The Revelation 6:1-2 | Episode # 1038

October 1, 2025

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

The Revelation 6:1-2

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

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Transcript

This is Chad Harrison, and you're listening to Hope Applying God's word to your daily life.

Hi, this is Chad Harrison and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and have been serving as a pastor for 25 years.

I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life.

I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open up.

His word to you and allow you.

To see him and to know him and to know his will, that you might glorify him and that you might walk in faith and power each and every day, especially today in Jesus name.

Revelation, chapter six is the beginning really of the. Of the judgment of God. It is Jesus opening the seals. And remember, the seals are on the book, the book that no one can open except for Jesus.

And so when we're studying through Revelation chapter 6, it is the beginning of the judgment of God. There are gonna be three phases to the judgment. The first phase is the opening up of the seals.

And really the first four seals are separate from the second three seals. And so when we study through the book of the Revelation, we. We understand that there are things that are happening in progression.

And what I mean by that is sometimes when you're in a chapter, it has a timeline to it. And that timeline takes place during the Tribulation, during the seven and a half years.

Some of it is during the first part of what we call the Tribulation, which is the first three and a half years. And then the last three and a half years are what we call.

I guess the best way for me to describe it is the Great Tribulation, because the Bible describes it as that the last three and a half years of what we call the Tribulation is the Great Tribulation.

And that is when God's judgment's being poured out on the earth. And that is when the battle of what we call Armageddon. But it's really the battle at Megiddo,

or the time when God calls together the armies of the earth and defeats them.

This is a study of the judgments of God. And so when you have these time periods,

these are the beginning of the time periods. I believe that Revelation 6 begins the last three and a half years of God's judgment. When Jesus takes the scroll, he begins to open up the seals.

And as he begins to open up the seals, that brings about horn judgment. And then you got vile or bowl judgments. So there's seven judgments that have to do with the seals.

There's seven judgments have to do with the horns, and then there's seven judgments have to do with the bowls or the bowls of God's wrath, or the vials of God's wrath.

And so as we study through it, we kind of need to know that.

And those judgments take place over three and a half years. Although we're gonna have some interludes in there.

We're not just gonna straight go through each separate set of seven judgments. We're not gonna do that. We're gonna have some interludes where we talk about the Antichrist and the false prophet, and the Antichrist and the false prophet are a interlude.

And by the way, we don't know, but we're kind of sure that the Antichrist is going to be revealed during the seven year period. So this begins at the three and a half year period,

at the end of the seven years,

the Antichrist is revealed right at the beginning of the seven years. And so you can see each chapter has its timeline. And as you lay the timelines on top of each other, sure, you're progressing toward the end.

But oftentimes the interludes or the times where,

where God steps back and explains something or gives us a revelation, that is an understanding of what's going on contemporaneously with what's happening,

we can see that. And so the first four seals of the Revelation, they're famous too, okay? And as you're studying through the book of the Revelation, you realize that a lot of these things are famous.

They're famous because people had used them as well, sometimes even analogies in mythical stories that are written,

stories that have some kind of illusion toward the Revelation, but they're not actually accurate as far as what the Revelation teaches.

And the first four are the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And I know you've heard that if you've had any touch with the Revelation, if you ever had anybody talk about it or teach through it in any aspect, you're gonna hear about the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

And they're the four horsemen that go out. And what they really do is they prepare the earth for God's judgment. But they are a judgment in and of themselves.

Because when God prepares his judgment,

it is a work of his, it's a work of his wrath. And so these things are preparations for God's judgment. And in many ways they don't seem like they're all that terrible.

But, you know, as you,

as we study on into the book of the Revelation, you're gonna realize how terrible they actually are to have gone out and done and been a part of them. Now the last one is pretty bad, but the first three,

you know,

bad.

But nothing that we would say is horrific or devastating. It doesn't rise to the level of what most people think of the judgment of God that we find in the book of the Revelation.

And so when we're studying it, we gotta realize that that's where we're at and that's what we're seeing when we're dealing with this book and all the things that are going on with this book.

And so I love it because it gives us a heads up and it kind of tells us,

it gives us really kind of what's going on on the earth as the revelation and the judgment of God. God begins in the last three and a half years. And it begins with and I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals.

Now notice John's in heaven and he's actually visually seeing these things take place.

He's actually in heaven.

And so he's not having anything told to him.

He's literally seeing the seals opened and each rider of the apocalypse, each horse rider comes out.

And there's aspects to them that you can see and you can understand. And so he says, when I saw, then I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals.

And I heard, as it were word were the noise of thunder. Now the interesting thing about this is when you hear the voice of God himself in scripture, that's Old Testament and New Testament, if it has to do with judgment or God's holiness,

usually the voice is portrayed as sounding like thunder.

Okay, peels of thunder. You see that on the mountain where Moses goes up to receive the ten Commandments. And so you see that there.

You see also what sounds like the voice of many waters. And remember, the voice of many waters would sound like the voice of many languages.

Because waters represent language. It's the voice of many waters. It also represents the Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit and God speaking to all of humanity, all of creation, with the languages of all humanity and all creation.

And so you'll see that the voice of many waters generally alludes to God's revelation, which would be a work of God's grace. We don't see that here. We don't see the work of God's grace here.

What do we see? Well, we see the voice of God that sounds like thunder. That means that this is the voice of God or his will, as it were, toward,

toward judgment. And so the first beast is going to begin that judgment and notice one of the four beasts saying, come and see. He wants him to draw close and see what's going on.

Check it out. He says, come see what's happening over here. And so John draws near and he says, and I saw and behold a white horse. And he that sat on him had a bow and a crown was given unto him.

And he went forth conquering and to conquer.

So there is this horse goes out and he is a white horse.

And in many ways there are many who when they read this,

draw the correlation with Revelation 19,

where Jesus rides and conquers the earth on a white horse. So this might be an allusion toward the Antichrist. We're going to meet the Antichrist later on in the Revelation, or what we call the political Antichrist or.

And remember, there's two beasts that come out. One is the political Antichrist and the other is the beast out of the land who is a religious figure. And so we have really two antichrists, if you want to know the truth.

And so this rider has the appearance of a savior, a messiah. He's got the appearance of Jesus. Side he's riding the white horse like Jesus.

He has the appearance of being messianic. In some ways he's taking on the role of being messianic. Notice that he is powerful in that he has a bow,

which means he has the ability to kill.

Bows and the arrows back then they were hated and they were feared because you could kill somebody from a long way off.

Usually wars were fought face to face, person to person,

armies against armies, clashed in battle. And this goes on. This really goes on until the advent of firearms, okay? And even then,

armies would line up 30, 40, 20, 10 yards apart from each other and unleash 50 caliber rounds, huge rounds of ammunition at each other in balls and firing them and tearing through bodies and limbs and all that kind of stuff.

It's really horrific.

And it wasn't until we move on into having those things rapid fire in World War I and realize we can't be just sending waves of men up against firearms like that.

And then the modern warfare began in World War II and has gone on to today, which is a multi level warfare that involves air and land and sea.

And it's not the same.

But with this picture, it's a picture of a bow, which means he has military power, pretty great military power.

And he had a crown which was given him.

And that understanding of the idea of a crown here is that, you know,

it wasn't a crown that comes from being royalty. It's a crown that is gained by being victorious. It's Nikkei. It's the word. We get Nike, as far as the shoes are concerned.

It's this means to conquer.

And so this rider on this horse is a picture of a powerful rider who looks like Jesus.

He has the trappings of a messiah.

He's powerful militarily.

And not only that, he has a conquering. He conquers,

and the ability to conquer is given to him.

And he went forth conquering, and that's what it says.

He's got the crown and he goes forth conquering.

And he does conquer. Okay,

now, if you said, well, Pastor,

what do you think this represents? I actually think this represents what we would call today the capitalist or democratic societies of the Earth. They're very powerful.

NATO and the United States and Europe and our allies with Japan. And I can just start naming all the allies that we have around the world.

And we all operate kind of in the same democratic system, some of us parliamentary, some of us representative republics, like in the United States.

All these democracies are together. They're very powerful. They're very powerful economically, but they're very powerful militarily. Notice that the bow does not have arrows.

So the conquering that takes place is a form of conquering that does not involve the taking of life.

It is a conquering that involves conquering by some other means. And I actually think this has to do with the west and its ability to conquer other nations by economic means.

And so I think that God is laying out a framework God. This first seal is preparing the earth for his judgment. And one of the preparations that God makes for his judgment is what seems to be a messianic or has the essence of what we would call Godly, but is not Godly.

It conquers this pale. This rider on this white horse conquers.

And he's very powerful militarily, but he doesn't do it by killing, actually.

And so I actually have a feeling that this has to do with the military power of the West.

And it says that he conquers by victory.

Stephanos or Nikkei,

anyway, it says Christ returns in his triumph and it's complete.

This triumph is not going to be complete. In fact,

the Antichrist may very well be an elected figure. He may gain his power over the Western world by being elected official. And I do believe the Antichrist rules from the elected Western world.

I think that's pretty obvious in Scripture. It's not something that's.

That's really debated. It just depends on where he comes from,

because I think he really does have great control over not only Europe and Israel, but he has a great influence over the United States and maybe a powerful elected figure that we've not seen yet before.

We're going to see the Antichrist, and you're going to realize how amazing the Antichrist actually is as far as his his beauty and his knowledge and his insights and his abilities.

And he's going to be seductive. There's no doubt about it. The Antichrist, the beast out of the sea, is a seductive creature, a seductive in some ways, a human being for sure.

And he is. He changes the world.

As you go today, I pray that.

The Lord will bless you and keep you you that he'll make his face to shine upon you, and that he will give you hope and peace today. In Jesus name.