8.091 Whoever heard of a Green Horse? 25 September
There's a new book published recently by my author-friend, Norma Parrish Archbold. Many of you would have known and appreciated her previous work, "The Mountains of Israel". Her latest one is called, "The Green Horse".
She contacted me earlier this year to ask if I would have a look at the manuscript. My kneejerk thoughts were, "Not so sure about that title!" But my eventual more studied assessment was, "Brilliant! Keep it!"
In the Seal Chapter of Revelation 6:7-8 we have a mini-saga of four horses -- a white one, a red one, a black one and a "pale" one. That fourth one goes like this:
"When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, 'Come!' I looked and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a 4th of the earth to kill by the sword, famine and plague and by the wild beasts of the earth."
The "color-coded" fourth horse is rendered "a pale horse" in most standard translations, but Living New Testament does translate it a bit more judiciously as "sickly green". The Greek word relates to "chloros", i.e. from the root chloro- we get words like chlorophyll, chloroform or the deadly yellow-green of chlorine gas. Not bad, Norma, not bad!
The essence of her book traces the historic rise of Islam from 636 A.D. right on through that infamous rude awakening of September 11, 2001 to the present.
The eighth and final Middle East Empire, Dar al-Islam or "House of Islam", then proceeds on to the now global ascendancy of Islam and the so-called "war on terror". And this becomes the point where Ms Archbold's research coincides with mine.
Her book is a must read. It chronicles the historic bloodletting and struggle for supremacy from both within and without the Islamic hierarchy, which certainly calls for comparison with not only Rev 6:7-8 above, but also to what the Scriptures refer to as an 8th Kingdom (cf. Daniel 6:7-- 7:23 and Rev 17:11).
But this is Norma's genius and research, and it's for her to outlay her own insights. Get her book!
But in my brief introduction, I want to make one more point that is as obvious as the daily dawn, but ironically slips over the heads of the masses with nary a notice. Who in the world ever labeled this system of struggle and tyranny of terror as a religion? -- at least as a religion in the scriptural sense of worship, praise and piety?
Probably it was the same Hellenistic-boggled brains that presumed a similar "Christian" bloodletting of the Dark Ages to be a bona fide "religion" from those evil days. Bloodletting for power is power politics and the shadow of the Almighty is nowhere to be found!
On the other hand, most of us these days don't like that "religious" label anyway for what it may reflect by a seductive, secular media from what they may invent as well as what they may present.
Of course, secular semantics from a dictionary calls anything a religion that prays or preys (either will do), but most Bible believers never really thought that through seriously until the President of the USA started stressing "good Islam" right after 9-11! (Good people, of course, I will not deny.) Since one of the ground-floor tenets of Islam is anti-Semitism, whoever heard of good anti-Semitism? Adolf Hitler, perhaps!
And immediately upon a President's word, a naively seduced media-society took a U-turn!
The God fearing will be God-fearing, but political conquests (East or West) will be political conquests! And never the twain shall meet!
So, you'll want to discover some amazing details in Ms Archbold's new book. It's a fabulous bit of history. You can get it from:
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And as for my 2 shekels worth in the religion vs. political obfuscation (a.k.a. baloney) above, a most helpful article on why the leaders of the Western world are so confused about who their enemy may be,canbe found in the following URL: Presidential Debate -- A Critical Omission by Esther Levins . Moreover, I can supply you with about a dozen similar URL's from an array of sources if you want them!
Victor Schlatter, South Pacific Island Ministries,