What is the Abomination of Desolation?

Well, we do have a shorter service today because we do have a break and then a Bible study, and of course after the Bible study of Pont Luck. So I have a huge subject I want to cover today that I want to do in an hour. It's something we don't talk about much. It's a term that's used in one of the most famous biblical prophecies. Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21.

The abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet. Jesus said to look for the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet. Now the very phrase, abomination of desolation, that's a frightening phrase. That's probably one of the most powerful statements in English. I'm sure it is strong in Greek, too. The abomination of desolation.

Something that's so horrible that it makes things desolate. It destroys. But what is that? I mean, we're told to look for it. What exactly are we supposed to look for? That's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to look at the abomination of desolation. Now I gave a sermon on prophecy, all probably about five months ago, where I talked about different prophetic fulfillments. There's different prophetic fulfillments. And those prophetic fulfillments, let me turn on this, these different prophetic fulfillments, what that means is there's a former fulfillment and a latter fulfillment. And what that means is that there are certain prophecies that happen in time.

They're fulfilled, but only partly. And we went through the day of the Lord, if you remember, how the day of the Lord happened to Israel, the day of the Lord happened to Judah, the day of the Lord is going to happen on the world when Jesus Christ returns, and the day of the Lord is going to happen again when the earth is destroyed by the lake of fire or the surface of the earth.

We talk about four different days of the Lord. Each one gives us a little message of the next one. When we talk about the abomination of desolation, we're also going to look at the same thing, that the abomination of desolation has three different fulfillments in the Bible. Two of them have already happened. Now by looking at the two that already happened, we will be able to understand what the phrase means.

Now there's a lot of details we're not going to go through today. We're just going to define what is the abomination of desolation that Jesus said in His prophecy about His Second Coming, look for this. So we're supposed to look for it. So we have to define it. Let's go to Daniel 12 as our starting point here. Daniel chapter 12. Daniel is such an interesting book, part of its history, part of its prophecy.

And what's very interesting about Daniel is we are able to understand a lot of prophecies that are yet to be fulfilled because Daniel also shows us many prophecies that have already been fulfilled. Now we're going to cover a lot of ground, and we're going to go through some things that I've covered before, but we're just going to look at them very shortly, in a very short period of time as we work on this bigger concept, just definition of this phrase. What is the abomination of desolation? So let's go to chapter 12, the last chapter in Daniel. And let's look at verse 1 here.

It says, at that time, so it's talking about a time in the future, Daniel's time, and he's looking out into the future. At that time, Michael, who was one of the great archangels, shall stand up, the great prince who stands watch over the sons of your people, and there shall be a time of trouble, as such as never was since there was a nation even to that time.

And at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting contempt. And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the filament, and those who turn away to righteousness like the stars forever and ever.

Now here we have a prophecy, and we're not going to go through all the details, but it's obviously in the future. It's a time like no other time in human history, a time of trouble like no other time in human history, and we usually tie this directly into, of course, Matthew 24, to the Olivet Prophecy, where Jesus talks about a time like no other time. It's also a time of the resurrection, so we can tie this into the book of Revelation.

So he's talking about a time off in the future that has not happened yet, a time that involves horrible events on this earth, terrible trouble on this earth like no other time in history, and a time before the resurrection. Now let's go to verse 9.

Because Daniel's told, okay, you're not going to understand this, Daniel, so don't even try. Now that's got to be a little discouraging. You've just received a lot of prophecies that you're not going to understand, so don't even try to explain them. Verse 9, and he said, Go your way, Daniel, for the words are closed up and sealed to the time of the end, and many shall be purified, made white and refined, but the wicked shall do wickedly, and none of the wicked shall understand, but the wise shall understand.

And from the time that the daily sacrifices take it away, and the abomination of desolation is set up, there shall be 1,290 days. And then there's other days here. There's 1,300 days, but we're not going to go into that. We're going to stop here. Because he tells him, he ends this prophecy with, shut this up, you're not going to understand it, but there's going to come a time at the end where the daily sacrifices are taken away.

And they're going to be taken away for a certain amount of time, and other events are going to happen. So there is an abomination of desolation in the future. When we get to Matthew 24, we'll see there's an abomination of desolation in the future. So let's look at now what we put up here. If we just look at this, okay, this is all we know. If you already had Daniel 12, this is all you would know, is that there's going to come a time in the future, like no other time in history. It's going to be such a troubled time.

And it will be followed by a resurrection of the dead. And it concerns the time of the end. Now the time of the end isn't the time when all humanity is destroyed. That's not, people misunderstand that. The word Armageddon, if you remember back last year, we just went through the word Armageddon and showed that that's not the end of humanity. That's not what it means.

It means the time when God intervenes to take control of human history. So this time of the end is when God takes control of human history. Sacrifices will cease. Now that's all we know. Sacrifices will cease. The abomination of desolation will be set up, and the abomination of desolation will last.

Actually it says 1290 days. I think 1260, that's 1290. So I'm sorry, 2290 days. Now I'm not going to go through all those days. That's a whole other subject. Okay, that's a whole other subject. So what is this abomination of desolation? That's all we know. And I put the wrong numbers up there. I was working on this late last night and I got the numbers wrong. So but you know what it says here. You can read it. So what do we do?

How do we understand this? Well let's look at a time when there was an abomination of desolation historically. To do that, we have to understand and continue in the book of Daniel. You know, Daniel, that means we have to go back in history before this. Back in history before this. Daniel was one of a group of teenagers, actually. He was very young, who was taken into Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar. He was from an upper-class family and he was possibly even from a royal family. But he was educated and probably wealthy from a wealthy family.

Babylonians invaded Judea 605. He is now taken there where he is educated as a Babylonian, but he never gives up his faith. Daniel never gives up his faith all through his teenage years, up until an old man. He dies an old man in Babylon and never gives up his faith. And during this time, he becomes an advisor to various kings. He becomes advisor to various kings. Now I gave a whole sermon on this a number of years ago, so we're just going to look at this. We're going to touch on it.

Because this is where we begin to understand the major template that these prophecies are based on. And that is, Nebuchadnezzar has a dream. You've all heard this many times. He has a dream. And he doesn't know what it means. And he tells all his advisors, come tell me what the dream means. And they say, okay, tell us the dream. And he said, no, because you'll just make something up, so I'm going to kill all of you if nobody can tell me what the dream means.

And so they go to Daniel and say, he's going to kill all of us. And Daniel says, well, I'll go ask God. And Daniel comes and says, I can tell you what it means. God has told me. And he explains to him that what he saw was an image. And that's one of the problems we're going through today. It gets very difficult. We're going through images. We're going through visions. What do these things mean? And he explains to him that the image is a prophecy of four coming kingdoms. And we know what the first one is, and this is real important.

We would know, except he tells him that the first kingdom in these four kingdoms, which is a head of gold, is Babylon, which of course he is the king of.

Then he says that there's going to be this chest of arms and silver, which is another. And then the belly of thighs and bronze, which is another kingdom. And then there's going to be legs of feet and iron and clay, which is another kingdom. Now we look at this, and because much of this has been fulfilled, not all of it, because at the end a stone, not cut by human hands, destroys the image and sets up God's kingdom on the earth, which is a messiotic prophecy.

But we know that we can start with Babylon and know that Babylon was destroyed by the Medio-Persian Empire. We know that the Medio-Persian Empire was destroyed by Greece, and we know that Greece was destroyed by Rome, and Rome was there when Christ came. And we know by putting this with Revelation that Rome will be there, a Roman Empire will be around when it comes to the second time. You say, okay, this is the whole subject in itself, but this sets the stage, because we're going to have to look at some events that Daniel tells about that happened at the time of the Medio-Persian and Greek empires.

And that's going to tell us something about the abomination of desolation, or sometimes as it's called, the abomination of trespass. So where do we go? Well, let's go to chapter 8. So we're going back now, and we're going to look at what Daniel saw. He saw this. Daniel 7, he was given a series of other visions that explained these same four empires. And we've covered that before in a Bible study. That Daniel 7 explained, once again, those four empires. This is the template for understanding world history from the time of Nebuchadnezzar to the return of Jesus Christ in terms of how people relate to Jerusalem. And all has to do with who controls Jerusalem.

But now we have chapter 8. Chapter 8 is a vision he receives that unless we have some information, it's like this one, unless you're told that the first kingdom is Babylon, there would be no way for us to forget what this is. We would just be making it up. We're not making it up. This is why, when we look at prophecy, one of the great proofs of the Bible is fulfilled prophecy. This is why there are many scholars that say Daniel never wrote this book, because the events are too perfect. It was written after the events. So they believe Daniel was just, you know, some guy who wrote this hundreds of years later and made it all up after the events took place. No, it was written by Daniel.

And it is one of the proofs how God is working through history. Now in chapter 8, we have a vision. Now remember, it's a dream. If you can imagine a dream between a ram and a goat. That is, wow, how in the world am I supposed to know what a ram and a goat mean? Is there some place in the Bible that says, rams mean this, prophetically? Nope.

There is a place. So how are we supposed to know? And this is what he receives. He's on the banks of a canal, and he sees this ram with two horns. So this is what he sees in this dream, and he knows it's from God. He writes it down. And one horn is higher. We're not going to go through all of chapter 8, but we're going to read part of it here in a minute. And it's charging in every direction, and it dominates everything that it comes across, defeats everything it comes across. And then this male goat approaches from the distant west, but it's not running like a normal animal. It's hovering on the ground. This is like someone that's, you know, had a bad drunk. And this is what he's seeing. It's like a bad sci-fi movie. And so here we have now this goat that's hovering over the earth, and it's coming towards the ram. And he charges the ram, and he destroys the ram's horn and tramples the ram. And the goat becomes great, but soon its horn is broken, and four other horns come up. What in the world does that mean? Now if the Bible doesn't tell me, I don't know.

See, we have a problem with prophecy sometimes. We can make up anything we want. We always have to look and say, does the Bible tell me? We know. Now I've seen people take Daniel 2 and say one of those kingdoms is Russia, and one is the United States. It can't be. It starts with Babylon. It goes with progressive kingdoms. So we know what it is, because we know what the starting point is. How do we know what this is?

And it's interesting you can read all kinds of commentaries that will tell you all kinds of ideas of who the ram and goat is in history or in prophecy. Well let's skip down here to verse 15. Let's go to verse 18 so we won't have to cover all these incidental things. He says, Now, he was speaking what it is the first part of this tells how an angel came. So he doesn't know what this means either. You know, Daniel's perplexed too. I just had this weird vision from God. It wasn't a dream. It wasn't just because I ate some bad onions before I went to sleep. This was from God, but I have no idea what it means. And an angel comes to him and he says, Now as he was speaking with me, I was in a deep sleep with my face to the ground. But he touched me and he set me upright and he said, Look, I am making known to you what shall happen in the latter time of the indignation. For at the appointed time the end shall be. So he tells us about this goat and this ram. He says, I'm telling you what's going to happen at a time in history here, at a time in the future. Not history, not in the past, but in the future. The ram which you saw having the two horns, they are the kings of Medea and Persia. Oh, we have a starting point. We don't have the guests anymore. The angel comes and tells him, you have no idea. You can't figure this out. So I'm going to... God sent me to tell you. The ram with the two horns are the kings of Medea and Persia. And the male goat is the kingdom of Greece. And the large horn that is between his eyes is the first king. Now here's what's very interesting, is now if we begin to look at what happened historically. Remember, he had already told them that there were four kingdoms. Babylon was during the time of Daniel. Daniel actually lived over into the time of Persia. Because he lived in Babylon at the time that the Persians showed up and took the city. They took him one night. They thought Babylon could never fall. It was the greatest military power in the face of the earth. All the Persians had to do was divert the Euphrates River while they were all having a big drunken party and then get the men to crawl through the mud underneath the iron gates.

And when they woke up, the city was full of Persian soldiers. They lost it one night. And Daniel was alive! He saw that! How many of you have been to the Pergamum Museum in Berlin? That's where the walls of Babylon, from the time of Daniel, are there. Not the highest walls, but the secondary walls. It is amazing to walk between those walls and realize Daniel looked at these every day.

He walked through these and looked through these every day.

So here he is. He lives through two of these, you know, the end of one of the empires and the beginning of another. But now he's told, well, there's another one. Persia is going to come, but also there is this one of Greece. The Medes and Persians were destroyed by the Greeks very quickly and very... it was astonishing. They had a huge empire and it was destroyed by the Greeks in a very short period of time. And it was the speed in which the Greek army moved that surprised everyone. And that's what makes this prophecy so interesting, because the goat that represents Greece isn't moving like a regular animal. It's hovering. It's moving faster. And so this prophecy has a lot of interesting detail. It destroys the Greeks, destroyed the Persians, and it had one great horn. There was one great leader of the Greek empire, which was Alexander the Great. Alexander the Greek conquered most of the Persian empire and then died. His empire fell apart. Let's go to verse 23 of this same chapter. So you see where we are. We know what the first four kingdoms are of Daniel 2 because he tells us it starts with Babylon and their success of kingdoms. We know what this ram and goat are because he tells us. One is Persia and one is Greece. And so the Greek empire now has conquered the Persians and he's telling us something about an event that's going to happen in the future of the Greek empire. Verse 23, and in the latter day of their kingdom, well let's go to verse 22 because this is very important too, as for the broken horn and the four that stood up in its place, four kingdoms shall rise out of that nation but not with its power. When Alexander the Great died, Greece was divided into four different kingdoms. Four different generals took it over. And the Greek empire never really coagulated into a strong empire after that because they spent hundreds of years fighting each other. They ended up with two halves, the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids that were up in Greece and Turkey, and they just fought each other all the time. So the empire never really was able to come together after that. He says, verse 23, in the latter time of their kingdom, in the latter time of these four kingdoms that survived because of Alexander the Great, when the transgressions have reached their fullness, a king shall arise having fierce features who understand sinister schemes. His power shall be mighty but not by his own power. He shall restore fearfully, and he shall prosper and thrive, and he shall destroy the mighty and also the holy people. The holy people here in the Old Testament refers, of course, to Israel or the Jews when they came back, because all of Israel did not come back, but into the Promised Land.

Through his cutting, he shall cause deceit to prosper under his rule, and he shall exalt himself in his heart, and he shall destroy many in their prosperity. He shall even rise against the prince of princes, but he shall be broken without human means. And the vision of the evenings and the mornings, which was told, is true. Therefore, seal up the vision, for it refers to many days in the future. Many days in the future. What's now interesting is, we have to look back and say, is there a time in the time of the Greek Empire that the people of Israel or the Jews who had come back after the Babylonian captivity were destroyed, were attacked, or this happened? And of course, it did.

The Jews today, of course, believe entirely that what he's talking about here, this was fulfilled when Antiochus Epiphanes, around 167, invaded Israel. He was one of the Seleucids. They were invading Israel all the time, or Judah, it was Judea at the time, because, like I said, the Ptolemies and the Seleucids were fighting all the time. You know what they find regularly in Israel when they do excavations? Baskets full of coins, and some of them have pictures of Ptolemies, and some of them have pictures of Seleucids, depending on who was reigning at the time, because the two groups just came back and forth across their nation. But Antiochus Epiphanes did something different.

And Antiochus Epiphanes forbid them to keep the Sabbath, and he forbid them to keep the Ten Commandments, and he forbid them to do anything that was in the Bible.

If you circumcised your child, it was brutal. I won't go through all the things he did. If you found you had circumcised your child, a Jewish mother, he would kill the baby, he'd have his soldiers kill the baby and hang it around her neck, and she'd have to wear the child.

This is a brutality. You know, we just read through here, and we just read through quickly, oh, he's terrible, he's mean, he's terrible. No, no, no. Understand the reality of what this actually describes, because this is at sort of towards the end of the Greek Empire, just like you predict at the end of their times, the four kingdoms of the Greeks, at the end of their times, something terrible is going to happen.

In the temple, which was Zerubbabel's temple, he forbid them to do sacrifices. He took away the daily sacrifices. He set up pagan idols, and just to get to the Jews, all the sacrifices had to be pigs. Because if you were caught refusing to eat pig, you could be killed. If you were caught with a copy of what we call the Old Testament, of the Tanakh, you could be killed. They had to hide it.

So you have this terrible time in which the daily sacrifices are stopped.

And so we see, as we go through this prophecy now, the little horror arises out of the four.

And this, of course, is the Tychus Epiphanes. He comes from these four empires towards the end of their of their time. The regular bird offerings were canceled. The sanctuary was desecrated.

And it says here, he committed the transgression of desolation.

Now, what we have back in verse 14, let's go back to verse 14.

Because they ask, how long will this happen? Verse 13.

I showed you through this, but I skipped these two verses on purpose, because I want to go back to them.

So they explained to him what's going on. Or they explained to him what he sees the vision. He hasn't yet been explained to him what's going on. And it says that in verse 12, that this transgression and this army that comes, and they oppose the daily sacrifices.

They heard a Holy One speaking, verse 13. Another Holy One said, so here's two angels speaking, how long will that vision be concerning the daily sacrifices and the transgression of desolation and the giving of both the sanctuary and the host of trampled under foot?

He said, 2300 days, then the sanctuary shall be cleansed.

When Antiochus Epiphanes came in and he destroyed Judaism, or tried to, and he took over the temple and this desolation of transgression, this abomination of desolation was set up, how long did it last? Now what's interesting here is what it says in your King James, it says 2300 days. Now some of you might have a different translation that says something different, and there's a reason why. In Hebrew it says 2300 mornings and evenings.

Now there's a reason for that. You know, so he says, oh that's a day, morning and evening. That's not what it means. Just think of what we read here, looked at briefly beforehand. It's talking about the daily sacrifices. How long will the daily sacrifices not be given?

There were two sacrifices given a day.

One in the morning and one in the evening. So when it says here 2300 days, what it says is 2300 mornings and evenings. It means the sacrifices.

1100, you know, that's 11 150. What's interesting is, and Tychus Epiphanes did this in 167.

A little over three years later, 1150 mornings and evenings later, the Jews rose up under the Maccabees. This is all explained in 1 Maccabees. The Jews rose up, defeated the Greeks, shoved them out, and became an independent nation again.

They hadn't been an independent nation for a long time.

The abomination of desolation was there. They experienced it, and they experienced it while the morning and evening sacrifices were totally taken away. Now, remember Daniel 12, it said that there's coming an abomination of desolation where the sacrifices are taken away. But this happened before that. This happened because that prophecy has to do with the very end. This has to do with the relationship between Greece and Persia. The sacrifices were taken away, and we know historically how long they were taken away. And then the Maccabees threw them out.

This is very important. But we look at Daniel chapter 8. We have one of the great proofs of biblical prophecy. Daniel 8, by the way, this is the way most Jews interpret this, and this is the way almost all evangelicals interpret this, and this is the way probably half of non-evangelical Protestants interpret this. It's the way most of the Baptists interpret it.

I mean, it's not hidden. The information here and the historical information fits too exactly, and that's why there's some people, there's some scholars that say, well, that's because this had to be written afterwards. It has to be written afterwards.

It had to be written after the Maccabees, and it wasn't.

So we have an abomination of desolation. So we have 2300 evenings and mornings, which means... Now let's just look at what we covered. The first two-horned goat portrayed the empire of Medes and Persians. Under Cyrus, Persia became greater than the Medes, and so that's why one horn was bigger. Most of the military campaigns came from west, north, and south. That's why it says they come from the west. The male goat rushing from the west without touching the ground was Alexander the Great. He came from west of Persia, which is Greece.

His swift conquest of the known world is legendary. His empire was vast, but didn't look very long. The four horns that replaced the broken horn represented Alexander's four generals who succeeded him. Seleucis was one of Alexander's generals who ruled over Mesopotamia and Persia.

The Ptolemy had the Egypt. The vile little horn was Antigonus the Piphanes, Antigonus the fourth, the eighth leader in the line who traced back to Seleucis. He invaded the glorious land we just read in verses 23, how they would invade the glorious land, the land which is where God placed his name. So this now summarizes very quickly what would take a lot longer to cover if we went through every detail. But if you can understand this, if you can see this, you understand something about the abomination of desolation. It happened already. And what did it entail? What did it entail? A king who hates God and wants to destroy those who worship him. A leader, a very powerful leader, who decided to destroy God's people.

Armies invade Jerusalem, and there's the violent cessation of sacrifices to the God of Israel. In fact, in the temple, they set up pagan idols. They set up pagan idols in the temple.

So that's what happened. First abomination of desolation. Now I said there was another one that happened in history. Go through this very quickly before we get to the future abomination of desolation, because once we understand these, we'll understand what to look for. Jesus said, look for this. What am I looking for? Oh, by the way, you know what Hanukkah is? You've all heard of Hanukkah? Hanukkah is the celebration of when the Maccabees overthrew the Seleucids, and they took control. So what other abomination of desolation can we find in history?

At time that we're going to find these three things, what's some other things happen?

Well, one is that we find a temple in Jerusalem, not Zerubbabel's temple, but Herod's temple, which has been a total renovation of Zerubbabel's temple. And we find it there when Jesus is there.

In the early church, Paul, Peter, they all go to the temple. And this is the temple that stands on the site of Solomon's temple. It stands on the site of Zerubbabel's temple that Antiochus Epiphanes was in. And there is a war between Rome and Judea, the Jews. And there is about a three and a half year period between 66 and 70 AD in which they fight a war. Judea declares itself free for Roman rule. They declare that they are now an independent nation. The Romans send in some soldiers thinking they can stop it. The Jews come together to defeat the Roman legion that was sent in. Of course, the Romans are just horrified at that. So they send an army. No, not just a legion, but an army. And they besiege Jerusalem for an extended period of time.

What happens in Jerusalem during this time period is absolutely terrifying. It actually ends up being one of the great battles in terms of people who died in the history of mankind.

Tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers died, Jewish soldiers died, and thousands of Roman soldiers died. But it is estimated by Josephus, as the only person we have a figure at the time, well over a million civilians died. Most of them starved to death or by disease epidemics that came through Jerusalem because it was packed with people. They couldn't get out. They couldn't get out. And they ran out of food. And it became horrifying. Cannibalism at the very end.

Until finally, the Romans took the city. And when they did, they did some very interesting things.

They decided they were going to go into the temple, take down the altar to God, put up some pagan altars, and do sacrifices. They now forbid sacrifices. But the temple caught on fire, and it burnt down before they could do it. So it didn't matter. In the ruins of the temple, they built pagan altars and did sacrifices. So we have, once again, the temple being ransacked, and this case totally desecrated, destroyed, but still they have to set up the altars and they have to do sacrifices to the pagan gods, and they forbid the daily sacrifices.

Jesus had told the people of Jerusalem that this was going to happen. Let's go to Luke 19.

Luke chapter 19.

And verse 41.

Jesus says here, or it says here about Jesus, now as he drew near, he saw the city and he wept over it saying, if you had known even you, especially this your day. You know, there's all kinds of prophecies about the Messiah coming to Jerusalem. And he says to them, this is your day, I'm here.

The things that make for your peace, but now they are hidden from your eyes, for days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embarkment around you, surround you, and close you in on every side, and level you and your children within you to the ground, and they will not leave in it in you one stone upon another, because you did not know the time of your visitation. You did not know that I was here, and because you refused me, there's going to come a time when they will actually build an encampment around you, which the Romans did. No one could get out, although there is a fascinating, and you can find it in history enough to know that it's true, that there was a small group that got out, the Christians got out.

The true followers, the church, actually got out during the siege. Nobody else did. And I mean a few people here and there, but basically people could not get through the Roman lines. And the result was that what Jesus predicted here happened to those people.

So when there is an entire school of philosophy, or prophecy, if you will, who looks at Matthew 24 and Matthew, in Luke 21 and Luke 13, and says, all these things were fulfilled in 70 AD. Jerusalem was destroyed.

So all of the prophecies were all fulfilled in 70 AD.

There are other things. All of that prophecy says that there's going to be wars and rumors of wars and famines. There were lots of famines. All through Judea, hundreds of thousands died.

Rumors of wars, false prophets. One of the things that the writers from that time period will talk about is how many false prophets were going around saying, do not despair, God is with us, the Romans are going to fall. Of course, it didn't happen. There were going to be signs in the skies.

Even the Romans talk about seeing signs in the skies during the siege of Jerusalem.

Josephus talks about signs in the skies. They talk about miracles taking place, including at one point where the temple doors swung open and many, many people heard a voice cry out, remove you, hence. And later, at least according to legend, that's when the Christians left. We do know that the Jerusalem church survived because 400 years later they still exist in a little town outside of Jerusalem. And people still write about them. And they trace their roots, clear back to there, and they say, well, you know, our great, great, great, great grandparents fled during the siege and moved to Pella, and this is where we live. And this little church was there hundreds of years later. So there are many people that look at Matthew 24, and they look at Luke 21, they say, see, that's already happened. No, it hasn't. But there was an abomination of desolation, and it's very, very similar to what we saw in what happened in the Tygus Epiphanes.

It's very similar because we have a king that wants to destroy God's way. We have the cessation of sacrifices, right? And we have armies surrounding Jerusalem and actually attacking and destroying Jerusalem. Those three things happened again, all over again. But let's go now to Matthew 24, and let's look at why Matthew 24, whatever happened in 70 AD, is a former fulfillment. It's not the complete fulfillment. It's a small fulfillment compared to what's going to happen later.

Let's jump through just a few places here. Verse 3, Matthew 24.

Now, as he said on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, Tell us, when will these things be? What will be the sign of your coming and the end of the age?

Not the destruction of humanity, but the end of when you will come back.

When the Messiah comes to set up the kingdom on the earth, and he rules, and the Father now is going to send out the Spirit as Joel prophesied, and the whole world is going to be converted. When's that going to happen? What happens first? And he explains all these things are going to happen. Now let's go down to verse 15, because he talks about wars and rumors of wars and pestilences and all those terrible things are going to happen.

Just like they happened in 167 BC. Now verse 15.

Therefore, when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the Holy Place, whoever reads this, let him understand, when you see it in the Holy Place, that meant a lot to those people, because there were people there who actually saw pagan altars in the Holy Place. Let those who were in the Judea flee to the mountains. Let those who in the house ought not go down to take anything out of his house. He says that they should flee.

Verse 21 says, For then there will be great tribulation, such as not been since the beginning of the world, till this time, no, nor shall ever be. What happened in 70 AD was horrible, but it pales into insignificance to some things that happened in the Middle Ages, or World War I, or World War II, or the Russian Revolution.

So there's a greater fulfillment of this. Verse 22, And unless those days were shortened, no flesh shall be saved, but for the elect's sake those days will be shortened.

And so he tells them that there's going to be an abomination of desolation. Those people saw that in a former way, but they didn't see the greater fulfillment. The greater fulfillment is yet to come.

Because look at verse 29, Immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from heaven, and the power of the heavens will be shaken. And then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And this, of course, is the great hope of this time.

The abomination of desolation, that term is horrifying. But that's just part of the story that leads up to this. This is the focal point of what we should have as Christians.

Because the next verse talks about how He will gather His people from the four corners of the earth. So we have here, this abomination of desolation had a former latter fulfillment.

So there's three fulfillments of the abomination of desolation.

I'm going to tie in one more passage here with this, and then we can wrap it up.

2 Thessalonians 2. Remember, all we're doing today is defining a term. We're now going through all the details of these prophecies. We're just defining a term. And we know by the way this has been fulfilled twice what's going to happen in the future, and therefore we know what to look for.

We're told to look. We have to know what to look for. 2 Thessalonians 2, chapter 2, verse 1.

Now, brethren, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our gathering together to Him, we ask you not to be soon shaken and mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as if it came from us, as though the day of Christ had come. Someone was telling them that Christ had already come back.

Some spiritualizing away, some allegory, He had already come back, and He's saying, no, He hasn't. Let no one deceive you by any means, for that day will not come, unless the falling away comes first. And the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God. There's coming a man who's going to be such a great leader that he's going to sit in the temple.

Now, this is the pagan temple, the temple, and he's going to claim that he is divine.

He's going to claim that he's divine. And if you read through the rest of the chapter, there's going to be such great miracles and wonders that he does that the entire world believes he has to be divine. He must be from God. He is God.

Maybe he will actually take the term, son of God upon himself. He will be a messianic figure, that he is like Christ. He is divine, and he is a man, and he has come to save the world, and he will do miracles. It's going to happen. And he's going to sit in the temple.

And now we begin to see, if we look at the first two abominations of desolations, what the future abomination of desolation is going to be like.

Let me say something here about a temple.

This doesn't mean you have to have a huge, beautiful edifice like Solomon's Temple.

It doesn't mean you have to have anything like Zerubbabel's Temple or Herod's Temple. I mean for 40 years, no longer than that, because not only as they wandered, Israel wandered in the desert in the wilderness, but the entire time that under the time of Judges, and the time of Samuel, and the time of Saul, and the time of David, it was in a tent.

The temple, if you will, the tabernacle, is a tent.

All there has to be is a place where they do sacrifices.

So, you know, I mean if someone goes to Jerusalem and builds a giant temple, I guess we'll all see that, but it doesn't have to be a giant temple.

It simply has to be a place where it's considered the holy place where sacrifices are done, where sacrifices are done.

Now, when we go back to what we read in Daniel 12, what we read in Daniel 12 was, at the time of the end, the daily sacrifices will be stopped.

The daily sacrifices will be stopped.

Sometime in the future, there's going to be sacrifices in Jerusalem, and they're going to call it a temple.

And there's going to come a time when, just like before, what happened the first two times?

Someone who was against God came into the temple and stopped the sacrifices.

Now, that means there has to be sacrifices before. Don't get too caught up on the temple. I mean, when we were in San Antonio, John Hagee has collected millions and millions of dollars so that people will build a temple, because he feels like there's him. He and a group of other ministers believe they've been called to fulfill this prophecy by building a temple.

But it doesn't have to be a temple. I'm not saying it won't be. I'm just saying, I'm not looking for the temple. I'm looking for the sacrifices, because that's what the message is given over and over is the sacrifices. The tent will survive. But maybe it is a big temple. I don't know. We'll know when it happens. Okay? We'll know when it happens. But there's going to be sacrifices, and there's going to be the stopping of those sacrifices, just like the first two times.

And Tychus Epiphanes saw himself as a demigod. He was sort of semi-divine.

When the Romans came in, their emperors saw themselves as semi-divine.

So will this one. He's going to take it a step further in his claim to divinity.

So what did we look at in Matthew 24? Jesus said that the abomination of desolation will be a sign of his return. The abomination of desolation will stand in the Holy Place. The Holy Place is the temple. So it's just like the first two times. Like I said, the second time, they didn't quite get it in the temple because they burnt it down too quick. The soldiers started looting the temple and it burnt down before he could get his altar built. So they built it the next day or whatever it was. A couple days later, they built it right there sort of on the ruins to the side. It will involve Jerusalem being surrounded by armies. And it's going to involve a man who hates God's way and promotes himself as divine. You see the similarities between the last two.

When we look at how it's been fulfilled otherwise, I don't know what the abomination of desolation is. It's just I don't know what the ram and the goat are unless the Bible tells me. The Bible tells us what this is. So this is important for you and me not to live in fear, but to know how to do what Jesus said. Look for these things. So what are we going to look for?

Well, a place in Jerusalem where daily sacrifices are reinstated.

We need to be looking for that. It's going to happen. They've been working on this for decades.

They have the Levites picked. They have the clothes made. They have the animals picked. The Israeli government's involved in it. And there's lots of money coming from the United States for this to happen. It's not that in secret it's all out in the open. Why?

I mean, I've seen Sunday morning services where they're collecting money to build a temple.

Why? Because everybody wants to fulfill this.

So it's going to happen. And there's going to be sacrifices. But remember, we are not to do sacrifices under the new covenant. Jesus Christ is our sacrifice.

This is not acceptable to God. It'll look good. It'll seem to unite Christians and Jews together. But we're not supposed to do animal sacrifices anymore. So whatever sacrifices they're doing, and the first two times this happened, they were actually animal sacrifices.

The coming man of lawlessness who claims to speak for God will deceive the world with miraculous signs. And he is a king who wants to destroy the way of God. He hates it, just like the other two kings did. And the army's beginning to surround Jerusalem.

Now you're probably saying, boy, I was hoping for something like really inside information, you know, so I could really know all the details. But the abomination of desolation... I mean, if you do... and I didn't cover everything, but if I covered everything I have ever read about the abomination of desolation, which I think I took out three pages of notes to do this, you would come up with this. This is what you come up with. There's going to be sacrifices.

There's going to be a king who wants to destroy God's way, and in this case, does miraculous signs. Satan works with him directly. And army's moving around Jerusalem.

You know what's amazing is that number one and number three are in the news all the time.

We're just used to it.

People trying to get a temple started. There's always this fear, you know, they're going to start a world war if they start doing sacrifices over there. The Arabs aren't going to... or the Muslims aren't going to stand for that. And, you know, army surrounding Jerusalem is in the news so much we don't even pay attention to it. Those two things are inching towards this, just a little inch at a time towards this event. It's still a ways off. And the man of sin, he's going to come on the scene real quick. Whenever he does, and I don't know when it's going to be, I can only tell you when it happens, it's going to happen real quick. When it does, overnight he's going to become a very important person. But the good news is this just warns us that it's about to happen.

The good news is it doesn't last very long. It doesn't last very long, although it's devastating on the earth. And as we read in Matthew 24, if Christ does not come back what He does, no one will be saved. But He is coming back. That's the point. That's why we're told all this.

Not so that we can live in fear, but so that we can be spiritually prepared, knowing that He is going to return. And that when we look for these things every day, we watch, we see what's going to happen. We use this information not to go build a bunker someplace and stock up food and buy yourselves a bunch of guns. That's not what we're doing. We're doing this to be spiritually prepared because we know that these are just the events that are going to happen before what we're anticipating. What we're looking for is to the return of Jesus Christ to intervene in human history and set up God's kingdom on this earth.