The seven seals (Ch.6)
Chapter 5 opens with a bang. Up to this point everything has felt fairly understandable, but now we enter a chapter of rather unusual pictures.
First we see a scroll with seven seals that nobody is able to open, and we wonder what’s written inside. But that turns out not to be the real question — the real question is who is worthy to put its contents into action and fulfill God’s plan.
There is only one: Jesus. But he shows up in a paradoxical way. He is announced as a strong hero, yet appears as a weak, slaughtered lamb. This is the key to the whole book — our strength is not brute force but something of an entirely different nature.
When Jesus opens the scroll, another one is exposed: the devil, with all his promises and power, revealed in the picture of the four horsemen as a total disappointment.
Finally, Jesus comes and brings it all to an end.