The Fourth Seal
The Empire in Crisis 235-284 A.D.
And I looked, and behold a pale horse:
and his name that sat on him was Death, and
Hell followed with him. And power was given
unto them over the fourth part of the earth,
to kill with sword, and with
hunger, and with
death [pestilence], and with the
beasts of the earth. Rev 6:8
The chaos of civil war and the crushing economic
oppression prefigured by the second
and third seals weakened the empire to the point
where it could no longer defend its borders.
Suddenly, at the death of Alexander Severus
in 235,
the
empire was invaded on all sides. The Goths
poured
over the Danube, the Franks and Alemanni
crossed the Rhine and the Persians disrupted the
East. The Roman Empire had never been beset by
such an array of foreign enemies.
Four Sore Judgments
The Empire Suffers a Progression of Woes
When I send my four sore judgments upon
Jerusalem, the sword, and the
famine, and the
noisome beast, and the pestilence.
Ez 14:21
John Wesley in his notes on Rev 6:8 observed
that
"War brings on scarcity, and scarcity
pestilence, and pestilence by depopulating
the country leaves the few
survivors an easier prey to wild beasts. And
thus these judgments make way one for
another
in the order wherein they are here
represented".
Rome almost fell under the weight of these
cascading
judgments. Famine ravaged the empire creating
immense social crisis and fear. Then
pestilence
came as the result of scanty and unwholesome
food.
From A.D. 250 to 265, a plague raged without
interruption in every province and city, and
almost in
every family in the Roman Empire. For some
time five
thousand persons died daily in Rome, and many
towns were entirely depopulated.
As a result of the ghastly depopulation of
the empire, wild
beasts began to attack the remaining population.
The Pale Horse
An Era of Unprecedented Mortality
"The ruined Empire seemed to approach the
last and
fatal moment of its dissolution." Gibbon
Expositors have no difficulty with the symbol
of the
pale horse. All agree it signifies death. The
Greek
word "chlorus" means greenish or
pale. E.B. Elliot mentions that Constantine's
father who
lived in this period was called Chlorus for his
paleness.
The early church historian Eusebius, writing
of this
period, said, "Death waged a desolating war
with two
weapons, FAMINE and PESTILENCE ... Men, wasted
away to mere skeletons."
Gibbon wrote that as many as half of the
inhabitants of the empire perished at this
time while Niebuhr makes a more conservative
estimate of about one third.
Not only was the population decimated but the
empire
itself appeared about to perish. However, two
capable
soldier-emperors, Claudius II and Aurelian
turned the
tide.
The Four Parts of the Earth
Diocletian Creates a Tetrarchy
And power was given unto them over the
fourth
part of the earth. Rev 6:8
The Emperor Diocletian (A.D. 284-305) put an
end to this disastrous era. In 285, he
divided the empire into four parts creating a
"Tetrarchy" or "Rule by Four".
Many expositors agree with Jerome that the
expression "the fourth part" should read
"the four parts of the earth" and thus the
prophecy prefigured this division.
To support this, it is mentioned that in Rev
8:8-10,
the expression "third parts" is uniformly
interpreted
to signify the fact that the empire fell in
three parts. (Goths, Arabs, Turks)
.