What Are The Seven Seals In Revelation?

In Revelation 5, God is on His throne holding a seven-sealed scroll.  The only one worthy to open the scroll is Jesus, the lamb of God.  In Revelation 6 and following Jesus proceeds to open one seal at a time.  With the opening of each seal the apostle John sees another vision of terrible doom and destruction.  What do the seven seals mean?  

In my previous post I made the case that the scroll represents God's divorce certificate against unfaithful, covenant-breaking Israel.  The main theme of Revelation is God's divorce and destruction of Israel, and His taking a new bride, the church.  The seven seals represent the terrible judgments that are pronounced upon Israel, and which were fulfilled in 70 AD when the Roman army destroyed Jerusalem and the temple.  In this post I will briefly explain the meaning of each of the seven seals.  

The First Seal: Revelation 6:1-2

The lamb opened the first seal.  Its rider held a bow, wore a crown, and went out as a conqueror.  

The white horse either represents the Roman empire which is given authority to go out and destroy Israel, or it represents Jesus who works through the Roman empire to destroy Israel.  Either way, the first seal represents victorious war against Israel.

The Second Seal:  Revelation 6:3-4

The second seal reveals a rider on a red horse who is allowed to take peace from the earth.

This second seal represents the terrible bloodshed of war leading up to and including the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD.  As the Romans attacked Israel from the north and made their way south to Jerusalem, there were severe military conflicts in and around Israel.  20,000 Jews were killed in a conflict in Caesarea; 50,000 Jews were killed in a conflict in Alexandria; 10,000 Jews were killed in a conflict in Damascus.  13,000 Jews were killed in a conflict in Scythopolis.  50,000 Jews were killed in a conflict in Seleucia (Gary DeMar, Last Days Madness, p. 52-53).  

The Third Seal: Revelation 6:5-6

The third seal reveals a rider on a black horse.  He is holding a set of scales and calls out the price of food.  

The third seal is a symbol of the deadly famine in Israel resulting from the war with Rome.  The horse is black because black is associated with famine in the Bible (Lam 5:10).  The point of the scales is that the price of food in that day would be drastically inflated.  A denarius was one day's wage, so it would cost an entire day of work just to buy a little food.  David Chilton says this was a 1,000% increase in the normal cost of food.  

While wheat and barley would become scarce, wine and oil would not.  You can survive without wine and oil, but not without wheat and barley.  The point is that during the famine there would plenty of the non-essentials, but not enough of the essentials.

This famine reached its peak when the Roman army besieged Jerusalem for five months near the end of the war.  They cut off the city's food and water supplies, leading to a severe famine and the deaths of thousands.  There is one report of a woman who cooked and ate her own child.

Josephus wrote, "Then did the famine widen its progress, and devoured the people by whole houses and families; the upper rooms were full of women and children that were dying by famine; and the lanes of the city were full of the dead bodies of the aged; the children also and the young men wandered about the marketplaces like shadows, all swelled with the famine, and fell down dead whenever their misery seized them.”

The Fourth Seal:  Revelation 6:7-8

The fourth seal reveals a green horse whose rider was named Death, and Hades followed after Him.  They were given authority to kill a fourth of the earth.

This fourth seal represents all of the death that will be caused by the preceding seals in the time leading up and including the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD.  The horseman's name is Death (Gk. thanatos), which is where the name of Thanos, the Marvel supervillain comes from. 

The Greek word for "earth" (Gk. ge) can be translated "land," such as the land of Israel.  In other words, this seal is prophesying the death of 1/4 of the population of Israel, not the world.

Four means of death are mentioned: sword, famine, plague, and wild animals.  This is an example of Revelation's heavy usage of the Old Testament.  In Ezekiel 14:21, Ezekiel prophesied about the impending destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, and he referenced the same sources of death.  The point of the fourth seal is that just as God used these four means of death to punish Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BC, He would use the same to punish Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD.

Hades is the place of torment where unbelievers go immediately after death.  The fourth seal says that not only will unfaithful Jews be killed, but then they will go to Hades for even more torment.

The Fifth Seal:  Revelation 6:9-11

When Jesus opens the sixth seal, John sees the souls of Christian martyrs under the altar crying out for vengeance against their oppressors.  The martyrs were given a white robe and told to rest just a little while longer until the full number of martyrs had been killed.

In the fifth seal we are given a short break in the destruction to remind us of the reason for the terrible judgments against Israel.  The reason is because the Jews had killed God's Messiah as well as His followers.  The martyrs are crying out for God to not delay the judgments pronounced in the first four seals.  They were told to wait until all the martyrs had died.  This doesn't refer to all the martyrs throughout Christian history, but the certain number of martyrs that needed to die before God would pour out His wrath on Israel.  

Why were their souls under the altar?  This image comes from the Old Testament sacrifices in which the priest would pour the blood of the sacrifice at the base of the altar (Lev 4:7).  The same priests who were supposed to be offering pleasing sacrifices to God were instead sacrificing God's own people.  They would pay for this.

The martyrs were given white robes.  When a Roman victory was celebrated in Rome, all the citizens wore white.  The city was called the city in white.  The white robes were given to the martyrs to assure them of their final victory against their enemies.    

The Sixth Seal: Revelation 6:12-17

When the sixth seal is opened John sees a vision of de-creation: the earth quakes, the sun turns black, the moon turns red, the stars fall, the sky splits apart, all the mountains and islands are uprooted, and the people of the earth (or land) hide from God's wrath. 

The language of the sixth seal is highly resemblant of the OT prophets when they pronounced judgment on different nations.  Douglas Wilson wrote, "It would be easy to place these events at the end of the world – since only the end of the world, we think, would have enough room for a disaster this size.  But we tend to think this way because we do not let the Scriptures instruct us how disaster symbolism works.”  Let's look at some examples of what Wilson calls "disaster symbolism" in the Old Testament.

In Isaiah 13 Isaiah prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, which was fulfilled in 586 BC.  He describes this destruction as the day of the Lord's coming (Is 13:9); He will make the earth a desolation (Is 13:9); the stars of the sky and its constellations will not give their light (Is 13:10); the sun and moon will go dark (Is 13:10); the heavens will tremble (Is 13:10); the earth will shake from its foundations (Is 13:13).

In Ezekiel 32:7-8, Ezekiel prophesied the destruction of Egypt at the hands of the Babylonians.  He said that God would cover the heavens and darken the stars, and that God would cover the sun with a cloud, and the moon would not give its light.

Look at the language used by the prophet Habakkuk as he prophesied Jerusalem's destruction by the Babylonians (Hab 3:16; 1:5-17).  When God comes in judgment, light rays would flash from His hands (Hab 3:4), plague would go before Him, and pestilence would follow (Hab 3:5); the earth would shake (Hab 3:6); the mountains would break apart and the hills sink down (Hab 3:6); the mountains would shudder (Hab 3:10); the sun and the moon would stand still (Hab 3:11).  

None of these prophesies were fulfilled literally because they were using "disaster symbolism" to describe the actual destruction of nations.  

In the same way, "disaster symbolism" is employed in the sixth seal to describe not the end of the world, but the destruction of the nation of Israel at the hands of the Romans in 70 AD. 

The Seventh Seal: Revelation 8:1-5

When Jesus opened the seventh seal there was silence in heaven for half an hour.  Seven trumpets were given to seven angels.  Another angel with a golden incense burner stood at the altar.  He offered incense with the prayers of the saints.  The angel took the incense burner, filled it with fire from the altar, and hurled it to the earth, resulting in lighting, thunder, and an earthquake.

This is an allusion to the burning of incense in the Old Testament, which was offered twice daily in the temple.  This ritual would take approximately thirty minutes, during which the entire temple complex would fall silent, and everyone would bow and pray.  When the priest exited the temple, he would stand on the steps, raise his hands, and say a prayer of blessing over the people (Num 6:24-26).  

In the seventh seal, the angel is offering incense to God, representing the prayers of God's people.  These prayers are found in the sixth seal (Rev 6:9-11), where the Christian martyrs are praying for vengeance upon the Jews for their persecution.  When the angel finishes offering up the prayers of the martyrs to God, instead of exiting the temple to pronounce a blessing upon Israel, he fills his incense burner with fire and hurls it to the earth (or land of Israel) in judgment.  

The thunder, lighting, and earthquake are an allusion to Mount Sinai in the book of Exodus, when God gave the Ten Commandments to the nation of Israel.  God descended on the mountain, and there was thunder, lightning, an earthquake, and the mountain was covered in smoke (Ex 19:16-1).  The purpose of this display of power was to cause the people to fear God, for if they broke the covenant they would face God's wrath (Ex 20:18-21).  In the seventh seal God is once again descending upon Israel with the same display of power.  But this time it is not to warn them about breaking the covenant, but to punish them for breaking the covenant.  First century Israel had rejected God.  They killed the Messiah and His followers.  Now they would have to face the terrible wrath of God which would be poured out through the Romans in the Jewish War (66-70 AD).  

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