At the end of the First World War, French poet Paul Valery in 1919 wrote:

“The storm has died away, and still we are restless, uneasy, as if the storm were about to break. Almost all the affairs of men remain in a terrible uncertainty. We do not know what will be born, and we fear the future, not without reason. There is no thinking man, however shrewd however learned he may be, who can hope to dominate this anxiety, to escape from this impression of darkness.”

Paul Valery, “Disillusionment”

Written off the back of the carnage of the First World War, these words capture the existential angst that pervaded at that time, and that has pervaded right throughout human history. Someone else wrote at the same time:

“Everything has not been lost, but everything has sensed that it might perish.”

“Everything has not been lost, but everything has sensed that it might perish.”  Today, the world continues to be overwhelmed by a feeling of apprehension. The world, and life in it, remains a perplexing puzzle, and always with the specter of nothingness at the back of humanity’s mind. One of the purposes of the Book of Revelation is to show us that the mystery of the world is in the hands of God and beyond the competence of humanity.

In chapters 4 and 5, which are vital to understanding this book, we have a clear line of demarcation drawn between creatures and the Creator, between this world and the eternity that God himself inhabits. We have there a tableau of Creation, in which the throne of God is surrounded by symbolic representatives of the created order, the so-called living creatures. Those living creatures ceaselessly offer their praise to God. It’s those living creatures who have a concern for life under the sun, that is, for life in this creation. They are creatures. And they know that the book that is held in the right hand of God is the book of destiny. That in this book is written the future of creation — all of creation — and in particular the living creatures in creation. While that book remains sealed, history’s meaning remains unintelligible to us. These representatives of creation are motivated by the state of creation, its fallen state, the meaninglessness, the directionlessness of world history.

What is the solution to this existential angst of creation? The representatives in heaven, of the church in the Old and the New Covenant – the twenty-four elders – they have the answer. “Do not weep. Lo, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and the seven seals.” The prophets tell us: “I saw the Lord standing, the Lamb standing, as though it had been slain.”

Now this is the insight that lies back of what is happening and unfolding before our eyes today. The sacrificial death of Jesus Christ on behalf of his people is the key to history and the destiny of the world. He alone gives human existence its cosmic meaning.

Now in this, it’s this insight then that leads to the first of three cycles of sevens in the book of Revelation. Seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls of wrath. And these describe the whole of human history, repeated three times over, each from a different level, from a different angle, from a different perspective. Between the second and the third of these cycles, we will come face to face with Christ and his alter ego Antichrist. With the seven seals, we see the unfolding of history as it is happening today.

So we come to look, for example, at this opening verse:

“I watched the Lamb open one of the seven seals.”

Revelation 6:1

Where is the Lamb? The Lamb is on the throne of God. He is in the center, in the midst of the throne of God. He is there by virtue of his resurrection and ascension and exaltation. What we find in chapter 5 is a heaven’s eye view of Jesus’ crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and exaltation. Everything that is going to unfold now in the book of Revelation concerns life on this world as well as in the heavenlies, between Jesus’ ascension and exultation and Jesus’ return in glory at the end of the age. He has taken his place as mediator between God and man. He’s done so as the God-man. And just as Yahweh the God of Israel when he ascends from Mount Sinai, his ascension is accompanied by trumpets and noise, the noise of thunder and fire. So the ascension of the Lamb will be accompanied by a voice that sounds like thunder, fire from heaven falling down to earth, and seven angels sounding the trumpets of God. The background to this little piece we’re reading today is the acclamation by the hosts of heaven that this One, this glorified and exalted Jesus, has dominion over the affairs of the world.

“And I saw, and behold, a white horse!”

Revelation 6:2

We’re introduced immediately to what are known as the “four horses” or “riders” of the Apocalypse. These four riders ride onto scene. We’ve seen them caricatured, even cartoonized, and sometimes in Hollywood movies, when they’re trying to conjure up a sense of foreboding. But these are the originals. Echoes of their foot beats can even be heard in Bob Dylan’s cryptic lyrics in “All Along the Watchtower”:

“Outside in the distance, a wildcat did growl, two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.”

Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower”

Are you afraid? Well, you may not be afraid by Bob’s song, but you should be afraid of the picture that we’re reading today. The Biblical source of the imagery is in Zechariah chapter 1, where the prophet is shown four riders on four horses with different colors. Those particular riders, we’re told there, are “goodies”. They’re those from the Lord are sent out to patrol the earth. They are the eyes of the Lord which range over the whole earth. They’re like heavenly scouts.

But the riders in our passage are not necessarily heavenly scouts. They’re given power. It’s the way in which we read in Romans God gives people up to do what’s in their heart to do. You remember in Romans chapter 1, God gives people over to impurity and dishonorable passions and a base mind, and what is true of individuals is true of institutions. It goes on to say, Paul goes on to say:

“They’re filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice, envy, murder, strife, malignity.”

Romans 1:29

These riders are human agencies connected to heavenly powers, or we might say, beneath the heavens, satanic powers, that are active in the world. The first rider seems innocuous enough. The white horse and the conqueror. Later on in this book, in chapter 19, we will see Jesus Christ, the Word of God, the Lamb of God, riding a white horse; but this is not that horse. This horse is written by one who goes out to conquer. That’s the major feature. Conquest is the big idea under this rider; he has conquest on his mind. He may resemble Christ, and therefore deceive you.

“Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.”

2 Corinthians 11:14

Certainly, this first horseman is all about conquering, winning, triumphing over everything under his feet. The second rider symbolizes war or civil strife. Maybe we should just say symbolizes strife. It’s either total war, or it is civil war. He is given power, we’re told, to remove peace from the earth so that men should slay one another. In other words, this is not something that is being done to people. Rather by the removal of peace, people get to do what is in their heart to do. You notice that the will to kill rests with humans. The rider merely disrupts the peace, allowing the demons in human minds and human natures to do their worst by instinct of human will. It may be a picture of militarism, not to be confused with the judicious use of defense measures, or even the judicious use of preemptive measures. But this is militarism for its own sake, grounded in spiritual wickedness in the high places. War is a constant throughout this era that we live in from Jesus’ exaltation till Jesus’ return. Strife, the slaying of one another, is an expression of human history.

The third rider tells us how some of this slaying is carried out — pestilence, hunger, famine. We hear a voice crying,

“A quart of wheat for a denarius, three quarts of barley for a denarius, and do not harm the oil or the wine!”

Revelation 6:6

The gifts of creation are turned into commodities, priced out of reach for ordinary people. Meanwhile luxury items are unaffected. Scarcity is what is felt by the majority.

“And the fourth beast is named Death, and Hades followed him. and they were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill with a sword and with famine with pestilence and with wild beasts of the earth.”

Revelation 6:8

Death. Hades is what imprisons those who are dead. These evil powers are unable to unleash their wars on a fourth of the earth’s population. They unleash the sword — rider number two. Famine — rider number three. And with other pestilence and epidemic disease, as we see in number four. Death and Hades. These are no neutral figures in the Bible or in the book of Revelation. Later on Death and Hades will be consigned to the lake of fire, along with Antichrist, and along with the false prophet and Satan himself.

These evil riders represent an evil that originates in hell, that is co-opted or imitated by humans, and that is permitted by God as an interim judgment. An ongoing judgment on a world that is already condemned, and that has deserted him. Now I remind you why such horrors may be abounding. Who is it that’s unlocking these seals? It’s the Lamb who was slain. Who is the Lamb that was slain? He is the Son of God.

What greater crime can be conceived than that the creature should murder its Creator? What happens can only be put into effect by him as a created agent. That’s why Christ came into the world. In other words, he’s ruling history as the man Christ Jesus. The One who has been here, the One who has walked amongst us, the One who has lived in our flesh and bone. The One who was lived and laughed and loved as a human being does. The One who spent his time healing our sick, raising our dead, loving on us, teaching us; and the One who as a human being was deserted by his friends, given the fake trial, crucified, dead and buried. Who did we do this to? We did it to our Maker. And it’s this One who holds the keys of Death and Hell.

These four riders form an inexorable chain of political and social evil in the world. Death and Hades are both God’s enemy and God’s servant. They will ultimately be destroyed, but in the meantime, they have a function. They set limits to the human project. What is the human project? The human project is that in every intellectual activity, in every technological activity, in every entertainment activity, and every scientific activity, in terms of every individual, emotional, and relational activity we should learn to live our lives as if there were no God. To dismiss the input of God. “We will fix this!” said some one government person about the pandemic. “We will fix this!” It’s a statement of human arrogance and pride.

These riders combine the elements of the human and the superhuman, conquest and strife, our human actions. Famine is a result of natural causes accompanied by injustices committed by humans. Death is something we both suffer and commit. Well, these riders may well represent human or creaturely agents and agencies, but we must see them and think of them as powers and forces and systems and institutions where we have no power, we as individuals, have no power or control. The confident spokesman that I mentioned earlier was only parroting. Parroting the modern world’s arrogance that through our intelligence, our technology, our techniques, we can control the outcomes. Yet all the while the world spins more and more out of our control. People get elected to high office in our government at D.C. with great hopes, and yet when they find themselves in office, they realize it is beyond their power to make the changes they wanted to make.

The world is spinning out of control, out of human control. It’s as if we can say about humanity and humanity’s institutions what Paul says about himself:

“I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want, that I do.”

Romans 7:19

As humans, we aspire to great things, and we’re thwarted when we run up “against the principalities and the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual horse of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

Those powers are created by God, but they’re in rebellion against God. They exist parallel to the institutions and the powers of this passing age. They’re not human, though humans are their agents and their instruments and their pawns. And their goal is to enslave humanity. The god of this age has blinded the minds of men and women. They exercise their power in and through the social, political, technological forces that humans have developed. They are capable of subverting our human creations and human capacities and turning them against us. Conquest is their goal. Human extinction is their endgame, because the devil hates humanity, and he is a murderer from the beginning. And they make us the unwilling, unknowing collaborators in their project.

So we come back to the beginning of the story. Through his death, resurrection, ascension, and exaltation, Christ holds the keys of Death and Hades. These evil powers at work on earth can be used by him. They do what they want to do, which is destruction and destroying. But God uses these same things, unbeknown to the world and its system, to bring before, to expose before the eyes of men and women who are unable to see it, the essential thinness and superficiality of this world and this age.

On the other hand, he can use them for the means, as the means, of purifying and sanctifying his church, as he sends his Holy Spirit into the world. By enduring these things, and the way in which we endure these things, and the priorities that we have as we seek to make our way through life, God uses these very pressures to teach his people endurance. That having endured, they may also reign with him.

He uses these things to pries our fingertips away from that clutch we have onto the things of this passing world, the values of this passing world, our sense of what it’s like when everything is going well, everything is going nicely and life is uninterrupted as we cling onto that vision, as if that’s what this life was really about. God uses these trials to pries our fingers off that illusion that we have, in order that we might place our hands firmly in the hand of God and trust in him, and in him alone. He uses it for the purification of his church.

The world is under judgment. But examine for a moment why that should be. Why should this world be under judgment? Consider our thoughts of God: If he indeed is your Creator, who right now is the cause of your existence, and the cause of this room’s existence, and right now, what cosmic crime would it be to think nothing of him? That he should never enter the horizon of your mind; or that if he does that you should think lightly of him. And consider the crime of crimes — that we should take the Lamb of God and slay him. The story of the slaying of Jesus tells us this one thing — that humans, if given the chance, will murder their Maker.

God hands over people to the powers, so that he may reclaim for himself those whom he calls to himself. In fact, during the time of the church between the first and second coming of Jesus, what we see demonstrated, and these very crises that I’ve mentioned demonstrate this — what we see demonstrated is the patience of God. There’s worse to come. This is the patience of God. However bad it is at this moment; this is the patience of God. The tenderness and the long suffering of God. And he calls in his church to keep its head, even though we drive our enemies mad. That’s why they killed Jesus, and why they will kill Christians too.

The world is the arena where Satan’s work and human sin freely cause havoc on the earth and all the creatures in it. The vehicles of carnage are not sent by God, are driven by their own will but God utilizes them for his own purposes. Without these struggles, people would be at peace, wouldn’t they? That’s what we want. We want people to be at peace. The problem is that peace builds an illusion in people’s minds in a fallen world; we forget that we’re a world under judgment.

God disturbs the peace so that we have space for us to change our minds about him. For the world, it’s an opportunity for people to reflect. Reflect on your end. Reflect on death. For the church is an opportunity for us to reflect on our allegiances. Why should we live — continue to live — as if this life was our best life? As if basically our values are the same values of the people around us? So that when the people around us are crying about what they’re losing, we think that we are losing. We are never losing.

 But there’s another way to look at this passage. You know, Scripture often has its kind of obvious meaning, but smuggled into the teaching of Scripture the Holy Spirit always put some other perspective there to get us thinking. What have we seen? We’ve seen a movement to conquer. Conquer and conquest. We’ve seen strife between people. We’ve seen people’s behavior leading to famine, scarcity. And we’ve seen death. At one and the same time while that’s happening in the world in a very physical material way, there is something else going on. If that the rider on that white horse, looked a bit like Jesus, but wasn’t. Couldn’t he be a little like the one Jesus sends during this age? The Holy Spirit.

What has been the language that’s been used consistently in chapters two and three to the churches? It is that if they endure, they will conquer. What was the language in chapter one? That Jesus had conquered over Death and Hell. Conquering has been used of Jesus and Jesus’ people. That right now while there is in the world a worldly desire to conquer, and to conquer by force; there is also a  movement that is a subterranean movement among God’s people, in which we are seeking ourselves to overcome, that is, to conquer sin, to conquer Satan in our lives, to conquer evil in our behavior, to conquer on the in the name of the truth and the righteous and the Holy One.

When there’s an evil impulse to conquer, it leads to strife and friction between people. We see that in the world all the time. But even at the spiritual level, as the church goes forth to conquer in Jesus’ name, the church causes friction. Jesus said it would do so.

“I will set the father against the son, the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, the daughter against the mother.”

Luke 12:53

“I will send friction.” Jesus creates friction in the world as his truth advances. So there is friction and strife. And the strife generally, Jesus says he’s “come not to cause peace, but to cause division in the world,” as men and women have to decide whether they’ll follow him or not. The church has got to decide who are we following in the midst of all of this. And there’s scarcity — scarcity that leads to death.

What scarcity can there be that would lead to death at the spiritual realm? It’s the scarcity of the Word of God. God sometimes withdraws his word from people who have heard it and rejected it. As country after country after country in Europe, for example, which was where Christianity really took on great strength during the Middle Ages, and in the early part of the Reformed centuries, as they fall like nine pins in a bowling alley.

What’s happening? There is a scarcity and a famine of a hearing of the Word of God. It’s a judgment on the church. Just as God is judging the world in these famines and wars that are going on in the world today, he is judging his church for not appreciating his Word. But he’s also judging nations that have rejected him. These two elements are going on hand in glove throughout this whole section. As the world does its conquering its way, using strife and scarcity to bring the world to death; that’s what the world is doing.

At the same time, the church in its way of conquering — in a spiritual way — is seeing division happen as people reject the gospel. It’s seeing people die spiritually because of the scarcity of the Word of God which they’ve rejected. And whereas the end for the church is not Death and Hades, it is death. But it’s death that comes to life, and that’s the next section of the of the chapter, whereas for the world it’s death and the imprisonment of Hades. The world did its worst to our Savior, but he turned it into our salvation.

Brothers and sisters, God can bring good out of evil. He’s doing it every day. As we see the things that are happening in the world, don’t let it spook you. Don’t let it throw you off. Understand that the book of destiny is in the hands of the Lamb who was slain, who has triumphed. And keep reading, keep reading, because he has great things in store for those who love him.