Chapter 12 - The First Four Seals: The Last Days
It should now be possible to reconsider the same portion of
Revelation 6 as a prophecy yet to be fulfilled the third time, the
“continuous-historic” fulfilment here being regarded as the
second. Since, however, the problem is now one of interpreting prophecy
in advance it will not be possible to do so with anything like the same degree
of exactness. What follow must be regarded as suggestions only, suggestions
supported by Biblical evidence.
Looking for a further fulfilment of these Seal visions is not
unreasonable. The very close parallel between this part of Revelation and the
Lord’s Olivet prophecy is sufficient in itself. Here, of course, is the
reason why John’s gospel has no record of that discourse of the Last Days
which occupies such a prominent place in the synoptic gospels - the Book of
Revelation is John’s equivalent (and much more!) of that important
prophecy.
Again, the breaking of the Seals of the scroll now in the
hands of the Lamb (5:7) can only mean that the revealing of the contents of the
Book of Life is not far behind. It is details such as this which show that any
A.D. 70 or continuous-historic application of the Seals is at best only a
primary and subordinate fulfillment - just as a hundred prophecies in the Old
Testament had their basis in imminent developments in the prophet’s own
times but a much more dramatic reference to more distant and more important
events concerning Messiah. When detailed consideration comes to be given to the
Sixth Seal the truth of this principle will be more evident than ever.
THE EXHORTATION: “COME”
Each of the Seals is introduced by a voice saying:
“Come.” But only in the ease of the first is the voice described as
“a voice of thunder.” This means that it is the voice of God (John
12:29; Psalm 29, especially verse 3). It is the roar of the Lion of the tribe of
Judah (5: 5).
Quite apart from the dubious manuscript evidence, the reading:
“Come and see” is hardly admissible, for John did not “come
and see.” The next verse begins: “And I saw.” The door was
already opened in heaven. His task was to observe and record that which took
place there. Nor can “Come and see” be an exhortation to
“hasten unto the coming of the day of God” (as the A.V. of 2 Peter
3:12 mistakenly has it). It is possible to “hasten the coming” of
that day (see Appendix on this) by one’s “holy way of life and
godliness.” But otherwise it is a matter of “patient
waiting.”
It is even doubtful whether the solitary imperative:
“Come,” was addressed to the apostle, for the three main sections of
the prophecy are each introduced with a heavenly voice which is pointedly
described as speaking directly to John (1:10; 4:1; 10:8); but not so
here.
Then what is the meaning? It could express the longing of the
New Creation (as in Romans 8:18-22) for the coming of the heavenly kingdom. Or
perhaps it represents a four-fold appeal in the last days to Israel that they
turn to God and through His Messiah find the rest for their souls, which they so
desperately need (Joel 2:12-18; see chapter 2 in “The Time of the
End” for fuller treatment of this topic). Or this
“Come...Come...Come ... Come ... “could represent the urgent longing
of saints in Christ to see these dire events take place because they are seen as
the necessary prelude to “the manifestation of the sons of
God.”
ISRAEL’S TIME OF TROUBLE
Once again it is necessary to insist that the main application
of the Seals is to events in the Land (see comment on verse 4 in chapter
11). For most readers it will require no proving that the Last Days immediately
preceding the coming of the Lord will be characterized by War, Famine and
Pestilence in Palestine. God will gather “all nations against Jerusalem to
battle” (Zechariah 14:1). Palestine, so often the cock-pit of warring
nations, will be devastated from end to end, and all the evils that go with war
will find their foulest and almost their last expression there.
Here is the seven-fold chastisement of Israel for their
stubborn rejection of God and His Christ. So few Jews see the return to the Land
as a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy and as preparing the way for the true
realization of the Hope of Israel. Instead, the building of the State of Israel
is seen as the work of dedicated enthusiasts devoted to a political
ideal. As such it must not only prove a failure, but also merit the
retribution of heaven:
“And if ye will not be reformed by me by these things, but will walk
contrary unto me; then will I also walk contrary unto you, and will punish you
yet seven times for your sins. And I will bring a sword upon you that shall
avenge the quarrel of my covenant: and when ye are gathered together within your
cities, I will send the pestilence among you; and ye shall be delivered into the
hand of the enemy. And when I have broken the staff of your bread, ten women
shall bake your bread (for the entire nation) in one oven, and they shall
deliver you your bread again by weight: and ye shall eat and not be satisfied.
And if ye will not for all this hearken unto me: then I will walk contrary unto
you also in fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your
sins” (Leviticus 26:23-28).
Once again the words of the prophet will become a desperate
reality: “I will break the staff of bread in Jerusalem: and they shall eat
bread by weight and with care; and they shall drink water by measure, and with
astonishment” (Ezekiel 4:16). “We get our bread with the peril of
our lives because of the sword of the wilderness. Our skin is black like an oven
because of the terrible famine” (Lamentations 5: 9, 10). Such is the fell
work of the rider of the Black Horse, when “all faces gather
blackness” (Joel 2:6). Nevertheless the immediate mention in the third
Seal of oil and wine not being “hurt” may be intended to echo the
reassurance in Joel that when Israel repents “the Lord will answer and say
unto his people, Behold, I will send you corn, and wine, and oil, and ye shall
be satisfied therewith: and I will no more make you a reproach among the
nations” (2:19).
A WIDER FULFILMENT
However, since the prophets also make it plain that “the
slain of the Lord shall be at that day from one end of the earth to the
other” (Jeremiah 25: 33), and since the cup of God’s wrath is to be
given to “all the kingdoms of the world which are upon the face of the
earth” (25: 26), there is reason to believe that this third fulfilment of
the Seals will not be restricted to Palestine only. “And it shall come to
pass in that day, that a great tumult from the Lord shall be among them,”
as it was “in the day of Midian” (Judges 7:22; Isaiah
9:4).
The phrase: “to him it was given ... that they should
kill one another,” will find fulfilment not only in world-wide conflict
but also in civil war everywhere. In nearly every nation in the world there
exist stresses, racial conflicts, class hatreds and antagonisms, such as now
make this expectation a fearful possibility. With a big proportion of the
world’s population living near starvation level and with underprivileged
nations desperately eager to assert themselves, it needs no vigorous use of the
imagination to picture some of the chaotic and ghastly by-products of a Third
World War. With the collapse of civilization there will come such a resurgence
of the depressed and exploited masses in all parts of the world as will more
than amply fulfil the passages of Scripture quoted.
FAMINE AND PESTILENCE
Again, the restrictions put by another World War on the normal
transportation of food supplies, together with the critical conditions already
created by the rapid increase in the world’s millions, will mean famine on
a vast scale and the rocketing of food prices - “a measure of wheat for a
penny.”
Neither is anything more certain than that Pestilence also
will take terrific toll of human life. Disease has always been a concomitant of
war. In the war that is to come the breakdown of the complex machinery designed
to cope with the health problems of this complicated modern civilization will
mean an anarchy in which diseases will travel fast and unhindered. To this foul
prospect must be added the grim spectre of bacterial warfare - a probability in
any future world war, which the more spectacular bomb and rocket have tended to
push into the background of the popular imagination.
Yet not only have strange new diseases been discovered but
also it is reported that the biggest obstacle in the way of successful germ
warfare - the problem of how to produce very rapid multiplication of bacteria
without loss of virulence - has now been surmounted. “And this shall be
the plague wherewith the Lord will smite all the people that have fought against
Jerusalem; their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet and
their eyes shall consume away in their holes, and their tongue shall consume
away in their mouth” (Zechariah 14:12). With very considerable
plausibility it has been suggested that the horrific picture described here is
the result of modern germ warfare - bubonic plague or some ghastly fruit of
modern scientific devilry.[21]
“A RECRUDESCENCE OF BARBARISM”
“Power was given unto them to kill with the sword, and
with famine, and with pestilence, and with wild beasts of the earth.” It
is unlikely that the last phrase in the words just quoted should be taken
literally. Almost identical words are used in Ezekiel 34:25 - “I will
cause the evil beasts to cease out of the land” - this in a context which
makes it only too plain that the reference must be to Israel’s enemies in
the day of their re-colonisation of Palestine, i.e. the Arabs. Ever since 1948
Arab nations have been eager, like so many savage hungry wolves, for an
opportunity to mangle the corpse of the State of Israel.
The same idea may well be generalized to apply to conditions
that will prevail as soon as the threatened collapse of civilization comes all
over the world. There will be a recrudescence of barbarism - “the wild
beasts of the earth” - which will be quelled by no power on earth save by
the Lord Himself returned in power and great glory. He who sent a great herd of
swine headlong into the abyss will readily repeat the miracle and restore sanity
to a naked, pitiable Israel now willing to sit at I-lis feet.
BLESSING IN THE MIDST OF CURSE
“See thou hurt not the oil and the wine. ‘ If
these words are intended to carry a figurative meaning, then just as there was a
means of escape and safety provided for those who were Christ’s at the
time of the fall of Jerusalem, so will it be also in the days to come. There is
no lack of indication of a special provision for the well-being of God’s
people in the day of wrath. “Come, my people, enter thou into thy
chambers, and shut thy doors about thee: hide thyself as it were for a little
moment, until the indignation be overpast. For, behold, the Lord cometh out of
his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity: the earth
also shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain” (Isaiah
26:20; cp. Matthew 6:6). “For thou hast been a strength to the poor, a
strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from
the heat, when the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the
wall” (Isaiah 25:4). “Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye
may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and
to stand before the Son of man” (Luke 21: 36).
Precisely how such protection will be provided is not
clear, but the experience of the faithful remnant in the time of Noah and of Lot
and of Rahab and of Hezekiah reinforces the Scriptures already quoted as to the
fact of it.
The vision of the destroying angels, Death and Hell, in the
Fourth Seal is introduced by the fourth of the Cherubim, the Eagle.
“Thither will the eagles be gathered together,” Jesus had foretold,
with reference to the time of his return (Luke 17:37). The eagle mounts up at
God’s command (Job 39:27): “Her young ones also suck up blood: and
where the slain are, there is she” (v. 30).
The Old Testament allusion is important here: “Wherefore
hear the word of the Lord, ye scornful men, that rule this people which is in
Jerusalem ... Your covenant with Death shall be disannulled, and your agreement
with Hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, then
ye shall be trodden down by it” (Isaiah 28:14, 18). After three of the
shortest and most successful wars in all human history, and with
“safe” boundaries facing Syria, Jordan and Egypt, there is a swagger
and a confidence about the modern Israel, which must before long find its proper
level.
FOUR HORSEMEN - THE FOURTH PART
There is a fairly plain hint, also, in this Fourth Seal that
these visions are not to be taken chronologically but as different aspects of
one mighty expression of judgement: “And power was given unto them
over the fourth part of the earth (Land) to kill with the sword, and with
famine, and with pestilence, and with the beasts of the earth (Land)”
(6:8). To whom is this authority committed? - to “Death and Hell?”
or to the four Cherubim? The mention of “fourth part” is decisive in
favour of the latter suggestion. Four cherubim bring four expressions of
heaven’s wrath on the four quarters of the Land These judgements all
operate together.
Is it possible that this emphasis on four is intended
also to recall the repeated enigmatic prophecy of Amos 1, 2?: “For three
transgressions and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof.”
The idiom means “three plus one, equals four,” and not “three
plus four, equals seven.” And the eight-times repeated recompense comes on
Israel and Judah as well as on all the Arab countries round about, “two
years before the earthquake” (1:2) which is described in the Sixth
Seal.
THE WHITE HORSE
Once again, the rider on the white horse is considered last of
the four. The resemblance between this rider and the one described in Revelation
19:11 ff. can hardly be accident, yet there are significant
differences.
The white horse is not the symbol of peace. This is
hardly possible, since the rider in chapter 19 goes forth with his army to make
war and to “tread the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty
God.” The invariable symbolic meaning of the horse in Scripture is that of
war.
On the head of the “Faithful and True” rider in
chapter 19 there are already “many crowns;” he is already King of
kings, and he goes forth not to conquer but to punish. By contrast with these
details, in the First Seal “a crown was given unto
him,[22] and he went forth conquering and to
conquer,” having a bow in his hand. Is there here a suggestion of Jesus
becoming King of the Jews, conquering them by means of his “bow,”
the word of instruction concerning him (see previous chapter on this)? Here is
God’s final, and at last successful, appeal to Israel through His Word and
by the eloquence of much adversity and through the work of an Elijah-like
prophet who will “turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the
heart of the children to their fathers” (Malachi 4:5, 6). See “Last
Days,” chapter 7, and “End of the Age,” chapter 2.
There can be no doubt that the last days are to see a
repentance of Israel, at least in part (“conquering and to conquer”)
immediately before the coming of the Lord. Most probably, the complete crash of
all Jewish hopes, when the brilliant new State of Israel is overwhelmed, will
drive to reliance upon God those who through all their generations, and
especially in this century, have been remarkable for their reliance upon their
own cleverness and industry.
At such a time there will come Christ’s peaceful
conquest of the hearts of all the nation which hitherto has utterly rejected
him. “They shall look unto me whom they pierced, and they shall mourn for
him, as one mourneth for the Only Son” (Zechariah 12:10). In this sense
his arrows will be sharp in the heart of those who were once the enemies of the
King (Psalm 45:5).
[21] On
the other hand it may be that what is depicted here is the effect of radiation
following the use of nuclear devices.
[22] John
sees the crown given. The rider is not wearing it when he
appears.
