S
"False worship is idolatrous worship. When the Jews rejected Jesus and kept offering
sacrifices, they were engaged in idolatry. .... This was the "wing of abominations" [Dan.
9:27] that took place in the Temple. It is why the Temple was destroyed.
"A full picture of this is provided in Ezekiel 8-11. .... There you will see that when the
apostate Jews of Ezekiel's day perfomed the sacrifices, God viewed it as an abomination.
He called the holy shrine an "idol of jealousy, that provokes to jealousy" (8:3). The Jews
had treated the Temple and the ark as idols, and so God would destroy them, as he did
the golden calf. Ezekiel sees God pack up and move out of the Temple, leaving it empty or
desolate. Once God had left, the armies of Nebuchadnezzar swept in and destroyed the
empty Temple. (When we recognized that Ezekiel and Daniel prophesied at the same
time, the correlation becomes even more credible.) (1)
"Jesus' actions in Matthew 23:28 in proclaiming the temple "desolate" and walking
away from the structure are what God had warned about when He saw abominations
present: "The the glory of the LORD departed from the threshold of the temple and stood
over the cherubim" (Ezekiel 10:18). John Calvin put forth a similar intepretation: God
"deserted his Temple, because it was only founded for a time, and was but a shadow,
until the Jews so completely violated the whole covenant that no sanctity remained in
either the Temple, the nation, or the land itself." (2) As J. Marcellus Kik states, "The real
cause for the desolation was found in the spiritual fornication of the Jews, especially
their rejection of the Messiah." (3)
"While disagreement remains as to what form the abomination took, Scripture makes it
clear that it occurred soon after Jerusalem was surrounded by armies. As history attests,
Jerusalem was surrounded just prior to the temple's destruction in the fall of A.D. 70.
The abomination brought desolation.
"Not the Real Thing"
"Those who look for a rebuilt temple to be destroyed during the "Great Tribulation" or
a millennial temple where Jesus will sit have a problem with much of the Bible. The Book
of Hebrews describes the temple, the daily sacrificial system, religious feasts, the altar,
the holy of holies, and the priesthood as "a copy and shadow of the heavenly things"
(Heb. 8:5). Copies and shadows are not the real thing. With the death of Jesus, no\
barriers separated the people from the holy of holies (Matt. 27:51). There was no longer
a need for an earthly priesthood to offer up animal blood in atonement for sins."
(DeMar, Gary. (1999). Last Days Madness: Obsession of the Modern Church. Powder
Springs, GA: American Vision,.pages 108-109).
Notes.
1. James B. Jordan, "The Abomination of Desolation: An Alternative Hypothesis", in Gary
DeMar, The Debate over Christian Reconstruction (Ft. Worth, TX: Dominion Press, 1988),
240.
2. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book of the Prophet Daniel, trans. Thomas Myers,
2 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1948), 2:390.
3. Kik, "Abomination of Desolation", 19.