I watched as the Lamb opened the first of the seven seals. Then I heard one of the four living creatures say in a voice like thunder, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a white horse! Its rider held a bow, and he was given a crown, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest.
When the Lamb opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make people kill each other. To him was given a large sword.
When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “Two pounds of wheat for a day’s wages, and six pounds of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!”
When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.
When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” 11 Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the full number of their fellow servants, their brothers and sisters, were killed just as they had been.
I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind. The heavens receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place.
Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and everyone else, both slave and free, hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?”
Seal #1: Conquest
As with so much of the rest of the book of Revelation, John draws his images from Hebrew Scripture. The image of four horses comes from Zechariah 6:1-8. However, John uses the image in a slightly different manner from Zechariah.
For John, the white horse and its rider stand for conquest. When a Roman general celebrated a triumph, his chariot was drawn by white horses, the symbol of victory.
The Living Creatures say “Come!” before each horse appears. This, to me, suggests the divine power that is behind all human events. But it is not as though God directly causes all things. He gives to his creatures free will. In that sense, God allows conquest, war, famine, and death. But surely, we human beings are the direct cause. Without our human greed, there would be no conquest. If it were not for our self-centeredness and selfishness, we could all live together peacefully on this planet. There is certainly enough bounty in God’s creation to sustain us all.
But such is not the way of life in this world.
Seal #2: War
Jesus said, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.” (John 10:10)
War is not the way of Jesus. If we lived in a perfect world, one completely and totally surrendered to the leadership of Jesus, there would be no war.
But all human history has been marked by war. There was war and strife in John’s time, and there is in ours as well. War is not a unique sign of the end times. If it were, then we should consider all human history to be the end time.
Seal #3: Famine
Just as there is no reason for conquest and war, other than our own sinfulness, so also there is no reason for famine or scarcity of any kind. There is enough bounty in the world to feed, clothe, and house every person on planet earth, if we would just learn to share.
But we don’t. We live in a world dominated by conquest, war, and famine, and so did John. G. B. Caird has said, “Unless Christ can be said to reign over the world of hard facts in which Christians must live their lives, he can hardly be said to reign at all.”
Caird continues by saying, “During the last thirty-five years of his life John has lived through a series of grim events which might well seem a challenge to the Christian belief in the kingship of Christ:
- The earthquakes of A.D. 60 (Tac. Ann. xiv. 27)
- The humiliating defeat of the Roman army on the eastern frontier by the Parthian Vologeses in A.D. 62 (Tac. Ann. xv. 13-17)
- The persecution of the Christians which followed the fire of Rome in A.D. 64 (Tac. Ann.xv. 44)
- The four-year horror of the Jewish War which ended in A.D. 70 with Jerusalem in ruins
- The suicide of Nero in A.D. 68 and the political chaos which ensued as four claimants battled for the imperial throne, and for a whole year the Roman world echoed to the tramp of marching armies The eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79 which had obliterated the luxury resorts of the Bay of Naples and created a pall of darkness so widespread that men feared the imminent dissolution of the physical order (Pliny, Ep. vi. 16)
- And the serious grain famine of A.D. 92 (Suet. Dom. 7).
“John’s vision of the four horsemen is intended to assert Christ’s sovereignty over such a world as that.”
Seal #4: Death
Each of these four horsemen, or seals, leads to the next. Conquest leads to war, which leads to famine, which leads to death. Calamity wiping out a quarter of the earth sounds almost like the end of the world. But do we not see in our own time at least a quarter of the world negatively affected by conquest, war, and famine? 100% of humans die. But life expectancy in large parts of the world is much lower than in the United States. Out of 193 countries, the US ranks 46. Our average life expectancy is 79. Hong Kong is #1 at 85. The Central African Republic is lowest at 54.
Conquest, war, famine, and death are all the commonplaces of history, not necessarily signs of the last days. “… all four riders represent evils which are not directly caused by the will of God, but only tolerated by his permission.” But amidst this constant vicious cycle, there is hope…
Seal #5: The Martyrs
Under the altar was the place where the blood of sacrifices was poured out in the Jewish Temple. (Leviticus 4:7)
Up until now, John hasn’t said anything about a temple in heaven. But it will soon become clear that God’s throne room is also like a temple.
The martyrs may represent all who suffer for Christ in various ways. William Barclay has said,
There is a great and uplifting truth here. When a good man dies for the sake of goodness, it may look like tragedy, like the waste of a fine life; like the work of evil men; and, indeed, it may be all these things. But every life laid down for right and truth and God is ultimately more than any of these things—it is an offering made to God.
The short way of saying this is that every minus in our lives can be turned into a plus if we offer it to God.
The souls under the altar long for justice, as we all, in some way, long for justice; we long for the world to be set right. The martyrs’ question, “How long O Lord?” appears frequently in the Psalms. The plea suggests that the souls under the altar are still in some sort of time sequence, not eternity as we normally think of it.
I find this whole idea of justice and judgment a very intriguing one in our current social and political climate. We have all heard the cries of justice over the past 12 months or so. We have heard these cries in the context of police brutality, racial division, and all the rest. But it suddenly occurred to me, when viewing our current cries for justice in the light of Revelation, that justice is not what we get in this life. Not that we should not strive for it and work towards it. We should. But we never quite get there. We may achieve some sort of accountability, but we never arrive at pure justice. The reason is that pure justice, God’s kind of justice and judgment involves setting things to right. God’s judgment is not so much about punishing people who do wrong; it is about creating a new world where there is no more wrong, where there is no injustice or unfairness.
Why doesn’t God usher in that kind of world here and now? Tom Wright answers that question this way…
There are three ways of ending a game of chess. The first is that one player or the other simply wins the game. There is no question: this is checkmate, and that’s the end of it. The second is that both players realize the game is unwinnable, and they agree to a draw. The third is that one of the players loses his or her temper, kicks the board over and stalks off. Highly unsatisfactory—except, no doubt, for the short-lived pleasure of letting off steam.
There are plenty of people who think that God, faced with the long chess game of rescuing the world, should simply kick the board over and leave it at that. The game has become so stupid and complicated, with so many crazy people doing so many idiotic things, with so much suffering and pain and anger and violence—isn’t it time, they think, for him to step in and do something? Shouldn’t he, as it were, send in the tanks and sweep all opposition aside? Wouldn’t that be better than letting things run on?
… [but] God is not the sort to kick the table over. Nor will he settle for a draw. His opponent has many things going for him, but God is playing the long game and will go all out for the win.
What has to happen, it seems, is for evil to do its worst, to reach its height, and so to be at last ripe for the judgment that wise and faithful people know, in advance, it deserves.
Seal #6: The Final Cataclysm
So, let’s sum up what we have seen with the seals opened by the Lamb…
Seals one to four display different aspects of world history. Seal five shows what is happening in heaven during this: the prayers of the saints continue to ascend to God. And seal six describes the day that will end all suffering.
Hebrews 12:27 talks about “the removing of what can be shaken—that is, created things—so that what cannot be shaken may remain.” I think John is talking about the same thing here.
All the images associated with the sixth seal are typical descriptions of “the day of the Lord” from the Old Testament (Isaiah 13:6,8; 34:4; Hosea 10:8; Haggai 2:6; Joel 2:1,11,31; Micah 1:1-4; Zephaniah 1:14; Malachi 3:1-3; Enoch 102:1,3) The New Testament takes these pictures and relates them both to the destruction of Jerusalem which happened in AD 70, prior to the writing of Revelation, and to Christ’s Second Coming which is still future. All one must do is read Mark 13 and the parallels in Matthew and Luke to see this. Some scholars see the events related to the sixth seal in Revelation 6 not as a reference to the day of the Lord, the end times, and the coming of final judgment, but I do.
“However,” you say, “we are only in Revelation 6. Why is John already alluding to the Second Coming of Christ?” I think the reason is because Revelation does not move in strict chronological fashion. Rather, each scene (as hinted in my outline of the whole book) displays a similar story using different imagery.
Still, you may ask, “Why would John tell his story in this way?” Perhaps he does so because we need to be reminded of God’s truth more often than simply taught.
And John’s way of reminding us of God’s truth in Revelation is very much like that of the writer of the First Letter of John. Remember how in that letter themes repeated over again? We said, during our study of that letter, that it was like ascending a spiral staircase. You go around and around, but each time you go around you see the same things from a new angle. We will see the same thing happening in the book of Revelation.
These verses here suggest that no one is exempt from the judgment of God. However great a leader a person is and however much power that person wields they are still subject to the judgment of God. However rich a person may be, however strong, however free that person may count themselves, however much of a slave, however insignificant, that person cannot escape the judgment of God.
But there is one curious thing here. Those who try to hide themselves from God say they are fleeing the wrath of the Lamb. We do not usually associate wrath with a lamb but rather gentleness and kindness.
We must remember that this is the response of the rebellious to the Lamb. They are not seeing Jesus in proper perspective. It is true that God has appointed Jesus to be our judge in the final day (Acts 17:31). But his wrath is a wrath of love. He is not out to destroy, but even in anger he is out to save the ones he loves. Jesus is not mad at you. He is mad about you. He is mad at sin, at everything that destroys humanity; he wants to burn away everything that impedes our human flourishing.
So, how do we prepare to meet that kind of burning love?
John Donne, the 17th century poet, and Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, once asked in a poem: “What if this present were the world’s last night?”
In other words: what if you knew that tonight the world was coming to an end? How would you live today if you knew that?
That line from John Donne was the inspiration for an essay by C. S. Lewis entitled “The World’s Last Night”. Personally, I have found what C. S. Lewis had to say about preparing for the Second Coming very helpful. Here is a bit of what he says,
The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph. This seems to some people intolerably frustrating. So many things would be interrupted. Perhaps you were going to get married next month, perhaps you were going to get a raise next week: you may be on the verge of a great scientific discovery; you may be maturing great social and political reforms. Surely no good and wise God would be so very unreasonable as to cut all this short? Not now, of all moments!
But we think thus because we keep on assuming that we know the play. We do not know the play. We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. We do not know who are the major and who the minor characters. The Author knows. The audience, if there is an audience (if angels and archangels and all the company of heaven fill the pit and the stalls) may have an inkling. But we, never seeing the play from outside, never meeting any characters except the tiny minority who are “on” in the same scenes as ourselves, wholly ignorant of the future and very imperfectly informed about the past, cannot tell at what moment the end ought to come. That it will come when it ought, we may be sure; but we waste our time in guessing when that will be. That it has a meaning we may be sure, but we cannot see it. When it is over, we may be told. We are led to expect that the Author will have something to say to each of us on the part that each of us has played. The playing it well is what matters infinitely.[1]
That last line has helped me more than all the other books I have ever read about the Second Coming. “The playing it well is what matters infinitely.” Am I playing my God-given part well? Are you playing your part well? “Playing it well” is how we prepare for Jesus’ return.
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