In chapters 4 and 5 of Revelation John has shared with us his vision of God the Creator, Who holds the whole world in His hand, and of Christ the Redeemer, Who controls the course of human history from His Father's throne.
Now, from Chapter 6 onwards, we are to be shown how He does it. What we shall be given now in these ensuing chapters is the Bible's theology of power; surely the most relevant theology that can be proclaimed in our modern world. For men think to rule the world - by military superiority and the balance of power, by industrial might and commercial giantism, by scientific knowledge and technological skill, by political manoeuvring, and the control of the world's resources and its economy.
John says "No!" It is the ascended Christ, seated at His Father's right hand, Who rules the world. In all these things He rules. "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me." (Matt. 28:18)
John will show us that He exercises that authority both by judgments and by mercies, and that in the exercise of His rule, His church has a crucial role. (For now we shall be occupied with judgments only; mercy and the role of the church we shall come to later.)
In ch. 5 we have seen how the book of human destiny was given into the only hands found worthy to open it and unfold its contents. As one by one, the seals are broken, they are broken open by the Lamb. John means us to understand that as the panorama of history unfolds feature by feature, it is the hand of Christ Who directs its course toward its planned climax.
Here let me pause to indicate how the chapters 6-8 we shall look at now fit in to the broader context of the whole book. John's visions in the Book of Revelation are grouped in series of sevens -
Seven Churches in chapters 1-3
Seven Seals in chapters 4-8
Seven Trumpets in chapters 8-11
Other series of sevens follow: seven bowls, seven thunders, seven angels for example. We shall not complicate the issue now by going into all of them; all it is important to note for the moment is that John tells us plainly in chapter 10:6-7 that he is not speaking of the end - the final fulfilment of all things - until the days of the seventh trumpet call.
So in the two series of visions leading up to that, the seven seals and the seven trumpets, we are being given an overview of history before the end. And it is not a progression or a timetable of events that we are given in these two series, but a mosaic, a collage of the salient features that make up the panorama of life on earth as seen from heaven.
One of the obvious differences between the two series - of the seals and of the trumpets - is that in the first, the judgments that overtake the world are called forth by the cries of the four living creatures (which are symbolic of the powers God has built in to His creation), whereas in the second series (the trumpets) the judgments that overtake the world are cast down on the earth out of heaven. John means us to understand thereby that these are two dimensions of judgment: earthly and heavenly. There are judgments that came upon us out of the creation itself. because its powers bear upon us in consequence of our sinful mismanagement of them: and there are judgments that fall upon us out of heaven because God in righteous anger reacts personally to our rebellious folly. The one dimension of judgment is natural so to speak; the other is supernatural. That is why the demonic element in life is not introduced until the second series of judgments in ch. 9, for example, under the figure of a plague of locusts out of the bottomless pit.
In chapter 6, then, John shows us how Christ rules the life of this world, first by judgments.
This aspect of His reign is described under the symbols of four horses and their riders - the well-known
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
v. 1 They ride forth, observe, at the summons of the four living creatures. Those four creatures, we have noted, symbolise the powers God has built into His creation, including humanity, for humanity is as real a part of His creation as air and earth and sea. John means us to understand that under Christ's controlling hand, the powers of creation, including humanity's own life force, work against us for our undoing, in reaction against our sinful will.
i. War - White Horse
v. 2 The first result is war; it is symbolised by a white horse, whose rider has a bow, who is given a crown and who goes out conquering and to conquer. The thing represented is national armed conquest.
In John's day the Roman Legions had for the first time suffered defeat on the empire's northern boundaries by the armies of the Parthians, who were renowned as superlative bowmen and all of whose horses were white. It is all a forgotten chapter of history now, but for a time the Parthian bowmen on their white horses were the terror of the civilised world.
Armed invasion, John is saying, is permitted under the ruling hand of the ascended Lord as a judgment on us for our sin, whether by the Parthian bowmen from the north (in the 1st century) or by the Panzer Divisions of the Third Reich (in the 20th century).
War is the first result of sin, as James reminds us (4:1-2); for when we turn away from God, we must fight each other for the possession of what we choose instead of Him.
This first horseman, too, rides a white horse - in a blasphemous parody of the white horse that Christ rides when later (19:11) He makes war on evil - because when nations wage war they always claim their cause is just. Both Britain and Argentina claimed it in their conflict over the Falkland Islands. "God is on our side!" men cry, and destroy each other.
But God is not on anybody's side. We were given life to be on His side. But because we are all of us rebels against Him, it is God's purpose of judgment that is served by war on both sides; for war is never a victory, even for the victor, but a tragedy consequent upon covetousness and arrogance. Dominion was in the beginning God's gift to humanity. But because we have turned our backs on God, the only inspiration of its right exercise, it has gone sour on us. The power He gave us to ennoble us now debases us.
ii. Civil Strife - Red Horse
v. 4 The second horseman mounted on a red horse is given a great sword, and he is "permitted" (note the word; it is again the mark of Christ's sovereignty) to take peace from the earth, so that men should slay each other.
The thing symbolised is civil strife, for the sword is the symbol of state, ("He does not bear the sword in vain," Rom. 13:4), as the crown is the symbol of national sovereignty. The very nations that go to war are themselves torn by inner strife, and it happens by the will of the Lamb of God, whether in Nicaragua or Northern Ireland.
Not only sovereignty, the gift of God to men, is corrupted when we turn away from Him, but brotherhood also, His other gift to man. The breakdown of trust in community relationships, the curse of industrial and party strife, the collapse of good order, is the inescapable consequence of men's pursuit of selfish advantage.
For what is such strife but an exposure of the truth that lies concealed behind our professed desire for peace - namely a false calm on the surface of things above the deeper currents of restless illwill. That is the best peace a world that has forsaken God can produce, for it is founded on a lie we all covertly believe - that men are born to serve our needs, and not we to serve God in serving theirs.
iii. Want - Black Horse
v. 5 The third horseman rides a black horse and has a balance in his hand.
v. 6 Listen with care to the cry that goes forth with him - "A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius, but do not harm oil and wine."
A denarius was the standard day's wage for a working man, a quart of wheat the minimum that was needed to keep his family alive; and he might make his money stretch further by buying instead the inferior barley. In times of normal prosperity a denarius would buy ten quarts of wheat, or more; here it buys only one. John is presenting a picture of inflated food prices and rationing - that is what the scales in the rider's hands are for. It is a picture of famine - but of famine, which, though severe, is not wholly crippling. For oil and wine are the products of the olive tree and the vine, whose roots, deeper than the roots of the grain crops, enable them better to survive drought. But they are luxury goods, compared to wheat and barley.
John is describing a situation, then, in which the mass of men keep body and soul together in a state of chronic under-nourishment but where luxuries are still in supply to the wealthy minority.
Do we recognise that situation? Does it not have a familiar ring?
It is a remarkably accurate description of the food problem as it afflicts our modern world, and which is the cause of so much bewilderment and distress.
John says it happens by the will of Christ. The good earth, too, no longer tilled by the wise husbandry of godly men, turns against us and resists our labours. And the resources it does yield fail to satisfy the world's needs as they might, because the energies and wealth of the powerful minority are consumed in the production of useless luxuries, and the stock-piling of wicked weaponry. It is not God's wish that men should suffer; but it is His will that when men sin, suffering shall follow.
iv. Death - Pale Horse
v. 8 The fourth rider on a pale horse is death, and Hades follows him. For the wages of sin is death.
War, strife and want - these, the first three products of sin, bring disease and death in their train.
How often has it all happened as John describes it. He is not inventing anything more terrible than history has recorded many times over ... or than Jesus Himself predicted, indeed, as being characteristic of the whole Gospel age (Mark 13:7-8 - wars, risings, famines and earthquakes.)
What is disturbing to us, perhaps, is John's affirmation that these things happen by the authority of the Ascended Lord as He rules the world in His Father's name - for the power these riders wield is given them from above.
v. 9 As the fifth seal is opened, it is seen that the faithful suffer as well as the faithless. They are slain for the Word of God and the witness they had born. Their witness and that Word are the same they had always been on the lips of God's prophets - that war, strife, suffering and death are God's judgments on sin, and that by means of them He calls us to repentance that He might cleanse and heal our life.
"Why do we suffer?" men cry; and the People of God are called to answer. "Because we sin. Repent and God will save us."
The Church is delinquent in our day because we have lacked both the conviction and the courage to interpret God's judgments to the world as His summons to repentance.
Is it because we know that if we do, we shall suffer for it? And do we fancy that by our silence we shall avoid suffering? Well, we can't. For if we won't suffer for the obedience of our witness, we shall suffer for the sin of our silence. Either way, we shall suffer. The only choice we have is whether we shall suffer at God's hand or in His fellowship.
Nor are the People of God themselves immune from all those ills that are the consequence of God's judgments. They fall on us as on all men else, for our own sin is no less than the world's, and we are all bound up in the bundle of life together, repentant and unrepentant alike. Only the meaning of our suffering is changed. God's judgments are transmuted into discipline so as to toughen our faith and supply us with the raw material of witness.
v. 10 And when their cry goes up, "How long, O Lord, how long?" the answer is given, "For as long as is necessary to allow time for the last man who shall repent to be gathered in." Others have suffered, remember, while God kept the door open for you.
If men are to have time to repent, then their evil, and the judgments that attend upon their evil, must be endured a while longer. "God is longsuffering, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance," (II Peter 3:9) and His People are called to share in that longsuffering with Him. He continually extends the time limit, allowing the game to go on, so to speak, into seemingly endless injury time. "Here is a call," as John will later say (14:12) "for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus."
But there is an end. God cannot allow us to be endlessly deceived by His patience into thinking that final judgment will never come.
v. 12 And so John records that when the sixth seal is opened, all earthly security finally collapses. There comes what Luke (17:22) tells us Jesus Himself called "one of the days of the Son of Man." (There is more than one before the end.) It is a time when the long ripening of man's rebellious folly comes to a grim harvest.
From time to time God allows an age to witness the collapse of everything upon which men have depended, and be challenged thereby to turn to Him on Whom alone we may depend.
v. 15 At such times, position is of no avail. There is no safety, even for the kings of the earth and the great men and the generals and the rich and the strong. The wealth of the rich can no longer buy them protection. The worker has no security in his employment, and the employer no gain from his ownership. Not even the ground under our feet remains firm, so there is left nowhere in the world where it is safe for a man to stand. And so men are taught at last that unless God Himself alone is our refuge and our strength, our strong tower in Whom we rest for safety, there is no place left in the earth where we can stand at all.
One of these 'Days of the Son of Man' is surely soon to break upon us; whether the last, I cannot tell. All that can be said is that whereas in the past such days have been national and local, our progress in communications and multi-national interdependence is hastening us toward the frightening situation where such a harvest of our folly cannot be less than global.
Understand this, and understand it well - at the same time as God passionately longs for men to turn from their wickedness and live, He also wishes passionately for the peace of the earth to be shattered - for it is a false peace, founded on a lie.
Righteousness is the foundation of God's Throne. Righteousness, therefore, is the only foundation on which our earthly life may safely rest.
But more and more, our life in society is being grounded down in deceit, in greed, in corruption, in licentiousness, in selfishness, in illwill, in ruthlessness and violence and brutality. More and more it is to these things men pay the homage of their energy and ambition, not to the pursuit of honour and compassion and conscience and cleanness; and a society founded on unrighteousness the Lord must, and surely will ultimately destroy.
The biggest lie to which the Church in our time has succumbed is the lie fed to it by a liberal theology that has persuaded us that God is Love ... and nothing else. He is also Light, and at the heart of His Love there is death to all sin.
Be not deceived; God is not mocked - for whatever men sow they will reap. That is the judgment.
And if God's ways with us seem to our soft eyes severe, it is nonetheless the severity of love. "Lo, it was for my welfare that I had great bitterness," cried Hezekiah the King, after God had smitten him and raised him up again. "Thou hast held back my life from the pit, for now Thou has cast all my sins behind Thy back." (Isa. 38:17)
The reason why God's love for men is so severe is that He might cleanse us by the forgiveness of our sins.
Of the tenderness of His love's mercy John will speak soon. Christ rules from His Father's Throne, not by judgments only but by mercies also, for as John knew, men are not led to repentance by the experience only of disasters or of bitterness. Men are moved to repent only when they perceive the connection between God's judgments and His Gospel of Redemption. It is not the threat of doom alone that awakens faith, but the vision of God. It is not enough that His wrath should drive us, but His love must draw us before we will run into His Fatherly arms. The message of these chapters keeps a balance between God's rebuke and His entreaty, between His warning and His promise.
But let us heed the reminder, however offensive to our native complacency it may be, that the fear of the Lord - the proper dread of Him - is the beginning of wisdom.
I commend for attention Hosea 5:13-6:6 - paraphrased a little to help make it more relevant in our contemporary situation. Ponder it in an attitude of prayer:
I mean to pour out my anger on Ephraim and Judah, for a wanton spirit is in them; they trample on justice, and have only contempt for God.
These things have been their undoing.
Yet when Ephraim saw how sick he was, and Judah the extent of his wound, they turned, not to me, but to Assyria and its king.
But he has no power to cure you or to heal your wound.
So I shall be as a panther to Israel, as a ravenous lion, mauling its prey and dragging it off, chasing its rescuers away.
Then I shall leave them like that, as a lion leaves its stricken, half-eaten pray in the open field, while it returns to its lair.
They will not find me, until they confess their guilt, and seek my face, searching for me in their distress ... until they say -
"Come, let us turn back to God. He has torn us to pieces, but He will heal us. He has wounded - He will build us up. In a day or two He will revive us. On the third day He will raise us up to live under His care and protection.
Let us humble ourselves; let us strive to know the Lord. He will respond to us. He will come to us. Sure as the dawn, the light of His forgiving favour shall rise upon us; like spring rains watering the earth, it shall refresh us again.
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