We are approaching the end of our apocalyptic summer reading through Revelation. Each week, we’ve been asking God to sanctify our imagination as we give our attention not to our news feeds or social media but to these arresting images of the Apocalypse: Team Dragon and Team Lamb, angels and multitudes, bowls and stars and plagues. Now, in these last pages of all of Scripture, at the end of all things, the heavens are opened, and a rider on a white horse descends.

The rider on the white horse is perhaps the easiest of John’s images for us to decode.

You don’t need to know the significance of numbers or any ancient near eastern culture to know Who the rider is.

It’s one thing for Jesus to be a prophet, telling us the way of the kingdom. It’s one thing for Jesus to be a priest, an image of sacrifice shown to us in the slaughtered Lamb. But it’s another thing altogether to stand before Jesus the King, the rider who “in righteousness judges and makes war” (Rev. 19:11).

If we are to let John and the Spirit do their work in us, we must not look away.