The Great Ribulation

74 THE -T TABULATION
a show of good, their minds nevertheless ever remain
enveloped in hypocrisy and deceitful craft, and
their hearts bound by inner depravity.”
All this was abundantly fidfilled in Israel and the
surrounding nations during the Last Days, when the
Land was filled with murderers, revolutionaries, and
terrorists of every description; when, as the historian
Josephus wrote, “every city was divided into two armies
encamped against one another, and the preservation
of the one party was in the destruction of the
other; so the day-time was spent in the shedding of
blood, and the night in fear. . . . It was then common
to see cities fled with dead bodies, still lying
unburied, and those of old men, mixed with infants,
all dead, and scattered about together; women also
lay amongst them, without any covering for their
nakedness; you might then see the whole province
fill of inexpressible calai-nities, while dread of still
more barbarous practices which were threatened,
was everywhere greater than what had been already
perpetrated” (The#wish War, ii. xviii. 2).
The Black Horse
Following on the heels of war is the third angelic
rider (Revelation 6:5-6), on a black horse, holding a
pair of scales in his hand, a symbol of famine from
the prophecy of Ezekiel, in which the starving inhabitants
of Jerusalem were forced to weigh their food
carefully (Ezekiel 4:10). This Horseman brings ecoizomti
hurdship, a situation described as completely
chaotic. A voice from “the center of the living creatures”—
i.e., from God’s Throne- says: “A quart of