Week 51 Revelation 6
Today I read about the four horsemen that John saw in Revelation six. And I thought back to Zechariah’s vision. A similar vision. There were four horses back there too: two red horses & a sorrel & a white. Zechariah wondered who the riders were and he was told: they are the ones the Lord has sent out to patrol the earth (Zechariah learned the earth was peaceful and quiet).
Things shape up a little differently in John’s vision. The focus there is on a sealed scroll – an Unopenable Book – that no one but the Lamb could access (chapter five implies that the Lamb is the Lord). When the Lamb began to break the seals the Unopenable Book seems less like a book and more like a huge vault with doors that start swinging open and from behind the first four doors ride John’s four horsemen. But John’s horsemen were different. For one thing the horses were different colors: white & red & black & off-white. And the horsemen hadn’t been patrolling. They’d been confined and inactive but now they’d been released to subject the earth to international-warfare famine disease & death. The four horsemen of the Revelation are about to inflict serious damage.
So I don’t know if there’s a connection between Zechariah’s four horsemen and John’s. Four horse-riders is a tempting similarity. But there’s differences too. So for now I’ll not complicate Revelation by trying to connect it to Zechariah.
Note: see Zechariah 1:8. Quote from Zechariah 1:10 (NLT)