November 23, 2024

Passage Read: Revelation 5-6
Meditation Verse: 6:2

Thought

I keep thinking this has to represent a person, but it's a spirit like the rest, perhaps an angel. He is a spirit of conquering and apparently incites rulers to go out and conquer. The next spirit has power to take peace from the earth so that men kill one another. The third brings famine and the fourth kills a quarter of the world's population, with what sounds like the help of the first three. Instead of looking for one ruler to go out and try to conquer the earth, like Hitler or the Japanese emperor, it could be many rulers making war on their neighbors to claim their lands. Perhaps it was WWII. Perhaps it will be WWIII. But the second spirit seems to imply greater chaos than a world split into two sides, if the second seal is opened in short order. If so, then the third and fourth would naturally follow in quick succession.

Application

The picture given through these four horsemen is of great calamity and chaos, something hard to imagine in this nuclear age. If global war broke out, surely someone would use nukes at some point. But if there were many smaller wars all over the planet, Babylon could still be buying and selling souls and living it up in luxury, while much of the rest of the world burns. Instead of looking for one man to be the conqueror, it might make more sense to look for several or even many smaller conquerors. For a quarter of the world to be killed by war and famine and disease and wild animals, things have to get pretty desperate in large swaths of the earth.