If the white rider was the Antichrist, he would have to date back to Zechariah's time, and that would make him ancient. So, clearly, these horsemen are angelic beings. The white rider has a bow and a crown. The crown is a symbol of authority and leadership. So, he has a sign of leadership in organisations. He has a bow, which is a symbol of victory but also of deception or deceit. A bow is a weapon used for hunting. He rides a white horse that is the same colour as the horse Jesus and the angels ride in Rev. 19. The same colour as the garment that the saints receive.
To understand the White Horseman, we need to understand who the horsemen are. The coloured horsemen appear first, not in Revelations, but in Zechariah 1. The Red, Green, and White Horsemen patrolled the earth, seeing that everything was at peace.
Therefore, I read this as the horseman hunting the leaders of organisations that are Christian. Once captured, he leads organisations or churches astray with deception. The deception will be so good that you will struggle to find the difference. Even the elect would be deceived if it were possible. It is only through the spirit of God that we will be kept safe. If we look through our human eyes, we will call evil good.
From our look at Laodicea, we have observed that he started his mission in 1844. His first target was the Catholic Pope. We see a change of pope in 1846, from a conservative pope to a liberal pope. To put this in different terms, we saw a change in the authority of the pope and therefore the word. Pope Gregory believed that divine authority was passed on to each pope using the same system that God the Father passed authority on to Jesus and Jesus on to man. This was God's authority to pass these rights on as he saw fit. It was divine, unquestionable, done with love, and always trustworthy. Pope Pius believed in the rights of men, and these rights were unalienable. So, he set up various groups to control the different aspects of the church. The result of this change was that everything was questionable, and so the rot set in. I will digress for a moment to provide a bit of clarity. In Numbers 15:32, we have a story of a man who was stoned to death for collecting wood on the Sabbath day. To our modern ears, this is a horrible story of injustice where the crime and punishment did not match. The story, though, is not one of actions, but one of attitude. The Sabbath day was holy, and the attitude of just a bit of disobedience is OK, and it will not matter. As soon as you cross the line, the next bit of disobedience creates a norm for the situation. The next time it is a bit worse and the president is set, you can push out the boundaries. God knows this always happens if you do not enforce the law. This law was about the Sabbath being holy. If you could push a law about what is holy, you would soon push God out. This man did not die for wood. He died to stop Israel from developing a poisonous attitude. The result of which would mean Israel being left Godless in the wilderness. Can you see how this one small act by a Pope was at the very heart of the destruction of today's church? Over the centuries, so many wicked popes and incorrect doctrines have already damaged the Catholic Church.
It was not hard for the white rider to practice his deception. He was very successful in crippling the Catholic Church, with sexual scandals being a regular occurrence. Popes continued to become weaker in faith and power, with a few exceptions. Today, we have reached the point where we have a non-Christian Pope. This Pope is a Jesuit, and if you do a little research, you will find that the doctrines the Jesuits adhere to are not those of Christ. A Christian is a follower of Jesus and the way he taught us to live. The Jesuit doctrines follow the way of man. The White Rider now turns his eyes to his next victim, the Protestant churches. He had already started with the set-up of pseudo-Christian churches; Baha'i and Mormon churches had foundations in 1844. The White Rider did not take long to get going. Later came churches such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Christadelphians, and Darbyism, to name a few. Darbyism and the pre-tribulation rapture doctrine came from this period. Moreover, at this time, we started to see new variations of the Bible appear. The Scofield and Darby versions are among the worst. Subtle changes in the words. When Luke wrote Acts, he used the first person, I and we. Showing he was there as an eyewitness. These got changed to he and they, making the events distant and questionable.
People had begun to become extremely wealthy because the industrial revolution was producing a great deal of wealth. Wealth is the enemy of man, and they were searching for every opportunity to remove the guilt of increasingly wicked behaviour. The doctrine of the church was also being attacked by evolution and Marxist doctrines. The priesthood started to have pressure on them to change their teachings to suit modern ideas. The education of the priesthood started to show signs of becoming worldly. This did not reach the average person in large numbers until after World War 11. In the 1950s and '60s, there started to be a rapid deterioration in the faith of people attending mainstream Protestant churches. The devastation in some denominations has been quite mind-boggling. The Anglican Church in Canada and the USA is utterly devastated. The doctrines they have been following are an abomination before the Lord. If any of the people attending these churches make it to heaven, I will be utterly amazed. Happy, but amazed. Saints have left these mainstream Protestant churches in droves. You have to hand it to the White Rider; he has been superb at what he set out to do. We can see how the White Horseman has told Man that he is more important than he is. That he has inalienable rights and that everything is up for question. The horseman was attacking the church from all directions. He created in the world a challenge to Christian belief.
Firstly, Darwin puts out his theory of evolution. The doctrine is one of science, is given God-like reverence, and is unchallengeable. Darwin's theories have their upside because, if you apply open science to them, they fail miserably and fail from a more holistic viewpoint as well. But the seeds of doubt are sown. Secondly, Marxism comes along and challenges the authority of God with statements like "religion is the opium of the people". It is openly preaching that there is no God. What chance did the mainstream churches have against the white horseman? The churches had none, but that does not mean all the saints within these churches have fallen. For the most part, there is still a core of saints who have not fallen away. With the collapse of faith in the mainstream churches' leadership, saints turned to the more alive churches in droves. Names like Pentecostal, Apostolic, Charismatic, New Life, and an endless list of others. They bloomed as mainstream traditional churches suffered defeat after defeat. Even in these defeats, there has always been a group of faithful servants who have held on tightly to Jesus. In many ways, it became even stronger.
How has the white horseman faced this fight back by the people of faith?
The period we need to look at is after World War Two. In the 1950s, we did see a new phenomenon. This is the Crusade and the Tent Crusades. A new type of preacher was making a name for himself. Oral Roberts and Billy Graham were two of the most famous. They were preaching a gospel that was not unsound, but something was missing from it. They were taking away the principle of consequences, and you just need to look at some of Billy Graham's teaching on hell to see how these people were starting to weaken the foundations of the word. It was not just Hell, simply every aspect of the gospel that would cause the crowds to stay away. If they preached good things, they would have big crowds, and if they preached hard things, the people would stay away. I would not be surprised to find they had no idea this was what was happening. These preachers were leaving open the opportunity for the next generation of bad preachers to take things even further away from the truth. These preachers were far more aware of what they were doing. There were many heated debates over only using the good things about Christianity. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did these preachers go out and unintentionally deceive the people, or did the people only want to hear a good thing and seek them out, making them famous?
The white horseman planned to introduce a new gospel. Billy Graham may be the most beloved preacher of the modern era, but we hope he was unaware of his part in the rise of the new gospel. So, the crusaders started to dilute the gospel, and their place was taken by the Christian television networks.
What were they doing with these crusades to break down the new church? This poison is very subtle, and I hope I can find the words to express it. Until 1950, the attack was on people's faith within the priesthood. Now we have the introduction of the new gospel. Jude goes to great lengths to warn us about. What happens at one of these crusades with the gospel? These events are highly charged with emotion, and the faith of people rises, and miracles happen. The preaching must be positive and inspiring. It cannot be too technical or cover negative aspects of the gospel, such as judgement. This was the standard formula used by these crusaders, and the people loved it, and miracles happened. It made them feel good about God and themselves. These preachers, as with modern televangelists, rarely said a scripturally incorrect thing. Not until they accumulated vast wealth did they often go nuts. Where the crusaders left off, the new preachers, the televangelists, took their place. The TV networks were lost to the white horseman, and the televangelists had easy pickings. The new gospel led to the rise of the megachurch. Using the same formulas, individual preachers were able to raise large churches. However, from Satan's standpoint, this was much more hit-and-miss. A lot of these large churches kept preaching the full gospel.
One of the by-products from the White Horseman's perspective was that these new gospel preachers pulled in huge amounts of money that would normally go to helping the poor and people in need at the local churches. Well-known TV preachers suck a hundred million dollars out of the gospel being preached with what is little more than an assortment of ingratiating platitudes.
What exactly is the new gospel? How does it work to destroy the modern church? We will next look at Revelation and the seven thunders in the last section called The New Gospel. The new gospel has three cornerstones. If you are doing well financially and in the world in general, you are blessed by God and so much closer to Him. God is love, and love covers everything, and because of this, there are no real consequences for your actions; once saved, always saved. If you are doing good works or giving generously, you are closer to God and more blessed by God.