“Behold, the devil is about to cast some of you into prison that you may be tested, and you will have tribulation for ten days.” Rev. 2: 10
The church in Smyrna was a suffering church that was under tremendous pressure from the outside. The Roman government persecuted it with the threat of death because it wouldn’t worship the Emperor. The Jews in Smyrna were antagonistic and hostile towards it because Christians, being rooted in Judaism, refused to join in the fight against the Romans.
Yet the church remained faithful. And Jesus encouraged it to remain faithful, even as He told the church that it would suffer even more in the days ahead. He characterized that coming time as a period of testing that would last for ten days. There are two ways that the “ten days” can be looked at.
Some Bible scholars and students look at the ten days as a prophecy. As such, they employ the biblical “day for a year” principle that stems from Ezekiel 4: 6 – “I have laid on you a day for each year,” and from Numbers 14: 34 – “For each day you shall bear your guilt one year.” From that, the understanding is that the ten days symbolically represent ten years.
And it can be said that is how it played out. The Smyrna church went through an intensified, withering ten years of persecution under the emperors Diocletian and Gallerius, from 303 to 313 AD. It ended when Constantine became emperor and granted religious freedom to Christians.
However, the Smyrna church readers probably didn’t understood it that way. I’ve learned that during that time and in earlier centuries, “ten days” was used as a common expression to simply indicate a short time. In their minds, the imprisonment and harder period would be a testing that wouldn’t last for too long.
Incidentally, speaking of time, here’s the historicist view of interpretation that I subscribe to. The Smyrna church can be thought of as symbolically representing the church age that spanned from the beginning of the 2nd century until approximately 313 AD. That period of church history was characterized by the most severe persecution of Christianity by the Roman Empire.