The Lord opens the fourth seal today and the fourth horseman rides out.
"When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, 'Come!' I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth." (Revelation 6:7-8)
This horse is often depicted in art as being white or almost white, but the word translated into English as "pale" is the Greek word "chloros" from which we get the word "chlorophyll". (Think of plants with their green color.) Chloros is a green shade. In our passage today, it represents something that is decaying. Have you ever found containers of food in your fridge that you'd forgotten about? Did the food inside have green mold growing on it? This is the shade of green we need to imagine when we picture the fourth horse. The color of this horse symbolizes decay because the horseman riding upon it brings death.
In fact, the fourth horseman is the only one of the four who is given a name. He is called Death, and we are told that Hades follows close behind him. Older translations of the Bible sometime translate "Hades" as "hell", but the more modern translations have reverted back to the original Greek. "Hades" does not particularly indicate the destination of the damned but merely means "the unseen place, the invisible realm in which all the dead reside". It makes sense that John would see Hades following closely behind Death, since the souls of those killed by Death would enter the invisible realm immediately afterward.
The fourth horseman will cause the death of a fourth of the world's population. It's difficult to estimate what a fourth of humanity will be in those days, especially when we consider that the Christians who inhabit the world today will be gone by the time this takes place. As of July 2019 it is estimated that the world population is at 7.7 billion, and those who identify as Christians make up about a third of the population. This means that if the rapture of the church took place today, about 5.14 billion people would be left behind. So we see that the death which strikes one fourth of the remaining world population will mean the devastating loss of approximately 1.28 billion lives.
John tells us that some of these people will be killed by war. Since famine often follows war, John tells us that some of them will perish from lack of food. Others will lose their lives due to "plague", and there are several reasons for this. Unsanitary conditions often prevail following a war. War can disrupt access to purified water. War can disrupt the power grid, causing people to be unable to safely preserve food or to cook food to the proper temperature to kill bacteria. In addition, the war in the end times may involve biological weapons. On top of all this, over the past few years we've seen the reemergence of diseases that were for many years mostly eradicated by vaccines. If something deadly like smallpox were to emerge again, the CDC says we are not prepared to handle it. It could even be that a lab-created disease will break out during the end times and cause a pandemic.
I don't know what John means when he says that a portion of the fourth of the people who die will be killed by "the wild beasts of the earth". Some scholars suggest this may represent a revolt of the animal kingdom. Back in Genesis, the Lord instilled into the animals an instinctual fear and respect of man. (Genesis 9:2) This occurred after the flood and after the Lord gave man permission to eat meat. Apparently something on earth changed during the flood that made it difficult for man to obtain enough nutrition on a vegetarian diet, so the Lord allowed the eating of animals. But because this made man a predator, the Lord told the animal kingdom to be on guard against us. In the end times the animals may lose their fear and respect of us, perhaps because the worldwide famine will affect the animal kingdom too. Other scholars propose that in the end times there may be diseases which suddenly cross over from the animal kingdom to humans, infecting humans with illnesses they've never faced before. We are already seeing things like this happening, some examples being bird flu, swine flu, and mad cow disease.
It has been suggested by some scholars that the fourth of the population who dies at the opening of the fourth seal may only be from among those who have taken the mark of the Antichrist. We briefly discussed this mark in yesterday's passage and we will look at it in more detail in Chapter 13. I think there's a great deal of merit to this theory. As we will see later on, many people will come to faith in Christ during the Great Tribulation, and since the death that the fourth horseman brings could be considered a judgment upon the inhabitants of the earth, it makes sense that this particular judgment would fall on a portion of those who have given their allegiance to the man of sin rather than to the Lord Jesus Christ.
We need to pray for unbelievers like never before. We need to share the good news of the gospel like never before. I don't know how short the time is before Christ calls believers out of the world, but time is shorter today than it was yesterday or the day before. The Great Tribulation is going to be a dreadful time to be on earth, and we shouldn't want anyone to be left behind to endure it.
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