The Fifth Seal of Revelation
Revelation 6:9-11
9 And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held:
10 And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?
11 And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled.
When Jesus opened the fifth seal, John saw Christian martyrs under an altar in Heaven. The martyrs cried out to God, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?” Instead of seeking vengeance on his followers’ behalf, God gave the martyrs white robes and comforted them by suggesting they rest a little longer while the remaining believers destined for martyrdom were killed. This seal does not require much effort to understand. It represents a harsh persecution of Christians sometime after the tumultuous Crisis of the Third Century.
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The emperor Diocletian stabilized most of the issues facing Rome after his ascension in 284 AD. He more than doubled the number of provinces to reduce the power of generals, as their ambition had been a leading catalyst of the domestic chaos of the prior fifty years. He also increased the number of government officials to lessen their authority and bestowed less power upon soldiers within local provinces. Diocletian also placed limits on commodity prices to reduce the cost of living and minted new gold and silver coins to reduce inflation.[i]
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With their problems largely stabilized, the Romans celebrated the festival of Terminalia on February 23, 303 AD. This annual feast honored Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries. At the suggestion of his second-in-command, Caesar Galerius, Diocletian felt it fitting to mark the event by issuing the first in a series of four edicts so ruthless that they would irreversibly terminate the Christian faith. The Diocletianic or Great Persecution would be the last and cruelest Christian persecution in the history of the empire.[ii]
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Diocletian would abdicate his throne in 305 AD, but his policies towards Christians continued. Caesar Galerius, whose severe temper was well-known, was promoted to Augustus and promptly escalated the persecution. Six years into his reign, Galerius realized that a tyrannical monarch’s extermination campaign could not eradicate the Christian faith. As Edward Gibbon wrote, “The frequent disappointments of his ambitious views, the experience of six years of persecution, and the salutary reflections which a lingering and painful distemper suggested to the mind of Galerius, at length convinced him that the most violent efforts of despotism are insufficient to extirpate a whole people, or to subdue their religious prejudices.” In 311 AD, Galerius recoiled. That year, he issued the Edict of Serdica—also called the Edict of Toleration—which repealed several of Diocletian’s laws. However, the persecution would not officially end until Constantine’s Edict of Milan in February 313.[iii]
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The Great Persecution fell at the end of the Smyrnaean church age in Revelation 2:8-11. Jesus told the Christians of Smyrna that they “shall have tribulation ten days,” but if their faith did not waiver during the persecution they endured, they would not be “hurt of the second death.” The ten-day tribulation of the Smyrnaean church age represents the ten calendar years of the Great Persecution and the fulfillment of the fifth seal—February 303 through February 313 AD.
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[i] The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2023. Domestic Reforms of Diocletian. May 6. Accessed August 15, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Diocletian/Domestic-reforms.
[ii] Gaddis, Michael. 2005. There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire, 29-67. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
[iii] Gibbon, Edward. 1789. “Chapter XVI.” In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I, 620-704. London: Strahan & Cadell.