FOUR APOCALYPSES FACING MANKIND
The real threats come from a failure to successfully manage public debt, trade, security and climate change. What government has any practical cooperative ways for sorting these things out?
The setup is, we had 7 or 8 billion people living in 195 countries under the global so-called rules based order that was created after the last war. But this has broken down with the result that we get uncontrolled pandemics and fiscal crises and trade wars and hot wars.
It's now a bit of a cliché to remind ourselves that through globalisation and technology, the world has really shrunk down. The easiest way to understand this is to picture a scene with 195 boats on a sea and a set of rules to stop them from bumping into each other.
But that isn't the situation anymore. Instead, we have one luxury cruise liner with 195 cabins ... where's the captain? Oh, he's doing what suits himself.
Could some of the more active passengers get together and take over stewardship of the ship?
THE BOOK OF A REVELATION.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse come from the Book of Revelation (Chapter 6). Each symbolises a major force of destruction:
1. White Horse – Conquest or False Peace
He brings victory without war, but peace with a price.
2. Red Horse – War and Bloodshed
He shatters peace, leaving the world soaked in blood.
3. Black Horse – Famine and Economic Collapse
He weighs grain on scales — scarcity rules, and the poor starve first.
4. Pale (chloros) Horse – Death, often linked with Plague and Pestilence
He follows silently, and hell follows with him.
The Pale Horse portends mass death from plague, famine, war, and wild beasts. Not just one kind of death — but the sweeping, indiscriminate kind that follows major collapse, "the fourth turning" comes to mind when society breaks down completely. It's the final horseman — the culmination of the chaos brought by the first three.
The four horsemen of the apocalypse ride out in sequence, as seals are broken, heralding the end times.
The Seven Seals
According to revelation, God holds a scroll, sealed with 7 seals, and only the lamb - meaning Jesus - is worthy to open them. Each seal, when broken, releases a different event or judgment onto the world.
The first four seals release the Horsemen:
- Seal 1 – White Horse (Conquest)
- Seal 2 – Red Horse (War)
- Seal 3 – Black Horse (Famine)
- Seal 4 – Pale Horse (Death)
The remaining seals bring even more apocalyptic events:
- Martyrdom
- Earthquakes, cosmic upheaval
- Silence... then the Seven Trumpets begin — and it gets worse.
The breaking of seals symbolises the start of divine judgement — a step-by-step unraveling of the world order?
The Seven Trumpets of Revelation
You'll wish you hadn't asked
The Seven Bowls of Wrath
Armageddon comes from the Hebrew Har-Megiddo, meaning “Mount Megiddo.”
It appears in Revelation 16:16 as the place where the final battle between good and evil takes place.
Symbolically, it’s the climactic showdown between the forces of God, good, and the forces of Satan, evil.
After the sixth bowl is poured out, demonic spirits gather the kings of the Earth to fight at Megiddo.
It’s not the end itself, but the last major battle before Christ’s return and the final judgement.
Think of Armageddon as the military climax of the apocalyptic narrative. It seems to me that this is what certain people are pushing for in Middle East, which, after all, is the birthplace of apocalyptic religions.
Armageddon is a literal global mass extermination event you might call it, or at least the final spiritual struggle. However you see it, it is the final moral reckoning of civilisation.
It’s the moment humanity reaches the edge - and divine intervention ends the chaos.
It’s not just a war, it’s the last word before renewal.
It's important to see Revelation as a moral narrative, rather than a material story about conquest, land, resources, plunder. The vertivation is moral, the final showdown between good and evil.
Resumé of he Narrative So Far
1. The Seven Seals – Open the scroll of judgement. The Four Horsemen appear.
2. The Seven Trumpets – Catastrophes escalate: natural, demonic, and cosmic.
3. The Seven Bowls (Vials) of Wrath – God’s final, most devastating judgements.
4. Armageddon – the tipping point.
5. The Second Coming – Christ returns to defeat evil in this great battle.
6. Judgement and New Creation – Satan is bound, the dead are judged, and a new heaven and new earth are revealed.
Conclusion
The story so far is that following the earthquake, we realized that this was a sequence of three apocalypse, flooding pollution and the earthquake and speculated on what might come next.
We identified fout potential future apocalypses at the start of this piece - debt, trade war, hot war, climate change.
For those running the world, it seems that these troubles can only be seen in eschatological terms:
Divine revelation through sacred texts
A moral struggle between good and evil
A final judgement or apocalypse at the end of time
Eschatological — meaning they focus on how the world ends, and why it must.
In the final article of this series, we shall try to understand how the three monotheistic religions developed such a harsh narrative, how it emerged from perhaps the world's harshest region, and consider ways of combating a mindset which, on the face of it, seems to be leading us to planetary destruction.
[End]
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