Revelation 6:3-4; Opening of 2nd Seal – Warfare and Bloodshed
3 And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see, 4 And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.
“Come” is a command given to John, that he is to do so himself and he is beckoned to see for a fact what is to come!
The church is exhorted to be vigilant for our Lord’s return is nigh as the Apostle Paul warned, surely, we are nearer to His return than we may ever imagine – 1 Thessalonians 5:2-7 For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief. Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness. Therefore let us not sleep, as doothers; but let us watch and be sober. For they that sleep sleep in the night; and they that be drunken are drunken in the night.
The opening of the second seal with the red horseman signifies warfare and bloodshed for he was given a great sword initiating war and killing. The horse’s colour, pyrros, means “fiery red”, intimates the nature of the afflictions under the second seal. It is a span of slaughter and bloodshed. Please note the word “another” in verse 4 that describes in the Greek another of the same kind. It shows the connection between the first and second horseman and implies a separation of time between the appearance of two horsemen in that war and peace cannot exist at the same time.[1]
MacArthur observed well, “The Bible repeatedly warns of the deadly lure of false peace… It may seem incredible that the world, hovering on the brink of final disaster, could be so totally deceived. Yet that is precisely what happened on a smaller scale before the outbreak of the most devastating war to date, World War II. Adolf Hitler spelled out in detail his plans for conquest in his book Mein Kampf, published more than a decade before World War II began. Yet, incredibly, the Western allies (particularly Britain and France) persisted in believing Hitler’s false claim to be a man of peace. They stood idly by as he reoccupied the Rhineland (demilitarized after World War I), thus abrogating the Versailles Treaty, then annexed Austria, the Sudetenland, and Czechoslovakia. Desperate to appease Hitler and avoid war, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with the Nazi dictator at Munich in 1938. Upon his return to England, Chamberlain triumphantly waved a piece of paper (containing a worthless pledge of peace from Hitler) which he claimed guaranteed “peace with honor… peace for our time.” When Winston Churchill (one of the few never taken in by Hitler) rose in the House of Commons to declare that England had suffered a total, unmitigated defeat he was shouted down by angry members of Parliament. The deception was nearly universal; almost everyone misread Hitler’s intentions. Only after he invaded Poland in September 1939 did the allies finally acknowledge the truth. By then it was too late to avoid the catastrophe of the Second World War.”[2]
May the Lord bless spiritual wakefulness to watch and be sober. Amen.
[1]Robert L.Thomas, Revelation 1-7 An Exegetical Commentary, Moody, 1992, 426.
[2]MacArthur New Testament Commentary, The – Revelation 1-11.