Revelation 6The First Six Seals

A scroll could not be opened, nor its contents read, until all of the seals were opened. So the visions that come with the seven seals are a precursor to, or a foreshadowing of, what’s in the scroll. They are not the contents of the scroll. The seals are the warm-up. The “four horsemen of the Apocalypse” are just the warm-up for the actual Apocalypse. The contents of the scroll are the seven trumpets and the seven bowls of wrath.

This echoes the Old Testament horsemen in Zechariah 1:8–11 and Zechariah 6:1–8. Those horses are different from the Revelation horses: a different mix of colors and a different purpose. Zechariah 1 has a red horse with red, brown and white horses behind it; Zechariah 6 adds a dappled one, which maybe corresponds to the pale horse here. We don’t know, so we can’t make a direct correlation.

Here’s the parallel: horses in prophetic imagery always mean movement of some sort. In Zechariah it’s good movement; in Revelation it’s negative movement. But always movement. They can mean military movement, like some of the Revelation horses, or the movement of the Spirit of God and His purposes.

White horse … bow. An archer on a white horse would terrify the hearers in the first century. The Parthians had mounted archers, they were the primary enemies of Rome at the time, and the Parthian armies included “sacred” white horses. The white horse with an archer means conquest, as stated in the verse and as symbolized here.

The white horse rider is a parody of Christ, an Antichrist, if you will: an angel of light, a demon, that brings darkness. This is a call-evil-good part of human history. He and his actions will probably be looked on by the world as good. He’s part of what’s causing the suffering of the martyrs we’ll see at the fifth seal, and he lines up with other figures and characters in the rest of Revelation. We’re seeing the beginning of the spiral helix that is John’s description of the end of the world.

Fiery red is associated with lack of peace, with bloodshed, like Mars, the “red planet,” named for the Roman god of war. This horseman takes peace and makes people kill. The sword is a symbol throughout history associated with war. The first conqueror does it without war; the second does it with war.

All right, time to address the structure of the three groups of sevens: seals, trumpets, bowls.

From chapter 6 to the end of the book, only chapters 12–14 and 17–22 are not part of the three sevens; those two sections play their own role. The three sevens dominate much of Revelation.

This pattern shows that John is not interested in a strict chronology. It’s more like looking into an unfolding spiral helix: the events cycle some and repeat some, but point toward the conclusion. That is more truly the structure of Revelation than any linear structure.

Also, the bowls and the trumpets echo the plagues of Egypt, which all of John’s readers would have caught. John, through the Holy Spirit, is inviting the comparison between Egypt’s persecution of Israel and the end-times persecution of the church. We have to pick up on it, or we don’t fully understand it.

Black horse, rider with scales. Hyperinflation is what’s going on here. Sound familiar? You could call it famine and pestilence, as a lot of people do, but this is existence-threatening economic inflation and scarcity. The scales indicate rationing of all the basic foods needed for survival. Starvation would be a part of this now.

But there is a level of mercy here: “do not damage the oil and the wine.” The olive trees and the vineyards are left alone instead of being burned or cut down, as often happened in war and conquest. He added that olive trees take 17 years to produce a crop after planting, so cutting them down would devastate an economy for years.

Still, the inflation is crushing: six pounds of barley a day would not be enough for an entire family to live on long term. Oil and wine were, and are, Israel’s primary crops; they would import wheat and barley. So Israel’s economy is being preserved in this judgment. Wheat and barley were necessary for sustenance, unlike oil and wine. This foreshadows a measure of protection and favor that Israel will have during this period of God’s wrath. There’s more coming!

The pale horse resembles the angel of death. It echoes many Old Testament prophets: Jer 14:12, 24:10, 27:8; Ezek 6:11, 7:15, 12:16.

Paul personifies death too, in his famous talk on Jesus’ resurrection: “O death where is your sting? O death where is your victory?” (1 Cor 15:55). That echoes Hosea 13:14, “Where, O death, are your plagues? Where, O grave, is your destruction?”, and Isaiah 25:8, “He will swallow up death forever.” Death and Hades are now being used as tools in God’s hand before their own destruction, which is coming in Rev 20:14.

Death and Hades together mean they’re killing off non-believers, people who are going to hell. That’s why Hades is paired with death. Someone in the room said she’d always been amazed that Death and Hades are entities, not places, and he agreed: they’re entities.

“Kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts” echoes Jeremiah 15:1–3 very specifically. There Yahweh sends unfaithful Israelites away to their destruction in four ways; here it’s the whole earth. Israel was the example for the whole earth. In both their faithfulness and their unfaithfulness, Israel showed the consistency of our God in dealing with those things, and that consistency is destined to be meted out on the rest of the world too. Israel is still the example to the whole world at the end of time. Other parallels: Jeremiah 24:10; Ezekiel 5:12, 17.

A fourth of the earth is taken by conquest killings, war, famine, economic starvation and wild beasts. These people were Hades-bound: people who supported the martyring of believers. The horsemen are used as tools of God’s judgment in spite of their evil intent. Verse 9 …

That’s a wild thing to wrap your head around, but the Lord can use whatever He wants. In spite of these horsemen being evil, God is using them.

“Under the altar” is the same place where the blood of the bull was poured out in the priests’ consecration offerings (Exodus 29:12), and where the blood of bulls was poured for sin offerings (Leviticus 4:7). The altar itself responds and speaks to honor God in His justice later (Rev 16:7).

There are a lot of martyrs; I don’t know how they all fit under there. It’s a spiritual reality, not a physical one. This is heaven; the physics don’t have to work. The blood of bulls poured out in those sacred ways is now represented by these whose blood was spilled: sacred, holy before the Lord.

“How long” echoes Psalm 119:84. “Avenge our blood” echoes Deut 32:43, 2 Kgs 9:7 and Ps 79:10; and “It is mine to avenge” is in Deut 32:35, Rom 12:19 and Heb 10:30. Proverbs 20:22: “Wait for the LORD, and he will avenge you.” God is the great avenger, and the timing is His!

This is definitely not the final judgment on the earth; that’s still coming. Remember, we’re in the outer rings of the spiral helix. These are things that can be seen as natural judgments. The world might see them as coincidences or just chaos, or as regular judgments; they’ll be misunderstood. The judgment of the four horsemen and the seals is not adequate, according to these martyrs or to God Himself, to rightly avenge the blood of the saints. It’s not enough. It’s the warm-up.

Now, the people of the earth see what’s happening next as wrath, and it would seem that Revelation does too.

John moves from being prompted to see (“Come!”), to a passive onlooker (“I looked,” “I saw”), to now anticipating what’s coming next: “I watched.” He’s invested; he can tell where this is going and he’s already leaning toward it. There’s a shift in John’s attention to the vision.

Earthquake, then … the cosmos is in mourning over the events on the earth. This is bigger than an eclipse or a “blood moon.” These are signs that mess things up for the whole world (if the moon goes away, the tides change!), and all the earth’s inhabitants know that something is terribly wrong.

These signs echo Isaiah 29:6, 34:4, 50:3, 54:10; Jeremiah 4:24; Ezekiel 38:19–20; Nahum 1:5; Matthew 24:29; and 2 Peter 3:10. Then Psalm 46:2 gives us hope even in the moments the earth is being destroyed: “Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea.”

There are scholars who see what happened in all these seals as near-future prophecy: most of it happened in the first two centuries after John wrote, with the Roman Empire. I think that’s true to a degree; the beginning of the spiral could have been that near fulfillment. But seeing it as a spiral helix, as John does, requires that there will be deeper degrees of fulfillment of this imagery as we near the end.

They’re aware of whose wrath this is: “the wrath of the Lamb.” The world will know that God Himself and His Son Jesus are doing this. God knows how to make Himself known. Those on the verge of faith need to get right with God; the faithless will side with the wrong side and shake their fists at God.

People would rather receive death by random nature, “acts of God,” as insurance calls them, than face the living God Himself and Jesus! The hiding in caves echoes Isaiah 2:10, 19, 21; Hosea 10:8; and Luke 23:30.

These seals complement each other and set up the rest of the book! These are the two questions the rest of the book answers.

We’re still asking “how long.” It’s more appropriate for those who were murdered to ask it, but it’s on the hearts of believers. That’s why people have charts, and why books came out like 88 Reasons Jesus was coming back in 1988, and then another for 1989.

“A little longer” means it will get worse before it gets better. You see it in all the end-times prophecies (Matthew 24 and 25, Thessalonians): the bad gets worse and the good gets better, and then there’s a clash. The white robe anticipates the final resurrection; the martyrs are getting part of their reward early.

The rest of the book builds on this to describe the nature and reasons for God’s wrath. It also describes God’s salvation for the saints, who are going to experience humans’ wrath in this time.

Revelation 6 brings it all together and caps off, culminates, many of the judgments and prophecies from the rest of the Bible. That’s why there are so many echoes and so much quoting.

With this kind of activity the whole earth will be aware of God’s wrath. Seals one to four, they’re not sure yet; at five, the martyrs are asking how long; at six, they start to get it. But this is just the precursor, the prelude, because it’s only after the seventh seal that we get to read and see what’s in the scroll. And it definitely gets weirder from here!