Revelation 6: The Fifth Seal and the Martyrs (Part 20)

Now, if you’re new here tonight, we’ve been studying the book of Revelation and we have already gotten to chapter 6. We’ve studied the first two horsemen of the four horsemen. And they are the judgments that Jesus unleashes on the world when he opens the seals of a scroll and unrolls it. And each time he breaks a seal and unrolls more, it describes the judgment.

And the first imagery of this judgment is the four horsemen that are unleashed. Now we saw that the first horseman is a rider of a white horse. And we saw that that person goes forth to conquer and that person is the Antichrist. And the first seal lasts how long, that judgment?

You have been here three and half years, right? The second seal is the rider of the red horse who takes peace from the earth. And a great sword is given to him in order that men mightslaughter one another, it says. Now when is that?

When is that? At exactly the middle of that seven-year period. Up until that time, there’s a pseudo-peace going on. And the second seal is opened at the middle.

And then you find that the successive judgments after that become more frequent, closer together. Now, let’s look at the rider of the third horse, and the opening of the third seal in Revelation 6. And that begins with verse 5. Now I call this the rider of the black horse is economic catastrophe and famine.

That’s what he brings. Let’s see what it says. Verse 5, when he broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, come, and I looked, and behold, a black horse; and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, a quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; and do not damage, or literally don’t touch, the oil and the wine.

All right, going back to the time that the apostle John wrote this prophecy, a scale, in fact, where -the kind of scale is one that has the two trays and balance. That sort of a scale was used to weigh precious things. And in the Bible, when it’s used in a symbolic sense, it means something that is precious and scarce. So right away we know when he comes riding in, with a scale, that he’s talking about a time when there’s going to be a great scarcity of what?

Food. Because, you see, once war breaks out, the system begins to break down. And then is the terrible news, it says a quart of wheat for a denarius. Now think how much wheat is a quart.

A denarius is what was the -was the wage of a day’s work for the average person in that day. So it meant the average person had to pay a whole day’s wage for a quart of wheat. And — or either he could buy a lesser grain, barley, three quarts of barley for a whole day’s wage. So that shows the tremendous scarcity that this rider on the black horse brought.

And then he says, literally but do not touch the oil and the wine. You see, in that day, olive oil and wine was considered luxury. There was always the inner circle that lived in luxury. And it will be the same thing with the Antichrist.

And the Antichrist has got this system set up. Well, there will be certain leaders in the inner circle that will have the luxuries, but the masses will not have it. And so what this is talking about is the beginning of famine. And this will begin to hit the whole world.

And then he opens up the fourth seal and unleashes the fourth horseman. And in the Greek, it says in my translation, this is the new American standard Bible I’m reading from. It says when the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, come, and I looked, and behold, an ashen horse. Now the word translated ashen, means a sickly, pale color.

And that’s the way it should be translated. He saw a sickly, pale horse riding forth. And here’s what he brings. It says and I looked, and behold, a sickly, pale horse; and he who sat on it had the name death; and Hades or hell.

Now this tells us something. This next judgment is going to particularly hit the unbelievers. And it will be a global kind of a judgment. And it says that he rides forth and the rider’s name is death and hell and they’re joined together.

You know, death should hold no fear for a believer in Jesus Christ. It’s not a pleasant thing. I’d just soon avoidit if I could. But you don’t see people out there having or organizing marches against death.

It’s kind of futile. But there’s a good chance that you and I might miss it because Christ says he’s going to come just before this seven-year period begins and snatch out every living believer in him. And snatch us up to meet him, and he’s gonna take us to the father’s house and he’s preparing a place for us to dwell right now. And it’s a great building program, I’m sure.

Now, chilling things are said about this rider that’s called death and hell. I want tosay something to you. I think I’ve said it before. But one day I was sitting studying the third chapter of the Gospel of John about the fact that men and women must be born again.

And I was thinking, and then I remembered in Revelation 20, it talks about blessed and holy are those who have believed in Jesus Christ because over them they will not suffer the second death and it hit me. He who is born once, shall die twice. But he who is born twice, shall die but once. So make sure you’ve been born twice.

Now he comes with death and those who die go immediately to hell. And it says authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth. And I looked up this word earth. I expected it to be the word in Greek, oikoumene, which means inhabited earth.

But it isn’t. It’s tes ges, which means the lands. And so authority is apparently given to him over a fourth of the land mass of the planet and a fourth of the population of the earth will die in this judgment. And here’s how they will die.

It says and authority one given them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with the sword, with famine, with pestilence or plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth. And, again, I was surprised. I thought it would be the Greek word makhaira for sword, the two-edged sword. But it’s rhomphaia, which is the kind of sword muslims use.

Interesting, isn’t it? The big, long curved one. And so remember sword is a symbol of weapons of warfare. So through weapons of warfare, a great many people of this fourth of the population will die.

But also a fourth will die of famine. I mean, the part of the fourth will die of famine. And that is set forth by the last rider of the horse, by the scarcity of food. Well, I looked a little bit at the math.

I was staggered to find that it took the world from the flood, and I’m going back to biblical time. It took the world from the flood until 1850 to reach the first one billion in population. It took from 1850 to 1930 to reach the second billion. It took from 1930, and I was born just the end of ’29.

So it took from 1930 until 1960 to reach the third billion. Then we really started generating. It only took from 1960, to about 1976 to reach the fourth billion. From 1976 to around, I think it was 1988, we reached the fifth billion.

Now we’re over six billion and counting. So, you see, population is increasing geometrically. And it has to result in suffering in a great deal in some places. Well, this says that there’s going to be a tremendous suffering from famine.

And when you have malnutrition, what’s the next thing that becomes a problem? Plagues. And that’s what it says. A great many will be hit with plagues.

It’s the worldhealth organization. They’re living in fear that there’s going to be the outbreak of some uncontrollable plagues. And partly because of just nature itself not engineered by man. But antibiotics and so forth have been so misused and overused, that many of the organisms that attack our body, viruses and bacteria, have developed immunity to our best antibiotics.

And now we are — the health organization is just very concerned that we’re gonna have an outbreak of some major plague. Well, we already have a major plague in the world. You look in africa, you look from the sahara, all the way down to the republic of south africa. There are large cities where there’s nothing there, but little children and grandparents.

All of the others have been wiped out by aids. And, of course, we’re not spared. It’s still spreading like wildfire all through the United States, too. But just think what it will be when it hits a fourth and kills part of the fourth of the population of the earth.

It says that is what is coming. And then the last one is kind of a surprise. And by the wild beasts of the earth. Apparently what’sgoing to happen is the ecology and the order of natural things is going to be so disrupted that animals are going to be driven into chaos and act in a way abnormal to what we’ve known for years and, well, for centuries and centuries.

They’re going to, probably out of starvation, and maybe a great deal out of disorientation and so forth, they’re going to attack the human population as never before. Crazy, crazy things, isn’t it? And then comes the saddestthing of all. The fifth seal is opened.

When the Lamb broke the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar, the souls of those who had been slain because of the Word of God, and because of the testimony which they had maintained; and they cried out witha loud voice, saying, how long, o Lord, holy and true, will you refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on the earth? And there was given to each of them a white robe, which is the imputed righteousness of Christ. There was given each one of them a white robe; and they were told that they should rest for a little while longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brethren whowere to be killed even as they had been, would be completed also. You know, history is full of illustrations of christians being used as scapegoats.

And also Jews being used as scapegoats. There were many Jews that were slaughtered during the plague, the bubonic plague that hit Europe in the mid-centuries. And they attacked the Jews because the Jews in following the law of Moses, and the laws of cleansing the hands and cleansing the foodand so forth and not eating certain food, did not get the plague as much as others did. So they thought, okay, they’re the ones that did it.

And so they slaughtered, in some cities, the whole population. They slaughtered them. But this is something that’s gonna be set up by the Antichrist. The world, you know, it says that the rider on the black horse is named what?

Death and hell. And that shows that most of these plagues are going to hit the unbelievers because they go to hell when they die immediately. So they are going to turn their wrath about all of this suffering, on to those who have come to know Jesus Christ during this seven-year period after we’re gone. And, you know, it’s encouraging to me, we’ll see in the next chapter, chapter 7.

It’s encouraging to me to know that there’s going to be a number of people that is too great to be numbered standing before the throne of God who have come out of the Great Tribulation and washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb, it says. In other words, there’s going to be such a huge number saved during that time. Almost all of them are going to be martyred. But there’s going to be a tremendous number that turn to Jesus Christ.

And, you know, I’m thrilled about that because you know one of the reasons that’s going to happen? Because people you talk to now, even if they don’t believe now, they’re gonna remember what you said. And when they see these things happening, they’re gonna have to make a decision. They’re gonna have to make a decision to whatever I have to suffer, I’m gonna believe in Jesus Christ.

You know, it’s easy to become a believer in Christ now. You don’t have to suffer. In some parts of the world you do. Here you just have to maybe suffer a little embarrassment ’cause of the old nature.

But then it’s going to cost most of them their lives. And so this fifth seal is about the wholesale slaughter of believers around the entire world. And that’s going to, that’s going to bring God’s wrath, it’s gonna unbridle it. But even then God holds back his wrath, in order that as many as will believe, may believe.

All right, that brings us to the sixth seal. And here’s what I call the sixth seal, the first global icbm nuclear exchange. And I’ll show you why in just a minute. Do you know all of our understanding about nuclear weapons is mostly theoretical.

There have only been two nuclear bombs used in a hostile attack. And those were firecrackers compared to what we have now. As horrible as it was, they were nothing comparedto what we have now. We have miniaturized thermonuclear weapons, warheads, where they pack, each warhead that’s been miniaturized, packs enough power to destroy a whole city.

And there are still, Russia still has a bunch of intercontinental ballistic missiles that have multiply independently targeted warheads. That is they can carry as many as ten, we have them, too. And that means they fire one missile, after it goes above the atmosphere, it parts the cone of the missile parts, and the warheads split off and go -each one is targeted at a different target. All right, now remember that all of our knowledge about what these weapons would do is theoretical.

For instance, we do not know what would be the interactive consequence of firing a great number of nuclear, thermonuclear weapons into a closely related area at the same time. It is possible that it can cause chain reaction. And I think when we get to the trumpet judgments, I’ll show you something that will be amazing that the apostle John -you know, he was an eyewitness to all of this. The only way to understand a lot of this prophecy that we’re headed into now, is to remember that John the apostle was told over and over by Jesus, write what you have seen and heard only.

And the word see that is used means eyewitness on the scene. And that’s why you go through the book of Revelation, you’ll find every time there’s a significant event that the apostle John is about to introduce, he will say I looked and I heard and I saw. Every time. ’cause he was there. You say, wait a minute, it hasn’t happened yet.

No problem for God. I mean, time is a creation. God can put somebody in any spot. But that’s what happened and you have to remember and apply that to understand these prophecies in the book of Revelation.

Because you have to put yourself in the place of John the apostle in the first century. He was propelled into the what I believe is the early 21st century, and he was made to stand and witness events, especially war, that would be with weapons beyond his imagination. And he would see these things. And then he was brought back to the isle of Patmos again and said now write about it.

Well, how do you describe something like that? It’s beyond anything they had any inkling of. So with that in mind, let’s read the sixth seal, okay? Verse 12, and I looked when he broke the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon became like blood.

Mike, you were telling me you just, you drove over here. Only about a hundred feet up was just a solid mass of black smoke from this fire. Well, think of that kind of debris scattered over most of the earth. He says that he saw -when he looked and he broke the sixth seal, there was a great seismos in Greek.

And the sun became black as sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon became like blood. Now, seismos is translated earthquake, but that’s a jump from the original meaning. Seismos means a violent shaking. Now an earthquake can do that, but other things can do it.

You see, he was standing on the earth when the violent explosions took place and to him it felt like an earthquake.

If you have the guts to be a real revolutionary, come forward right now and accept Jesus Christ as your real revolutionary. And he’ll make a revolutionary that will change lives.

Thank you so much for standing with me as a watchman on the wall. I pray daily that he will reward your faithfulness and protect and prosper you in these difficult times. Thank you again for being a vital part of my team.