Jay Adams, following Pieters, suggests that the seven seals are in a row on the overlapping lip of the document, thus rendering it impossible even to begin opening the scroll until all seven seals are removed. In this view, nothing happens historically until the seventh seal is broken in 8:1:

A careful study of the passage shows that during the seal-breaking, no action takes place. The most that chapters 6 and 7 do is introduce the reader to the main characters, forces, and circumstances with which the rest of the section is concerned. They are preparatory to the action which will take place once the book is opened.

With the breaking of the first seal (v. 1), the Tribulation begins. There are some futurists (e.g., Kuyper, Ladd, Morris), who see this rider on the white horse (v. 2) as Christ. Similarly, Ladd interprets this rider as the proclamation of the gospel in all the world. White, he argues, is always a symbol of Christ, something associated with Christ, or of spiritual victory. F. A. Jennings rejects this adamantly:

The whole context and character of these seals absolutely forbid our thinking of this rider being the Lord Jesus, as so many affirm. His reign shall not bring war, famine, and strife in its train.

Most futurists (e.g., Walvoord, Ryrie, Lindsey, and others), believe that the white horse (v. 2) and its rider represent Antichrist riding forth to conquer the world. The crown given to him (v. 2) is not a symbol of legitimate sovereignty (for then the word for crown would be diadēma), but a crown acquired by conquest (stephanos). Who “gives” the Antichrist these victories and this power? It is the dragon Satan (cf. Rev. 13:2 and 2 Thess. 2:8–10). Satan once told Christ that all the kingdoms of the world were his to give to whomever he wished (Luke 4:6). Here we see the one to whom Satan finally gives these kingdoms.

The second horseman represents the loss of peace from the “land” (a preferred translation to earth—v. 4) of Israel. Besides the war that the Jews were fighting against the Romans (suggested by the first seal), there were civil wars among the Jews themselves.

In the end, during the siege of Jerusalem, there was deadly fighting among three or four antagonistic Jewish camps within the besieged city.

The fiery red (v. 4) color of this horse suggests bloodshed, and speaks of a time of war that comes upon the earth as the Tribulation progresses. Walvoord writes that

the constant tension among nations and the ambitions of men have their climax in this period before Christ comes.

The scales in the hand of the rider of the black horse (v. 5) seem to indicate that men must eat their bread by measure, as God warned the Jews that they would have to do if they rebelled against Him (Leviticus 26:26). This horse represents famine or shortage of food.

The denarius (v. 6) was a day’s wage for the average laborer. In return for his work he is to get a mere quart of wheat, or about one person’s daily ration. Thus a man would have to work a full day just to earn enough to fill his own belly. To feed a family, he must turn to cheaper grain, which costs only one-third as much.

Most futurists understand this horseman to represent famine conditions brought on by the warfare in the previous seal during the future Tribulation.

Because of the internal fighting and starvation of the Jews, conditions in besieged Jerusalem in A.D. 70 could readily be described in the terms found here. The reference to the means of death, sword, hunger, death [i. e., pestilence], and beasts of the earth (v. 8), are a deliberate echo of Ezekiel 14:21, where “sword and famine and wild beasts and pestilence” are called God’s “four severe judgments on Jerusalem.” In Ezekiel, God used these means to inflict judgment at the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 B.C., which was a precursor of this event, similar in detail and in significance, in A.D. 70.

Applying these seals to the end times Tribulation, Kuyper writes:

Death and Hell now attack human society, and the great destruction sets in, the first effect of which is bewilderment and general havoc, as a fourth part of the inhabitants of the earth is destroyed by the sword or by starvation or by deadly disease or by wild beasts.

As the blood of sacrificial animals was poured out at the foot of the altar (Lev. 4:7), so the souls of the martyrs (slain like animals by the Jewish priests) are seen under the altar (v.9). “The soul [Heb. nephesh] of the flesh is in the blood” (Lev. 17:11). Their blood cries out for vindication, as did the blood of Abel (Gen. 4:10). The fact that the martyrs are asking for the avenging of their blood upon those who dwell on the earth [or land] (v. 10) suggests that their persecutors were still alive on earth at the time John saw the vision.

These souls under the altar (v. 9) are persons martyred during the Tribulation period. “The introduction of these martyred dead in heaven at this point immediately after the fourth seal seems to imply that these martyrs have come from the tribulation scene on earth” (Walvoord). Gaebelein, despite the mention of “souls,” contends that “They are risen from the dead and are in glory with redeemed bodies.”

Russell writes: “This is … ‘the great and terrible day of the Lord’ predicted by Malachi, by John the Baptist, by St. Paul, by St. Peter, and, above all, by our Lord in His apocalyptic discourse on the Mount of Olives.… It is impossible to overlook the connection between the seventeenth verse and the language of Malachi 3:2, ‘But who may abide the day of his coming?’ ”

The vision depicts the end of the Jewish state and the fall of its leaders.

Mounce sees this seal, and the catastrophes that go with it, to be heralding the beginning of the last days through great cosmic disturbances. For example, the earthquake (v. 12) was a regular feature of divine visitation (cf. Ex. 19:18; Isa. 2:19; Hag. 2:6). He does not commit himself to a strictly literal interpretation of the phenomena mentioned, but sees them as “signs in the heavens” that are both symbolic and literal. The reader is thus left wondering whether some of the phenomena are literal and some symbolic, or if they are literal, but with symbolic significance.