<p>6:2 <i>And I looked and beheld a white horse, and he that sat thereon had a bow, and there was given to him a crown, and he came forth conquering and to conquer</i>- In the first century application to the &quot;last days&quot; which culminated in AD70, the rider on the white horse &quot;bent on conquest&quot; would initially refer to the victorious Roman march towards Jerusalem in Spring 67. The rider takes peace from the earth (cp. Mt. 24:6,7)- the disruption of the '<i>pax Romana</i>', the peace of the Roman empire. &quot;Caesar has obtained for us a profound peace. There are neither wars nor battles&quot; (Epictetus, <i>Discourses</i> 3:13:9). The riders on the black and pale horses would then refer to the famine and death resulting from the Jewish war.</p><p>The description of the rider on the white horse going out to conquer is intended to be linked with the description of the Lord Jesus in Rev. 19:11. Yet the rider of Rev. 6:1,2 is part of the judgments upon the land. It refers to an anti-Christ, a fake Christ, the ultimate false Messiah; perhaps the Islamic Mahdi.</p><p>The white horse here must be understood as the latter day version of the white horse of Zechariah chapters 1 and 6, which went forth to conquer the land promised to Abraham and to tread down its cities and inhabitants. The simple point is that the land of Israel will be conquered; the current technological advantage of the IDF and the bravado of the state of Israel will not ultimately save them. Only faith in Christ will. And yet the figure of a rider on a white horse is used later in Revelation regarding the Lord Jesus. This doesn&rsquo;t mean that it is the Lord Jesus who is in view here in 6:2. For often in Revelation, the powers and entities who dominate God&rsquo;s land and people are presented in terms elsewhere used about the true Kingdom of God and its king. Thus the whore who rides the beast represents the city of Babylon, but the descriptions used have clear connection with the description of the true city of God. This is not to say that they are one and the same. It means that the antiChrist is a fake, imitation Christ, and his Kingdom is likewise an imitation of the true. So the white horse conqueror of the land is an antiChrist- bearing in mind that the Greek idea of <i>anti </i>carries the idea of an equivalent or imitation, rather than as in Latin someone &lsquo;against&rsquo;. The Hadith in book 19.4388.4390, 4392 and 4437 claim that Mohammad rode on a white horse during the time of the early Moslem battles with the Jews. The language of conquering is very current amongst Islamic jihadists: &quot;Allah hath decreed: Lo I verily shall conquer&quot; (Sura 58.21).</p><p>The horses invite connection with the locusts like horses and &ldquo;the sound of chariots of many horses rushing to battle&rdquo; in Rev. 9:7,9,17, which I later interpret as the hordes of Israel&rsquo;s neighbours from the Euphrates who will rush into the land promised to Abraham to destroy it. Horses are frequently used in the Bible to represent military action. In Rev. 14:20, blood comes up unto the horse bridles- these invaders meet a terrible destruction. The final destruction of Israel&rsquo;s enemies features the destruction of their horses (Rev. 19:18), and that prophecy compares their horses with the white horse of the Lord Jesus and His followers also on white horses (Rev. 19:11,14,19,21). This juxtaposition of &lsquo;horses&rsquo; suggests that the white horse conqueror of 6:2 is not Christ, but rather an antichrist, an imitation, fake Christ.</p><p>The rider on the white horse was &ldquo;given&rdquo; a crown, a <i>stephanos</i> of victory, and with that &lsquo;gift&rsquo; he goes out to &lsquo;conquer&rsquo;. We find the same Greek words translated &lsquo;given&rsquo; and &lsquo;to conquer&rsquo; in Rev. 13:7, where &ldquo;the mouth&rdquo; of the beast is &ldquo;given&hellip; to make war with the saints God&rsquo;s people, Israel and to <i>overcome </i>s.w. &ldquo;conquer&rdquo; them&rdquo;. The mouth of the beast is his publicity agent, the false prophet, the little horn- the antichrist figure. And it is this same individual who is pictured in 6:2 as riding the white horse, an imitation Jesus, an anti-Christ. The same Greek word translated conquer / overcome is also found in a similar context in Rev. 11:7: &ldquo;The beast that ascends out of the bottomless pit having experienced a death and amazing &lsquo;resurrection&rsquo; shall make war against them the two faithful witnesses and shall <i>overcome </i>them and kill them&rdquo;. But the same word is found frequently throughout Revelation and John&rsquo;s letters, speaking of how ultimately God&rsquo;s people shall conquer / overcome. The point is, they will temporarily be overcome, but they shall gloriously overcome at the end. &ldquo;A troop shall overcome him, but he shall overcome at the last&rdquo; (Gen. 49:19).</p><p>The crown of the antichrist connects with how the horns of the beast have crowns. His bow connects him with Gog, the individual leader of the assembly of ten nations from within the land promised to Abraham who will invade Israel in the last days. In Gog&rsquo;s defeat by Divine intervention, his bow will be smitten out of his hand (Ez. 39:3). The bow is the weapon of Esau / Edom, the father of the Arab peoples (Gen. 27:3); and it is repeatedly used about the weaponry of the Babylonians and Assyrians and the neighbours of Israel, whose desolation of the land and Jerusalem are the prototypes of the latter day desolation (Is. 5:28; 13:18; Jer. 4:29; 6:23; 46:9; 50:29,42; 51:56). Jeremiah perceived that the bow of Babylon was effectively the bow of Yahweh, drawn against His own people in judgment (Lam. 2:4; 3:12). Again we see that the horses, their riders and weaponry are also those of God, just as the coloured horses of Zech. 1 are matched by the same coloured horses which comprised the Angel cherubim in Zech. 6. Zech. 9:10 speaks of how the horse, chariot and battle how will be &ldquo;cut off from Jerusalem&rdquo; just prior to the establishment of God&rsquo;s Kingdom on earth. Here in Rev. 6:2 we have the development of that situation- and the focus will finally be upon Jerusalem as the holy city of Islam, now proclaimed by some Jihadist theologians as more holy than Mecca.</p>