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.

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

457. Nearly everyone who enters the next life from the world imagines that hell is the same for everybody, and that heaven is too, when in fact there are limitless differences and variations in both. Hell is never exactly the same for one person as it is for another, and neither is heaven, just as one man, spirit, or angel is never given to be exactly like another. At my merest thought of two being exactly alike or equal, people in the world of spirits and those in the angelic heaven were horrified. They said that every unified whole is formed from the harmony of many constituent parts, and that that whole depended on this harmony. Indeed a simple whole cannot possibly exist, only a harmonized whole. Every community in heaven forms a whole in this way, and all the communities, that is, heaven in its entirety, form a whole. And all this derives from the Lord alone by means of love. A certain angel was counting up merely the most general classes of joy found among spirits, that is, among members of the first heaven. They came to about four hundred and seventy-eight. This demonstrated how countless the less general classes must be and how innumerable the divisions within each class. And with so many in the first heaven alone, how limitless must be the classes of happiness in the heaven of angelic spirits, and still more in the heaven of angels!