Daniel coined the phrase, Antiochus IV acted it out in 167 BC, and Jesus aimed it at the city standing in front of Him. It is a warning that was heard, obeyed and fulfilled.
The abomination of desolation is Daniel's name for something detestable set up against God's temple that leads to its ruin. It happened first under Antiochus IV in 167 BC, and Jesus said it would happen again to His own generation.
Luke tells us what He meant in plain words: Jerusalem surrounded by armies. That warning was fulfilled in the Roman war that ended with the temple's fall in AD 70.
This is not a puzzle about a future world leader or a rebuilt temple. It is a first century warning to real people about a real city, and the people who took Jesus at His word got out alive.
The phrase shows up in Daniel 9:27, 11:31 and 12:11. Each time it sits beside the same picture: the daily sacrifice stopped, the sanctuary defiled, and something offensive planted where God was meant to be worshiped.
“His armed forces will rise up to desecrate the temple fortress and will abolish the daily sacrifice. Then they will set up the abomination that causes desolation.”
Daniel 11:31Daniel 11 reads like history written as vision. By verse 31 we are in the reign of a Seleucid king who hated the Jewish faith, and readers Jewish and Christian, ancient and modern, have recognized Antiochus IV in these lines.
The Hebrew word behind abomination. It means something disgusting or detestable, and it is used especially of idols. This is worship language, not a general word for something bad.
The Greek word the Gospels use in Matthew 24:15 and Mark 13:14. A detestable thing, again with idolatry in view.
Desolation, laying waste. In the New Testament it appears only three times: Matthew 24:15, Mark 13:14, and Luke 21:20, where Luke writes that Jerusalem's desolation is near.
Hold on to that last line. The same word that Matthew and Mark use for the abomination of desolation is the word Luke uses when he describes armies around Jerusalem. That is not a coincidence we have to force. It is the Gospel writers telling us they are talking about the same event.
Antiochus IV called himself Epiphanes, God made manifest. He tried to stamp out Jewish worship by force, and the book of 1 Maccabees records what he did to the temple in plain terms.
Antiochus IV takes the Seleucid throne, and pressure on Judea to adopt Greek religion grows.
1 Maccabees 1:54 in the King James wording: they “set up the abomination of desolation upon the altar, and builded idol altars throughout the cities of Juda on every side.” Verse 59 adds that ten days later they sacrificed on the idol altar that stood on the altar of God. The dating uses the Seleucid calendar, year 145, which lands in 167 BC.
The Maccabees rise. Torah scrolls are burned, faithful Jews are killed for keeping the law, and a family of priests leads the resistance.
The sanctuary is rededicated. Jews still remember it every winter at Hanukkah, which is why Jesus is in the temple courts at the Feast of Dedication in John 10:22.
So when Jesus used the phrase, nobody in His audience heard a riddle. They had a festival that remembered it. They heard, “It is going to happen again.”
Daniel's prophecy already had a fulfillment on the books before Jesus was born. Jesus did not invent a new mystery. He took a known category of disaster and said this city, this temple, would meet it again. I go deeper into what Jesus meant by you are gods in a separate study.
The disciples admire the temple buildings, and Jesus says not one stone will be left on another. They ask when. Matthew 24 is His answer about that building.
“So when you see standing in the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation,’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel … then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.”
Matthew 24:15 to 16Notice who is being addressed. “When you see.” Those in Judea. Pray that your flight does not happen in winter or on a Sabbath. These are instructions for people who live near Jerusalem, keep the Sabbath, and would have to run on foot. And the chapter closes the window with a line no one can stretch: “Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” (Matthew 24:34).
Standing in the holy place, spoken of through Daniel. Written for a Jewish readership that knew the phrase, so Matthew names the source.
Standing where it does not belong, with the aside “let the reader understand.” Mark keeps it coded, and expects his readers to catch it.
“When you see Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, you will know that its desolation is near.” Luke, writing for Gentile readers, drops the code and says what it is.
All three follow the sign with the same command: those in Judea, flee to the mountains. Same sign, same response, same event.
We let Jesus interpret Daniel, and when one Gospel writer explains a saying the other two keep coded, we take the explanation. For the wider shape of the chapter, our walk through the Olivet Discourse and Matthew 24 explained go verse by verse.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
Jesus spoke around AD 30. Roughly forty years later, inside the lifetime of people who heard Him, everything He described came down on Jerusalem. Our witness is Josephus, a Jewish general turned Roman historian with no interest in proving Jesus right.
The Roman governor of Syria, Cestius Gallus, marches on Jerusalem and surrounds it. Then, with the city seemingly within reach, he pulls back. For anyone who remembered Luke 21:20, that was the sign, followed by an open door.
Zealot factions seize the temple and turn it into a fortress, with bloodshed in its courts. Josephus puts a lament in the mouth of the former high priest Ananus: “Certainly it had been good for me to die before I had seen the house of God full of so many abominations” (Jewish War 4.3.10).
Titus breaks through. As the temple burns, Josephus writes that the Romans “brought their ensigns to the temple and set them over against its eastern gate; and there did they offer sacrifices to them” (Jewish War 6.6.1). Pagan worship offered to military standards, on the temple mount.
So which one did Jesus mean? Teachers who agree on the timing weigh these differently. The sacrifice to the standards is the most vivid match to Daniel, but it came too late to be a signal to run. The sign had to come early enough to obey.
That is why Luke's wording carries so much weight. The desolation begins when the Gentile armies surround the holy city. The Zealot defilement and the Roman standards are that same desolation reaching its end, from within and from without.
Which Gospel explains the abomination of desolation in plain words?
Luke 21:20 sits exactly where Matthew and Mark place the abomination, gives the same command to flee, and uses the same Greek word for desolation. Luke is telling his Gentile readers what the Jewish phrase meant.
Many sincere Christians read this differently, so here is their case at its strongest.
Daniel 9:27 speaks of a ruler who breaks a covenant in the middle of a final seven. Paul describes a man of lawlessness sitting in the temple. Matthew 24 goes on to describe cosmic signs and the Son of Man on the clouds, which did not visibly happen in AD 70. So there must be a future temple and a future figure to fulfill it.
Jesus attached a clock to the whole discourse: this generation. The cosmic language is the prophets' own way of describing the fall of nations, as in Isaiah 13 over Babylon. And Paul's figure sits in the temple that was standing when he wrote, not in one that does not exist.
At Sound of Heaven we hold that the abomination of desolation Jesus warned about was fulfilled in the Roman war against Jerusalem, climaxing with the destruction of the temple in AD 70. It was the sign given to His own generation, and that generation saw it.
We do not teach a future third temple, a future antichrist who will desecrate it, a rapture, or a coming seven-year tribulation. The teaching that moves Matthew 24:15 into our future is wrong. It is held by people we love, and it is still wrong, because it asks Jesus' first hearers to flee from something that would not happen for two thousand years.
We are also honest about what is open. Scripture does not tell us which single moment between AD 66 and 70 Jesus had in mind, and faithful readers differ. The timing is not open. It is written into the text.
This matches what we have said about the son of perdition in 2 Thessalonians and about when Jesus is coming back. Daniel's seventy sevens point to the same first century window, which we trace in the 70 weeks of Daniel.
It matters who this reading gets used on. Temple mount charts have been used to frighten children, sell books whenever the news turns, and tell people this world is not worth caring for. None of that comes from Jesus.
Jesus gave the sign so His followers could act on it. Do not go back for your coat. Do not run into the city for safety, because the city is what is being judged.
“Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let those in the city get out, and let those in the country not enter the city.”
Luke 21:21Early Christian memory says they did. The church historian Eusebius, writing in the early fourth century, records that “the people of the church in Jerusalem had been commanded by a revelation, vouchsafed to approved men there before the war, to leave the city and to dwell in a certain town of Perea called Pella” (Church History 3.5.3).
To be honest about it, Eusebius wrote more than two centuries later and credits a revelation to church leaders rather than quoting Matthew 24, and historians debate the details. It still fits a church that believed Jesus meant what He said.
Some of us grew up with charts, films and sermons that left us afraid of being left behind. Hear this plainly. The warning Jesus gave was for a specific city in a specific war, and it was an act of love that saved lives.
You are not waiting for a terror that has your name on it. You are living in the Kingdom He established. If that fear still sits heavy, we would be glad to pray with you.
Here is the part that turns a history lesson into good news. The desolation of the stone temple did not leave God without a house. Jesus had already said, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days,” and John tells us He was speaking of His body.
When the old sanctuary fell, the covenant transition was complete. God's dwelling was no longer a building on a hill in Judea. It was Jesus, and everyone joined to Him. That is why Paul could tell ordinary believers in Corinth that they are the temple of God.
So the abomination of desolation is not a fear to carry into the future. It is proof that Jesus told the truth about the most dramatic event of His century, and a reason to trust Him about everything else.
For related reading, see our Book of Daniel summary, the great tribulation, are we in the end times, when Revelation was written and we are the temple of God. You can also read what we believe.
Daniel named it, Antiochus IV acted it out in 167 BC, Jesus aimed it at His own generation, Luke explained it as Jerusalem surrounded by armies, and it was fulfilled in the Roman war that ended the temple in AD 70, while those who believed Him fled and lived.
If you were raised on a future abomination and a third temple, you probably have questions. Send them in and someone at Sound of Heaven will work through them with you.
It is a phrase from Daniel 9:27, 11:31 and 12:11 for something detestable set up against God's temple that brings it to ruin. It was first fulfilled under Antiochus IV in 167 BC. Jesus used the same phrase in Matthew 24:15 and Mark 13:14 as a sign for His own generation, and Luke 21:20 explains it as Jerusalem surrounded by armies. That was fulfilled in the Roman war that ended with the temple's destruction in AD 70.
Antiochus IV was the one who set it up the first time. 1 Maccabees 1:54 says that in 167 BC his officials set up the abomination of desolation upon the altar, and ten days later sacrifices were offered on the idol altar in the temple. Daniel 11:31 describes those events. But Jesus said it would happen again to the temple of His day, so Antiochus was the first fulfillment, not the last.
Luke was writing mostly for Gentile readers who would not recognize a coded phrase from Daniel. So where Matthew and Mark say the abomination of desolation, Luke says when you see Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, you will know that its desolation is near. Same place in the discourse, same command to flee, same Greek word for desolation. Luke is telling us what the phrase meant.
We do not believe so. Jesus tied the sign to the temple standing in His day and said this generation would not pass away until all these things happened. That temple fell in AD 70, and the warning was fulfilled. Nothing in the New Testament calls for a rebuilt temple, and after the cross God's dwelling is Jesus and His people.
Early Christian tradition says they did. Eusebius, writing in the early fourth century, records that the church in Jerusalem was warned by a revelation before the war to leave the city and settle in Pella, a town across the Jordan. Historians debate the details because he wrote long after the events. Still, it fits what Jesus told them to do, and it shows a church that took His warning seriously.