Central Presbyterian Church, Russellville, Arkansas
Sunday, November 23, 2008
How curious then that the
horse figures so prominently in this last book of the Bible.
I see it as the figure, the beast of God’s total
judgment upon not only Israel, but also all the
nations, their evil, their greed, their inhumanity,
their false religion.
Jesus in his last days also warned
against this as he prophesied the
destruction of Jerusalem and the corrupted
temple worship, by none other than the
Romans, the riders of the horses of war.
For Israel’s history, in the words of
a commentator on Revelations 6, "became a
litany of catastrophic decline from the
singlehearted devotion" which YHWH demanded.
God had to descend upon the nations of
humanity as the Russians had the Afghan
tribesmen in a wave of destruction,
pestilence, famine and death, in a total
eschatological catastrophe before God
might re-create his own earth as the Eden,
the new Heaven and Earth he had once
envisioned and provided.
And ironically he did it by
means of the 4 horses and their
riders, man’s own creature, not
God’s.
It is said that the horse is
one of the most ancient of all
animals, some 65 million years ago.
Scientists telll us that the
earliest ancestor of the modern
Equus, horse, was a small
animal, the Eohippus, that
look more like a greyhound or
whippet and was found all across the
earth.
The first horse and its rider comes as a
conqueror.
The horse is white, and his
rider whom we cannot see, is given a bow
and a crown.
The beast is allowed to go out
and conquer the saints, God’s
people.
This is the judgment of our own
history, of course.
In the scheme of Revelation, the
sequence of the 7 Trumpets, the
advent of this horse and rider is
accompanied by hail and fire mixed with
blood;
1/3 of the earth is burned up.
What kind of bow did he have? The bow
of the archer or of the rainbow?
Interestingly, it is the same
word as for rainbow in Ezekiel,
chapter 1.
There is an obvious dichotomy or
double meaning here!
Some say the white horse is
the one ridden by Christ the
Conquering Lamb who appears later on
in Revelation, chapter 19.
Others say it is the
Anti-Christ, who appears to be like
Christ.
Thus the rainbow and the
archer’s bow stand in tension in
human annals, choose life or death;
choose to be servant or warrior.
Look closely at Fred Shepard’s white
horse:
It is the only creature with
an eye, and a finished
face.
For me the eye is the eye of
God, the Trinity,
the only One who sees
completely the vision of the Kingdom
of the future that will follow, when
God’ new Heaven shall come.
the only beast in the
painting with character and
personality.
The eye is that which
separates you and me from the
Godhead.
He is about to drink from the
polluted river, with its wormwood or
poison, and the water mixed with the
blood as in the first plague in
Egypt caused by the staff of Moses.
This horse represents the
presence of Christ’s Incarnation in
the midst of human evil and God’s
judgment upon it. And as this horse
will drink of the polluted river, it
too must die for our sins as must
all the horses.
It likewise sees
clearly that he must drink
of the river of death.
The second horse and its rider is a very
bright red. Its rider takes peace from the earth so
that every man and woman and child will turn on
their neighbor and kill them.
The second trumpet which is soundedin chapter 8, has a fiery
mountain thrown into the body of water, 1/3
of the sea creatures are suffocated, and the
water turns to blood. (page 2)
Look at the horse in Fred’s painting:
its nostrils flayed open, its lips pulled
back, all caution to the wind, and greedily
sucks in the putrid stream.
This is a representation of
all of us in civilization who are
power brokers, who use our neighbor
and toss her aside, who are drunk
with excess,
Like this red velvet horse in
the painting, they too have their
reward and have poisoned themselves;
they will be the first to die.
the opposite of those whom
Christ blesses as the peacemakers on
earth, the merciful, and the pure in
heart who are God’s true children.
Now the third living creature: is it this
horse black as midnight that says, "‘Come!’"
(with an exclamation point!)
Its rider has a balance in its
hand, as if it says, after the manner of the
scene in Daniel, like the handwriting on the
wall, "‘You have been weighed in
the balance and found wanting.’"
With the third trumpet sound, the
water is made bitter after a star falls from
heaven, people must die from drinking this
water.
A voice is heard from somewhere in the
midst of these 4 creatures, that offers a
quart of wheat or 3 measures of barley for a
days’ pay! But do not touch the price of
olive oil or wine.
In a time of sever economic
downswing, famine, or pestilence the
first place you will be cheated is
not at the gas pump, but at the
grocery store counter where everyone
is stocking up or hoarding the
essential staples of food.
It is pure greed and
it is deadly!
I learned in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina that the first
thing those who stayed behind want
is a gun; the second thing is water!
Now do any of you remember our
Invitation to Confession today?
Lord, your invitation to us is
always, "Come." It was Isaiah’s
invitation to come to the waters,
each of us who has no money and yet
is thirsty. It is Christ’s
invitation to his table; it is your
invitation in the book of Revelation
and your glorious new kingdom. And
so now we come...
After such a devastating scenario as
painted in "Revelation 6," and those
wormwood waters, what could be more
"heavenly" than the vision the water from
the river of life that flows from under the
throne of God which is a clear as crystal,
like the glass sea upon which God’s throne
rests!
On either side of this now-life giving
river grows the tree of life, which yields
12 different kinds of fruit each month, and
the leaves are for the healing of the
nations.
This now in a place where
there is now no more death and no
more hunger and no more disease.
Are there any horses? I do not know.
A reinterpretation of a Native
Am story from the North Pacific
tells of a time when the earth was
very young. The chief or God lived
in the upper world & a man & a woman
lived on the earth. The Outcast or
the Devil lived in the lower world.
God frequently visited the earth &
talked with the two people. One Day
the Devil heard he was coming for a
visit. So the Devil created an
animal like a horse & made it appear
before the man & woman. The woman
said, "This is God come to visit
us." The man said it was not. When
the Chief, or God, came to earth, &
when the two people saw the God's
hands they recognized him. God
wetted both his thumbs, pressed them
on the animal & marked him, saying,
"Henceforth you will be a horse & a
servant & plaything of the people, &
they will use you for many
purposes.". Then he wetted his
thumbs & marked the man & the woman,
saying, "Henceforth you will be a
servant of mine, your God, & will
use you for many purposes."
We had said that God himself had to
come riding into our civilization as a
conquering warrior on horseback to
completely reverse the sickness and evil
humanity has created. Only in this way could
God redeem us and recreate a new heaven and
a new earth.
This is the lesson of the
Incarnation and the Cross, and of
the white horse and its rider.
This is the unseen vision, the vision that is yet
to be, what you do not see in the painting.
Scripture attests that only the pure
in heart will see God and his final kingdom,
those who have stayed the
course,
whose names have not been
erased from the book of life,
whose clothes are not soiled.
Interpret the symbolism however you
will, it is the beautiful water that wells
up in me as the gift of eternal life, which
Jesus promised the woman at the well that I
want to see.
