Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

The Abomination of Desolation.

What is it and what does it show us about God’s grace today?

Context

We’ve been studying Matthew 24 and have been looking at how this is not a prophecy about the end of the world, but a prophecy about the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans.

Right before this passage in Matthew 23, Jesus condemned Jerusalem and said that because Jerusalem rejected Christ and killed the prophets God sent to it their house, their temple would be left desolate (Matthew 23:37-38).

And then pointing to the Temple that was standing there in Jesus’ day, He told the disciples Truly I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down (Matthew 24:2).

By this point He had already cleansed the Temple twice and according to the Law in Leviticus 14 it needed to be torn town brick by brick.

And so the disciples come and ask him Tell us, when will these things be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?

(Matthew 24:3).

When will you come and destroy the Temple and how will we know its about to happen.

And the rest of Matthew 24 answers that question.

He tells them all the signs that re going to take place and as to when he says Matthew 24:34 Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.

That’s the key to interpreting this whole passage.

Either everything Jesus says, all these things, took place in that generation, the generation living in Jesus’ day, or else Jesus was a false prophet.

And what we are going to see, especially today, is that everything Jesus talked about happened within about 40 years, within one generation, of giving the Olivet discourse.

Verses 4-14 talked about the beginning of the birth pains.

A phrase that talked about one age giving birth to a new one.

Christ established the Kingdom and the New Covenant in His life, death, resurrection, and ascension, and for 40 years there was an overlap of the New Covenant, gospel, Christian, Church age and the Old Covenant age.

And when Jerusalem was destroyed, the Old Covenant which was obsolete and growing old according to Hebrews (Heb.

8:13), finally vanished away and gave birth to the New Covenant Christian age to stand on its own without the Old Covenant weighing it down.

And that takes us to the labor and delivery of this stand Alone New Covenant age and the putting away of the Old Covenant Age, with the Abomination of Desolation prophesied by Jesus in verses 15-28.

I. Abomination of Desolation

Matthew 24:15-20 So when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.

Let the one who is on the housetop not go down to take what is in his house, and let the one who is in the field not turn back to take his cloak.

And alas for women who are pregnant and for those who are nursing infants in those days!

Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a Sabbath.

Now right off the bat, I want you to see that what Jesus is talking about in Matthew 24 is a local judgment.

People that take the Great Tribulation to be a future, world wide Tribulation seem to ignore the fact that Jesus explicitly says its all going to happen in Judea.

If you are in Judea, flee to the mountains.

This is not a worldwide judgment.

This is a judgment you can run away from on foot.

Just flee to the mountains.

And we are going to see, that is exactly what the Christians did before Jerusalem was destroyed when they saw the Abomination of Desolation.

Well what is that?

Antiochus

The Abomination of Desolation comes from the book of Daniel.

And in Daniel the Abomination of Desolation had to do with a man named Antiochus Epiphanes.

Antiochus was a monster.

He was a Syrian King who ruled over Israel and terrorized the Jews.

He slaughtering thousands of Jewish men and sold women and children into slavery.

And in 168 BC he slaughtered a pig on the Altar of the Temple and desecrated it.

He made it unclean and cut off the people of God from worshiping for three years until the Maccabean revolt finally drove the Syrians out.

Double Fulfillment Vs.

Type

But here Jesus points to that Abomination of Desolation and says you need to be looking for that again.

This is another one of those examples of what we might call ultimate fulfillment or double fulfillment.

And people that take Matthew 24 to be future will often say, “Well yeah its about the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, but there will be another fulfillment one day in the future of everything Jesus says.”

The problem with that is if there can be a double fulfillment why not a third, fourth, fifth, hundredth?

How would anyone ever know when its actually being fulfilled?

But more important than that, I think we should limit our double fulfillment and ultimate fulfilment of prophecy to the things the New Testament explicitly tells us “This - what you’re seeing - is that - what was prophesied.

So no.

I don’t think we should be looking for double fulfillments where the Bible doesn’t explicitly say so.

If the Bible is prophesying about something, we should take that to be all that it is.

Now that’s not say prophecies like Matthew 24 can’t still be looked at or thought through as a Type.

A Type is a shadowy picture that gives us a little bit of clarity about something we are seeing today.

For example, the destruction of Jerusalem, or Sodom and Gomorrah or Babylon, are all a type, a shadowy picture, of the Final Judgment.

We can look at them and say that is a picture, a blurry picture, of what that greater judgment is going to be like.

But here’s the difference between a type and double fulfillment.

With a type we say ok this, what we are seeing, is like that.

But with a double fulfillment you have to say we are looking for all these prophecies to happen again.

So for example, say a nation, any nation, was coming under judgment.

It would be fair to look at other nations God has judged in the Bible and say that gives us a picture of what might be going on behind the scenes.

Of what God is doing.

But it would not be fair to look at those and say, “Well yeah.

Matthew 24 happened to Jerusalem, but we should still be looking for it to happen again” when there is no Biblical basis to do so.

Unless otherwise told in Scripture, we should understand prophecy to only be talking about what its talking about and then look at those prophecies to see what applications they might have for us today.

So with the Abomination of Desolation, we should look at that in Matthew 24 and see that the destruction of Jerusalem itself is the ultimate fulfillment of that prophecy, not Antiochus Ephiphanes, because Jesus explicitly says so.

There’s not some future double fulfillment because what Jesus was talking about was the double fulfillment.

Its like Jesus takes the Abomination of Desolation out of the box as a True Prophet of God, and starts the prophecy clock on it again.

For Him, the Abomination of Desolation wasn’t just about the Temple being desecrated and made unclean under Antiochus Ephiphanes.

The ultimate fulfillment of the Abomination of Desolation would be the Temple’s total and complete destruction.

Would be when it was torn down and desecrated by the Romans not one stone left on another altogether.

So Jesus says, when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel…then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.

But then He also says let the reader understand.

That’s a note from Matthew that expects the reader to know what Jesus is talking about.

He doesn’t explain it because he expected Christians to know what they were supposed to be looking for.

Well what is that?

Thankfully Luke tells us.

Surrounded by Armies

Luke 21:20-22 But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near.

Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart, and let not those who are out in the country enter it, for these are days of vengeance, to fulfill all that is written.

Now Matthew was written for a Jewish audience so he takes for granted his audience’s understanding of the Abomination of Desolation and the book of Daniel.

Luke, on the other hand, writes for Gentile believers like us to flesh out and explain what Jesus said.

So for Luke, the Abomination of Desolation is near when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, and when you see that, everyone in Judea, the greater country outside of Jerusalem needs to flee to the mountains and those who are inside the city of Jerusalem itself need to get out.

That’s why Matthew says Matthew 24:17-18 Let the one who is on the housetop not go down to take what is in his house, and let the one who is in the field not turn back to take his cloak.

When people worked in the fields they would show up in a cloak.

But as the day got hotter they would take it off and leave it on the side of the field.

And Jesus’ point was that when you see the Abomination of Desolation, when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, don’t waste a second.

You’re not going to have much time.

You need to get out.

Don’t worry about your stuff and don’t even worry cloak to keep you warm at night.

You need to flee.

That’s why He also says Matthew 24:20 Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a Sabbath.

During the winter the days would be short and travel would be cold and hard because the roads would be covered in mud (France, TNTC: Matthew, 344).

And on the Sabbath, the gates of Jersualem would be shut and you wouldn’t be able to buy supplies on your way out of town because no one would be working.

Not to mention some of the Jews might arrest you for traveling more than a mile or two on the Sabbath and keep you in the city against your will.

All of this again shows us that Jesus was talking to the generation alive at that time and the judgment that was going to come on Judea and Jerusalem.

We aren’t worried about Sabbath laws today.

And if the Great Tribulation was a world wide judgment in the future, it would make little since for Jesus to tell us to flee and try to run away from it or pray that our flight would not be on the Sabbath.