The First Seal: The White Horse

Revelation 6:1-2

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And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures saying with a voice like thunder, Come! And I saw, and behold, a white horse, and the one sitting on it having a bow and there was given to him a crown and he went out conquering and in order to conquer. Revelation 6:2

Each time John saw the Lamb open a seal and heard each living creature say “Come,” John successively saw four horses of different colors: white, red, black, and then green. Upon each was a rider “sitting upon it.” The first and third riders had something already in their hands. The first, second and fourth riders were given a commission or authority to act. The second rider was later given an object. Beyond these patterns, the content of each is distinctly different.

I could say here that these seals with the horses, etc., are simply a vision with no significance, but that would betray the very words of 4:1 “I will show you what must be after these things.”

Some sort of significance is built into the visions.

Questions

Asking questions is one way to inquire into that significance (these are my questions; other interpreters may have different ones).

Do the respective living creatures connect metaphorically with the seals?

Who are the riders? Are the riders different? Could it be the same rider?

Do the colors of the horses have metaphorical significance?

What sources do we draw from to determine the significance of the objects and the commissions?

Do the horses, riders, and content relate to the gospel in any way?

How do the first four seals relate to the fifth and sixth seals? And the seventh?

“Come” (again)

Before addressing any of them, I want to go back to something I dealt with in the last post, the command “Come.”

One of the IPS subscribers, Kathy, suggested to me another book on Revelation, Discipleship on the Edge by Darrell Johnson.

I realized later that I had read the book years ago and wondered what Johnson said about the seals, so I tracked it down (thanks archive.org!).

Johnson’s comment on “Come” blew me away, and immediately resonated as a distinct possibility: The four living creatures are imploring Jesus to come!!

All throughout Revelation Jesus says he is coming soon and at the very end the church begs “Come, Lord Jesus” in Revelation 22:20.

The four living creatures are representatives of creation who are asking this very thing. May your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in the heavens.

Lots of theology in that one word “come.”

What are the implications?

Could it be that Jesus was the rider on each horse?

We’ll see.

An argument can fairly easily be made for the first three.

The fourth horse though has a named rider, Death with Hades following. The weeks ahead should be interesting!

The White Horse and its Rider

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s focus on the white horse and rider and divide the description into four parts:

1. A white horse and the one sitting on it 2. Having a bow 3. There was given to him a crown and 4. And he went out conquering and in order to conquer (completely).

1. A white horse and the one sitting on it.

Thesis: White is the color of purity and Jesus is the rider, literally “the one sitting on it.”

Many commentators of the past one hundred ninety years (since roughly 1830) have taken Paul’s statement that Satan masks himself as an angel of light to argue that this horse and its rider represents a deceiver, 1. either the Anti-christ, who will challenge Christ’s reign, or 2. generally empires who attempt to conquer the world.

The Antichrist view (1.) is primarily that of premillennial-dispensationalists introduced by J. N. Darby in the 1830s and made popular in the Scofield Bible.

The latter interpreters (2.) have taken the white horse to be the sign of a conquering general who seeks to rule the world, so interestingly even many current Bible scholars follow the trajectory of dispensationalist view, though the rider only represents earthly conquest not necessarily the Antichrist (every commentary I listed in the last post).

But prior to 1830 —including the church fathers, medieval interpreters, Reformation interpreters and, with a few exceptions, up to the mid-19^th century —the horse and its rider represented Christ and/or the advance of the gospel.

The formulations were slightly varied, but the point was the same: the white horse and its rider were the same as Revelation 19!

There are certainly quite a few interpreters who have continued this view, but the turn to the exact opposite by so many is surprising.

Over eighteen centuries of consistent interpretation (I give an extensive history of interpretation in the paid subscriber section) pointed to Jesus and the gospel and there is nothing in Revelation itself to contradict this view.

Here is some data that I think supports this view:

Revelation uses “white” sixteen times and none of those suggest anything but purity.

The only other white horse in Revelation is in Revelation 19:11 and Jesus is its rider.

The language is precisely the same in both: “Behold, a white horse and the one sitting upon it …” and referred to again in 19:19—in contrast to the beast in the same verse.

Jesus is the conquerer there, so there is no reason to not see him as the conquerer here either (though as we will see, the conquering is not with physical violence, but through his own blood and the truth of the gospel).

In the New Testament, Jesus was dazzling white at the transfiguration, the angels at the tomb of Jesus were dressed in white, as well as the angels at Jesus’s ascension in Acts 1.

The prophet Zechariah saw white, red, black and bay-colored horses in two different dreams (1:7–13; 6:1–8)—and most scholars think John created his vision with these horses in mind, including the white horse.

I beg to differ.

John’s horses are very different from those of Zechariah.

Those were plural and together (and those in Zech 6 pulling chariots), these in Revelation 6 are singular with a singular rider on each. And there is no green horse in Zechariah. And what the horses did in Zechariah was totally unrelated to the horses of Revelation 4.

John saw four horses, one at a time, in his vision, with a rider—“the one sitting on it”— and distinct descriptions for each.

Speaking of “the one sitting on it,” this language is the same as God sitting on his throne in Revelation 4 and 5.

Each rider could be different or the same rider is on each.

(continued)

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2. Having a bow.

This image of a horse and a rider with a bow would be familiar to those of the first century.

The horse-borne archers from the kingdoms east of the Euphrates (now Iraq and Iran) were famous for their military exploits with bows.

The rider on this white horse has a weapon to shoot arrows that pierce and kill.

This appears to be an image of physical violence (albeit in a vision), but if we take John’s use of visionary metaphor seriously, then the bow is not literal but represents something else.

Is this an metaphorical image of Jesus?

I believe yes.

We’ve already seen Jesus as a Lion and as a Lamb. Now he is a rider (as he will be in Revelation 19) with a bow.

The early interpreters of the first five centuries all saw the rider as Jesus.

And they saw the arrows from the bow as the gospel that pierced hearts to bring about faith.

This insight is key to most of the “violence” in Revelation.

It is those who have trusted in Christ who die!

And the one who puts them to “death” is Jesus through the word of the cross!

I need an entire post to set this statement into the context of New Testament theology and all of the posts ahead to show how this works out in Revelation. Stay tuned.

3. There was given to him a crown.

In Revelation, this term for crown, stephanos, occurs eight times: “crown of life” once in 2:10 (and one referencing that crown in 3:11), “golden crowns” three times 4:4, 9:7, 14:14 (and a reference to golden crowns, 4:10), “a crown of twelve stars” in 12:1, and here in 6:2, a “crown” alone with no other descriptor (what Jesus wears in 19:12 is not a stephanos, but many diadems—multiple royal jeweled crowns).

When I spoke about the twenty-four elders I mentioned that the golden crowns they wore were victory garlands plated with gold.

It is strange that this crown is not distinguished with gold.

But from the Gospels, we know that Jesus did wear an actual crown.

If this is Jesus, then this visionary crown represents the crown of thorns as described in Matthew 27:29, Mark 15:17; and most pertinently John 19:2 and 5 (and Jesus wears a purple—royal—robe in the Gospels).

No metaphor but a direct relationship between the visionary crown and Jesus’s literal crown.

The crown was given to him. If you think to the passion narrative, the soldiers forced a crown on Jesus at the crucifixion, but in this visionary case it is given from God.

It was God’s plan that Jesus need suffer in order to redeem the world. God crowned him “with glory and honor” (Psalm 8).

(cont.)

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4. And he went out conquering and to conquer.

Many modern interpreters, in a rejection of every use of conquer so far in Revelation, take this image as literal war and apply it to an earthly conquerer or the Antichrist.

Yet in Revelation and in the Gospel of John and 1 John, “conquer (Greek: nikaō)” is almost totally used for Jesus and his followers:

John 16:33 “In the world you will have tribulation, but take courage, I have conquered the world.”

1 John 2:13 “I write to you young men because you have conquered the evil one.”

1 John 4:4 “You are from God, children, and you have conquered them, because greater is the One in you than the one in the world.” (Also 1 John 5:4-5).

Revelation 2–3: “(to) the one who conquers” seven times. Most pertinent is 3:21 “The one who conquers I will grant to sit with me on my throne as also I conquered and sat with my Father on his throne.”

Revelation 5:5 “And one of the elders says to me, ‘Don’t cry, the Lion from the tribe of Judah, the root of Jesse, has conquered in order to open the scroll and its seals.’”

Some commentators point out that conquer is past tense in these instances, but present tense in this first seal, thus the conquering hasn’t happened yet.

But this opinion does not take into account that the seals are revelatory of things, not predictive. The Lamb opened the seal to reveal what was there.

What the Lamb revealed was Himself as the victorious crucified Messiah who came to redeem the world with the truth of the gospel.

This conclusion leads me back to consider the lion-faced creature who with thunderous voice said, “Come.” This creature is connected symbolically with the Lion of Judah, the conquering Davidic Messiah, but who would conquer not with violence but with suffering.

The seals to follow will only reinforce this view.

For paid subscribers I have the normal Observations on the Greek Text of Revelation plus a long sampling of interpretations of the white horse and rider from the second century to now using Grok 3.

Observations on the Greek Text of Revelation