“Yes,” continues John, “I saw the souls of those executed with the ax for the witness they bore to Jesus and for speaking about God, and those who had worshiped neither the wild beast nor its image and who had not received the mark upon their forehead and upon their hand.” (Revelation 20:4b) Among those kings, then, are the anointed Christian martyrs who earlier, at the opening of the fifth seal, asked Jehovah how much longer he would wait to avenge their blood. At that time, they were given a white robe and told to wait a little longer. But now they have been avenged through the devastating of Babylon the Great, the destruction of the nations by the King of kings and Lord of lords, and the abyssing of Satan.​—Revelation 6:9-11; 17:16; 19:15, 16.

11. (a) How are we to understand the expression “executed with the ax”? (b) Why may it be said that all the 144,000 died a sacrificial death?

¹¹ Were all these 144,000 royal judges physically “executed with the ax”? Likely, relatively few of them were in a literal sense. This expression, though, doubtless is intended to embrace all those anointed Christians who endure martyrdom in one way or another.b (Matthew 10:22, 28) Certainly, Satan would like to have executed all of them with the ax, but, in fact, not all of Jesus’ anointed brothers die as martyrs. Many of them die of disease or old age. Such ones, however, also belong to the group that John now sees. The death of all of them is, in a sense, sacrificial. (Romans 6:3-5) Additionally, none of them were part of the world. Hence, all of them have been hated by the world and, in effect, become dead in its eyes. (John 15:19; 1 Corinthians 4:13) None of them worshipped the wild beast or its image, and when they died, none of them carried the mark of the beast. All of them died as conquerors.​—1 John 5:4; Revelation 2:7; 3:12; 12:11.