We are looking at two more seals starting in Revelation 6:7 with the fourth seal which is death.
It says, “When the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, “Come.” I looked, and behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth.” This is an awful judgment. We find that once again one of the living creatures, the fourth of the four living creatures, call for John to look or to come up here. This is the last time the four creatures will do this. We will see in a moment that the other three seals are opened in a different manner. This one is death. What we find are people dying in great waves. As a matter of fact, it says one-fourth of the people on the earth die during this time. If we put that in the numbers that we have on the earth now, this would be closing in on 2 billion people that would die at the same time. Could you imagine the devastation of 2 billion people on this planet dying? Our world has been rocked by the SARS-CoV-2 virus in this last year in which hundreds of thousands maybe in the low millions have died. Now imagine the deaths of 2 billion people. That would just be absolutely devastating. Of course, in ancient times it wasn’t all that unusual for plagues, such as the black plague, to go through and a third to a half of the population of a given area would die. So, these types of things happened. But never worldwide where the whole planet had so many people die. It also says, “Hades was following with him,” with the idea then that if death speaks of physical death, Hades is speaking of spiritual death. We find later in Chapter 20 that both death and Hades are thrown into the lake of fire. So that would be the distinction, apparently in this case, the spiritual death that follows the physical death. These people that are dying during this time are people that do not know Christ, and therefore they will face not only the physical death that all human beings face, but they will face eternal spiritual death in Hades. It’s an awful picture of what follows.
That leads us to another seal. The fifth seal which is very, very different. It says, “When the Lamb broke the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God, and because of the testimony which they had maintained.” Let’s stop there for a moment. Notice that the living creatures do not say anything at this point and our attention is taken from the earth and the devastation going on down on the earth to a scene in Heaven. There we find that these individuals, who are believers, under the altar of God. This is probably the incense altar, as we think of the Old Testament, the blood of the sacrifice was poured under the incense altar, and so we have the slain saints who have died during this time under the altar of God in Heaven. This is the picture we have here. Notice, they have died because of their testimony for Christ. When the rapture takes place, there are no believers left on the earth, but during the days that follow as we will see later on in Revelation 7-8, many multitudes of people come to Christ and they begin to follow Him, but in following Christ, there is a huge price to pay because they will be persecuted and they will be martyred and many, many thousands, perhaps even millions will pay the price of death for following the Lord Jesus Christ . . .
