
Revelation and Christian Interpretation
The Book of Revelation was written by its enigmatic author, “John the Evangelist” around the third century, A.D. On its face, it is a lengthy prophecy that details the end of days. It is replete with global plagues, calamities, and mass death. It foretells the rise of the antichrist, his deceit of nations, and his eventual defeat at the hands of the returning Christ. In the end, the good are rewarded with paradise, while the multitudes of the wicked are cast into hell for 1,000 years, before meeting their final end in the Lake of Fire along with Satan himself. It is perhaps one of the most well-known and influential books of the Bible. It is oft cited and encompasses some of the central tenets of the Christian faith; of submission to God, enmity toward the Devil, the reward of salvation for the faithful, and the assurance of eternal damnation for the wicked.
The grim nature of the prophecies can evoke intense feelings of horror and trepidation, and it is perhaps the best book in the Bible for scaring believers straight. Conversely, the promise of ultimate victory and salvation can also have a soothing effect. The promise of swift justice against the wicked even offers a bitter guarantee of revenge toward those who feel themselves victims of evil forces. Its passages evoke a strong emotive response and cryptic prose can be interpreted in virtually any way that suits shepherds and sheep alike. Due to these attributes, Christianity’s famed doomsday saga proves itself as a reliable tool for maintaining good order and discipline within the flock and compelling conversion among others.
The Meaning Between the Lines
But is the Book of Revelation merely the far-fetched prophecy of doom that many claim it to be? Should we take it at face value, as literally true? As Gospel? As a non-religious myself, I decline to accept Revelation as sacred or valid in any religious sense. In my opinion, there is just not enough evidence. However, this does not mean that the Book of Revelation lacks value in all respects. The goal of this article, therefore, is to consider the value of the text outside of its religious context. In fact, upon carefully reading the book in question, this author believes that this epic saga of suffering and salvation, whether fact or fiction, provides a good deal of truth regarding how evil manifests in the real world. Interpreted like this, we can glean valuable insights into how diabolical forces manifest throughout history and how to avoid them.
If we follow from the assumption that the Book of Revelation was simply the work of its author without divine inspiration, it would be apparent that John was an educated man with expert knowledge of history and how systems tend to function. His writings, therefore, provide a template of lessons learned from times gone by from a well-studied man of antiquity, who provided a priceless text warning of sinister trends in human affairs. Many of John’s cryptic predictions seem to hint at insights into various historical processes. Further investigation could perhaps reveal the Book of Revelation as something of a guidebook for guarding against large-scale manifestations of evil. But for now, let us focus on one clear and well-known reference; the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
The Four Horsemen
“[1] And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.
[2] And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.
[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.
[5] And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
[6] And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.
[7] And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.
[8] And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.[1]”
It is well-established that these four horsemen represent conquest, war, famine, and death, respectively. Yet the absence of context surrounding their arrival in these ominous passages leaves the faithful and non-believers alike scratching their heads. What exactly was John talking about? As in most cases, interested people look to both the past and present for clues as to when these horsemen have, or shall arrive on Earth. While those who see their arrival as a future event keep a close eye for any sign of these menacing beasts trotting about on their steeds, others comb the annals of history for any sign of their passing. Were these horsemen symbolic of events happening in John’s own time? In the spirit of prophecy, was he cryptically warning of the arrival of some imminent threat quietly unfolding before contemporary eyes? Or are his words truly meant to be a prediction of cataclysmic tribulations in some future time?
In some sense, it is possible that all these assumptions are true. Through studying history, we can start to see parallels between the progression of travesties represented by the horsemen and the way events unfold when people are drawn or dragged into war by foolish or disingenuous leaders. How often do these so-called leaders, through deception, hubris, or sheer incompetence, lead the masses of their nation to the folly of war and condemn them to disaster? My theory is that John, whether he intended to or not, described a cycle of violence that has demonstrated itself to be such a persistent historical constant, that it is very likely to repeat itself over time, to the point of potentially reaching a global scale. The tragic story of the lust for power and the calamity it brings is a tale as old as history itself, and John’s understanding of the process of warfare upon nations speaks volumes to his intellect and subject matter expertise.
John’s depiction of the horsemen and the sequence through which they arrive symbolically lays out how the process of war commonly progresses. This process begins with the first rider. This first horseman, representing conquest, stands out from the rest of the horsemen in his illustrious appearance. Unlike his ghoulish comrades, he is seated upon a white horse, receives a crown, and wields a bow. The representation of ostensible purity and authority embodied by the coronated horseman alludes to the susceptibility of people to the illusion of the glory of conquest. Common Biblical scholarship often identifies him as the deceitful Antichrist, which alludes to the bewitching quality of promises of conquest and victory. It is this false perception that draws the masses into conflict and paves the way for the first horsemen’s ghastly counterparts.
The second beast rides into the fore wielding a great sword. The hue of this horse is red, symbolizing the grisly nature of his business. This rider represents what so often follows an unfettered lust for conquest and domination. With him, the savagery of war comes into full swing, dashing peace from the Earth and submerging humanity in a horrific bloodbath.
The beastly rider that follows the horsemen of conquest and warfare, brings the rotten fruits of the labor of their practice. Famine descends upon belligerents and approximated bystanders alike, delivering hunger, poverty, and misery. (This was well pronounced in John’s times and up until recent history. Until recent times, armies on the march often seized the foodstuffs of passing villages. Such austerity carries over into modern times when supply chains are either disrupted or diverted to the war effort. Recent examples of starvation due to war are evident in South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.)[2] As the war rages on, the illusion of its justice vaporizes, leaving the multitudes with little more than their pain and fervent wish to end the violence.
Yet so often, the very leaders that drew them into war continue to rattle their sabers and drive their people to battle. They call for solidarity, yet forsake their citizens to the trials of war. Either from malice, fear, or the simple hope that they can save face in their folly, political leaders ship better souls off to their ill-conceived conflict, pitting their bodies and spirits against the rigors of man’s most horrific activity, the organized slaughter of one group by another.
In the end, riding behind the rest, arrives the last horseman, the personification of death. This dreadful rider signifies the final result of war’s bloody chaos. Far from the triumph and glory, all that remains is devastation, the corpses of the fallen, and the grief of the living. Even those who survived are scarred by the violence, and many will die as famine and pestilence continue to stalk the blood-soaked countryside and the ruins of once-great cities.
Examples In History
Even today, people are all too often persuaded to either actively engage in war, or at least tacitly support it. The most recent case here is Putin’s horrific misadventure in Ukraine, where his promises of swift victory and the political reunion of Ukraine and Russia have delivered only corpses and devastation. For anyone watching, it seems that, far from being a quick victory, it promises to be an agonizing tragedy for both Ukrainians and Russians alike. Such a travesty serves as a bitter reminder that the ambitions of those in power far too often spell suffering and tribulation for the rest. Unfortunately, such examples are in great abundance.
Perhaps the most appropriate example is World War I. There is perhaps no better event in recent history that illustrates the morbid work of the horsemen. Europeans had been primed for calamity through jingoistic conditioning for decades. Over the course of the 19th century, right up until the outbreak of war in 1914, the people of Europe were inculcated with a fervent nationalism that drove imperial ambitions. The mutual arrogance fostered by this mindset triggered a feverish arms race as each power both aspired for hegemony and feared conquest by a rival. Recent conflicts such as the Franco-Prussian War, a humiliating defeat for the French, only served to ignite greater efforts. Foolish edicts glorifying war and sacrificing oneself for one’s homeland were impressed upon the people by rulers and scholars alike. By the time war was declared in 1914, the entire continent of Europe was geared up for the slaughter.
Encouraged by promises of swift victory and triumph, thousands of young soldiers marched off to the battlefield, cheered on by thousands more of their countrymen. Romantic visions of gallantry and heroism swirled in the heads of thousands of young soldiers as they were marched, trucked, and hauled by trains off to the front. They believed the promises of their leaders, that of a swift war and a great adventure. As they faced their enemy for the first time, they were emboldened by the Napoleonic demeanor of their officers and looked forward to bringing honor to themselves and their country.
It was not long before the survivors of those first few engagements came to the bitter realization that they had stepped into hell itself. Nearly a century of industrial advancements devoted to the mass production of the instruments of death produced national war machines that transformed the European Front lines into mechanized meat grinders. Troops fell like dominoes before hails of machine gun fire. Poison gas choked and blistered men’s lungs, while artillery rained down on the near-helpless victims below. By 1917, the first tanks rolled through no man’s lands bringing death before it, while flamethrowers turned these metal monsters into ovens that roasted the crew inside.
Against this, national leaders, fearing the loss of public faith in the conflict, made foolhardy decisions that cost thousands of lives. The Battle of the Somme, one of the deadliest battles in human history that cost the lives of 19,240 British lives in the first day, was greenlighted on the grounds that the leaders wanted a successful offense to reignite popular support for the war.[3] Belligerent nations unleashed a flood of war propaganda upon their populations to maintain the flow of fresh, steely-eyed recruits and to refresh national resolve.[4] The earliest horrors of the war dropped the veil of romantic illusions of the glory of war, as the theater of war crystallized into a nihilistic, trench-riven hellscape of industrialized mass slaughter. Yet leaders of all nations understood the chance for an equitable peace with their adversaries was off the table. Their only option, then, was to grind forward, filling their peoples’ hands with rifles and their heads with hogwash, and power through. Thanks to this, nations sent millions of more men to fight and die for their hollow causes.
While soldiers fell, food became scarce. The loss of labor from mass conscription and the redirection of remaining foodstuffs toward the war effort strained troops and civilians alike. Germany, prior to the war, was the most fell-fed country in the world, with the average adult consuming a whopping 3,000 calories per day. In fact, the stereotypical image of a German at this time was a fat man. By the middle of the war, that calorie count fell to a mere 1,000, hardly enough to survive on. Rich diets were replaced by rudimentary nutrition relying on staples such as turnips.[5]
By the end of the war, Europe was littered with corpses, fallen trees, and fields filled with craters and destroyed war engines. Yet this was not the end. Years of thousands of troops living in close quarters in damp and squalid trenches among rats provided a breeding ground for disease, and it is believed by historians that the Spanish flu that killed about as many people as the war itself was brought home by troops returning from the war.[6]
Thereafter, World War I became renowned as the paragon of tragedy and the folly of war. The conflict itself became a focal point in USMC General Smedley Butler’s book, War is a Racket, where he highlighted the horrors of the war and the sinister ways in which the war industry reaps profits while troops pay with their lives. In Manufacturing Consent, the renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky uses the events of WW1 as an example of collusion between politicians and the media to convert a nation of isolationists into bloodthirsty warmongers. The entire conflict was a cataclysmic disaster that served only those cunning enough to exploit it. They were all duped by the glitter of glory, yet if we take John’s advice, we know what – and who—follows.
WW1, then dubbed, “The Great War”, was said to be “The War to End all Wars”. Yet later events proved that armed conflict is firmly entrenched historical constant. Despite the efforts of well-intentioned officials such as Woodrow Wilson and the establishment of the League of Nations, they continued unabated. One generation later, a second, more devastating World War followed. This war was also initiated by promises of national glory and revenge, buttressed by a newly resurrected romanticization of war. The result of this was a terrible human cost and a level of devastation that took decades to repair. This cycle continues to repeat itself to this day. It would seem as though the Horsemen are not something set to arrive sometime in the future but have always been here running laps around the globe, leaving horror, hardship, and tribulation in their wake.
Conclusion
The Book of Revelation is a famously cryptic text with no one unambiguously clear interpretation. Perhaps that was the point. Perhaps John wasn’t foretelling the literal End of Days, but had a very different goal in mind. It is possible that John put pen to paper to warn its readers of the ways in which evil manifests in the world, placing it in a Christian context in the hopes that followers of the ascendent faith would remain vigilant against would-be disasters. If so, it was a noble, if not naïve, hope.
As G.W.F. Hegel once said, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” Most often, we do cannot accurately anticipate events before they are already unfolding before our eyes, and even then, the signs are all too often misinterpreted. Throughout history since John’s time, tyrants and fools alike have risen to power and called their people to war on the false promise of victory and glory. Over and again, these promises fade like mist, as the beguiled masses bear witness to the ghastly reality of combat. How many times have the Horsemen trodden through blood-soaked battlefields and reduced resplendent cities to rubble? How many millions have borne witness to their own personal Armageddon, or suffered to their last gasp during the Apocalypse of their era? Revelation is generally regarded as a book of final prophecies, but if we look at it as a practical text for evading evil, we may be able to thwart a few of the beasts, antichrists, and plagues that have already visited us so many times before and are all but destined to come again. Perhaps now, we can finally take heed and learn from history, sidestep disaster, and lay the foundation for a better path to the future. However, there is no crystal ball, sacred text, rational equation, or holy prophecy that can assure us of the wisdom of our strategy. We can only learn of the efficacy of our tactics through practice. The resolve to implement such strategy takes a level of courage that requires a clear mind and a stoutness of heart that reaches far beyond the practical inadequacy of the comforts of blind faith and the assurances of religious illusions.
[1] https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/k/kjv/kjv-idx?type=DIV2&byte=5395677#:~:text=6,forth%20conquering%2C%20and%20to%20conquer.
[2] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/hunger-and-war/
[3] https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-was-the-battle-of-the-somme
[4]https://www.libs.uga.edu/news/wwipropaganda#:~:text=Propaganda%20often%20incorporated%20national%20symbols,fight%2C%20and%20raise%20war%20loans.
[5] https://www.cairn.info/revue-cahiers-bruxellois-2014-1E-page-173.html#:~:text=Berlin%20was%20the%20political%20centre,component%20in%20the%20urban%20panorama.
[6] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340389/