The descriptions of God’s judgment upon the earth are fierce and unsettling. The four riders depicting the initial signs of God’s judgment are terrifying on their own (6:1-8). They symbolize the world’s all too common experience of death by violent conquest, war, famine, and pestilence. Even God’s own beloved people pay a heavy price while living in a world under judgment (6:9-11). These are all the beginnings of the birth pains of God’s judgment (Matthew 24:8).

While the judgments symbolized by the four horsemen span the history of the fallen world, the particular judgments depicted in the sixth and seventh seals are meant to be understood as the final days of God’s judgment at the end of the age. The once solid earth will give way under the wrath of the Lamb. The light that God created will be, for a time, blotted out and the kingdoms of the world will collapse. Rather than repenting and fleeing to Christ, the impenitent will continue to turn away, seeking shelter in the crumbling earth. The terrifying account ends with a question: “Who can stand?”

At first glance the question may seem to be rhetorical as though no answer is anticipated. But nothing could be more blessedly far from the truth. There is a people – a vast number of men and women from all the nations – who will stand on the firm ground of God’s mercy while all those who scorned that mercy will fall under the wrath of the Lamb.

As we will see in chapter seven (an interlude between the sixth and seventh seal) this particular people, this holy nation and kingdom of priests are the people of God, redeemed out of a world under tribulation. A nation of redeemed men and women beginning with Adam and Eve who believed the Lord in the wreckage of their own sin. That vast company includes all of those who, throughout history, have trusted in the Lord to redeem through his Christ all that had been ruined by sin. It is a vast multitude that will be completed once the final martyrs are offered up (6:11).