodge a contradiction; it is the same 'already historically inaugurated, not yet finally consummated' pattern that Christian theology (and honest OT scholarship generally) recognizes across the whole prophetic corpus.