The seals (Ch. 6)
Chapter 6.
The four horsemen
The scroll from chapter 5 is opened one seal at a time, and the first four send out riders on coloured horses.
The first looks like a conqueror: white horse, crown, bow, riding out to win. The three behind him strip that picture bare - war, then hunger that prices bread out of reach of the poor, then death. Taken together the four are the standard list of disasters the Hebrew prophets warned about: wild beasts, sword, famine, plague.
The first rider is the one readers argue over, because Christ rides a white horse himself later in the book (chapter 19). Revelation keeps setting up look-alikes like this, and its case is that the power promising victory here is an imitation: it can conquer, frighten and starve, but it makes nothing of its own. The same three-part imitation returns in chapter 13 with the dragon and the two beasts, and in chapter 17 with the harlot and the beast.
The souls under the altar
The fifth seal is not a disaster but a question. Under an altar are people killed for what they said, and they call out: “How long, Sovereign Lord, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth?” Nobody corrects them for asking. They are given white robes - the book’s way of saying the verdict has gone in their favour - and told to wait a little longer.
That wait is the tension the whole book lives in. The longer the end is delayed, the more time there is for people to change their minds; and the longer it is delayed, the longer those already paying the price go on paying it.
When it ends
The sixth seal answers “how long” with a picture rather than a date: the sun goes black, the moon turns the colour of blood, the stars fall, and everyone from kings to slaves hides in the rocks from “the wrath of the Lamb”.
That phrase is deliberately the wrong way round - a lamb is the least frightening animal there is - and the text never says what the people hiding are actually afraid of. Their own consciences, or power as such, or a lamb they assume will behave the way the conquering rider did: the chapter leaves the question open.