启示录 2:10

3. Exhortation 2:10a

These persecuted Christians did not need to fear their adversaries or death since they would live forever with Jesus Christ. "Behold" signals an oracular declaration (cf. Revelation 2:22; Revelation 3:8-9; Revelation 3:20). [Note: Thomas, Revelation 1-7, p. 167.] The devil would incite their foes to imprison some of them shortly, having received permission from God to do so (cf. Job 1). This would be a trial (Gr. peirasthete) that Satan would use to try to entice them to depart from the Lord.

"Under the Roman legal system imprisonment was usually not a punishment in itself; rather it was used either as a means of coercion to compel obedience to an order issued by a magistrate or else as a place to temporarily restrain the prisoner before execution . . . . Here it appears that imprisonment, viewed as a period of testing, is primarily for the purpose of coercion." [Note: Aune, p. 166.]

The "ten days" of trouble may refer to a period of relatively brief duration, specifically the "days" of persecution under 10 Roman emperors (cf. Genesis 24:55; Numbers 11:19; Numbers 14:22; 1 Samuel 1:8; Nehemiah 5:18; Job 19:3; Jeremiah 42:7; Daniel 1:12; Acts 25:6). The emperors whom advocates of this view identify are usually Nero, Domition, Trajan, Hadrian, Septimus Severus, Maximin, Decius, Valerian, Aurelian, and Diocletian. [Note: See Thomas, Revelation 1-7, p. 169; and J. Vernon McGee, Through the Bible with J. Vernon McGee, 5:906.] However, Ladd claimed that these were not empire-wide persecutions. [Note: Ladd, pp. 8-10.] Other interpreters view the days as symbolic. Some interpret these days as undefined periods of trial. [Note: Beale, p. 243.] Others see them as an undefined period of years. [Note: William Lee, "The Revelation of St. John," in The Holy Bible, 4:481, 520, 532.] Still others take them as some other period of time (e.g., complete tribulation). Of these, some view the days as a longer period of time. [Note: Ray Summers, Worthy Is the Lamb, p. 113; Mounce, p. 94.] Others interpret them as a short, limited time. [Note: Swete, p. 32; Charles, 1:58; Martin Kiddle, The Revelation of St. John, p. 28; Aune, p. 166; Ladd, p. 44.] However, John probably intended us to interpret this period as 10 literal 24-hour days that lay in the near future of the original recipients of this letter. [Note: See Walter Scott, Exposition of the Revelation of Jesus Christ, p. 69.] There is nothing in this text that provides a clue that we should take this number in a figurative sense.