"AND THE THUNDER ROLLS"
Let me say at the outset that my intention with this particular article is not to interpret the passages in Revelation to which we will be referring but rather to demonstrate their tremendous relevancy to the devastating problems that we are presently facing in our world today.
Anyone who has had the misfortune to be in a war zone will tell you that the sounds of war - the enemy jets flying overhead, the missiles filling the sky like mosquitoes, tanks plowing through anything that gets in their way - these are not sounds that anyone enjoys hearing. They fill the heart with a tremendous dread and fear that goes all the way to the bone. The same thing was true during the apostle John’s day back in the first century, but of course rather than sounds of missiles and tanks theirs were the sounds of galloping enemy horses, the sound of approaching hoof beats. In the same manner that the sound of an approaching missile would certainly frighten you or me, in those days it was the sound of a horses’ hooves pounding into the ground that brought tremendous fear and dread because those were the sounds of an advancing enemy. An army of soldiers on horseback sounded like thunder rolling. It is in the book of Revelation that John describes the approaching hoof beats of four specific Horsemen known as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and he describes these four horsemen as the pouring out of God’s judgment upon the earth. There is a white horse, a red horse, a black horse, and a pale horse. In succession they bring with them (1) deception (false religions), (2) war, (3) hunger, and (4) pestilence. Virtually everything that these four riders represent has been fulfilled which means that our world sits on the precipice of the second coming of Christ. We can hear the rolling thunder of those hoof beats echoing throughout the four corners of the world announcing the soon return of our mighty Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
The hills, seas, lands and oceans of our world all reverberate with the billowing thunder of these horsemen beginning with the horse of deception and false religions. At present there are at least 43 known "religions" in the world; "And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many" (Matthew 24:11). "For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall shew signs and wonders, to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect" (Mark 13:22). It has been said that religion is the WORST thing that has ever happened to this world; Countless souls have been lost by false religion. Mankind must realize that a "religion" didn't die on the cross on our behalf - Jesus Christ did! Man’s greatest need is not for religion, his greatest need is for a Saviour, and we have one (and only one) in the person of Jesus Christ.
"WAR," (the second horse) follows the horse of deception. At any given moment there are an estimated 32 to 40 wars taking place somewhere throughout our world. In fact, when we go back to the beginning of recorded history and trace those records all the way to present day what we find is that 92 percent of the time that it has existed our world has been at war. Only eight percent of the time has our world been at peace. There have been an incredible eight thousand peace treaties that have been broken and there is literally never a single moment when our world is in a state of complete peace.
The third horse brings "hunger &famine." According to the Center For World Hunger every two seconds a child dies as a result of famine, more than 40,000 children dying every day because they starve to death. The most recent estimate, released in October 2010 by FAO, (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization) says that 925 million people are undernourished (1 in 7 people).
The fourth horse brings with it "Disease and Pestilence". There are thousands of diseases in our world today. According to the World Health Organization, of the 57 million global deaths in 2008, an astounding 36 million of those were due to disease. The Bureau of Communicable Disease Control New York State Department of Health recently listed well over one hundred communicable diseases. There are more than 210 known human infectious diseases, many of them deadly. Even more alarming is that many of these infectious and deadly diseases which were once treatable have already grown immune to our antibiotics and our efforts to control them. Add to all of this the fact that our nations national debt is nearly 15 Trillion dollars....gas prices are up more than one thousand percent from just 35 or 40 years ago....the cost of living has reached epidemic proportions....more and more people are losing their homes, and then you hear more clearly the ominous sound of these four horses’ hooves beating into the ground and echoing throughout every land, nation, country and continent in the world. These four horsemen so vividly described by the apostle John echo the words and warnings spoken by Jesus Christ Himself in the book of Matthew when He said. "You shall hear of wars and rumors of wars, nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines and pestilences....these are the beginning of sorrows."
Jesus told us that all of these things would precede His second coming and He warned that we must always be ready "for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning:" (Mark 13:35). He said that He would come as "a thief in the night" (I Thessalonians 5:2, & 2 Peter 3:10). The Bible is filled with wonderful promises of the second coming of Christ. There are 1,845 references to it in the old testament and a total of 17 old testament books give prominence to His second coming. Of the 260 chapters in the New Testament there are 318 references to the second coming or one out of every thirty verses. 23 of the 27 new testament books refer to Christ’s second coming. For every one prophecy on the first coming of Christ there are eight prophecies on His second coming. What does all of this tell us? It tells us that every day we must go out into the world and live the kind of Christian life in which if Christ were to return at this very moment He would find us in a state of complete readiness, fully prepared to present to Him a spiritual resume of complete Christ-likeness.
Yes, the world continues on its self-appointed rush to judgment, but standing on this side of that day are the open, outstretched arms of Jesus Christ. The hooves of these four horses are kicking up the dirt as they gallop back and forth across the earth....You can hear them in the distance....And The Thunder Rolls!....Are you ready?
God bless you,
Mark Shutts