Revelation 6. The scroll is opened, precipitating the birth pangs of the kingdom in the 20th century and the wrath of God in the 21st.
Of the four gospel writers, only John did not record what Jesus said about the end. The visions in Revelation 7-16 make good the omission and do so by adding material provided nowhere else. Chapter 6, on the other hand, expands on what Matthew, Mark and Luke record. In those gospels, as he drew his teaching to a close, Jesus warned that one day the magnificent Temple built by Herod would be demolished. In response, his disciples asked him two questions: when would the building be demolished, and how would his followers know that his arrival as king was imminent?
In reply to the first, he said he would send prophets and scholars expert in the Scriptures to Jerusalem, and they would be persecuted with such hatred that the Jews would end up being held accountable for all the innocent blood shed on earth since Creation (Matt 23:34-36). Retribution, including the destruction of the Temple, would happen in their lifetimes (Matt 24:1f). In Luke’s account, Jesus gave the same warning somewhat earlier (11:49-51). As he approached Jerusalem he wept, and added (19:43): “Your enemies will build a rampart around you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and your children in you, and not leave one stone upon another.”
The second question he answered on the Mount of Olives, where Yahweh was to set his feet at the end of the age (Zech 14). Many, he said, would come in his name and claim to be the Messiah, announcing, “The time is near”. There would also be wars and reports (‘rumours’) of war. Nonetheless, such troubles would not even be the beginning of the ‘birth pangs’.
| Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom … | 1st seal and 2nd seals: A rider with a crown, bent on conquest; people kill one another | |
| 3rd seal: Grain in short supply | ||
| 4th seal: Killing by war, famine, pestilence and beasts | ||
| Famines, disease and earthquakes | ||
| Followers (‘you’) imprisoned and killed | 5th seal: People killed for their witness to the gospel | |
| Terrors and great signs from heaven, ‘stars’ falling to the earth | 6th seal: The sun becomes black and the moon red, stars fall to the earth |
The metaphor of a woman in travail refers to the day when God’s wrath visits the earth (Isa 13:8, I Thes 5:3) and Israel’s forbears at the end of that tribulation rise from the dead (Mic 5:3). The events of Revelation 6 correspond to the birth pangs, and are foretold in the same order.
The rider ignores that the Lamb has already conquered. Like the warrior at the end of the period encompassed by the seals (19:11), he sits on a white horse; but he wears a stephanos, a victor’s laurel wreath or crown rather than many diademata, and his weapon is a bow rather than a sword (though both are symbolic of war). Roman conquerors were awarded a laurel crown and in triumphal processions on chariots drawn by white horses, but apart from being summoned with a voice like thunder there is nothing obviously portentous in the manifestation. Some interpret the rider as an Antichrist figure, but the other riders symbolise events, not individuals. Unlike the one who spilt no blood but his own, he symbolizes an episode of military aggression or empire-building.
That being so, how far back should one go for a historical parallel? Russia’s territorial expansion dates to the 15th century, and its empire, now known as the Russian Federation, still survives; the Spanish and Portuguese empires lasted from the 16th to the 19th century; the Mongol empire, the creation of Genghis Khan, sprang up in the 13th century and disintegrated in the 14th. All these empires were larger than Rome’s at its zenith. In the context of the Apocalypse, however, what is indicated is the latest such conquests, those of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Here an obvious starting point is the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, which resulted in the unification of the German states and the almost immediate transformation of Germany into an imperial power.
There were two waves of European colonisation. The first was the subjugation of North and South America, India, Siberia and Indonesia. The second was the drive by Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal and newly unified Italy and Germany to conquer Africa and Indochina. Russia meanwhile pressed into the Caucasus, central Asia and south-eastern Siberia down to Vladivostok. All these countries were in competition, but after the Franco-Prussian war they sought to increase their military, commercial and industrial might without fighting each other, by grabbing as much territory as possible outside Europe. Technological advances in transport, communication and weapons enabled them to spread their civilisation – their commercial practices, technologies, arts, sciences and philosophies – across the world. Only China, Japan, Thailand, Turkey, Ethiopia and Iran escaped subjugation. On the continent itself states protected themselves by a network of alliances.
Eventually, the tensions became too great. In 1914 a Bosnian Serb assassinated the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary because of the latter’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In retaliation Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia, and its ally, Germany, attacked Serbia’s ally, France. Britain sent troops to defend France and Belgium. Russia, its empire bordering Germany and Austria-Hungary, attacked Germany in defence of its ally, Serbia. Within weeks most of Europe, including Turkey’s Ottoman Empire, was at war.
“Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.” There have been wars for as long as there have been nation states and kings, so the prophecy implies conflict on a much larger scale than the wars with which Jesus’s listeners would have been familiar. Those of the 20th century offer unambiguous fulfilment. In the First World War some 10 million soldiers and 7 million civilians died, to say nothing of the wounded or deaths from disease and famine. More millions were slaughtered in Russia’s civil war of 1917-1921, which was partly provoked by the huge losses inflicted by Germany. In the Second World War 21–25 million soldiers and 50–55 million civilians died, including 19–28 million from disease and famine. They were instances of ‘total war’, affecting the whole of industry and the whole of society, while the power of the State grew ever bigger. And they reverberated through every level of creation: under the sea, the surface of the sea, the land, the air. Heaven became a place from which droning and screeching flying machines rained down bombs. Terrified civilians sought shelter underground as their homes were pulverised.
Countries beyond Europe were also sucked in: Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, parts of Africa, parts of south-east Asia, Japan, the Middle East, most of them because they were European colonies. Why would one not regard these wars as fulfilling Jesus’s prediction? But they now seem far in the past, and in Europe we have since enjoyed a period of peace and security (cf. I Thes 5:3). In retrospect they seem like a false alarm.
Wheat, barley, oil and wine were staple foods In Palestine (II Chr 2:10). A denarius was typically a day’s wages and would buy around 16 quarts of wheat or 30 quarts of barley; hence the better off tended to eat wheat bread, poorer people barley bread. Whether because prices rise or earnings fall, both become almost unaffordable.
| Year | Region | Deaths |
| 1921-1922 | Russia | 5 million |
| 1921-1922 | Tatarstan | 0.5–2 million |
| 1928-1930 | North China | 3 million |
| 1932-1934 | USSR, Ukraine | 4.5–8 million |
| 1936 | Sichuan | 5 million |
In Germany, massive war debts and crippling war reparations led to hyperinflation. A loaf of bread costing half a mark in 1918 cost 200 billion marks by the end of 1923. In the United States the stockmarket crash of October 1929 precipitated the Great Depression and soon spread to other countries. Worldwide gross domestic product fell by 15%. While prices dropped, so did real income, and unemployment soared (Crafts & Fearon 2010). Drought in the Great Plains of the United States subsequently reduced the land to a dust bowl.
In France – the principal wine producer and consumer – prices were depressed by the United States’ prohibition of alcohol from 1919 to 1933. Perfect weather in 1933 produced the biggest grape crop in French agricultural history. Bumper harvests and increasing cultivation in countries beyond Europe also resulted in a glut. ‘Wine production,’ concluded an official in 1939, ‘is in the process of destroying itself by its own excesses’ (Paxton 1997; Pinilla & Ayuda 2007). Europe was also the main market for olive oil, as it still is. In the principal olive-growing countries – Italy, Spain and Greece – the milling and pressing of olives became increasingly mechanised, and better methods were developed of storing oil. Again, there was no shortage in the interwar years (Ramon-Muñoz 2013). The production of other oil-yielding crops also rose. World production of groundnuts, copra and soya beans increased around 95% between 1910 and 1939 (Neumark 1949).
The prophecy is quite specific: some staples, such as wheat and barley, will be in short supply, others, such as oil, will not. It does not preclude harm to olive trees and vines at a later stage.
The series of the horsemen climaxes with the appearance of Death himself. Since he is distinct from Hades riding just behind, he must be the personification of an equivalent place, namely Tartarus. According to Homer, Tartarus was a region ‘as far beneath Hades as heaven is above earth’. It was where the demons could expect to be confined and tormented (Matt 8:29, Luke 8:31). Hades and Tartarus were also the names of the gods in charge of their respective regions.
Twice as many died in the Second World War as in the First, and while the trenches were hellish, the Nazi death camps and concentration camps were even more so. The horsemen kill by God’s archetypal judgements: war, famine, pestilence, vermin (Ezek 14:21 LXX). ‘Sword’ translates rhomphaia; the modern equivalent might be the rifle. ‘Pestilence’ is thanatos, the normal word for death, as in the sentence preceding. English has an analogous use of the word in ‘Black Death’, referring to bubonic plague. ‘Beasts of the earth’ echoes Gen Gen 1:24, where it refers to all animals apart from quadrupeds and animals with wings; ‘wild’ is not in the Greek. Typhus was transmitted in concentration camps by the human body louse and, as in Russia’s Civil War, killed millions. Japan used bombs to spread plague and other bacterial diseases (Harris 2002).
The world can be likened to a field in which some men sow wheat and others sow darnel, a weed that resembles wheat (Matt 13:24-30). The darnel comes to fruition independently of the good seed. The history of 19th-century Europe illustrates this. Pre-eminently in Britain and North America, the gospel transformed society, giving individuals a new understanding of reality and access to a fountain that, having cleansed the soul, inspired much well-doing. At the same time others were sowing different seed, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and their disciples. Although they were in some respects children of their time, their ideas disseminated with the force of newly revealed truth. After centuries of Christianity, the discovery (as it seemed) that there was no God opened up new worlds. There was ‘grandeur’ in the idea that natural selection brought about new life; the overthrow of capitalism would usher in a millennial reign of justice and peace when religion would wither; the death of God would make way for a new Man to emerge, free to choose his own values.
‘What is good?’ Nietzsche asked in The Antichrist (1888). ‘Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness.’ A dictator might be ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’, it hardly mattered. Russia’s internal war, lasting 30 years off and on, in which Stalin killed tens of millions by execution, starvation, deportation and forced labour, was as ideologically driven as Hitler’s determination to restore Germany’s greatness by genocide and foreign war. In this ‘age of social catastrophe’ (Gellately 2007) Europe reaped what it had sown and came face to face with the abyss in its own soul. Entire cities were levelled to the ground. Hundreds more were half-ruined. A thousand years of cultural history – palaces, museums, opera houses, churches, town halls – went up in flames.
In the 6th century BC the prophet Zechariah received a vision of four chariots emerging from between bronze mountains and heading out to the four winds of heaven. The first was drawn by red horses, the second by black horses, the third by white horses, the fourth by grizzled horses. Only two directions were specifically mentioned: the chariot with black horses went to the north country, Babylonia, while the chariot with dappled horses went to the south country, Egypt. Their function was to patrol the earth and report back. All the countries were at rest. With the return of some exiles from Babylonia, God’s spirit there was also at rest. Although having the same colours, the horses of the Apocalypse have a different function. They issue forth one by one, separated by time rather than geography, and they bring unrest to the nations. The whole earth is disturbed.
The horses suggest a rapid succession of events. Accordingly the First World War brought to fruition the ‘survival of the fittest’ philosophy that inspired the jostlings for power of the previous decades. The causes of the Great Depression are debated, but certainly war debt and the reparations imposed on the loser played a part. The reparations fostered resentment, and along with fear of Bolshevik revolution they enabled Hitler to win wide electoral support for his extreme solutions. Parliament itself voted for him to govern by decree. Just 22 years after the armistice in 1918 acknowledging Germany’s defeat, France signed another armistice acknowledging its own defeat. The events let loose by the fleet-footed animals took place within a single lifetime.
In the gospels, Jesus spoke of wars between nations without chronological distinction. In Revelation, large-scale slaughter occurs in two phases: that of the second seal and, after an interval, that of the fourth, corresponding to World War One and World War Two. Large-scale famine is associated with the third and fourth seals. The second is the only one to be opened without the phrase ‘I looked, and behold’, suggesting continuity with the first. World War One was the direct consequence of Europe’s imperialism in the preceding century. After World War Two the colonial empires crumbled. Bankrupted Europe had neither the strength nor the will to hold on to them. The United Nations, founded in 1945, reflected a new world order in which the increasing cost of weaponry and the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons rendered large-scale wars of conquest all but inconceivable.
Matthew mentions famines, infectious diseases (loimoi) and earthquakes as among the beginning of the birth pangs. Mark has ‘disturbances’ instead of disease and mentions earthquakes first. Luke has great earthquakes, famines and infectious diseases. Famines after the Second World War were as catastrophic as between the wars.
| Year | Region | Deaths |
| 1921-1922 | Russia | 5 million |
| 1947 | Soviet Union | 1–1.5 million |
| 1959-1961 | China | 15–23 million |
| 1967-1970 | Biafra, Nigeria | 1–2 million |
| 1968-1972 | Sahel | 1 million |
| 1974 | Bangladesh | Up to 1.5 million |
| 1983-1985 | Ethiopia | 1 million |
| 1991-1992 | Somalia | 300,000 |
| 1996 | North Korea | 600,000 |
| 1998-2004 | Congo | 3.8 million |
The phrase edothe autωi/autois, ‘it was given to him/them,’ occurs five times in chapter 6. It indicates something willed, not merely allowed, for in a non-arbitrary sense the will of God governs all things (Eph 1:11) and the horsemen come at the command of the cherubim. Nonetheless, the wars, famines and epidemics of the 20th century were as much symptoms of a general disorder as they were judgements, their immediate causes natural and human.
Since 1900 the frequency of great earthquakes (those now technically defined as moment magnitude > 8.0) has been out of the ordinary only in the decade 2004-2014 (Lay 2015). The quake that triggered the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 killed 230,000 people, the Haiti earthquake of 2010 85-220,000 people. The most powerful earthquake ever recorded was the Chilean earthquake of 1960.
We are all under sentence of death. Life is given so that we might seek him and find him, and of our own volition choose good rather than evil, life rather than death. The many acts of temporal judgement on cities and nations in the Old Testament – Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 19), Egypt (Ex 12, 14), Canaan (Lev 18:25), Israel (II Ki 17), Judah (II Ki 25) and the neighbours of Judah (Ezek 25-32) – came after wickedness had run its course, after society had become so corrupt that nothing good remained in it (Gen 15:16, Jer 13:10). That was not quite the case in the 20th century. The scriptural examples were types of a global judgement yet to come.
Europe saw the Great War as confirmation that there was no God. The kind of Christianity taught in the churches did not enable it to cope with the horrors. Half a century earlier, doubts concerning the foundations of the Christian world-view – concerning Creation, the existence of Satan, the historicity of the biblical narrative, the ability of God to foretell the future – had been robustly countered, as witness the response to Essays and Reviews published a few months after The Origin of Species (Altholz 1982). By the end of the 19th century such doubts were becoming commonplace, in the Church as well as society. The Church could not understand what was going on when philosophers and scientists posed the age-old question, “Did God really say…?” She did not wish to acknowledge that there even was a distinction between Church and society. Whenever a consensus emerged that what she had routinely commended, on the authority of the Bible, was in fact wrong, she gave ground, on the authority of those who were in fact her enemies. Man’s wisdom and God’s wisdom were assimilated. She wanted peace with society and to that end continually absorbed its doctrines. When finally people asked, “How can there be a God in the face of such misery?” the Church had little to say, not even after the Second World War, which was even more obviously the consequence of an atheistic, God-hostile understanding of reality.
More outbreaks of evil, disorder and hatred are to come. Faith in God’s goodness will be tested even more.
In contrast to the preceding seals, the opening of the fifth discloses no new development. The martyrs are described as souls because they have not yet risen. (The vision is a dramatisation. In reality, those who die in Christ ‘sleep’ or, as Revelation puts it, ‘rest’; they have no existence as disembodied souls, and they are not confined under an altar.) Not previously noticed, the altar is where the servants of God present their offerings. We offer ourselves, living sacrifices, willing if necessary to die. Christians are martyred for their unashamed ‘testimony of Jesus’, associated with the word of God also in 1:2, 1:9, 12:17 and 20:4. Their brothers are the Jews (13:10, 17:6).
The Spirit urges, ‘Bless those who persecute you. Never avenge yourselves but leave room for wrath, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will requite.” ’ ‘Vengeance’ in Greek and Hebrew means the righting of a wrong; there is no sense of exacting more than is due (Luke 18:2-8). When Zechariah, son of Jehoiada, lay dying, stoned in the court of Jerusalem’s Temple, he said, “May Yahweh see and avenge!” (II Chr 24:22). Despite his censorious last words, Stephen cried, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” Persecution reaches such a pitch that the martyrs’ patience is exhausted. They cry to him for justice.
Over half of the Christians martyred since the birth of the Church were killed in the 20th century, mostly under fascist and communist regimes. Since the 1980s the greatest persecutor has been militant Islam. Believers are killed not so often at the hands of the State – though in twelve states the death penalty is prescribed for leaving Islam – as at the hands of a brother or a father who thinks that killing an apostate is a matter of honour (Luke 12:53), at the hands of an incensed mob, or suicide bombers at a church service (John 16:2), or in civil war. Fulani herdsmen cry “Allahu akbar!” as they surround Christian villages in northern Nigeria, then cut down the adults and children as they flee. Some are kidnapped, enslaved, raped, imprisoned, tortured. Contrasting with the courage of the martyrs is the attitude of leaders who, seeing what can happen to those who criticise Islam, choose to appease it, lest criticism cause offence. Everywhere worship of the true God is being closed down – in Europe and the United States voluntarily, as congregations decline, in the rest of the world by force, as the pharaohs of this world illegalise churches.
Because of man’s alienation from God, good news can seem like bad news, and warnings of impending wrath are as hard to hear as they are to deliver. They provoke only more hostility.
A little later Jesus counsels, “If anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There he is!’ do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.” This warning, similar to that at the beginning of his discourse, concerns Jews and Christians alike at the end of the age. False prophets and signs will add to the deception, the pressure to follow Judas will be intense, and the elect will be desperate for news that the Messiah has come.
Because the events heralded by the trumpets in chapters 8 and 9 are omitted, we come immediately to the point where the door of salvation is closed (Gen 7:16, Matt 25:10, Luke 13:25). A sevenfold cascade of portents answers the martyrs’ prayers. Persecution ceases because the Church has been removed from the earth (I Thes 1:10).
Persecution of the Church comes to an end because the Church has been removed from the earth (Matt 24:40f): the martyrs’ prayers have been answered.
“Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” (Matt 24:29-31) The failure of sunlight recalls the 3 days of darkness before the death of Egypt’s firstborn and the 3 hours of darkness when Christ himself experienced desolation. The light of the world hides his face. The Church’s reflection of the light is reddened by the blood of martyrs. This is the first time that wrath is mentioned in Revelation, and it is attributed to the Lamb. Men hide in terror.
‘Star’ before the age of astronomy can be any heavenly body except the Sun and Moon. Here the stars denote meteoroids, which are non-luminous, not the stars of the Milky Way. Stars proper will disappear progressively, like a scroll being rolled up (Isa 13:10, 34:4) or as if sackcloth, the garb of lamentation, were being drawn over them (Isa 50:3).
In our generation, we understand what it means for stars to fall from heaven. In 2005 NASA was mandated to detect and track potentially hazardous asteroids orbiting near Earth. So far, more than 25,000 near-Earth asteroids have been detected, ranging from a few metres in size to several kilometres. In 2018 funds were announced for the construction of two observatories to survey space above the southern hemisphere.
According to the standard account of origins asteroids are leftovers from the natural formation of the solar system. In this century we have photographed them at close quarters and even retrieved samples, adding to the information gleaned from meteorites. But they have failed to confirm the account. Most of the smaller bodies have turned out to be ‘rubble piles’, aggregations of rocks and dust produced when larger bodies collided with one another and shattered. Larger bodies are either also rubble piles or the remains of planets which, shortly before their explosion, differentiated into crust, mantle and core, with correspondingly ‘stony’, ‘stony-iron’ and ‘iron’ compositions. At the time of the Flood-Cataclysm, the ‘windows of the heavens were opened’ (Gen 7:11) and through them asteroids rained down, instruments of God’s wrath. Craters produced by their impacts on the Moon are still visible.
‘The powers of the heavens will be shaken’ in Matthew recalls Isaiah 34:4 (Gk: ‘All the powers of the heavens will melt’, Heb: ‘All the host of heaven will rot away’). Prophecy speaks not of the humanly predictable approach of one stray asteroid, but of a strong wind or gale suddenly dislodging many. A strong wind in outer space can only be an intensification of the solar wind that continually streams from the Sun’s corona, such as the spurt of gas that erupted from the far side in July 2012.
“We have been lucky that we have not been hit by a really big event,” said Juha-Pekka Luntama, head of the European Space Agency’s space-weather team. “We will be hit eventually, the question is, when?”
These things will not be chance events. They were foreseen by Israel’s prophets, whose words, no longer sealed, have been preserved so that we on whom the end of the ages has come may take heed.
The sun also darkened when the Assyrians overran Samaria. An earthquake shook the hills, and men wished that the hills would fall on them (Hos 10:8, Amos 8:8f). So did the inhabitants of first-century Jerusalem when judgement came (Luke 23:29f).
Even the heavens will be shaken. God’s wrath culminates with the stars of heaven falling to the earth like unripe figs (which would not normally drop) and with a ‘great earthquake such as has not occurred since man was on the earth’.
The words are not intended as poetic fiction, and the events will not be entertainment confined to a screen in one’s living room.
The above is an excerpt from When The Towers Fall. If you have understood that much of Revelation has already taken place (the succession of seven churches, the four horsemen), you should now buy the book (author royalties were ploughed back into reducing the selling price). Revelation is a prophecy for our time, and the book is a prophetic exposition of it, designed to ensure that readers are alert and ready. People were not spiritually prepared for the First World War; they are also not prepared for what is about to come upon the world.
