The passage: The Lamb opens the seals one by one. At the first, one of the four living creatures says “Come and see,” and a white horse appears, its rider carrying a bow and wearing a crown, going out conquering. At the second, a red horse comes, whose rider is given power to take peace from the earth so that men kill one another, and he is given a great sword. At the third, a black horse comes, whose rider holds a pair of scales, and a voice sets prices for wheat and barley and says not to harm the oil and wine. At the fourth, a pale horse comes, whose rider is named Death, with Hell following, given power over a quarter of the earth to kill by sword, hunger, death, and wild beasts. At the fifth, under the altar are the souls of those slain for God’s word, crying out how long until God avenges their blood; white robes are given them and they are told to rest a little longer until the full number of their fellow servants is complete. At the sixth, there is a great earthquake; the sun turns black, the moon like blood, the stars fall, the sky rolls up like a scroll, and mountains and islands are moved. All people, high and low, hide in the rocks and beg the mountains to fall on them to hide them from the face of God on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of his wrath has come, and who can stand?
Much has been said about these seals. Commentators have worked hard to determine which seal was opened in which age, which remain to be opened now or in the future. Since I find no times mentioned in the prophecy, I will speak of none and imagine none. It seems to me that if we follow the words exactly, they will tell us more of what we want to know than if we substitute our own words for them.
I. The Lamb has been revealed at the center of the throne, among the elders and the four living creatures. He is said to have the seven horns of power and the seven eyes of wisdom. As He opens the first seal, the prophet hears something like thunder, and one of the living creatures says, “Come and see.” We must assume this divine creature is the Lion of the earlier vision. He represents the side of God’s nature we usually set against the lamblike side. But that opposition is not the teaching of the Apocalypse. The One who sits on the throne is fully shown in the One who was slain. The lion’s power belongs to him as much as the calf’s weakness does. The question to settle is this: Is the root of power—the power that actually rules the world, the power everyone will one day acknowledge—self-will or self-sacrifice? Which of the two expresses God’s will and being? Every other question is subordinate to this one.
- “And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him; and he went forth conquering and to conquer.”
Here another symbol is introduced that will recur throughout this chapter. Man’s mastery over the horse—as much for the Arab in the desert as for the Greek of an Ionian city—is the type of his mastery over all animals, the sign and pledge that he himself is of a higher origin. The hero is educated by the Centaur; his own defining title is horse-tamer. In the book of Zechariah—which I will refer to later in this sermon for another purpose, and which is in some ways more closely related to the Apocalypse than any other book of the Old Testament—there is a vision of a chariot with red horses, another with black, a third with white, and a fourth with dappled and bay horses. These are described as the four spirits of heaven, which go out from standing before the Lord of all the earth. The black horses go to the north country, the white after them, the dappled toward the south, and the bay seek to range to and fro through the earth.
Such language belonged, I think, especially to Zechariah’s own time—the period after Judea had sunk into a mere part of the great empire, and was rising again to the dignity of a nation. Zechariah had been urging his countrymen to rise and rebuild the temple; he had been showing them that its ordinances, and Joshua its high priest and Zerubbabel its lawgiver, all bore witness that not outward might but God’s Spirit is supreme. He had spoken of a form of government founded on the opposite principle, whose first home and full development were in the plain of Shinar. Then he turns to the vision of horses going out into different lands. He could no longer, I think, be content to imagine that only his own land was cared for and watched over by God. He felt more than ever that Judea had its own vocation, that keeping its distinctness was the highest of all duties, as it was the most divine of gifts. But the more he felt its pre-eminence, the more he had to see the other nations as also having their distinct callings and powers, however abused. They might not know the highest God, the source of all power—that was the blessing the Jew was to bring them. But he could only bless them so long as he saw every energy or faculty those nations exercised—even if they made it an excuse for self-exaltation or idolatry—as a divine energy, a “spirit of heaven going forth from the Lord of the whole earth.”
So when the Lamb breaks the first seal, and the Lion calls the prophet to come and see what form appears, I think He gives him light on the nature and outcome of conquest—light he especially needed in his generation, as every man has needed it in his own. What did those astonishing conquests mean—of the Asiatic monarchs, of the Macedonians, and still more of the Romans, to whom everyone bowed down? Did they prove, as they seemed to, that a Lion God was reigning, that power came from him, and that all were to be trampled under these white horses’ feet? No—it was not so. The power itself was not destructive, not even earthly, but divine. The Lamb was the Lord; the Lion was his servant. In time it would be shown for whom these conquests were won—not for the Asiatic, the Macedonian, or the Roman, not for self-willed arbitrary rule at all, but for Him who was slain and who lives.
The Lamb opened the second seal, and another vision came. “I heard the second beast say, Come and see. And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.” An optimist would turn away from this vision, but a prophet must look steadily at it, for it is the vision of facts. This red horse of tumult, civil war, and mutual hatred does stand before men’s eyes, does rise up in every period of the world’s history. I need not describe how wildly that horse plunged in the days after Nero’s death, before Vespasian was established. I also think there is meaning in which living creature summoned John to look. There is a lion-worship among men and a calf-worship among men. The first goes with admiration of mere conquering strength; the second with prostration, degradation, and moral slavery. Each is evil because it is a divided worship. The triumphant beast is revered by those who feel strong; the feeble beast is revered by those who feel weak. The strength turns to cruelty and tyranny; the weakness turns to meanness. The Lamb will raise men out of both. And this miserable side of humanity, like that splendid one, is a step in the revelation of Him as King of kings and Lord of lords.
“And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.”
The third living creature had the face of a man. Here we have no vision of war in either form—neither the grand form we think of with a Nebuchadnezzar, a Timour, a Napoleon, nor the wretched form of countries or families torn apart in some civil upheaval. The images here are all of peace. The sword is exchanged for the scales. Men are busy with buying and selling. They are careful of the oil and wine. So they suppose the qualities of the beast have all been set aside; they are humane and civilized. But alas for the manhood that belongs to this un-brutal state of society! The animal is gone—what has taken his place? The oil and the wine are more precious than the man who uses them; the price of the measure of wheat and barley matters more than the life and heart of those who sow and reap them. We are told John heard these earthly cries—these sounds of commerce—from the midst of the four living creatures. What can that mean? I think it clearly means this, brethren: we imagine a heavenly world that takes no interest in earth’s doings, that stands entirely apart from it; but the heavenly world revealed to John enters into all the concerns of men, highest and lowest; it is not indifferent to the needs of the most insignificant creature who feeds or starves below, not indifferent to our sordid ways, but longs to lift us above scorning anything human, however low it looks to vulgar pride, and above revering anything inhuman, however splendid it looks to those same eyes.
V. As in the earlier cases the Lamb claimed the Lion’s strength and the Calf’s weakness as His own, so now He emphatically claims as His own the face of the Man and all that belongs to the nature He took. The black, red, and white horses are powers and energies from the Lord of all the earth. But can that be said of the next vision? “And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.”
The living creature with the eagle’s wings tells the prophet to look at this ghastly picture. It is one often seen on earth without any heavenly guide to interpret it: Famine and Pestilence traveling together, cutting down hosts of men; the violence of sufferers making their diseases worse; the moral recklessness that accompanies such times, which the great Greek historian describes so wonderfully in his account of the Athenian plague, and which everyone who has recorded such calamities since has noticed. Here, surely, is the pale horse with Death for its rider and Hell following after. That this should be the last of the sights the four living creatures can show—that their work is finished when they have brought us to the mouth of this yawning abyss—might at first seem appalling. But pause a little, and light will dawn on you. This is the downward course of mere animal power. Its various aspects have been shown to us, each standing out clearly and separately; now it is exhausted, having done all it can do. If there is no power but this animal power—even adding to it the power of calculation, of reckoning how much wheat a penny buys, of providing for oil and wine, which we regard as peculiarly human—if this is the power of the universe, then we have reached the climax of its history. Then the pale horse and its rider are the last thing we shall look upon. Death and Hell have won. Let us weigh that result well; let us ask ourselves honestly whether the mere facts of earth, supposing all glimpses of any other kind of power be shut out, are not tending toward this end.
- I say, brethren, another kind of power; for merely to imagine this power raised to omnipotence does not remove the confusion but makes it hopeless. Do not suppose for a moment that the Apocalypse is repeating the old story of a contest between the Giants of earth and a Giant of Heaven to see which will prevail. Still further from us be the notion that it describes a struggle between a Prometheus who would seize some of the divine wisdom for man’s use and a jealous Jove determined to rule men without sharing his counsels with them. No—understand it well. It is precisely with this form of omnipotence, with this idea of a jealous will and all the religious and moral horrors that flow from it, that the Lamb is at war. As long as mere power—physical or intellectual—is what men most covet for themselves, they will attribute the same covetousness to the beings they worship; they will find themselves hemmed in by cruel conditions and restraints binding the might that works restlessly and confusedly within them; and in trying to break through these barriers they will destroy the very freedom they want and create the very tyranny they protest against. And so long, all the world’s legends and histories will only echo the same cry. There is a pale horse with Death for its rider who closes every vision of good and puts out the light of every sun.
Yes, and there is a darker form behind. You think Hell is an invention of priests. Alas, priests have been shamefully guilty in preaching Hell rather than deliverance from Hell; so far as they have done that, they have violated their commission and borne witness for anyone but the Lamb who conquers death and hell. But Hell is not the priests’ invention. It haunts and torments every man. He may picture it under one form or another; and so far as he gives it any form at all, he takes away some of the blank horror surrounding the thought of an impenetrable, solitary void as the home of a living, conscious, thinking creature. Until a man throws off the coil of self, he cannot throw off this coil. The more he wraps himself in self, the more impossible it is for him not to have this pale death-vision before him, and another following it that will swallow up himself, his family, and the universe.
- But though the four living creatures have finished their task once these four seals are opened, there is another seal for the Lamb to open, and the vision it discloses is wholly unlike the others. “And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? And white robes were given unto every one of them, and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled.”
By confining these seals to some particular period in the later history of Christendom, some have been able to limit this description to a single school or sect of Christians who are supposed (and I doubt not did) to have witnessed against the evils around them. But I dare not confine these words even to the Christian martyrs of any age. I understand the vision the Apostle saw to be of all who anywhere—before his time, in his own, or in later times—have believed that there is a power other than self-willed tyrannical power, other than what men worshipped in the lion, the calf, the human intellect, the flying eagle—a power other than death and hell; who, in every anguish and despair from within and without, have held fast their faith and cried to Him who is holy and true to show that He is mightier than those who counterfeit His majesty and abuse it for unholy and untrue ends. From these in every corner of the earth has risen that groan, deep or loud, for deliverance—which He who sits on the throne has understood, even if no one else did, and which has been in His ears a hymn and a confession of the Lamb as the one true Lord and King of the earth. The cry came from beneath the altar. It was inspired by the spirit of sacrifice. It was the expression of a sacrifice of body, soul, and spirit to Him who had shared His own mind with them. The sacrifice was completed when the self-willed tyrants they protested against gave them to the axe or the fire, or made them drink the poison cup. But their cry did not end when they fell by the axe, the fire, or the hemlock. Then it first became distinct and intelligible; then it first joined in clear, full harmony with everything that had ascended from those who had fallen in other lands and other times; then they themselves fully knew that they had not been pleading for their own redemption but for the redemption of the earth from its tormentors. And they were given what they most longed for—the white robe of innocence, purity from all the passion and selfishness that had been mixed into their witness for God and their prayers for men. And they were assured that if they waited, the answer to their prayer would come.
- Here is part of the answer: “And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondsman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; and said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb. For the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?”
In this grand description most have recognized the signs of a moral and political earthquake, more terrible than any physical earthquake ever was—though it has happened, and will happen again, that physical convulsions keep time with those that shatter nations and fill men’s hearts with dismay and anguish. Since the prophet names no time, I will introduce none. The description may fit many periods. It may have been fulfilled for many in the days of Alaric and Attila, of Genghis Khan or Timour, when Constantinople fell, when Napoleon laid the nations low. Do you think it must point to some still more distant day? Have you dreamed it must refer to a destruction of the earth? We shall see whether the Apocalypse leads us to expect any such destruction at any time, or whether instead it tells us of a redemption of the earth, such as the saints beneath the altar prayed for. I believe that if you study this earthquake’s description carefully, you will rather be led to think of an even earlier fulfillment than those I have mentioned—one that helps us better understand what the others meant. We are told here of the shaking and downfall of heavenly powers. What can these powers be? Are they not the demons of the old mythology? Were they not trembling, and indeed falling, at the very time John was on Patmos, before the preaching of a few fishermen and a tent-maker? It was not earth alone that was moved, but heaven too. I do not regard the revolution of the first century as an exception in the history of revolutions in this respect, but as a precedent for them. There has never been a revolution that did not test men’s faith and worship as well as their policy and government; never one that did not prove how inseparably these are connected. And I believe there never has been one that did not demonstrate the falsehood of self-will, or arbitrary will, and the truth that all power is centered in Him who gave up all power and took the form of a servant.
There are many excellent men today who will fully agree with me that the Apocalypse points to the deliverance of the earth, not its extinction. But they will say that the great men and captains who called the mountains to fall on them and the hills to hide them were fleeing from the wrath of the Lamb. So the prophet must be describing a manifestation of the Lamb—a manifestation of Him as the actual Lord of the earth. Certainly He is: nothing in human language is more evident. And there is no lesson, it seems to me, so important—none the Apocalypse was so much written to teach us as this: that all false and tyrannical power is a rebellion against the Lamb; that no false and tyrannical power has ever been put down except by a manifestation of the Lamb. May the Spirit of Him who is faithful and true root and ground us in the conviction that the world never has been and never can be governed by oppression and lies; that these have at no time upheld its order but have subverted it; that whether they are enthroned by false religions in heavenly places or seated by usurpation in the high places of earth, they are cursed and doomed; that the very conquests they helped bring about—the civil tumults, mercantile frauds, plagues and famines they promoted—have been their appointed punishments; that the cries of the weak and suffering have in the end proved stronger than they; that the revolutions most terrifying while they lasted, from the crimes that provoked them and the crimes they provoked, from the clash of human evil in its opposite forms, have been the instruments for putting down counterfeit powers and asserting the power that is and must endure; that all righteous men and righteous institutions have been proclaiming who was, is, and shall be the ruler over men; that the full revelation of the Christ who is to come will confirm all the true human authority and all the true human liberty that has ever existed; that He will prove the first to have come from Him, and will claim the second for our race as the reward of His agony and death.