Revelation 6:7: And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.

The fourth seal covers the earth's fourth millennium from about 1000 BC to the birth of Jesus Christ.¹ This was a millennium of spiritual sickness in Israel that began most notably when the kingdom of Israel divided after Solomon's death in 975 BC.² After this division, Assyria took the northern ten tribes of Israel captive in 721 BC.³ The empire of Babylon conquered the southern kingdom of Judah (the Jews) and destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BC.⁴ The Medes and Persians were next to subjugate the Jews in 539 BC.⁵ The Greek Empire became the next Jewish overlord when Alexander the Great conquered vast territories on the Asian continent in 331 BC.⁶ The Greek Empire then fell as the Roman Empire rose to power in 161 BC.⁷ The Romans conquered Judea in 63 BC.⁸

The prophet Daniel saw the rise and fall of these political kingdoms when he interpreted the dream of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel chapter 2.⁹ Daniel chapter 7 contains a companion vision of these same empires. However, Daniel chapter 7 describes the spiritual kingdoms of Satan in which his dominion continuously increased‒and will continue to increase‒throughout the world until the future gathering of saints at Adam-ondi-Ahman.¹⁰

When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, the fourth beast with the face of an eagle¹¹ called for the events of the fourth seal to symbolically come forth and be seen.¹²

Revelation 6:8: And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

When the fourth seal opened, John looked and beheld a pale horse¹³ as a symbol of Israel's spiritual sickness.¹⁴ Israel's sickening spiritual condition was a natural consequence of the spiritual famine she endured throughout much of the third seal.¹⁵ Spiritually malnourished people are prone to spiritual sickness¹⁶ and spiritual death.¹⁷ Thus, Death rode on the sickly pale horse¹⁸ to represent God's judgments of physical death that came at the hands of one Gentile nation after another.¹⁹ Hell then followed in Death's wake.²⁰ In this context, Hell represents spirit prison in the postmortal spirit world.²¹ Disembodied spirits of wicked and spiritually sick people entered this hell at the time of their physical death throughout the fourth seal.²²

Death and Hell were empowered fourfold²³ (the world number)²⁴ to execute God's judgment of death²⁵ with the use of (1) the sword (war),²⁶ (2) hunger (spiritual famine),²⁷ (3) death (pestilence)²⁸ and (4) beasts of the earth.²⁹ Even though Death's power was fourfold, God limited that power to a fourth part of the earth.³⁰ Some scholars equate this to a geographical area or to some fraction of all the earth's inhabitants.³¹ However, the fourth part of the earth pertains to the wicked Israelites themselves that are the object of John's imagery. They were physically and spiritually destroyed in part³² as they fought civil wars amongst themselves³³ and were then conquered by the Gentile nations of Assyria, Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome during the fourth seal.³⁴ Death and Hell truly had power over God's covenant people in a measured degree³⁵ because of their own wickedness.³⁶ If Israel had been obedient, the fourfold judgments of God would not have come upon even the fourth part of them.³⁷

The fourth seal was a time of increasing spiritual sickness in Israel as Satan's dominion increased in each of the political kingdoms that came to power during that thousand-year period. The events from the fourth seal also foreshadow similar conditions that will exist in the last days just before the First Woe of the Seventh Seal.³⁸ In other words, the conditions of spiritual sickness and Satan's increasing dominion during the fourth seal will repeat themselves in greater measure prior to, and during, the First Woe of the Seventh Seal, as described by John in Revelation 9:1-12.³⁹