REVELATION - Week 2

By this point in Revelation, the visions are starting to come thick and fast.

In this last week’s readings the seals are opened, horsemen ride out, trumpets blast, and plagues fall on the earth. It’s dramatic, even overwhelming.

But if you pay close attention, you’ll see that John isn’t just making this stuff up out of thin air. He’s drawing on Israel’s scriptures, reshaping familiar images into something new for his own time.

John’s first readers would have known these scriptures well. So, when they heard about horsemen, plagues, and a scroll that can only be opened by the Lamb, their minds would have gone back to passages in Zechariah, Exodus, Ezekiel, and Daniel.

What we get in Revelation is a kind of remix: old songs, new setting.

Let’s look at three examples from chapters 6–11.

1. The Four Horsemen and Zechariah’s Patrols (Revelation 6:1–8; Zechariah 1:8–11; 6:1–8)

When the Lamb opens the first four seals, we meet the famous “four horsemen of the apocalypse.”

First a white horse, whose rider goes out conquering; then a fiery red horse bringing war; a black horse carrying scales of famine; and finally a pale horse with Death in the saddle (Rev 6:1–8).

The background here is Zechariah’s night visions.

Zechariah sees riders on coloured horses—red, sorrel, and white—sent out to patrol the earth (Zech 1:8–11). Later, he sees chariots pulled by different coloured horses (red, black, white, and dappled) that also go out across the land (Zech 6:1–8). In Zechariah, the horses are messengers, reporting back that the earth is at peace under God’s watch.

John takes that imagery and gives it a darker spin. Instead of bringing reports of calm, the horses in Revelation unleash calamity: conquest, bloodshed, economic collapse, and death. What was in Zechariah a picture of order becomes in John a picture of chaos.

Scholars point out that this shift makes sense of the context. Zechariah was writing to encourage a people returning from exile, reassuring them of God’s oversight. John, on the other hand, is writing to communities under Roman rule, facing hostility and uncertainty. The horsemen reveal the fragility of human history, how violence, greed, and death are already galloping across the world stage.

2. The Trumpet Judgements and the Plagues of Egypt (Revelation 8–9; Exodus 7–12)

After the seventh seal is opened, seven angels sound trumpets, and each blast triggers another judgement. We get hail and fire mixed with blood (Rev 8:7), a burning mountain thrown into the sea (8:8), waters made bitter (8:10–11), the sky darkened (8:12), and swarms of terrifying creatures from the abyss (9:1–11).

It doesn’t take much to spot the echoes of Exodus here. The plagues against Egypt included water turned to blood, hail, locusts, and darkness (Exodus

 7–12). For John’s readers, those plagues weren’t just random disasters - they were God’s way of confronting Pharaoh and setting his people free.

In Revelation, the scale widens. The plagues aren’t limited to Egypt but fall on the whole earth. It’s as if John is saying: every empire that sets itself up like Pharaoh is going to face the same God who once humbled Egypt. Rome may look untouchable, but it is not beyond God’s reach.

But there’s an important difference too.

In Exodus, the plagues eventually led to liberation. In Revelation, they don’t bring repentance. Twice John says that even after all this, “the rest of humankind…did not repent of the works of their hands” (Rev 9:20–21). That detail gives the trumpets a sharper edge.

They’re not just warnings; they show how deeply rooted human rebellion can be.

3. The Little Scroll and Ezekiel’s Call (Revelation 10:1–11; Ezekiel 2:8–3:3)

In Revelation 10, John sees a mighty angel holding a small scroll. He is told to take it and eat it. The scroll is sweet like honey in his mouth, but it turns sour in his stomach (Rev 10:9–10).

This strange scene is lifted straight from Ezekiel. When Ezekiel is called as a prophet, he too is given a scroll to eat. Like John, he finds it sweet as honey (Ezek 3:3). The scroll represents the prophetic message he must carry to Israel, whether or not they want to hear it.

By echoing Ezekiel, John is making a point about his own role. Revelation is not just a record of visions - it’s a prophetic book. The sweetness of the scroll shows the privilege of receiving God’s word. The bitterness shows the hard reality of delivering it, especially when the message is one of judgement.

For John’s churches, this would have been a reminder that following Jesus involved bearing prophetic witness in a hostile world. God’s word is life-giving, but it also unsettles and confronts. Just as Ezekiel had to speak against rebellious Israel, so John’s communities had to speak against the might of Rome.

Why It Matters

All three of these examples -the horsemen, the plagues and the scroll - show us the same thing. Revelation is steeped in the Old Testament. John isn’t inventing new images from nowhere. He’s reworking the familiar symbols of Israel’s scriptures for his own day.

That tells us something important about how the early church read the Bible. They didn’t treat it as a relic of the past. They saw it as alive, still speaking into their present. If Zechariah’s horsemen once signified order, they could now signify disorder. If the Exodus plagues once humbled Pharaoh, they could now point to Rome’s downfall. If Ezekiel once ate a scroll, John could eat one too.

Revelation 6–11 is full of frightening images, but underneath it all is a reassuring point: God has dealt with empires and oppressors before, and he will do so again.

The world may look unstable, but God’s purposes are steady.