The End Times - Again

Throughout the past centuries, there have been various analyses that
concluded that the antichrist and the last days were here or nearly so.
All of them failed, as point of fact, and inherently were flawed,
because the features that prophecy warned of, were never entirely
present. Some, usually only an exaggerated few, but not all.

Now, according to St. Paul, we have been in the Last Days since
the First Coming of the Messiah (Greek word for this is Christos).
the Jews still await the first coming of the Messiah, we Christians
await the Second Coming.

That a dual coming is evident in Old Testament prophecy, from
Moses on through the Prophets, is shown by the fact that some
Jewish speculation on this positing TWO Messiahs, a Messiah
son of Joseph and a Messiah son of David. Somewhere in the
Talmud is a curse on those who think that the Messiah is divine
on account of certain specific texts in Prophets and Psalms
that point in that supposedly impossible direction.

Meanwhile, though the antichrist is not here yet, I strongly
suspect that we are in the time of the third horseman of the
four horsemen of the apocalypse of St. John, and are
moving into the time of the fourth sooner or later.

The first is an archer mounted on a white horse, a conqueror.
Peoples who specialized in archery and their descendants,
whatever weapons were common, played a role in building
huge empires that affected all the world, eventually even the
breakaway continents.

The second horseman is red, and takes away peace and
people kill each other. This sounds like various nationalist
idealistic revolutionary movements and banditry and of
course the 100 years war, the 30 years war, WW I and
WW II and the ongoing brush wars around the world since.

These of course overlap somewhat. But to fit the picture,
this has to be something that affects not just Europe, not
just America but more of the whole world, and especially
involves the Mediteranean and Near East and Middle East.

The third horseman is black, the color of oil. It has scales
to weigh goods and inflated prices for grain and "see that
ye hurt not the oil or the wine," apparently these will be
in short supply after a while, precious commodities.

We seem to have been moving into this phase now. My
suspicion that they overlap each other, is supported by
St. John's seeing the four horsemen as if all at once, or
in a close sequence, like they rode together. To some
extent, they might depict a repeating pattern to be
found at various times everywhere, but also a bigger
picture.

The fourth horseman is "pale" and death follows him,
killing by the sword, and famine, and plague, and "the
beasts of the field." These latter seem to have been
starting up a teeny bit. Maybe down the road chimps
will figure out how to use knives, spears and guns.
A quarter of mankind will die from all this.  Obviously
this isn't here yet, though stuff not unlike it occurs in
Africa right now.

I understand there is an Orthodox writer or online
theorist somewhere, who figures we are in the time
of the third or fourth horseman now, but he didn't
say on what basis, but it was something to do with
traditional Orthodox views of Scripture.

If he is reading this, or someone who reads this
remembers his post somewhere online, I'd like to
hear from him. Infowolf1@aol.com