Transparency is needed to sort things out. Before big change happens, God first reveals what’s really going on.

In the Book of Revelation - the last book of the Word - the apostle John describes a series of apocalyptic visions that he experienced during his exile on the Isle of Patmos, in the Aegean Sea.

In one of these visions, he saw four horsemen, the first riding a white horse, the second a red horse, the third a black, and the fourth - named Death - riding a pale horse. These "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" - oft-pictured - are described in Revelation 6:1-8.

What do these horses, and their riders, represent? What do they have to do with us, today? Watch as Curtis Childs and Jonathan Rose explore the hidden Bible meaning of the Four Horsemen in the Book of Revelation, in this video from the Swedenborg and Life Series, from the Swedenborg Foundation.

Plus, to go straight to the source, follow the links below to the places in "Apocalypse Revealed" where Swedenborg explained the inner meaning of this famous Bible story. A good place to start would be Apocalypse Revealed 298.

(Препратки: Apocalypse Explained 315; Apocalypse Revealed 262-263, 301, 306, 314, 316, 320, 322-323)

125. Those whose lust is for the deflowering of virgins, those, that is, who take the greatest pleasure in virginities and their theft without marriage as an object, and when they have stolen the flower of virginity abandon the girls; those who have led such a life, because it is contrary to their spiritual and celestial nature, and because they destroy the conjugial principle (for this is all they have in view in the flower of virginity, and once it is plucked they do not love the girls any more); and because it is contrary to innocence, which they injure and kill by driving innocent girls, who would otherwise have been chaste and capable of being filled with conjugial love, to a life of prostitution, and they are thus destroyers of marriages - it is well known that it is the first flowering of love which brings virgins into chaste conjugial love and joins the minds of married couples; and because the holiness of heaven is based upon conjugial love and so on innocence, and these men are such inward murderers; they undergo a most severe punishment in the other life. They are brought into a state of delusion in which actions appear real and produce sensation. They then seem to themselves to be riding a wild horse, which throws them so that they fall with apparent risk to their lives, such is the terror which is induced in them. Afterwards they seem to themselves to be under the wild horse's belly, and then they seem to enter the horse's belly through its hind parts. It then appears to them as if they were in the belly of a filthy whore; she is then changed into a great dragon, and there they remain wrapped in torture. This punishment comes back as often as they feel that lust and approach young virgins with their trickery. Others are punished by being stretched first one way and then the other, or twisted first one way and then the other; they are so torn apart by these violent movements that they seem to themselves to be rent into pieces or fragments with immense pain; and if they do not then desist, they are cast into a foul-smelling hell.