When I mapped out this year’s preaching schedule I did not - repeat NOT - know that war with Iraq would begin the week the seals on the scroll detailing the fate of the world would be opened and the four horsemen let loose. And I’m not egotistical enough to think that God arranged the timing of the war to give me the world’s most topical sermon illustration. But it does makes you wonder.
The four horsemen of the apocalypse. It’s a phrase that heralds doom and destruction, doesn’t it. These figures are the first of the many terrifying images that John sees in his vision and is told to describe to the church, to warn and prepare them for the days to come.
Apocalypse is just another word for revelation. It means that something hidden is now being disclosed. That’s simple enough. But what do these four horsemen signify?
Pretty nearly everybody agrees that they are all aspects of God’s judgment. They do echo the horsemen in Zechariah, which were apparently sent out by God to survey the earth and report back on its condition. But these horsemen aren’t just reporters. They’re actors in the drama that is about to unfold.
The first horseman represents war, in the classic sense, with one nation-state armed against another. “There was a white horse! Its rider had a bow; a crown was given to him, and he came out conquering and to conquer.” [v. 2] This is a war of conquest, an invasion by an outside agency, determined to gain power over another country by force. Why a white horse? No one seems to know. . . Some people see an allusion to Christ, since he comes on a white horse in chapter 19. But most think only that a pure white horse, being rare, is valuable, and the kind of figure with the power to embark on a war of conquest would naturally have a really impressive steed. I think, myself, that this kind of conflict has traditionally included some elements of nobility in it - courage, and patriotism, sacrifice and brotherhood and heroism. And so the white horse is an allusion to that potential for nobility, even if perverted to wrong ends.
But the second horseman represents a far different kind of violence. “And out came another horse, bright red; its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people would slaughter one another; and he was given a great sword.” [v. 4] That red horse proclaims violence unredeemed, brutal and vicious bloodletting. Many people think it means civil war - one faction within a society deliberately entering into armed conflict with another - maybe over a matter of principle, as in our own civil war, or maybe out of generations of ethnic hatred like that between Serbia and Kosovo. Although both the Kosovars and the Serbians claimed that theirs was also a matter of principle. . . . Yes, it could be civil war. But it could also be anarchy - a total breakdown of law and order within a society, with the strong preying on the weak, warlords or gang leaders carving out pieces of territory from the chaos. Or it could be terrorists. . .
The third horseman is famine. “I looked, and there was a black horse! Its rider held a pair of scales in his hand, and I heard what seemed to be a voice in the midst of the four living creatures saying, "A quart of wheat for a day's pay, and three quarts of barley for a day's pay, but do not damage the olive oil and the wine!" [v. 5-6] Now, I know you’re all dying to know exactly what the different prices of wheat and barley mean, and what part oil and wine played in the first century Mediterranean diet, but you’ll have to ask me some other time. Some scholars think the point is that prices are so high that the poor can barely feed themselves, let alone their families, but that the rich somehow still manage to put luxuries on the table. And isn’t that the way it always does seem to work? I’m sure that Mugabe and his henchmen are managing to eat high on the hog in Zimbabwe, even while their people are eating next year’s seed corn and then sitting down to die. Others think that the point is that even if you destroy the crops, olive trees and grapevines will bear again the following year if they’re not cut down. Whichever way you take it, though, people are going to be hungry this year. No one tries to explain why the horse is black. Perhaps the black horse symbolizes the despair a mother feels as she holds her starving child; it may portray bleak lifelessness in contrast to the blood red of destruction.
What’s important to realize is that famine has a tendency to accompany war - especially civil war, or anarchy - perhaps because people haven’t been able to get the spring crops sown or the harvest in, or else the armies have trampled the fields and burned the barns. Or it could be simple a matter of the rains failing too many seasons in a row, or floods destroying the harvest, or some other kind of natural disaster.
Following close on the heels of war and famine comes death. “I looked and there was a pale green horse! Its rider's name was Death, and Hades followed with him.” [v. 8] Actually, the horse isn’t true green. The word refers to a sort of sickly pale color, you know, the kind of color someone turns just as they’re about to lose their lunch, or perhaps the color of a corpse in decay. Because these two, Death and Hades, are the ones with the lunch-tossing job of cleaning up after the first three horsemen have done their work. John throws in, almost as an afterthought, that for those who don’t die of war, violence, or hunger, disease and wild animals are also weapons in the enemy’s arsenal.
Pretty awful pictures, aren’t they?
Not the sort of thing we want to spend a beautiful spring Sunday morning thinking about, right?
We could all close our eyes and pray for peace, instead. That’s what a lot of people around the country are doing. And I think it’s a wonderful idea to pray for peace. But we still have to open our eyes and face reality squarely, even when it’s ugly.
I just finished reading one of those international spy-thrillers, by a new guy named Joel Rosenberg. The most interesting line in the book was part of a conversation between our hero and the head of the Israeli Intelligence agency, Mossad. The Israeli said, “The trouble with Americans is that they don’t believe in evil.”
And that’s true. We don’t. By and large, we prefer to think the best of people, believe that reason and good will solve most problems, and that what we don’t know can’t hurt us. Well, folks, in case any of you were in any doubt about existence of evil before 9/11, I suspect that you’ve changed your minds since then.
But Americans still have a hard time believing in judgment.
Remember the outcry when Jerry Falwell said that the attack was God’s judgment on the immorality of contemporary American society? Well, I’m not as sure as he was about exactly what particular sins might be responsible for the terrorist attacks, but I do believe in judgment. I do believe that God isn’t nearly as impressed by our society as we are, and that from time to time he may shake us up to get our attention.
Because that is what is going on with the opening of these four seals.
Some people think that these four events are, in fact, the literal, sequential signs of the end times, that the man on the white horse wearing a crown is the Antichrist, symbolizing the head of a new world government who will promise to solve all of our problems, from global warming to hunger and nuclear weapon proliferation.
But Jesus warns us against just such interpretations in the passage we just read from Matthew: “And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All this is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” [Mt 24:6-8]
No, these passages are a reminder that God is in control of history.
Look again, more closely, at the first passage: “The [rider of the white horse] had a bow; a crown was given to him.” The crown was a gift. He didn’t inherit it, he didn’t earn it. Permission to conquer was given to him by God, for God’s own purposes. “Who has roused a victor from the east, summoned him to his service? He delivers up nations to him, and tramples kings under foot; he makes them like dust with his sword, like driven stubble with his bow. . . . Who has performed and done this, calling the generations from the beginning? I, the LORD, am first, and will be with the last.” [Is 41:2,4]
And the second passage has an equally important clue in it: “[The rider of the red horse] was permitted to take peace from the earth.” Who permitted it? Who but God? And the other thing to notice is that the rider doesn’t actually kill anyone. He just takes peace away - and then people just start killing each other, because that is what people are like. It is the presence of God that keeps the peace.
Remember what Paul says in Romans 13? Governments “have been instituted by God. . . . [and are] God's servant for your good [and to] to execute wrath on the wrongdoer.” [Rom 13:1-4] The collapse of social order that leads to the kind of bloodshed that we saw in Somalia and in Sierra Leone and Congo is what happens when God takes his protecting hand away.
The third passage tells us something else: God limits the scope of the disaster. Only what is permitted is destroyed. Enough is left so that the survivors can start over again after the crisis has passed.
So the first and most important point that this vision of John’s is trying to communicate to us is that God is in charge of everything. It is God who sends the riders out into the world, and it is God who calls them back when they’ve done his bidding.
The second point to keep in mind is that war, bloodshed, famine and disease are normal.
Let me repeat: war, bloodshed, famine, and disease are normal.
We have forgotten that, haven’t we. Listening to all the debates leading up to the war I’ve heard a number of people saying that containing the Soviet Union worked, and that therefore we should concentrate on “containing” Iraq. Well, what people forget is that although we may have stopped one another from actually firing off our nuclear arsenals at one another, war did not stop during those 45 years between the fall of Berlin in 1944 and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. Remember Korea? Remember Vietnam? And even when our young men stayed safe at home, civil war raged in Angola, and in Ethiopia, and in Nicaragua. And America armed one side, and Russia armed the other, and China tossed in a few grenades to fill the gaps. And don’t forget the never-ending wars between India and Pakistan. And I’ll bet most of you never even noticed the nasty little conflict between Ecuador and Peru in 1995.
Famine. Remember compassion fatigue? People simply grew numb with the never-ending pictures of starving children in Ethiopia, and Mozambique, and Somalia. It seemed as if no sooner did the famine end in one place that another country would begin to starve. And that’s exactly what happens. Sometimes it comes because of war, and sometimes it comes because of drought, but there is famine somewhere all the time. Right now it’s sub-Saharan Africa. Have you noticed?
And disease. No, it’s not 14th century Europe, where the black plague killed 30 percent of the population. Smallpox has been eradicated - unless, of course, someone like Saddam Hussein decides to lace one of our reservoirs with the virus. Cholera and typhus are - in most places - a thing of the past. Children no longer die of polio and diphtheria and scarlet fever. But cholera is making a comeback in Zimbabwe. There are some countries in Africa where AIDS is at 30 percent. Around two million children die of malaria every year. And the statistics on STD’s among teens in this country should scare the socks off of every parent here. And then there are the other terrifying new diseases we can’t cure, like Ebola, and the rise in chronic illnesses like asthma, multiple sclerosis, and Crohn’s disease. We’ve had antibiotics for only about 50 years; my own grandfather died of peritonitis because penicillin wasn’t in widespread use yet. And we’ve managed to so misuse them that we’re breeding super-bacteria that nothing can touch. How long are we going to regard freedom from disease as a right?
So what’s the point of these visions?
They are given, first, to remind us of God. They are there to turn us back to God when we forget, and think that we deserve everything we have, that somehow our wealth is not a trust that God has given for us to use as emissaries of Jesus Christ.
These terrible events - are they necessarily aimed at you, or at me, for particular named sins? Was San Francisco’s earthquake really due to its population’s sexual habits? Not any more than Bangladesh’s recurring floods are their punishment for worshiping the wrong gods. Remember what Jesus said when asked about some “Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.” He asked them,
"Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Psyllium fell on them - do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did." [Lk 13:1-5]
The second reason John was given these visions was to remind us that we are under judgment. These disasters don’t “just happen.” They are what we human beings merit, corporately, for the way we treat one another, and for the way we treat God’s creation, and the way we alternately ignore and mis-represent God.
But wait. There is hope.
And that hope consists in the fact that God is in control, and that everything that happens in history is being used by God to bring about the future he has already written. What remains for us is to choose what side to be on. There’s a wonderful hymn which is not, unfortunately, in our hymnal:
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.
Some great cause, some new decision, offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet this truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong,
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
The particular battle that this hymn refers to is a spiritual one, not a physical one. But the principle remains the same. Because every human evil is a reflection of human sin, and a judgment on human sin, each evil calls us to re-evaluate our role in it.
I believe that the war we are fighting right now is both just and necessary. Other Christians believe differently. That is a matter for each person to struggle with, with Scripture and conscience. But I think we all have to understand that in some measure it is our fault - yours and mine, as citizens of this country and participating in all her decisions and enjoying the benefits of her policies. We’ve supported tyrants from Bautista in Cuba and Noriega in Panama to the current Saudi regime. We’ve guzzled middle-eastern oil and exported Hollywood corruption. And we have stood by as our country’s leaders slowly squeezed God out of our public consciousness. We have been blind in the face of evil and weak in our defense of principle.
Earlier this week we participated in the dramatic 48 hours between our President’s speech and the time for Saddam Hussein to go into exile. As a nation we were glued to our television screens as the deadline grew closer, and the drama is even more compelling now as our troops cross the desert toward Baghdad. How will it end? We know who’s going to win. The only thing we don’t know what the cost will be.
We all have a similar deadline to face, one that God has placed in front of us. In a way, each one of us has already reached the 48 hours marker. . . . The only question is, how much time do we really have left? This war - that earthquake - or flood, or epidemic - is our wake-up call. Fortunately, we know who’s going to win, so we know which side to enlist on. Have you signed up yet?
