Original Meaning
THIS PASSAGE PRESENTS the notorious four horsemen of the Apocalypse as fierce images of terrifying judgment. A little historical consideration will help us understand how these images would have threatened the worldly security of a first-century audience, thereby inviting us to sense the same dread these images would have originally evoked.
It is doubtful that we should read the four riders or other judgments as a chronological map of history before the end; rather, they are probably images of the kinds of judgments that characterized that time, arranged in the sequence in which John saw them.1 Some regard the seals as past, a prelude to present or future judgments elsewhere in the book.2 More likely, the seals cover the same span of time covered by the trumpets and bowls, because all three sets of judgments climax in the end of the age (6:12–14; 11:15, 18; 16:17, 20; on the timing of Revelation, see comment on 12:5–6).
The judgments threatened by the four horsemen are judgments that Jesus said would characterize the present age (Mark 13:7–8).3 Many ancient prophecy teachers catalogued special sufferings they expected in the degenerate time of the end. Jesus took some of these and (in contrast to some modern prophecy teachers, who have failed to read him closely), explicitly said that such events did not signal the end; rather, “the end is still to come,” for these are merely “the beginning of birth pangs” (Mark 13:7–8; cf. Matt. 24:6, 8).Both Jesus and Revelation omit some signs mentioned by ancient prophecy teachers, however, such as mutant babies.4
John’s depiction of judgment here reflects both literary artistry and immersion in Scripture. The list of four plagues resembles some from the Old Testament (Deut. 32:24; 2 Chron. 20:9; Jer. 15:2; Ezek. 5:17; 14:21), but such a fourfold formula recurs specifically in Revelation 6:8 and may not stand behind the horsemen as a whole (since that summary substitutes “wild beasts” for conquest).5 A more compact list of three judgments (combining war and conquest, but retaining pestilence and famine) is far more common, suggesting that Revelation makes the image of war and conquest emphatic.6
The four riders appear to be angels of judgment, though their identity should not be pressed too much, given their symbolic literary function.7 They most directly recall Zechariah 1:8, where many riders on four different colors of horses represent the Lord’s patrol that report back to him about quiet on the earth (Zech. 1:8–11). Later God sends out four chariots, each drawn by horses of a different color, as his patrol (6:1–8), more impressive than the Persian patrols from which the image may derive. Here he has assigned some angels a more active role; some Jewish texts picture God’s routing of mortal enemies by means of mounted angels (2 Macc. 3:24–30).
The description of the rider on the white horse (6:2) has occasioned various explanations, including an allusion to the antichrist figure Gog (Ezek. 39:3) and the archer and prophecy deity Apollo.8 The evidence is not clear enough to support a connection with Gog. Readers would find in the white horse an imitation of Christ’s horse (hence to be associated with an antichrist figure) only if they had already read 19:11 (no “white horse” appears in the prophets except in Zech. 1:8). Although Revelation’s audience would undoubtedly hear the book read more than once, white horses are common enough to weaken the significance of the proposed link. Likewise, the link with Apollo, though brilliantly argued, is probably too subtle; other allusions to Apollo are missing here, and Apollo was not the only deity who carried a bow (cf. Artemis, Eros). Others parallel this white horse with Christ’s and see the first rider as preaching the gospel before the end (cf. Matt. 24:14).9 Others find in the call to “Come” (Rev. 6:1, 3, 5, 7) an allusion to the call to Christ to “come” (22:20), so that all four horsemen are epiphanies of Christ coming in judgment in history.10 But though the Lord does ultimately stand behind these angels, the symbols that follow are negative and cast their negative light over this one as well.
A more general allusion is possible; one might also reduce the significance of starting with the white horse by noting that such horses might be prized.11 The biblical prophets also used the “bow” as a metaphor for conquest no less than the “sword” for war, though the image is associated most frequently with particular peoples known for such skills (e.g., Isa. 21:15; 22:3; 41:2; Jer. 6:23; 46:9; 49:35; 50:14, 29, 42; 51:3; Hos. 1:5, 7; 2:18). But given other allusions to the Parthians in Revelation (Rev. 9:14; 16:12)—allusions that would probably be evident to an audience in Asia Minor—an allusion to the Parthians seems most likely here.12
Parthians were famous, like Scythians, for their horses. They were known as mounted warriors, and their cavalry were especially known for their formidable archery.13 Whereas in Roman armies only auxiliaries used the bow and made up the cavalry, the Parthians were all mounted archers; they were the only group of mounted archers known in the ancient Mediterranean world.14 White was the sacred color of the Parthians, and every Parthian army included some sacred white horses.15 (In their triumphs, Roman generals also had white horses, which were the best; but they were used to draw chariots.)
Furthermore, many Jewish people in the eastern Mediterranean expected Parthians to play a role in an eschatological war (1 En. 56:5–7; Sib. Or. 5.438).16 Even in 19:11–16, where the rider on the white horse is clearly the Lord Jesus, the book may strike terror into Roman loyalists’ hearts with an allusion to the Parthian threat; the title “King of kings” may allude to the Parthian ruler (see comment on 19:16). But Revelation uses this image merely to underscore the point of hostile invaders, not to predict a specifically Parthian invasion. The point is that Roman rule will someday collapse—not to yield an eternal rule by Parthia, but ultimately by God (11:15–19).17
The threat of war and conquest challenged the deceptive claim of a pax Romana, the Roman peace. Rome kept peace within the boundaries of its empire—though it was less genuinely peace than pacification and subjugation—but its propaganda of “peace” did not terminate attempts to expand its borders. More powerful invaders would now reveal the emptiness of the Roman peace.18
“Conquest” (6:2) would be followed by bloodshed (6:4), and in their wake would follow famine because of economic destabilization (6:5–6) and widespread death (6:8), as is frequent in wars. Bloodshed, the second rider, presents a grisly image. Readers would likely catch an allusion to blood in the “red” horse; later rabbis understood Zechariah’s “man riding a red horse” (Zech. 1:8; cf. 6:2) as the Lord’s bringing judgment, wishing to turn the world into blood (b. Sanh. 93a). The “sword” represents the judgment of warfare and violent death, an idiom that occurs well over one hundred times in the Old Testament alone (e.g., Lev. 26:33; Num. 14:43; Deut. 32:25; Isa. 31:8; 65:12; Jer. 4:10; 19:7).19 No specific mention is made of different nations here, so making people “slay each other” might (though need not) involve civil war, as some commentators suggest.20 Certainly the most memorable battles of the previous generation were wars within the empire itself, especially the Judean revolt (A.D. 66–73) and the violent power struggles in Rome during A.D. 68. Because it involved bloodshed of one’s own citizens, civil war often appeared the most horrible.21
Famine (the third horse) likewise constitutes a terrifying specter. The image of the balance (6:5), normally used in the marketplace to weigh out the amount of food one could buy for one’s money, suggests God’s sovereignty over the food supply. Both famine (Sib. Or. 3.236) and pestilence (Sib. Or. 3.538) often accompanied war. Pestilence could follow, for example, from rotting corpses in the water supply; famine could follow pestilence when many farmers grew ill.22 Both pagans and Jews also understood that such hardships often represented divine judgments, and they called for repentance (Lev. 26:26; Jer. 11:22; 21:6; Ezek. 4:16; 33:27).23
The famine affects many of the basic staples of the Mediterranean diet, which consisted of such foods as barley, wheat, and perhaps cheese and olives, plus fish for those near bodies of water. A “quart of wheat” is not much; those limited to half this amount of barley a day quickly became undernourished and proved susceptible to deadly diseases.24 Still, subsistence wages for peasants were not uncommon; hired laborers on a farm could be paid as little as two loaves of bread a day (about half a kilogram), just enough food for themselves and their family.25
A denarius was roughly a day’s wage in this period; a quart of wheat would feed a single worker for a day, but if he had a family to support he would buy instead three times as much barley, which was cheaper. One could eat, but the grain here costs at least five times and as much as fifteen times what it might in better times.26 Given the average size household in poorer regions like Egypt, many younger children would die or become stunted from malnutrition.
Why does the text mention the sparing of oil and wine (6:6), less necessary to life than the grain?27 Some suggest that it indicates that the wealthy will still have the luxury items (cf. 18:13; Job 24:11; Prov. 21:17).28 Whether or not this proposal is accepted, this disparity probably points to inequities inherent in the Roman economy. Although the stark reality of famine would have been felt by most people in antiquity, especially in cities dependent on the countryside, this image may have particularly grabbed the attention of an audience in Roman Asia in the 90s of the first century. Because the wine trade was more profitable than grain, Roman owners of provincial estates grew more vines than grain, leading to a wine surplus but grain shortage. Around the time Revelation was written, the emperor Domitian was trying to restrict vine production in places like Asia, but his attempts proved unpopular and unsuccessful.29 If enforced, his policy would have struck Philadelphia (Rev. 3:7–13) particularly hard, because it was especially dependent on vine production.30
So much of Asia’s land was dedicated to producing olive oil and wine for profitable export that its own cities often needed to import grain from Egypt or the Black Sea. Thus while owners and shippers profited, most people in Asia often had to pay higher prices for their food.31 Even well-to-do congregations in Sardis, Thyatira, and Laodicea would understand how near to them such a judgment might be, and might recognize the complicity of empire-wide economic practices in bringing about such hardship, which would prove most difficult for the poor.32 Inflation was already heavy at the end of the first century; famine, however, always drove inflation out of control (2 Kings 6:25).33
But the sparing of oil and wine also reveals God’s mercy in the midst of judgment (“do not damage” in 6:6 is the same Greek expression as “do not harm” in 7:3). Ancient Mediterranean warfare included destroying the standing crops in the fields but not the vines and olive trees; destruction of vines and olive trees would produce a long-range devastation of the local economies (and so negate the entire point of conquering the land). Destroying wheat and barley meant hardship for a year until the new harvest would come, but destroying olive trees (which took about seventeen years to grow) and vines spelled enduring disaster.34 In ancient Mediterranean thought, only the most savage of barbarians would destroy all means of food production; the wars of 6:2–4 were not total wars, but they would lead up to more powerful threats (16:12–16).
The “pale horse” (6:8) could be literally a “green” one, but the term when applied to complexions means simply “pale,” as the NIV correctly translates it.35 The coming of “Death” may sum up the result of the previous horsemen or may refer particularly to plague and pestilence (cf. 2:23).36 Death often appears personified in Jewish sources, typically as an angel subservient to God’s design or sometimes as the equivalent of Satan, who also, however, cannot strike God’s people apart from God’s will.37 Personified Death and Hades appear together in some biblical poetry (2 Sam. 22:6; Ps. 49:14; 116:3; Isa. 28:15; 38:18; Hos. 13:14; Hab. 2:5).
The four riders together slay with sword (violent death, as perhaps in the first two riders), famine (the third rider), pestilence (perhaps the fourth), and wild animals (6:8), perhaps added because it elsewhere appears in biblical lists of four plagues (Ezek. 5:17; 14:21). It also appears elsewhere as a judgment (2 Kings 2:24; Wisd. Sol. 11:15–18; 12:9).
Bridging Contexts
EQUIVALENT IMAGES. To apply these images we should translate them into images that would evoke an equivalent impact today. Wars, famines, and plagues remain terrifying matters today. To evoke afresh the message of 6:1–8, we should embrace the full horror of the vision, then contemplate that God is sovereign in these judgments. By revealing his anger against the world’s sin he both serves notice on oppressors and mercifully prevents us from becoming too comfortable with a world system destined to pass away (1 John 2:15–17). God is sovereign in history, even over sufferings; they are the seals, the marks of divine witness to the veracity of his promises.
Prophecy teachers have interpreted these images in various ways, not always with attention to their original historical context. Hal Lindsey, for example, says the rider on a white horse is a European Antichrist who rules from Rome (who secures the help of a Jewish Antichrist ruling from Israel).38 But the probable allusion to the Parthians means that the text would have likely scared Romans, not affirmed their sense of imperial pride! This figure would be ruling from Rome only if he first conquered it.
If the first rider bears the image of a Parthian conqueror, we must ask how to translate that image beyond the first-century Roman world. Rome ultimately succumbed to invaders from beyond the empire, but the fiercest and most successful proved to be from the north rather than from the east; was Revelation’s warning mistaken? Such a question forces us to grapple with the nature of Revelation’s images. The point is not that the Parthians alone could overthrow Rome, but that the vision portrays the most frightening image of war to the Roman world of its day to communicate the point that war was coming.
Likewise, we should not think that the fall of Rome exhausts the significance of Revelation’s image of terrifying judgment. The point applies not only to Rome, but to all empires in history; Rome was the mightiest in its day, but with the other empires of history now lies buried in the dust, succeeded by other kingdoms no more eternal than Rome proved to be.
If those of us for whom famine and pestilence seem distant realities are to hear the dread the text conveys, we must consider analogies closer to home. Many people in most of our churches are but a paycheck or two away from missing house or rent payments, so images like Revelation’s are more relevant than we may want to think. With downsizing, shifting markets, and so forth, few jobs are fully secure even in corporate America.39 In ministering in an urban context I have more than once encountered a former college professor who through some crisis lost work and ended up on the street. Widespread cholera or yellow fever may be far from American minds, but AIDS and cancer are not. The whole world stands under the curse of suffering and death, hence this text invites us to grapple with its horrifying images and their meaning. Not every suffering is the result of personal sin, but sufferings do result from the fallen state of the world in general, reminding us that God does judge the world order and summons its attention.
The four riders. What do we make of the four riders? As noted above, Judaism spoke of angels of death, usually in a terrifying manner. Even among Greeks and Romans, the deity that stirred war was considered a horrible, repulsive one.40 Yet all these horsemen act at God’s bidding and as his agents (also 8:5–6; 14:19); even a renegade spirit like the devil must submit to God’s bidding (20:1–3), as Luther’s song puts it: “One little word shall fell him.” In the midst of this world’s suffering—suffering that inevitably touches the lives of all mortal beings, including ourselves—we must remember that God does have everything under control and is bringing to completion his purposes in history. This does not mean that we should not work against the evil nor that God does not offer selective protection to his own (7:3), but that even in the suffering we can discern a long-range, redemptive purpose that is bigger than we are, as well as a reward for faithful endurance (21:4).
Sometimes interpreters have applied the images of the four riders only to a future time of tribulation. For a number of reasons, this view is unlikely (see esp. comment on 12:5–6). But on the level of application, the point is the same: God is sovereign in his judgments, summoning the world’s attention. We dare not grow comfortable with this world, which is not our home.
Contemporary Significance
GOD’S SOVEREIGNTY OVER HISTORY. This passage underlines the recognition that God is sovereign over history; terrible things may happen that seem beyond explanation, but on the larger scale God is using such forces to bring history to its climax. This text presents us not the God of Deism promoted by Jefferson, Franklin, and many other disciples of the “Age of Reason”; it declares the true and living God.41 The modern experiment to overcome the need for “superstition” and religion has failed. The modern world’s values have proved inadequate to confront the threats our world experiences; continuing wars, weapons of massive destruction, and other plagues have hurled modern humanity “into an apocalyptic age, without a faith in Christian eschatology.”42 Terror with teleology can only remind us of our mortality, our need to depend on someone greater than ourselves. Terror without teleology produces despair.
Ellul regards the four horsemen as “the four chief components of history”; history is characterized by their hideous imprint.43 If John received his vision today, the terrifying symbols might be different, but they would convey the same message as they did then. We can cling to nothing other than trust in the sovereign God who rules history, for nothing else remains certain.
Contemporary judgments. Judgments can come in a variety of ways, one of which is suffering caused by war and terrorism. The image of war may be glorified by generations that have never known it firsthand (cf. Judg. 3:2), but it is viewed more realistically by those who have suffered its ravages. My heart aches for friends in nations currently at war, but the threat is somewhat vivid even here. Needless to say, conquest and war remain terrifying specters for our generation. Expounding at great length on the red horse, Billy Graham several decades ago warned about “stockpiles of 60,000 hydrogen bombs” that could destroy human life on earth “seventeen times over.”44 At the time of this book’s writing fear of nuclear catastrophe has faded, but nuclear and chemical arsenals have actually proliferated, so that some may be found in the hands of terrorists with less fear of retaliation than nuclear states once had.45 By some estimates, the world “still has about fifty thousand nuclear weapons,” more than enough to end modern civilization.46 Terrorists without bombs make do with what they have to make their political statements; thus radical Islamic terrorists have murdered thousands of politically uninvolved peasants in Algeria, including one “eight-year-old boy … nearly decapitated while having his throat slit.”47
International terrorism such as embassy bombings is on the rise, but domestic terrorism also poses a genuine threat. Timothy McVeigh, whose truck bomb killed 168 people in Oklahoma City, was not an isolated activist. He took the script for this bombing directly from William Pierce’s Neo-Nazi novel, The Turner Diaries. He had peddled the book, which has sold over 200,000 copies, as he traveled on the gun circuit. The novel not only prescribes the sort of truck, explosives, and time of day for McVeigh’s bombing; it also describes plans for what violent white supremacists hope to do after they have destabilized the federal government, for instance the lynching of tens of thousands of “race-mixers” from lamp posts in Los Angeles.48 Active terrorists in this mold are few, but they are propagating their views at an alarming rate; one music company promoting violent white power lyrics sells 50,000 compact disks a year.49
War is brutal and does not choose its victims fairly.50 Whether because we know more about it or because killing machines and ideologies have become more efficient, the twentieth century we have just left has been one of the most savage in human history. Most readers are familiar with the Nazi holocaust against Jews and the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda. Less often discussed is the rape of Nanking, where—after the Chinese city’s surrender—women were gang-raped and killed and men were butchered for bayonet practice.51
One may also remember the sufferings of Korea in the twentieth century. Violating their treaty of 1882, the United States in 1905 approved Japan’s annexation of Korea in return for Japan’s allowing the United States to occupy the Philippines; this was viewed as Korea’s first recorded subjugation in 5,000 years. Between 1941 and 1945, about 200,000 Korean women were abducted for daily rape by the occupying soldiers; after virgins became rare married women were taken. The Japanese army used these “comfort women” for “an average of twenty to thirty and up to seventy soldiers a day.” Some had their breasts cut off; many committed suicide; most were slaves. At the end of the war most were “left behind to die in isolated areas or were exterminated to conceal evidence of these atrocious crimes. The soldiers had comfort women stand in open graves and then opened fire on them.” About two hundred were reportedly forced into a submarine, which was then torpedoed.52
I have some very close, zealous Christian friends in other nations whose lives are in danger not only because of their Christian faith, but because they may belong to the “wrong” tribe or because of food or health-care shortages. Those of us who do not face such tests would be facing them if we were born in such countries; we should make good use of the blessings God has given us for his kingdom, and honor and pray for our brothers and sisters. Part of Revelation’s message is the warning that all Christians must be ready to suffer. Suffering is unpleasant, but it is nearly universal, and we must be prepared for it. It is also our opportunity to prove what we are made of. How many of us are ready to cling to God’s grace the way our brothers and sisters in many nations must cling? But the sufferings of Revelation 6 are in principle God’s judgment call on the world, meant to vindicate rather than to crush God’s true remnant.
Wars thus remind us that our “modern civilization,” which so often regards with disgust the “barbarism” of ancient civilizations (and ancient writings like the Bible), remains captive to the same sinful human nature as past eras. Indeed, one could describe the twentieth century, at its beginning predicted as an apex of civilization, as one
open-mouthed grave: an entire generation of European youth composting the World War I battlefields of Verdun and the Somme, Hitler’s six million Jews, Stalin’s twenty million Soviet citizens, Mao’s tens of millions of political enemies and peasant famine victims, Pol Pot’s two million Cambodians, the Interhamwe’s million Tutsi Rwandans, and the millions of lives wasted away during apartheid’s forty-year reign.53
Rather than evolving morally, humanity has simply developed more effective means of killings its fellow humans than were available in the past.
Famine (6:5–6) is also one of God’s frequent acts in history that serves as a wake-up call to the world. If famine and disease are less horrifying for many Western readers than they might be, it is only for lack of exposure to suffering that is a standard part of history and the present experience of tens of millions. Commenting on the black horse, Billy Graham likewise expounds at length on the terrors of famine in the modern world, noting, for instance, that “one child in three of those who survive birth in the poor countries is unhealthy because of inadequate nutrition.”54 Ron Sider retells the plaintive account of a child begging her parents to sell her to rich neighbors so she could eat.55 At the time of this book’s writing, the specter of famine is returning to the Sudan, where our Christian brothers and sisters in the south have already suffered so much.56
We do not have to wait for famine to strike on a large scale to imagine the effects of poverty at the present, which often go beyond food deprivation to other kinds of vulnerability. Such images remind us that our world is already a place of suffering for many people. We may think, for example, of millions of children in the world forced to live on the streets or in garbage heaps, sometimes treated as dangerous to the fabric of society.57 Take Nahamán Carmona López, a thirteen-year-old street boy in Guatemala who, on March 4, 1990, was beaten by police. He arrived at the hospital in a coma, with “a ruptured liver, six broken ribs and bruises over 70 percent of his body. He died 10 days later.”58
Then there was fourteen-year-old Wellington Barbosa, gunned down by an ex-cop in a busy Brazilian street; his sister, who witnessed the murder, pleaded with the reporter to take her away because she was also slated to die.59 Death squads, roughly 70 percent of their members police officers, have sought to “clean up” the streets; in one eighteen-month period, Brazilian press reports documented at least 130 street children in Brazil murdered by police death squads, and some human rights activists there estimate such a murder every day.60 About 200,000 children live on the streets in Brazil; sixty out of every thousand there die before their first birthday, and 7.4 million never finish elementary school. At age eleven, Derivan Ferreira Lima has worked in the sisal industry since he was five; he works twelve hours a day for the same wage as other children there—$2.50 a week. A neighbor of his lost one eye at work and then his second eye in another work accident, blind at age eight.61 Of Brazil’s work force 11.6 percent consists of 7.5 million workers below age eighteen.62
Likewise, missionaries in Manila noticed street girls with whom they had been working, mainly orphans and runaways, being abducted into brothels where “they would be raped several times a day.” The local police would not help, because they were on the brothel’s payroll; happily International Justice Mission was able to intervene on the children’s behalf.63
Even in the United States, for that matter, there are tens of thousands of homeless children and teenagers. When I worked in a street mission in the early 1980s, I witnessed a transition from mainly men to also women and children living on the streets.64 We also observed that many were on the streets due to mental illness, especially after federal funding for the mentally ill was cut.65 Many children end up selling their bodies on the street to survive; mere sermons against prostitution cannot prove effective if they come from churches uninvolved with the needs of the poor in their communities.66 Christians can, however, work for justice, as when they secured the arrest of two New Orleans police officers who had raped a teenage runaway, or, over a century ago, Christian activist Katherine Bushnell’s successful fight against police-protected, forced child prostitution in northern Michigan and Wisconsin mining towns.67
Plagues are also a continuing part of life in the 1990s, though in the West we have tried to sanitize them away. We need not hark back to the fourteenth century, when the “Black Death” (bubonic plague) killed 30 percent of Europe’s population, carried by a type of flea infesting the black rats that were then everywhere.68 God was working during this time, but the Black Death whipped up an apocalyptic frenzy.69 We may think in our own society of the million or more people who are currently HIV-positive and who will ultimately die of AIDS unless God heals them or they die of something else first.70 In Japan a cult released deadly nerve poison in a subway; intelligence officials have intercepted people who wished to release deadly plagues such as anthrax here.71
God does use plagues to get our attention. One Sunday I felt led to preach about sexual sin, and many people repented of sexual sin that day. Not current on the news, I later learned why the Lord had led me to preach that message on that particular Sunday: Magic Johnson had just announced that he was HIV-positive, and many of the people who came forward that day were particularly receptive.
Those of us who share these texts with others have a moral responsibility to do our best to avoid being misinterpreted. Such plagues are wake-up calls to humanity, but we must remember that they are judgments against societies, not necessarily against individuals. Because innocent sufferers often hear our blanket statements about judgment as personal condemnations, we should always make clear what we already know, that not everyone who suffers is experiencing personal judgment.72
For example, many have contracted HIV through blood transfusions, often because of hemophilia. This includes one of the first widely publicized AIDS cases, Ryan White, a fourteen-year-old Christian. Mention can also be made of Steve Sawyer, who now spends his final years in Campus Crusade proclaiming the gospel to thousands of college students; or the daughter-in-law of a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, whose two children also died with her.73 Some Christian women in Uganda have died of AIDS precisely because they remained sexually faithful to sexually unfaithful husbands, and that nation faces tens of thousands of new orphans through AIDS.74 We must hear in the world’s suffering not condemnation of suffering individuals but, on a larger scale, God’s calling for the world’s attention.
Christian response. What should be our response to such suffering? (1) In the light of Revelation, we recognize that famine is a corporate judgment (on societies, not individuals), one of God’s methods for waking up an unrepentant world. But believers in wealthier countries dare not stop with this observation: The text provides no exemption for any nations, and all peoples are in principle susceptible to this judgment, especially those so arrogant as to suppose that it cannot happen to them (18:7–8). Even God’s people were subject to such judgments (e.g., 2 Sam. 21:1; 24:13); how much more a nation whose official public religion has become secularism. Those who denied that such sufferings would come on God’s people regularly appear in the Bible as false prophets (Jer. 5:12; 14:13–16). God often warned of famine in advance so people could prepare for it (Gen. 41:28–36; Acts 11:28–30).
(2) We must do our best to serve and empower those who are truly impoverished through circumstances beyond their control. Some skeptics of Christianity have asked whether Christians can work against plagues and famines when they believe these hardships to be judgments sent by their God.75 But John the Baptist and James the Lord’s brother, both prophets of judgment, define true repentance before God by our commitment to care for others’ needs (Luke 3:11; James 2:14–17). Jesus spoke of giving up possessions as much as proves necessary to care for others’ needs, because our brothers and sisters matter more than possessions do (Luke 12:33; 14:33). Unlike the rich man who was judged for letting Lazarus starve at his doorstep, however (16:25), few of us could be judged for letting a poor person starve at our doorstep—but only because in our society we would not let someone that poor get near our doorstep.
We remain responsible, once we know their need, to supply whatever necessary for believers in famine-stricken areas of the world, trusting that if possible, they will also help us in our hour of need (2 Cor. 8:13–15). To be sure, some American congregations will not want to hear such a message any more than John’s or Jesus’ hearers did, but to deny our personal responsibility for the poor is to deny Scripture.76 Selective theological liberalism is no less liberalism because it picks and chooses which Scriptures it will obey; it is simply more hypocritical because it pretends to affirm Scripture when in fact it believes only those portions it finds convenient. Such selective piety gives occasion to the Lord’s enemies to blaspheme (cf. 2 Sam. 12:14).
In his comments on this passage Billy Graham warns that if we do not heed, our own lifestyles one day “will be spread before us in judgment.”77 Russell Chandler comments on the inequitable distribution of resources even in our own country, where 1 percent of the households “hold one-third of all our country’s personal wealth.” Although there is much truth in the dictum that diligence pays off (cf. Prov. 10:4), one might be tempted to entertain some skepticism that this 1 percent has worked harder than most of the rest of the country put together.78 Evangelical organizations like World Vision, Food for the Hungry, and the Salvation Army can make excellent use of development funds donated to them. Chandler suggests that if all church members tithed, we would be able to “eliminate the worst of world poverty,” have seventeen billion dollars for domestic need, and enough left over to maintain “church activities at current levels.”79
Yet one wonders if, apart from a true revival, churches will use God’s funds in such productive ways. Currently, 99.9 percent of our budgets are spent on ourselves or other churches; of eight billion dollars allotted for missions worldwide, less than one tenth of 1 percent is directed toward reaching the non-Christian world.80 How would Jesus, who focused on the unevangelized and outcasts of his day and fed the hungry crowds, evaluate our priorities?
Even when we do our best, however, Revelation reminds us that in this age suffering is often God’s calling for the world’s attention, even when we do not choose to listen (9:20–21).