Revelation 6 - Introduction

VI.

THE VISION OF THE SEALS. — The relation of Christianity to great universal evils. The extinction of war, disease, death, persecution will not be immediate; the mission of Christianity is not to abolish them at once and by compulsion, but to undermine them; for her work is not coercion, but conviction, and is primarily to individuals, and only secondarily and indirectly to nations.
It is at this chapter that our most difficult work commences. We now enter upon the vexed sea of multitudinous interpretations. In the Introduction will be found a brief account of the principal schools of apocalyptic interpretation. It will be sufficient here to indicate the general view which appears the most simple and freest from difficulties. The seals which are opened by the Lamb seem to speak a double message. To the world they say, “When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?” To the Church they say, “In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” There are two lines of thought in the Bible, and these give rise to two apparently contradictory sets of pictures. There are the pictures of what would be the state of the world were the principles of Christ fully and universally accepted; and there are the pictures of the world as it will be because men do not fully accept them. The first set are the ideal, and include the abolition of war, social injustice, poverty, when the golden age and reign of righteousness shall dawn. When, however, we speak of this as ideal, we do not imply that it is visionary; it is the sober statement of what would actually take place were the rule of Christ admitted in the hearts and lives of men, and what will take place whenever they do so. But between this grand possibility and its realisation stands the wayward, and tortuous, and weakened human will, which either rejects or fatally but half adopts the teachings of God. This will of man, seen in a world which is directly hostile to Christ, and in a Church which is but half faithful to him, must be convinced ere the true ideal of Christ shall be attained, and the fulness of His kingdom made manifest. Thus the ideal pictures are postponed, and the world, which might have been saved by love speaking in gentleness, must be saved by love speaking so as by fire. Now in the earlier Christian times the hope of an ideal kingdom, soon to be realised in the immediate establishment of Christ’s kingdom, was very strong. The first disciples yearned to see it immediately set up. “Wilt thou at this time restore the kingdom?” The golden light of hope lingered long in their minds; they lived in the memory of those prophecies which foretold the cessation of war, sorrow, pain, and death. They thought, now that Christ had come, the Messianic kingdom in its utter gladness must immediately appear. They forgot the Prince’s visit to the far country; they forgot the citizens who hated Him, and rejected His rule; they forgot the session at God’s right hand till His enemies were made His footstool. They thought the day of the Lord, in the sense of the perfecting of His reign, was at hand; they forgot that the Heavenly Bridegroom must gird His sword upon His thigh, and that His arrows must be sharp in the heart of the King’s enemies (Psalms 45:3; Psalms 45:5). The vision of these seven seals is the repetition of the warning against such forgetfulness. The ideal Kingdom might come if mankind would receive it, but it must be established by conviction, not by coercion; and so the actual history of the growth of the Kingdom would be different from the ideal; the Church, like her Master, must be made perfect through sufferings; where He was, His servant must be; through much tribulation the Kingdom must be entered. The seals unfold, then, the general aspects of the world’s history after Christ’s ascension. Certain features would continue; war, famine, disease, death would remain. They might, indeed, have been abolished had Christ’s own received Him; but as it was, the face of the world’s will being in opposition to God’s will opposed the manifestation of the peaceful Kingdom. Thus the scenes which the seals unfold are but the pictorial statement of Christ’s own utterances in Matthew 24:6, “Ye shall hear of wars; there shall be famines and pestilences.” It will be seen, then, that, the seals tell the seer that these troubles will exist till the times of the end. The Church through him is warned to prepare for her mission of suffering; and in this way the vision stretches on till the close of earth’s history.

But this is not all. The visions of the book may have preliminary applications, because the principles on which they are constructed are eternal ones. Our Lord’s own language in Matthew 24 is our guarantee that we may look for such preliminary applications. The story of the overthrow of many a nation presents these features of war, famine, misery, convulsion. The fall of Jerusalem, as well as that of the Roman empire, was preceded by such. On this principle, other interpretations of the vision have a truth in them, as long as they are confined to broad, general principles; the mischievous affection for trivial details has been the bane of more than one school of interpreters.

It is perhaps worthy of notice that these seals are not to be regarded as being fulfilled one after another: in point of fact, the horseman of war and the horseman of pestilence have often ridden together. Yet it is true that there is a tendency in one to produce the other; war does lead to famine, famine does produce pestilence. There is, perhaps, also an application of these seals to the history of the Church. Her first era is that of purity and conquest; her next is that of controversy — the war of opinions; the age of controversy gives rise to the age of spiritual scarcity, for men intent upon controversy forget the true Bread, which came down from heaven, and a famine of the word of God succeeds; and out of this there emerges the pale horse of spiritual death, the parody of the victorious rider — the form of godliness without the power, the age of irreligious ritualism: the hidden ones of Christ may then be revealed, crying “How long?” and finally the age of revolution comes to overthrow the old order and give birth to the new.