As the Lunar Year of the Horse approaches, horses begin to crowd our digital world. On WeChat and Xiaohongshu in Chinese-language spaces—and on Facebook and Instagram beyond them—blessings and slogans gallop across the screen: “victory at the first gallop” (马到成功), “ten thousand horses surging forward” (万马奔腾), and “pressing on without pause” (马不停蹄). “Good fortune in the Year of the Horse” (马年大吉) appears again and again in animated stickers and memes, shared as casually as greetings.
Online wordplay has also found fresh momentum in the age of short video. A horse topped with a stack of banknotes becomes “wealth right away” (马上有钱); one carrying two elephants, “a relationship right away” (马上有对象); and one bearing a house, “homeownership right away” (马上有房). On platforms such as Douyin (抖音) and Kuaishou (快手), this “right-away horse” pattern—often called the mǎshàng style (马上体)—has drawn millions into playful imitation. Beneath the humor lies something more serious: a longing for success that does not merely arrive, but arrives now.
The Horse in Chinese Culture
This habit of attaching practical hopes to the horse flows naturally from a well-known trait of traditional Chinese culture—what scholars often call practical rationality. From Confucius’ picture of an enviable life—“riding well-fed horses and wearing light furs” (乘肥马，衣轻裘)—to Xiang Yu’s bitter lament at the edge of defeat—“My steed will run no more; what then can I do?” (骓不逝兮可奈何)—the horse has remained closely bound to human fate. Rather than urging an intense fixation on what lies beyond this world, Chinese cultural vision has typically given priority to well-being and order within the contours of ordinary life.
That orientation is not merely abstract. In an agrarian civilization, the horse served as indispensable labor; in eras of expansion and conflict, it became a strategic asset. It is no surprise, then, that the horse turned into a ready vehicle for pragmatic ideals. The idiom “meritorious service earned through sweat and horses” (汗马功劳), traced to Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji, “Biography of Xiao He”), places a soldier’s exertion beside a warhorse’s sweat, forming a moral world in which human and horse labor together toward honor.
Yet the horse in Chinese tradition is not only useful; it is also aspirational—an emblem of drive, resilience, and vitality. The Book of Changes (Yijing) speaks of “fine horses,” “old horses,” “lean horses,” and more, but the point is not zoology. The horse becomes an image of moral strength, echoing the famed line: “As heaven moves with vigor, so the noble person strives unceasingly” (天行健，君子以自强不息). The phrase “dragon-horse spirit” (龙马精神), associated in later tradition with a text attributed to the Book of Documents (Shangshu), elevates the horse into the register of auspicious portent, set alongside the dragon itself.
Tang-dynasty poet Li He presses the image further. In his Horse Poems (Ma shi), he writes: “This is no ordinary horse; its true home is the Fang star. Striding forward, it strikes its gaunt bones—and still it carries the ring of bronze” (此马非凡马，房星本是星。向前敲瘦骨，犹自带铜声). The horse is no longer confined to pasture or battlefield; it is drawn into a star-lit imagination, as though it belonged to the heavens before it ever touched the earth.
Horses also animate many of China’s best-known historical idioms and stories. “An old horse knows the way” (老马识途), recorded in Han Feizi, affirms the weight of experience and quietly honors the wisdom of elders. The tale of Bole discerning horses (伯乐相马), preserved in Strategies of the Warring States, sketches a familiar tragedy: true talent lost inside an ordinary system. Han Yu’s essay On Horses (Ma shuo) crystallizes the point: “There are always thousand-mile horses, but Boles are rare” (千里马常有，而伯乐不常有), using the horse to critique entrenched structures of recognition and authority.
Still, the horse is not always radiant in Chinese moral imagination. “The horse stumbles at the front hoof” (马失前蹄) warns that even confident plans can fracture through sudden misstep. “The restless monkey and the unruly horse” (心猿意马) captures the volatility of the human mind—its refusal to be reined in. Most sobering is the phrase “to work like an ox or a horse” (做牛做马). Here the horse loses all grandeur and becomes a figure of exploitation: a life spent under command, worn down by necessity. In today’s China, amid slower growth, property risk, weak domestic demand, deflationary pressure, and high unemployment, the phrase has resurfaced as both lament and dark humor—a shorthand for the exhaustion of daily survival.
And yet, Chinese tradition also preserves a deeper patience about outcomes. The parable “When the old frontier man lost his horse, who could say it was not a blessing?” (塞翁失马，焉知非福), found in Huainanzi, unfolds a chain of reversals—loss turning into gain, misfortune into unexpected good. It resists quick judgments, urging the reader to see gain and loss within a longer story.
With Buddhism’s arrival, the horse acquired still more layers. Dunhuang murals often show horses in motion, a visual energy that mirrors the restlessness of the human spirit. Chan tradition speaks of “wild horses of dust” (野马尘埃)—wayward thoughts that surge and scatter, difficult to tame. In Journey to the West, the White Dragon Horse joins the pilgrimage westward, moving from transgression toward transformation, embodying the Buddhist conviction that change remains possible even for the fallen.
Horses in the Bible
The Bible, too, knows the horse as a creature of power—and as a mirror that exposes the human heart. In Job 39:19–25, the warhorse is portrayed with vivid force: “Do you give the horse his might?” The poet does not treat the horse’s strength as human achievement but as the Creator’s gift, a reminder that even what appears untamable ultimately belongs to God.
Biblical narrative also places horses within the theater of divine purpose. In 2 Kings 2, Elijah is taken up amid horses and chariots of fire, a vision that fuses flame, craft, and animal into an image of divine deliverance. In Zechariah 1 and 6, horses of different colors patrol the earth and report what they see, functioning as instruments of divine scrutiny under heaven’s command.
Revelation presses the symbol to its most unsettling edge. The four horses—white, red, black, and pale—unleash conquest, war, famine, and death. As N.T. Wright observes in Revelation for Everyone, these figures represent powers that seek to wear God’s authority: militarized force, economic systems, and ideologies that promise stability yet leave ruin in their wake. In any age tempted to confuse power with salvation, the vision remains disturbingly recognizable.
Scripture’s warnings are often explicit. Deuteronomy 17:16 forbids Israel’s kings from multiplying horses or sending the people back to Egypt to acquire them—a direct refusal of the ancient Near East’s logic, in which cavalry signaled security. The issue is not horses as such; the issue is trust. “Some trust in chariots and some in horses,” sings Psalm 20:7, “but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.” Psalm 33:17 sharpens the point: “The war horse is a false hope for salvation.” Together, these passages form a sober critique of any politics of rescue built on strength and machinery. Isaiah intensifies the warning on the eve of exile: those who rely on horses and chariots forget that “their horses are flesh, not spirit” (Isaiah 31:1, 3).
Later Christian theology names the same temptation in new forms. Calvin, in Institutes of the Christian Religion, warns that when human beings anchor their security in created things rather than in the Creator, they drift toward idolatry. Through common grace, God grants cultural achievements—ancient horsemanship and chariot craft (China, too, preserves the image of Zhuge Liang’s “wooden oxen and flowing horses,” 木牛流马)—as well as modern technologies, including artificial intelligence, our contemporary “mechanical oxen and horses.” The danger lies not in culture itself, but in ultimacy: when gifts are asked to bear the weight of salvation.
The Gospel of Christ and the Horse
Zechariah’s prophecy contains a striking paradox. The coming king who “shall speak peace to the nations” will also “cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem” (Zechariah 9:9–10). He does not arrive as the world expects. He comes humble and riding on a donkey.
When Jerusalem waved palm branches and cried “Hosanna,” many hoped for a hero who would ride in on a warhorse and set the nation right by force. Jesus chose a donkey’s colt instead—an animal associated with humility and ordinary life rather than military display. The choice does more than fulfill prophecy; it reveals the nature of his kingdom. His path moves not toward domination but toward suffering service: “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). The figure of the humble king corrects a persistent human mistake: imagining salvation as conquest.
Philippians 2:6–8 describes Christ taking “the form of a servant.” This servanthood is not humiliation forced upon him; it is voluntary self-emptying. Here the logic of “working like an ox or a horse” is quietly overturned. What appears as lowliness becomes chosen obedience, bearing unexpected glory. Luther captures the paradox in On the Freedom of a Christian: the Christian is “a perfectly free lord of all” and also “a perfectly dutiful servant of all.” The gospel, in other words, does not merely command service; it redeems its meaning—freeing it from both exploitation and the hunger to rule.
Revelation’s final vision returns to the horse once more. A white horse appears, and the rider is called “Faithful and True” (Revelation 19:11–16). If Christ’s entry on a donkey reveals humility, his return on a white horse reveals judgment and righteousness. The true victory is not the “right away” triumph we chase, but the victory that belongs to God.
Conclusion
From a Reformed perspective, common grace sustains order in a fallen world, while saving grace accomplishes redemption. The qualities often celebrated through the horse in Chinese culture—strength, perseverance, diligence, endurance—may rightly be received as genuine gifts of common grace. And yet Scripture insists on a boundary we forget at our peril: the horse cannot save. No power, system, or cultural achievement can bear the weight of final hope. Only the grace accomplished in Jesus Christ—through humility, self-giving love, and obedient suffering—can free human beings from the grind of endless striving, from lives reduced to “working like oxen and horses.”
In that light, the truest fulfillment of “As heaven moves with vigor” (天行健) is not ceaseless effort, but liberation—life restored to its proper end. And that grace, in the end, is the most beautiful blessing of our lives.
