“It was given to him (the rider) to take the peace from the earth. ” “The earth" in this place cannot be the earth wherever men dwell, comprehending what we term Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Australasia. The last two were unknown to the ancients; and may therefore certainly be excluded from “the earth" having relation to events being transacted in their time.
“And there was given to him (the rider) a great dagger.” So I render the words, kai edothe auto machaira megale. In the English Version, machaira megale is rendered a great sword. My objection to this is, that in the symbolization of the Fourth Seal the sword<
John refers to the rider by the phrase “him who sits upon him.” This equestrian is a symbolical personage, not representative of an individual man, but of a class of agents blindly executing retribution upon those obnoxious to the Lamb’s displeasure. He evidently represents a class of agents endued with the power of the sword, and who could wield it in the cause of peace or war.
In the first seal the horse was white — it was in peace and prosperity; but the horse in the second seal appears under an administration that “takes away the peace from the earth.” Hence the redness of the horse — a horse dyed with blood — with arterial blood the life of the flesh, and therefore its fiery rather than a purple hue.
When the Lamb opened the first seal, John’s attention was called to the fact by a voice “as of a voice of thunder;” but in the opening of the second, he hears a voice of the same import, only without the thunder. There was no hurling of the tyrant Marcus Aurelius Antoninus into the shades of death by the hands of an assassin, and the revocation of his edicts, and declaring his memory infamous, by the decrees of an indignant Senate, as in the case of Domitian.
In my previous exposition I have shown that the Bowman of the first seal is emblematic of the spirit of the heavens manifested in the “we all” who had "come to a perfect man," who was engaged in an earnest contention for the faith against the superstition and infidelity of the world. This was that one styled by the Spirit in David, in Psa.
Vol. 1. p. 428,436
The Epheso-Smyrnean State of the Ecclesias degenerates into the Pergamian. The doctrine of Balaam and the Nikolaitanes gaining the ascendancy. Celsus, a heathen opponent of the word, objects, that Christians were now so split into sects, that the name, Christian, only remained to them in common.
ACT II. — SEAL-PERIOD SECOND Apoc. 6:3,4
Apoc. 20:7-10.
Apoc. 14:13.
FOURTH SECTION OF THE SEVENTH SEAL
“THE GREAT DAY OF AIL-SHADDAI”
Apoc. 10:2