May 25 2022
THE FOUR GALLOPING HORSES.
The last Bible book, Revelation, is big on horses: horses of different colors, white, black, red, pale. They are feared because they foreshadow the last days of the world we live in, and warn us that before the end comes, terrible disasters will take place. That’s why these four horses are called apocalyptic. Their different colors, too, have different meanings, and warn us that The End is near, almost always totally ignored by us.
THE WHITE HORSE
The first horse is white, and the rider carries a bow and arrow, and wears a crown. White indicates ‘holiness’. That’s why the Pope’s official attire is white. The Pope, just like this horse, is charged to bring the Good News, and the arrow to me suggests that, in the last days, the bringing of the gospel resembles the random shooting of an arrow, which yet finds its intended target, something that happens when we browse the World-Wide-Web.
THE RED HORSE
The book of Revelation does not see the rider on his red horse as a normal phenomenon, not as something that belongs to the usual course of events. Here God himself dispatches this rider, as he starts his journey from the heavens. The Red Horse has the mandate to “take peace from the earth.” (See Revelation 6: 4). It indicates that God’s no longer restrains the forces by which humanity will destroy itself.
Wars have a tendency to spread. We already see that the war in Ukraine has become a world war, as many nations are directly involved in supplying weapons to that beleaguered country. This also means that OUR WAR AGAINST CREATION, is pushed from the headlines, as hot wars intensify this conflict, making climatic disasters grow worse, and excessive heat, historic drought, floods, unheard-of storms become the norm. All these, too, are part of the Red Horse curse.
THE BLACK HORSE
After the red horse always come the black horse. War always brings scarcity, so prices always go up. A war sucks out so much raw materials for destructive purposes that shortages are the inevitable result. Today’s inflation is only the beginning. While the Environmental War greatly diminishes yields, causing hunger, hot wars, with the two-fold disasters of destruction and the need to manufacture war materials, always accelerates the price of goods.
THE PALE HORSE.
The Pale Horse represents death, pure and simple, magnified by the likelihood of more pandemics, overtaxing an already stressed medical system.
A LOOK BACK.
Of course, wars, weather events, terrible pandemics, have been the makers of history. But then, these happenings – the ‘Calamitous 14th Century’ comes to mind – were more or less regional, occurring before the Americas, Africa and Australia were discovered, and before the world population ballooned from millions to billions in my lifetime. Today all events are global and totally intertwined: that too, indicates the End.
For all the efforts of various activists, and promises by governments to restrain dangerous global heating, carbon emissions leapt world-wide last year as we reverted back to the polluting status quo before Covid lockdowns. Wildfires are now a year-round menace to the US west and especially to Siberia. Last week Friday, May 20, it was 51C in Pakistan, while India baked in such extreme, record heat that dozens of people died and birds were falling from the sky. And the real heat has yet to come!
ARCTIC NEWS regularly points out that: once the buried methane in the shallow Arctic Ocean is released, a sudden flareup will cause total global death.
As the food “apocalypse” approaches, the poorest peoples will suffer, as they always do, while we, in the wealthiest part of the world, may be insulated for a little while longer. When, not if, that happens, we will see extreme political turbulence, humanitarian crises, instability and geo-strategic rivalries across a hungry world. Already the USA is a deeply divided country, where LIE and Political Untruth is rampant, where guns abound, steroid deaths are skyrocketing, and, in general, the mood is bordering on desperation.
Of course.
Natural disasters and the human condition go hand in hand. Religious thinking is totally opposite of biblical givens: Rapture and Heaven feature prominently in the ecclesiastical world. Churches are pre-occupied with abortion and related issues, while Christ’ return to reclaim creation as his own, is ridiculed as heresy.
In all this, the words of Revelation 18: 10-17, will come as a total surprise: “In one hour your doom has come……….in one hour such great wealth has been brought to ruin.” This passage signals STAGFLATION, now expected to happen, before the sudden end. That great wealth is concentrated in North America and Western Europe! It points to us, you and me.
The Parousia, the Lord’s Coming, will come as a total surprise: no advance notice: only the signs, now everywhere.