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.

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

206. Where our own prudence comes from and what it is. It comes from what we regard as our own. This is natural to us and is called the soul we get from our parent. This possession of ours is a love for ourselves and a consequent love for the world, or a love for the world and a consequent love for ourselves. By its nature, love for ourselves focuses solely on ourselves and regards others either as worthless or as nothing. If it attaches any importance to them, it lasts only as long as they respect and worship it. At the heart of this love, like the effort to bear fruit and propagate in a seed, is a latent desire to become great--if possible, to become monarch, and then if possible to become God. The devil is like this because the devil is pure love for oneself, a love that inherently worships only itself and favors only those who also worship it. It hates any other devil who is like itself, because it wants to be the only object of worship.

Since no love can exist without its partner, and since the partner of love or volition in humans is called discernment, when love for oneself breathes its love into its consorting discernment, that love becomes a pride that is pride in our own intelligence. That pride is the source of our own prudence.

[2] Further, since love for ourselves wants to be the only master of the world and wants to be God as well, the cravings of evil that descend from it derive their life from it, and so do the perceptions of those cravings, which are schemes. The same holds true for the pleasures of those cravings, which are evil, and for their thoughts, which are distortions. All of them are like servants and employees of their lord, and they all obey every command of their lord without realizing that they are not really acting but are being impelled, impelled by love for ourselves through the means of pride in our own intelligence. This is why our own prudence is latent in every evil from its very beginning.

[3] The reason a recognition of the material world alone is latent in it as well is that it closes the skylights through which we can see heaven and the windows in the walls as well, to prevent us from seeing or hearing that the Lord alone is in control of everything and that the material world is essentially dead, that everything that belongs to us is hell, and that love for what is our own is therefore a devil. With these windows closed, we are in darkness, so we build a hearth in the darkness and sit there with our partners, chatting cordially about the material world as opposed to God and our own prudence as opposed to divine providence.