Six of the seven seals are broken in this chapter. If you have never read Revelation before, you were probably expecting the breaking of the seals to be a good thing. Unfortunately, they represent conquest, war, famine, large numbers of people dying, people dying for their faith and natural disasters. This is part of God’s judgment against those who have rejected Jesus.
The trouble we see in the world causes people to wonder why there is so much pain. The world we see today is not as God created it to be. It was humanity who introduced sin. Even after sin came into the world, God provided a way back to him through the death of Jesus. Many still reject him, and the kinds of judgments we see in this chapter are the result.