Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadWilliam Burkitt Notes and Observations - Revelation 6:5 - 6:5
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
The third seal opened, sets forth the great calamity which should befall the church by famine, which some understand literally, others figuratively and mystically.
1. A literal famine in Judea, seems here to be prefigured by a person riding on a black horse, with a balance to weigh food in his hand: famine discolours, the face of men, and makes them look black, sad, and dismal; accordingly it is represented by a black horse; and the rider having a pair of scales in his hand to weigh corn by the pound, and not to measure it by the bushel, imports the great scarcity that there should be in bread; and St. John heard a voice saying, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny.
The Roman penny was the ordinary wages for a day's work to a labourer, so that the quantity of bread was but sufficient to keep persons alive for one day. Famine is a very sore and terrible judgment, it consumes a people by piecemeal: other judgments cut off suddenly, but this is a lingering and languishing death.
Lord! help us in the midst of our fulness, when we eat the fat, and drink the sweet, to remember how righteously thou mayst cut us short of our abused mercies. How is it that we have not long ago sinned away our plenty, who have so often sinned with our plenty?
2. Others understand the famine, here represented by the black horse, to be meant of a spiritual famine, a scarcity of the word of God, which fell out in the time of the ten persecutions, when the storm fell upon the bishops and most useful ministers in the church, when many bright and burning lamps were extinguished, others hid under a bushel: a dismal, gloomy day, when the church of God did eat her spiritual bread by weight, when all the spiritual food men could get to keep their souls alive from day to day could be but sufficient for that end.