Revelation6chapter 6

Revelation 6:1-2

The Lamb himself opens the first seal, John's use of the Lamb carried straight over from chapter five keeping the two chapters one continuous vision, and each seal is announced by one of the four living creatures crying Come and see, not an invitation to John alone but a summons that a new phase of judgment now moves. The white horse's rider has a bow but no arrow named, wears a crown already given him, stephanos, an awarded rather than a warred-for crown, and goes forth conquering, and to conquer, a bloodless conquest of persuasion ahead of the plain warfare the next seal looses. The rider's identity is read two ways with holders: some, weighing the white horse and the given crown, find a counterfeit Christ opening the tribulation with false peace, the man of sin of 2 Thessalonians 2 riding first; others read simply the personified spirit of conquest, since only 19:11's white horse rider is named and armed as the true Christ, sword in hand rather than bow alone.

Revelation 6:3-4

The second seal looses a red horse, power given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another, a taking away rather than a beginning, since the peace removed is the very peace the first rider's conquest had extended. The great sword given him names the era plainly: not the Lamb's own sword of the mouth in chapter nineteen but a weapon of nations turned against one another, the wars and rumours of wars Christ named among the birth pains of Matthew 24:6-7.

Revelation 6:5-6

The third seal brings a black horse and a rider holding a pair of balances, scales, the classic sign of famine's rationing, and the voice from the midst of the four beasts prices grain by the day's wage, a measure of wheat for a penny, a denarius the ordinary laborer's whole day's pay for a single day's bread, three measures of barley, the poor man's grain, for the same coin. See thou hurt not the oil and the wine, the crops of the wealthy landowner whose deep-rooted vines and trees survive a drought that ruins grain, draws the famine's real shape: scarcity for the poor while luxury goods stay within reach of those who can still afford them.

Revelation 6:7-8

The fourth seal's horse is chloros, pale green, the color of sickness and a corpse, and its rider is named outright, Death, with Hell, Hades, the abode of the dead, following at his heel to receive what he kills, an image of the grave opening to swallow the slain as fast as the rider claims them. Power is given them over the fourth part of the earth, a bounded and measured judgment rather than a total one yet, and the means named are fourfold, sword, hunger, death, and the beasts of the earth, Ezekiel's own four sore judgments of Ezekiel 14:21 loosed together on a single quarter of the world.

Revelation 6:9-11

The fifth seal opens on no rider but on souls under the altar, martyrs slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held, seen and heard as conscious persons rather than sleeping or extinguished, crying with a loud voice, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood, a cry that answers the imprecatory psalms of Psalm 79:5 and 94:3 rather than contradicting the Lord's own teaching to forgive, since it asks for God's own justice and not personal revenge. They are given white robes and told to rest yet for a little season, comforted and stilled rather than granted the answer at once, until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled, a fixed company the text assumes without naming a number. The souls are addressed, comforted, and given a task of resting, never addressed in prayer by any living saint, the intermediate state exactly as Scripture describes it here and no more.

Revelation 6:12-14

The sixth seal brings the cosmic disturbances the prophets attached to the Day of the Lord, Joel 2:30-31's sun turned to darkness and moon to blood, and Isaiah 34:4's heaven rolled together as a scroll, here worded as the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together, and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. Stars falling as a fig tree casts untimely, unripe figs in a mighty wind pictures suddenness and totality rather than one meteor shower, and the readings divide on how literally to press the language, some taking a real cosmic and geologic convulsion at the visible end of the age, others reading apocalyptic idiom for the collapse of the world's ordered powers, kings and rulers pictured as stars in Daniel 8:10 and Isaiah 13:10.

Revelation 6:15-17

Every rank answers the same terror, kings, great men, rich men, chief captains, mighty men, bondman, and free man, seven classes naming the whole of human society from throne to slave, none exempted by power or wealth. Their cry, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, echoes Hosea 10:8 and is the very words the Lord used of Jerusalem's coming judgment in Luke 23:30, joining two titles that had stood in deliberate contrast through chapters four and five, the throne's majesty and the Lamb's gentleness, now revealed as one wrath no creature can escape. The great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand, closes the seals' cycle on a question chapter seven answers at once: some are able to stand, because they have been sealed.