Endure Suffering Patiently Series

She did the first thing that came to mind. She grabbed her blow dryer and blasted that little bird with hot air to dry him out as quickly as possible. The heat in contrast with the cold left the poor bird feeling scorched.

A few days later, a reporter who had somehow heard about Chippie’s ordeal, called to get the details of the story. At the end of the call, the reporter asked, “Hos is Chippie doing now?” The owner said, “Well, physically he seems fine. But these days, he just kinda sits there. Chippie doesn’t sing much anymore.”

Sometimes life has a way of stealing your song. When we walk out of Revelation 4-5, we are singing! We’ve been in the throne room and have just experienced the best worship service of our lives. But we barely get four verses into chapter 6 when the song is torn from our lips.

The Bible points to several different causes of suffering. There are our own sinful choices, other’s sinful choices, the fact that we live in a fallen world. Satan causes suffering. There are even times when God causes suffering.

We need to be careful in assigning each tragedy a cause. Did God cause my wife’s cancer, or did Satan? Is it just a fallen world? I don’t know. What I can say is this: in his sovereignty, God will use suffering – no matter its direct cause – for his purposes.

That’s what we see in this section of Revelation. The suffering mentioned here is all under God’s control. No matter its specific cause, God is using the chaos to accomplish his desires in history.

We’ve been waiting for the Lamb to open the seven seals on the scroll. What can it say? What are we going to learn about God’s – his plans and purposes? As each seal gets opened, we find that things get worse and worse.

First we encounter what have been termed the four horsemen of the apocalypse. As each of the first four seals are opened, there is released a rider on horseback. Kentucky is my home state and the thoroughbred capital of the world but in all my years of living there I never saw horses like these.

The first is a white horse, whose rider carries a bow, is given a crown, and rides out as a conqueror bent on conquest. Some have tried to claim that this rider is Jesus because of a reference later in the book of Revelation to him riding a white horse.

However, in the minds of the1st century Christians to whom this letter was written, they

would have envisioned the Parthians – a warring group of people from north and east of the

Roman empire. They were the only horseback-mounted archers of the time and had some military success in skirmishes with the Roman army.

This rider represents the suffering that comes from an insatiable desire to conquer other countries. It is suffering brought about by the battlefield. This rider represents all military invaders.

When the second seal is opened, out comes the rider on a blood-red horse. He represents conflict and bloodshed. It can include the effects of war but is a more general designation of conflict and strife which leads to assault and murder.