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. 2:22; 3:8, 9, 20).96The 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."97
The "ten days"of trouble may refer to a period of relatively brief duration, specifically the "days"of persecution under 10 Roman emperors (cf. Gen. 24:55; Num. 11:19, 14:22; 1 Sam. 1:8; Neh. 5:18; Job 19:3; Jer. 42:7; Dan. 1:12; Acts 25:6).98Other interpreters view the days as symbolic of years,99or a longer period of time (e.g., complete tribulation),100or a short, limited time.101However, 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.102There is nothing in the text that provides a clue that we should take this number in a figurative sense.
