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
In concluding this section, 1 remark, that it is not within the scope of this exposition to occupy its pages in stating and examining the multitude of opinions and theories that have been broached by the many and various writers that have preceded me in attempts, all of which have proved futile attempts, at apocalyptical interpretation.
How gratifying, then, to the spectator when he beheld a coronal wreath bestowed upon him — "and there was given to him a Stephanos, ” not a diadema.
But John not only saw the coming of this “most happy and prosperous period” in the color of the horse, but he saw a rider upon him. The rider of a horse is one who governs, controls, influences him in all his movements. He is active, while the horse is passive and subject to his will. The Roman horse, or people, in this first seal- period, were to be ridden, or subjected to certain activities, which would result in such a consummation as was indicated by other elements of the figuration.
In regard to the period thus propitiously initiated by the reign of Nerva, Gibbon has remarked that, “were a man called to fix upon an epoch in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was the most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus,” namely, from A.D. 96, to A.D. 180.
“And 1 saw, and behold, a White Horse, and One sitting upon him having a Bow, and there was given to him a coronal wreath; and he went forth conquering, and that he might conquer. ”