Herbert W Armstrong

   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.

   A baby is born and a baby dies somewhere on earth. Every few minutes, hundreds, no thousands die. They die from disease, from malnutrition, from starvation. From a series of horrifying causes traced to bizarre religions, incompetent governments, people who don't care about other people, and most of these people who die are black or they are brown or they are yellow. They live in India, Pakistan, Africa, Asia, China. They live in Central or South America.

   Most of these boys and girls are not Americans, Britons, Canadians, Australians, or South Africans. They're Biafran, they're Malaysians and Philippines, they're Chinese. Death, disease, malnutrition, pestilence stalks the earth continually, and John's bizarre dream of the wraith-like specter aboard the pale, sickly green horse. The foretended pestilence for the entirety of this earth rides across the heavens as much today as he did in that nightmarish dream nearly 2000 years ago when John on the island of Patna saw the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

   What did that dream mean? And does it mean us today? There is a way to find out, and the only way is to take a look at Bible prophecy and see if it really does apply to us in this modern space age. Is this the vision of four ghost-like specters riding across the heavens with their messages of death, of doom, of famine, destruction, and war? Does it mean us in this modern age? Or can we afford to ignore the prophecies of the Bible?

   One third of the Bible is prophecy. And the book of Revelation, along with Matthew 24, the absolute heart and the core of biblical prophecy. The last couple of times, I've been showing you a little bit about that dream that appeared as if in vivid technicolor nightmarish proportions to John, an original disciple of Jesus Christ. Is that John now grown elderly was on the island of Patmos off the coast of modern-day Turkey. This about the close of the first century A.D. what he saw, he recorded in a book called Revelation or the Apocalypse.

   John didn't want to see it, that dream he had, he didn't want to even write it down. He didn't want to remember it. Many of the prophets of God that are recorded in your Bible, Old and New Testament alike became absolutely sick to their stomachs when they saw in prophetic vision some of the cataclysmic occurrences that were going to strike peoples and nations on this earth. But they had to write what they were told. They had to carry the message that God had given them to people who didn't believe then any more than people believe today that some of these very same prophecies are yet to be fulfilled in the day and age in which we live.

   In John's vision of the four horsemen of the apocalypse covered in the sixth chapter of the Book of Revelation. He saw one mysterious ghost-like rider on a horse after another. And the first we explain in the beginning of the short series of programs is false Christs, false prophets, false religious doctrine, confusion, deception. And I prove that to you by showing you the scriptural interpretation, letting the Bible interpret the Bible.

   The second, that horse that portended warfare, that fantastic, unbelievable account that we went through of all the wars of history briefly. At the tremendous number of wars, there had been in that one generation, had a known unsullied peace. If there was such a time ever in the history of the world. In going through each one of these horsemen of the apocalypse, we have seen one after the other how the Bible interprets the Bible and how these dreams that John saw, this vivid technicolor vision that he saw, is coming alive in the newspapers, the prognostications, the scientific curves upon objected occurrences of tomorrow year in think tanks such as the Hudson River Institute, the Club of Rome projections by agronomists by agriculturalists by scientists.

   Those who predict the day when the food versus population curve crosses what will happen then. Death, disease, sickness, malnutrition have always been with us, you can say, but what if and when we in the Western world of overfed undernourished affluence come to the place when some of these very sickening pestilential diseases begin to strike in the big cities of the United States of America. Could that ever happen? Do we have a guarantee that we can go about our daily way of living and we can just forget about it because it just can't happen here and we can wave it aside with a careless toss of the head and go on doing whatever we're doing in a daily pursuit of pleasure and material things and forget about the prophecies of the Bible?

   Now, what's this I bring you, fear of religion? Not at all. It doesn't matter whether I believe these things or not. It doesn't matter whether you believe them or not because I'm here to tell you that these pestilential ravages that have taken tens and hundreds of thousands of hapless human beings to their death in past years are right now standing in the wings as it were waiting for the opportunity to strike in this modern world. And it doesn't depend upon me believing or not believing it.

   But I wanted to believe what my eyes told me from this medium of television coming out of the Africa and that intensive murderous civil war, which basically was tribalism that was happening there, whether I wanted to push my plate aside and sob and break up completely in my own living room when I saw them picking those tiny babies up that were like little, little black match sticks with their bloated bellies is beside the point. I can be thankful those boys weren't named Mark or Matthew a couple of my sons. But I'll tell you it didn't make me happy because they were somebody's children and my believing it or am I not wanting to believe it didn't make it go away. It was there anyhow and God didn't do it.

   God did not curse Biafra. God did not curse Pakistan or India. God is not cursing China or Indonesia. God is not cursing the nations that are called, the have not countries, where disease, sickness, malnutrition or the scourge of cholera or of bubonic plague or of one disease after another of some ghastly consequence that we think has been virtually eradicated in the earth that we in the western world, think shots can take care of. We'll get ourselves a vaccination, take a pill, we're in good health. It won't happen here.

   Let's not kid ourselves. That prophecy of the book of Revelation about the four horsemen of the apocalypse is coming to light in modern-day news. We've covered one after the other and we now come to that Revelation, the sixth chapter, 7th and 8th verse which tells us about a pale horse and that there was death that followed. Now that pale horse in the context of Revelation six? In verse eight of your Bible (Revelation 6:7-8), the Greek word is chloros and believe it or not. That's the same root word from which we take the word chloroform. It means a pale green, a sickly yellowish green color of disease.

   Jesus Christ is the only one who is capable of interpreting what that means. Not me. I am not an interpreter of the Bible. What I have is an idea means nothing whatsoever. But I've shown you by comparing the scripture, showing you what the Bible says here and there letting it interpret itself that Jesus Christ, the Revelator is the one who was qualified to tell us exactly what those symbols in the Book of Revelation called Apocalypse. These mysterious housemen, the many headed beasts and creatures, the biblical similes analogies, the prophetic symbolism, what it all means.

   Not me. I'm not qualified but Christ is, and he does show in Matthew the 24th chapter, a sequential series of events, the one as it were overlapping atop the other and becoming of tremendous global consequence. It is not a spiritual exercise to die of starvation. There's nothing spiritual, nothing biblical, nothing hidden away in the book of Zachariah about those little Biafran babies with their distended stomachs, dying of starvation. But there are scriptures in the Bible that warn of pestilence, that warn of worldwide disease, pandemics if you will, disease epidemics that strike not just one far-off nation because of its dietary habits because of a late or an early or an inadequate monsoon, because of the cholera epidemic because of typhoid or something has fallen in the wake of warfare.

   The usual tired old world. Uh You might say not a tradition but just a repetition. Encyclical pattern of this abominable, mindless human pendulum of first some fanatical religious nutty idea or some religious idea, which grows into a political idea of the tribal or the group instinct of perpetuating one's own racial desires, or one's own idea of his special role between himself and God. His idea about how to worship God and what that God looks like and what his name is and what that God wants you to do.

   Now, once this grows to become a political idea or ideal, and once it becomes the foreign policy of the country, then you get into a situation like the Indian Pakistani situation. Then it becomes military policy and then it becomes warfare. And what follows in the wake of warfare after devastation of crops, confiscation of property, the bombing, the destruction of people's homes, factories, businesses, and cities, people deserting the farms, refugees fleeing. And as in the case of Vietnam, massive defoliation and pollution of the landscape, not only by the incredible pockmarked surface of Vietnam that looks like a part of the moon as a result of the tonnages of bombs dropped there, that more than double that which was used by World War II by the United States in World War II. Not only that but what about defoliation of the destruction of crops from that point of view?

   What follows in the wake of all of that tremendous interference in a natural ecology of the bombing of the very lakes and rivers and valleys. I'll tell you what follows every single time vast massive disease epidemics, pestilence even ravages by wild animals. In a moment, I'll take you back for a brief look at history of pestilence of the past.

   One of the enigmas of all time has been understanding the Book of Revelation. For instance, the phrase "the four horsemen of the apocalypse" is common in our language. But few know the true meaning of these symbolic horsemen. The Ambassador College booklet, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, brings you that understanding. If you dare to know with biblical proofs, each of the horsemen is described and their meaning made clear religious confusion and misdirection, war and upheaval, drought and famine disease epidemics. You can now understand what the four horsemen of the apocalypse mean and how you can escape their destructive forces for this vital information. Request. Your free copy of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Send your request to Ambassador College Box 345 GPO Sydney New South Wales. That's Ambassador College Box 345 GPO Sydney New South Wales.

   God is not sitting in his heavenly armchair ready to throw his lightning bolts of displeasure at hapless human beings. Those little black Biafran, I should say babies did not die as a result of God's displeasure. They died as a result of some of the aberrant behavior of governments of leaders of personal desire for the perpetuation of one's tribe or of one's group. They died as a result of political programs of, of religious ideas. They died as a result of civil war and that civil war was the outgrowth of tribalism, the houses and Ebos, various tribal ideas, black against black, you and I couldn't tell them apart with a pencil. We couldn't tell them apart if we'd taken a course in anthropology. And yet they hate one another and they're there at each other's throats in Black Africa.

   So what I'm saying now is not, don't misconstrue that Garner Ted Armstrong is going off the deep end coming on with a series of programs talking about how mad God is at everybody and God's got to kill everybody. He doesn't like babies. No, God loves babies and so do I. And in the next program, we're gonna be talking to a bunch of kids, little children. We're gonna do some children's interviews and I've gone through the situation of losing children as well as seeing children born healthy. I have two boys that don't hear that are deaf. I know what it is to have children, the handicaps and what I'm telling you is not fear religion. I'm not trying to scare the daylights out of somebody. So they'll leap to some enormous conclusion and then get on the bandwagon and join something.

   But I am telling you that your Bible does show that God's laws which are broken, bring automatic consequences and penalties upon us. Take a look at Deuteronomy the 28th chapter and notice that the only reason for global genocidal policies in some cases and massive disease epidemics and pestilence is as a result of broken laws. God says, if you will not obey the voice of the Eternal, your God to observe, to do all His commandments and His statutes which I command you this day that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you, not that He is going to do it, but it will come upon you, it will overtake you. And he says in verse 21 of that chapter (Deuteronomy 28:21), The Eternal shall make the pestilence cleave unto you until He has consumed you from off the land whither you go to possess it. The Eternal will smite you with the botch of Egypt with the emerods, the scab, the itch whereof you cannot be healed. He will smite you with madness. That means insanity, and with blindness, and that's obvious, and astonishment of heart. And that original does mean heart disease.

   Now, God allows it. God allows it to occur as a natural consequence, but God does not come along. The Bible revealed both in the Old and the New Testament to some person who is perfectly healthy, an athlete who's got a tremendous sound set of lungs and a good heart pumping away and suddenly give him heart disease. Yet heart disease is a terrible, shall I say, killer? The number one killer among Americans today of the plus 40 groups and getting on down into young people in their twenties.

   Now, is God doing that or is a soft diet? Lack of exercise, wrong habits, starchy foods, fatty foods, misuse of the very food stuffs that come out of this good green earth God has given us. And therefore you have to tie in this simple connection that there are laws, believe it or not, which are God's laws divine and reveal laws that have to do with weather, that have to do with farming that have to do with the sowing and the harvesting of food as well as the preparation of food.

   Now, I'm not a weirdo when it comes to diet, I eat steaks and baked potatoes like anybody else does and I stay in fairly good health because they get a lot of exercise and I know about the pollutants and the additives and the colors, dyes and sprays and the artificial herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides that are used. The chemical ones of the chlorinated hydrocarbons, all the pollutants that we spread on our fields and those with which we, we taint and poison and color our foods. By the time we prepare it packaged and box it and then put it on the supermarket shelf to be sold and then later consumed. I know where some of our health problems come from. And therefore, I know what is the basic root cause of some of our heart disease, our multiple sclerosis and our muscular dystrophy and our Parkinson's disease and our arthritis.

   But these curses these botches that plague us today, the botches and diseases that God lists that fell upon ancient Egypt or as it were the scourge of these underdeveloped countries. And God says they will overtake his people. Why? If we let his laws, his 10 commandments fall to the ground back through history. It has happened time and time again. You can say it was better reporting bubonic plague, rabies, massive epidemics of cholera and typhus. You know, even in ancient Rome, there were 5000 people dying a day at one time as a result of the ravages of disease.

   In the near east, less than a year ago, there was a cholera epidemic that was raging its way westward. The onset of the disease of cholera, by the way, is usually abrupt and characterized by a roaring case of diarrhea, followed by extensive vomiting. The cholera bacteria trigger a devastating diarrhea. According to UPI that can drain off as much as 15% of the body fluids in eight hours, an amount of fluid equal to the victim's body weight in two days. This depletes the body of water and essential salts, which can be of course deadly dehydration is what usually kills most cholera victims.

   And cholera, the cholera disease usually explosively grows these bacteria in areas where human excreta is present. In other words, where the inability to purify water supplies or where this horrible situation of humans living in such squalor that is unimaginable like in India and Pakistan and many other countries, the victim usually suffers agonizing cramp, especially in the legs and feet. And at a later stage, the pulse cannot be felt in the wrist, the victim's eyes shrunken and his skin shriveled like a dry chamois skin dies of dehydration.

   The fatality rate is usually 40 to 60% untreated cases and 10 to 20% if adequate treatment is received and cholera spreads with lightning-like speed. It can be picked up in India and in a matter of hours can land in New York because we're in the jet age and now some of those diseases of the Orient of Africa and other places in the world can suddenly erupt inside the United States. And it's been shown by the way that cholera can spread the pandemic, meaning disease epidemics in a global sense. In a matter of weeks, it is known that seawater is an excellent carrier of the cholera germ.

   There was one case reported of a wealthy tourist swallowing from seawater while bathing in Israel, somewhere there near Tel Aviv or Haifa and he got cholera and very quickly, he could have been back in the United States. In this case, he wasn't. What about a cholera vaccine? The L.A. Times reported in March 1972 and I quote, cholera vaccines have existed for years and have customarily been given to world travelers as protection against the disease.

   However, principally due to research in East Bengal, the cholera vaccine has been shown to be relatively ineffective in controlling the disease. So convincing was the proof that the United States now no longer requires a cholera vaccination for entry into this country.

   Although cholera has been termed the most terrifying communicable disease. Next to the black plague. It is by far not the only disease threat to the Western world. What about the periodic influenzas that sweep across the country? And we never do see the total statistics. You never get a compilation of the total death state by state and nationally, you just don't see it. You hear of a death here and there, but most of them, you just have to read the obituary column of a big newspaper during the onslaught of one of these flu epidemics, it mounts up into the hundreds of thousands, sometimes a massive disease epidemic. And we almost never even hear about it.

   And these become superbugs because just as quickly as they get some kind of a vaccine, it seems the germs develop a resistance and they've got to come back with a whole new family of vaccines to combat those. It has even been warned that unless we find some way to put a halt to the prodigious use of antibiotics and synthetic drugs, we may soon be forced back into a pre-antibiotic era of medicine because the bugs are getting to become superbugs and we simply can't handle it anymore.

   There is a vast potential right now inside the United States of America for plague, pestilence and I'm not kidding about it. We are at a point today because of the combined pressures of our diet. Our lack of exercise, the potential of the lack of foodstuffs, the potential for the depletion of our reserves, food grains, meat. What have you, the prodigious amounts of pesticides in our daily diet of poisons of chemicals, the DDT in our liver and body tissues and vital organs.

   The point is that we today are less disease-resistant than many other countries might be. This isn't scare talk. I wish I had about five hours to tell you some of the statistics that are the background of this type of program that we have for you. Because these mysterious race-like ghosts that John saw in his vision of the four horsemen of the apocalypse are real. And that pale horse pending epidemics of disease and pestilence on this earth is going to follow in the wake of any nuclear war. It just will because the utter devastation nuclear fallout, the complete destruction of whole major urban centers in the United States will simply decree that that is what follows in the wake.

   And your Bible depicts a dramatic end-time climactic warfare in which vast percentages of the entirety of humankind will die. Unless, unless this world, not just our nations, no the world, really begins to turn to God and to understand his laws and to begin to live by them and obey our Creator for the first time in our lives.

   History shows there have always been wars, disease and famine threats to local population never before. However, has the possibility of total annihilation of the human race existed until this age of the arms race, nuclear stockpiles overkill. And the hydrogen bomb an entire generation has learned to live under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. We've heard talk start off if World War II comes. But when Jesus described the critical juncture in history, when except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved. He called it the end time our climactic age is vividly portrayed in the light of Bible prophecy in the booklet, Is This The End Time? Are we now living in that age? You need to know, request your free copy of the important booklet. Is This The End Time? Send your request to Ambassador College Box 345 GPO Sydney New South Wales. That's Ambassador College Box 345 GPO Sydney New South Wales.

   Let's take a look again at what Jesus Christ of Nazareth said about that mysterious fourth horseman of the apocalypse, that pale horse, that sickly yellowish-green one that portended pestilence. Jesus Christ of Nazareth, in Matthew, the 24th chapter, gave his disciples a sequential series of events: false Christs and false prophets, which dovetails exactly with the meaning of that first horse, the white one. He talked of wars and rumors of wars, which dovetail exactly with that red horse that we covered in at least two programs in this series. And he talked about famines, which dovetails exactly with that third horse that we also talked about with the balances and the scales in his hand, measuring out little pinches of the very substances of life such as barley and wheat and oil and wine for very small amounts of money.

   Here in this one, he finally said after famines, there would be pestilences. And now we come to that fourth horseman of John's vivid dream. And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast or living creatures, it could say, and the Greeks say, "Come and see," and I looked and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death. And the grave, the Greek word is Hades, not the hell that you've heard about the fiery flames, but Hades followed him, followed with him and power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth to kill with a sword and with hunger and with death and with the beasts of the earth. So it means pestilence following in the wake of warfare. It is something that is the outgrowth of warfare. All of these dovetail together, not a separate isolated incident that you read somewhere in the book of the Bible, but an overall global trend and series of conditions that are going to strike nations very realistically on this earth.

   In the event of a nuclear bomb, war is only logical. Anybody can say what's going to follow, pollution of surface water, disease, malnutrition, lack of food, starvation, even wild animals attacking people and the like. Look what it says in Revelation, the sixth chapter in the 7th and 8th verse again (Revelation 6:7-8), in comparison with what it says in Matthew 24. Jesus Christ of Nazareth said there would be a time without parallel, without precedent in the history of the entirety of the earth and except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved and Moffat adds, "a live." So he's not talking about converting people. He's talking about saving human flesh from destruction except those days should be shortened.

   Here is a time then when once set in motion, unless God Almighty himself intervened and took a hand in the course of world affairs, there wouldn't be any survivors. That's what Jesus Christ plainly said. Does that make him a prophet? You bet it does. Jesus Christ prophesied about an impending climactic last end-time battle, a nuclear battle. Because that's the only explanation you can give the potential for human extermination, and these horsemen of the apocalypse merely herald what is going to happen. What leads up to that. And this pestilential warning is one of global disease epidemics that are going to strike. That fourth horsemen of the apocalypse means global disease epidemics.

   You ought to write for these booklets, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. A brand new booklet, hot off the press, you can have by return mail absolutely free of charge. And also this new booklet, Is This The End Time? How would you like to have the whole thing in a very handy little pocket book size? So you can read it at home, and you can see this graphic, beautiful artwork showing the vision just the way John might have seen it. You will see the time setting, you will see how the Book of Revelation can be unfolded to your understanding. You'll see every single one of these Horsemen with other scriptures from Jesus Christ's own first-person quotation out of the Gospels over in the book of Matthew verse. Well, the 24th chapter, some of those verses as well as other sections of the New Testament included in this II Thessalonians, the second chapter, and other scriptures that show you exactly what this Book of Revelation, the sixth chapter, those four Horsemen are all about. Now, this booklet is very logically done. It is easy to understand. Even if you have not graduated from high school, if you're elderly and your eyes are not as good as they once were. The type is large enough that you can understand it. It's very plain, very simply put.

   And yet, even if you're a college professor or a theologian, you'll find it challenging and interesting and straight to the point for this book with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a brand new booklet, unveiling a part of that mystery book of all the books of the Bible, the Book of Revelation. It shows you chapter by chapter and verse by verse exactly what those mysterious horsemen mean in today's world news. All you need to do is to request it by sending your letter to Post Office Box 345, Sydney, New South Wales. Be sure to tell us the call letters of your station. We need that. That's all, there is no cost, but tell us the name of the radio station to which you've been listening, the call letters, and then send your letter to Box 345, Sydney, New South Wales. Until next time, this is Garner Ted Armstrong saying goodbye, friends.

   You have been listening to the World Tomorrow. If you would like more information, write to Ambassador College Box 345 GPO Sydney, New South Wales. That's Ambassador College Box 345 GPO Sydney, New South Wales.