Revelation 6:1

III. OPENING OF THE SEVEN SEALS, Revelation 6:1 to Revelation 8:1.

Four Creational Seals, Revelation 6:1-8.

1. And By decision of the divine court the seals are now, through the agency of the Lamb, about to be broken. And in each of the three series of sevens, the seals, the trumpets, and the vials the distinction between the creational four and the divine three is decisively marked; so decisively, indeed, as to be an important aid in the interpretation.

The first four of each seven have to do with external nature; and they so correspond with each other as to show that not so much chronological order, as mutual correlation, is the basis of their succession. This fact discards fatally those methods of interpretation according to which a long consecutive human history, with dates in chronological order, is here sought to be traced. The last three of each seven have to do with more spiritual interests dear to the hearts of the elders with men rather than physical nature, and with the Church. The six seals, nevertheless, run through a series of successive phases of the entire moral history of the world under the Messianic dispensation. The first four present the world under the aspect of the fall of man; the second, the renovation through the final doom and retribution; which is completed in the picture of the redemption and the glory in chapter 7. We have thus in the six seals the cycle of man’s moral history briefly symbolized, to be more fully evolved under the seven trumpets. The unsealing of chapter vi is a dark and gloomy series, which is gloriously relieved by the pictorial sealing of Revelation 7:0. Hence chapters sixth and seventh should be read as one great antithetic tableau. It is the great judgment history and contrast; woe to the profane, grace to the holy. However much the Church has misread the Apocalypse, it has ever read this great assuring fact, that with God the finality will be the eternal triumph of the right.

The Lamb opened So that of this second apocalypse, which draws forth the third, as well as of the first, Christ is the real revealer.

One of the four beasts Each of the four creational seals is called forth by one of the cherubic beasts. Noise (rather, voice) of thunder The movement of this great first unsealing thus signally announced.

Come and see Each of the four beasts utters a Come, and our English version adds, and see, as addressed to John. But the best authorities have only Come. To whom, then, was this Come addressed? Not to John, for the symbol was plainly visible to him without any coming. Clearly it is addressed to the symbol now to be released from detention by the opening of the seal, and ready to be called forth by the cherub. The fancy of Alford, that it is addressed to Jesus, (as in Revelation 22:20,) is very far-fetched.

The first seal of CONQUEST.