“Last things,” we’ve called our study on the book of Revelation. This morning we’re poking around in chapters 6 & 7. Which means we’ve now officially reached the point when many churches, and many pastors…quit. In this wild, image-laden, apocalyptic style of the writer John, we’ve already seen an amazing opening picture of Christ. We’ve glimpsed Him located squarely in the middle of the Church, the real earthly church. Last week, we were taken up into heaven and glimpsed the amazing worship service going on there, honoring Christ the Lamb. Amazing. Holy. Beautiful. But now…it gets more complicated. And frankly, harder.

What do you call evil? Perhaps you think of 800,000 Rwandans murdered in 100 days in 1994 by their own countrymen. Perhaps you think of someone robbing a handicapped person of their life savings. Perhaps brave enough to think of something in you, own life and thoughts. Big or small, I bet you think of the things that work against God’s desires for the world. How does Revelation picture it?

The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They’re pictured on the front of the bulletin. Literature is full of allusions and connections to this famous image. In Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities, a story of oppression and conflict…four horsemen arrive at the chateau of a wealthy nobleman to burn it to the ground.

In Toni Morrison’s dark and powerful novel Beloved, another story of oppression and pain, “four horsemen come- a schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sherriff,” who show up to recapture a slave woman and her children.

Culture and history also have had a good time with the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” The all-star backfield of the 1924 Notre Dame football team was nicknamed “The 4 Horsemen of Notre Dame.”

Or there’s a cocktail that you can order called “The Four Horsemen,” with one shot each of Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, Johnny Walker and Jose Cuervo. Please don’t try this at home!

The church has played around with the picture of the Four Horsemen as well. But we, of all people, need to be careful. Remember that the first readers of Revelation were people in a group of 1st century churches, and that this letter was read in the context of danger. Persecution was in the air.

In Revelation 2, a man named Antipas had apparently been martyred for his faith in Pergamum. The news was that the Jerusalem deacon Stephen had been martyred for his faith, a story told in Acts 7. James the Apostle’s murder is recorded in Acts 12. Apparently James, the brother of Jesus and the head of the Jerusalem church had been stoned to death in AD 62. And shortly thereafter, the crazed Roman emperor Nero had numbers of Christians crucified, torn to pieces by wild dogs or burned to death. Being a Christian was a life and death situation. That’s the context that Revelation was read in.

And that is still the context to read it in. Hans Milleau, a friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s once said “The book of Revelation should be preached, but it shouldn’t be played with…people who suffer never play with the book of Revelation.”

And we are in a world of suffering. There is evil present here, doing it’s horrible work of separation. Evil separates us from God. From one another. From God’s creation. Evil is present and it wins many, many battles in our world.

Someday, some way we will move off of the classic modernist sentiment that the world is moving progressively forward.

Someday we will fess up to the fact that we have not, are not and will not eliminate the effects of the presence of evil in this world by more education, by improved psychology, by the spread of Western Democracy or capitalism or any other system.

Someday we will admit that the horrors of WWI, the abominations of the Holocaust and WWII, all of the wars, all of the genocides and ethnic cleansings (including our complicity or powerlessness to stop them) which continue right up to today…all of this must surely someday convince us that things are not progressively improving.

Evil is present. And strong. “Postmodernism” as a movement may have strengths and weaknesses, but surely one of its strengths is that it recognizes this: Things are not progressively getting better. We are not gradually figuring out how to eliminate evil and its effects. This is the picture that Revelation 6 wants to give to us.

Remember that at this point, John has brought us up into heaven and the perspective we have is looking from heaven down to the earth. And as we might imagine, the view of life on earth from up there…is considerably different than it is from down here. It’s always that way. The way we see things is often not the way God sees them.

So what is the picture?

We see Jesus the Lamb, the only one capable of removing the seven seals from the scroll begin to do that work. The first four seals unleash four horses with four riders…the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

The first is a white horse, with a rider with a bow and a crown who comes to conquer. There is great debate over the identity of this rider. Some think it is the first of four terrors. I think it is actually a picture of Jesus Christ, the victorious one going to do battle on the earth. In Revelation 19, we’ll get a similar picture of a rider on a white horse who is clearly and unmistakably Jesus.

The second horse is bright red, blood red, whose rider has a sword, and removes peace from the earth and encourages slaughter. The horse and rider of WAR.

The third horse is black. The rider has a pair of scales, justice, in his hand and the voice shouts that the commodities impoverished people need to live, wheat and barley, have skyrocketed in price, 15 times as much as usual. A normal worker can’t even feed his family, while at the same time the luxuries of the wealthy, like olive oil and wine, are protected. The horse and rider of famine (or economics or greed).

The fourth horse is pale, sickly green, and the rider is identified as Death. The horse and rider of plague, disease, pestilence.

These are the forces unleashed by the opening of the seals.

Notice that while it is Christ who opens the seals, he is not the one who sends the War, Famine and Disease out. Another way of saying that might be that while God has allowed such things, he does not create or cause them.

And notice also, that if I am right about the identity of the first horse and rider, (that it is Jesus) as the terrors go out, Christ does as well. Into the world. Into a world racked by war, famine and plague, notice that Jesus shows up there as well.

It wouldn’t have taken people of any generation, from the first century right down through history, much time to apply this picture to their own world. It shouldn’t take us more than a few minutes either.

WAR?

Iraq, Afghanistan, , Israel/Palestine. Nearly 20 places in the world right now that are easily identified as wartime situations. Israel is building a 450 mile wall they think will keep bloodshed away. Sudan, Uganda. There are children pressed into military service. One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. Peace disappears.

FAMINE & INJUSTICE?

Hundreds of thousands of people go without food every day. Many more are consistently hungry. Millions of children will die this year mainly because of lack of food. Wealthy countries have more than enough food. Poor ones do not have enough. The wealthy become more and more insulated. The U.S. is building a 700 mile wall at the Mexican border to keep others out.

PLAGUE. DISEASE. HIV/AIDS.

Three million deaths per year. People are dying in some places from things easily preventable in others. Malaria and Tuberculosis kill over a million people each every year. And at the same time those countries with the best medical care in the world available…might be the sickest in other ways. We’ve forgotten compassion. Forgotten about others. We thought that we could just hide behind walls and be happy.

War, famine, disease…such threats to life. Or maybe, in a slightly different way, we might see these terrors as invitations or temptations to put our trust in things that last only until the horseman arrives.

In the first century the popular cry was Pax Romana, Roman peace. The hope of the world was in a conquering sword, the might of a nation…which would eventually crumble into pieces. Or people sought security in the Roman economic system, the most powerful in history. But systems fail to produce prosperity that is shared. Or people glorified the human body, athletics and beauty. Yet it aged, broke, grew sick or tired. They…and we are invited to trust in so many things that have so little long-lasting value.

Surely, these early Christians were asking the question:

• What about our faith?
• Does it make any difference here?
• Or are we just on our own to survive the best we can and there’s some kind of reward in heaven later?

When we encounter evil or suffering, do we not ask the exact same questions?

Our world is full of war, famine and disease. But one of the things that struck me as I looked at this was: we do have the capabilities of healing at least some of these terrible things.

War is caused by human beings.

Famine has any number of causes, yet we have the food and technology to feed the world, yet we don’t, or won’t.

Disease…we spend more on taking our pets to the vet than we do caring for those who are sick around the world. We human beings could stop many of these things...and yet we do not. And so before we rail against the One who opens the seals we have to look at our own culpability.

How should we feel when we read Revelation?

• Revelation should make us uncomfortable.
• Revelation ought to make us wonder where we see God in this world, and run to volunteer…not take cover behind our fences.
• We ought to be spending far more time pondering how we can follow Christ into a messy world than calculating the possible dates for the end of time.

The fifth seal reveals those killed on the earth because of their faith. Anyone who wants to talk or write books or make movies about Christians being magically airlifted out of the world need to read carefully here. The voices of the martyrs are crying out, like the Psalmist’s often does, “God, how long? How long does this have to go on?” They are surprisingly told… “a little longer.”

But they are rewarded, given the white robes of heaven. Here is another example of how differently things look from heaven’s perspective. From an earthly viewpoint, these martyrs have lost. The world would say they were misguided, or that they gave it everything they had and were defeated. Too bad. But looking from heaven…they’re winners. Big time. Robed in white, in the presence of Christ for eternity.

The sixth seal reveals the natural world shaken to its foundations, earthquakes and the whole cosmos changing to the point it made people run and hide in the hills.

War, famine, plague, martyrdom, natural disaster. We live in a world filled with suffering and evil. The early church lived in such a world filled with suffering and evil.

Where is the hope?

Chapter 7 shows a huge crowd of people, sealed in Christ, still upon the earth. Even though many have been martyred (as we read), many remain. John hears their number, 144,000…the 12 tribes of Israel, the 12 apostles multiplied by a thousand. It’s complete, and it’s big. It is the people marked as Christ’s own.

Now, there are people who have spent years trying to figure out exactly who is in the 144,000. It’s not a math number. It’s a symbolic number. It has meaning. It’s the church, the followers of Christ.

Or looking at it from another angle a few verses later, the crowd is shown to be: multinational, multitribal, multilingual, in heaven, robed in white, worshipping.

Whether Christ’s people are martyred, still battling on earth or gathered into God’s heaven…they are not alone. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil…for you are with me.” In the end, evil cannot separate them from Christ. God has sealed them in grace. It’s not that evil is absent. But it is not allowed to do its horrible separating work. Eugene Peterson writes “We are protected from the God-separating effects of evil even as we experience the suffering caused by evil.”

Let me just give you two things to walk out with this morning.

First, if we read the book of Revelation carefully, as pervasive as evil is- and it will consume many of the following chapters-it is boundaried. It is limited. Christ is at the beginning of Revelation and at the End. Christ is in chapter 1 and in chapter 21. He is the first seal and his will be the last seal. The last word on evil is that it is not forever.

Second, remember how God deals with us in Christ. What was God’s way of dealing with suffering? Coming to live in the midst of it with us. What was God’s way of dealing with evil? The cross. Absorbing it into himself, even forgiving it.

And whatever hope we have for being part of the work of God’s kingdom will come not from our illusions that the world is getting better…but from our ability to grab ahold of and live the extravagant love and forgiveness of Christ into the world.

Evil is powerful. But God is more powerful. Evil is long-lasting. But it is not forever. NT Wright says “Evil may still be a four-letter word. But so, thank God, is l-o-v-e.”

Let us pray.