As it has been stated in some above posts that the 24th chapter of Matthew – what is known as Jesus’ Olivet Discourse, where He spoke prophetically to the disciples about things to come – is confusing (and it certainly can be!), I post here a section of one of Kim Riddlebarger’s books so as to give conceptual tools to aid in understanding this crucial passage of Scripture.
Prophetic Perspective and the Abomination of Desolation
Understanding the way in which several key prophecies regarding the Antichrist are framed in the New Testament is important to interpreting them correctly. It is my contention that several of the prophecies (especially in Daniel) regarding Antichrist and his predecessors involve
double fulfillment, which simply refers to the fact that certain prophecies are fulfilled more than once. Such prophecies are usually connected to an immediate or imminent fulfillment in the lifetime of the prophet and again to a more distant fulfillment in the messianic age (at our Lord’s first or second advent). This phenomenon is also known as “prophetic perspective.” The prophet foretells what appears to be a single event in his immediate future, but as redemptive history unfolds, it becomes clear that there are multiple fulfillments of the original prophecy. This is true with the biblical data predicting the coming of an end-times foe of God’s people—the Antichrist.
Before we discuss what Jesus meant when he predicted an act of sacrilege that would bring about the desolation of the Jerusalem temple—the so-called “abomination of desolation”—we need to understand that a number of Old Testament prophecies, along with certain aspects of the prophecy Jesus uttered in the Olivet Discourse, have more than one fulfillment.
According to Herman Ridderbos, many biblical prophecies refer to “things that appear to be centuries apart in the fulfillment [and] are sometimes comprehended by Jesus’ prophecy in the same temporal frame and within the same local framework.” According to Ridderbos, such prophecy is “something different than a diary of future events. . . . The function of prophecy is consequently not that of a detailed projection of the future, but is the urgent insistence on the certainty of the things to come. This explains why, at the end of the vista, the perspective is lacking. The prophet sees all kinds of events that will come and he sees in all of them the coming of God. But he cannot fix a date for the events, he cannot distinguish all phases in God’s coming. To him it is one great reality.” (Ridderbos,
The Coming of the Kingdom, 523-25)
This is an important point. The prophet is not concerned with
when certain things will come to pass but with the fact that they
will come to pass. Keeping this in mind as we look at the biblical data regarding Antichrist will explain how Daniel can predict more than one event in a single prophecy—for example, the prophecy of a great blasphemer in Daniel 11, which refers to to both Antiochus IV (Dan. 11:21-35) and the Antichrist at the time of the end (Dan. 11:36-45).
A number of commentators believe that this telescoping of imminent and future fulfillment (prophetic perspective or double fulfillment) is found in several of the prophetic books of the Old Testament. It is also found in the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24; Mark 13; Luke 21), in which our Lord sets forth his most comprehensive teaching regarding future events. Some of these are fulfilled by the events of AD 70, while others remain to be fulfilled at the end of the age. The events associated with the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple may also serve as a type (a foreshadowing) of a universal and final cataclysm (antitype) at the end of the age. The imminent desolation of the holy place (the Jerusalem temple) by the armies of Titus in AD 70, predicted by our Lord in Matthew 24:15, fulfills Daniel’s prophecy of such an event (Dan. 9:27; 11:31; 12:11). But the actions of Titus’s armies actually fulfill Daniel’s prophecy a second time—Antiochus IV was the first to make the holy place desolate in 167 BC. Antiochus erected an altar to Zeus on the altar of Yahweh, and then some two hundred years later the armies of Titus started a fire in the temple before looting its sacred objects, profaning the temple and leaving it desolate a second time. This is what Daniel predicted and what Jesus restates. As Vos says, it is plain “that Jesus shaped the matter in his mind after the same fashion” as the desecration of the Jerusalem temple by Antiochus, “only he projects the horrible event from the past in which it had once taken place into a future beyond his own point of speaking.” (Vos,
Pauline Eschatology, 95) But Jesus’ mention of the “abomination of desolation” may also function as a prophetic picture of what will happen at the end of the age on a universal scale in Christ’s church. If this is the case, Daniel’s prophecy is not only fulfilled by Antiochus IV’s desecration of the temple in 167 BC but again by Titus and his Roman legions in AD 70, and them possibly again on a universal scale by an end-times Antichrist.
Prophetic perspective is clearly found throughout the Olivet Discourse. Take, for example, our Lord’s warning to his disciples in Matthew 24:4-13, where Jesus speaks of false christs, wars and rumors of wars, famines, and earthquakes before stating in verse 14 that the gospel must be preached to the whole world as a testimony. In verses 4-13, Jesus is speaking of events that will happen in the lifetime of the disciples; then he immediately jumps ahead to the time of the end in verse 14, seen in the reference to the universal preaching of the gospel to the ends of the earth, affirming the missionary calling of Christ’s church (Matt. 28:16-20).
The same thing can be seen when Jesus speaks of the imminent destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman army. When Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, he warns the disciples, “The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone standing on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you” (Luke 19:43-44). In Luke 21:20, Jesus is even more specific about what will happen to Jerusalem: “When you see Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, you will know that its desolation is near.” This is clearly a prophetic prediction of an imminent event within the lifetime of the disciples, namely, the Jewish War so graphically detailed by Josephus. Says Jesus, “They will fall by the sword and will be taken as prisoners to all the nations. Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled” (Luke 21:24). That Jesus is predicting the imminent events of AD 70 and the Jewish diaspora is indisputable.
In Matthew’s account Jesus is also speaking of an imminent fulfillment when he warns his disciples about a particular aspect of the desolation coming upon Israel’s temple:
So when you see standing in the holy place “the abomination that causes desolation,” spoken of through the prophet Daniel—let the reader understand—then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no one on the roof of his house go down to take anything out of the house. Let no one in the field go back to get his cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! Pray that your flight will not take place in winter or on the Sabbath. For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened. (Matthew 24:15-22)
Once again, the reference to the desolation of the temple (“the abomination that causes desolation”) and a time of unequalled distress for the city of Jerusalem is a prediction of the events of AD 70. The desolation and profanation of the temple, coupled with the siege of Jerusalem by skilled and combat-hardened Roman legions, is the worst cataclysm ever to come upon Jerusalem, and, according to Jesus, it will never be equaled again. The desolation of Israel and the dispersion of the Jews to the ends of the earth is a great tragedy.
Notice that later in that same discourse Jesus telescopes his attention to the time of the end of the age (Matt. 24:29). Only then does Jesus go on to tell his disciples, “At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other” (Matt. 24:30-31). Jesus speaks of an imminent event (the destruction of Jerusalem) and future events (the end of the age and his second advent) in what is a virtually seamless manner.
In light of the tension between things imminent and things future, Charles Cranfield has pointed out that “neither an exclusively historical nor an exclusively eschatological interpretation is satisfactory. . . . We must allow for a double reference, for a mingling of historical and eschatological.” (C.E.B. Cranfield,
The Gospel According to Saint Mark, 401-2) Thus when Jesus speaks of an abominating sacrilege, he is likely not only predicting the events of AD 70, he may also be speaking of events that occur at the time of the end—especially if the apostle Paul is speaking of the same thing when the apostle refers to “the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshipped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God” (2 Thess. 2:3-4). This connection, Vos believes, enables us to draw a line from Daniel to both Jesus and Paul and provides the continuity necessary to make sense of what would otherwise be three unrelated streams of data in the New Testament regarding the Antichrist (Vos, op. cit., p. 96). This is also the view of Anthony Hoekema in his influential statement and defense of Reformed amillennialism,
The Bible and the Future (pp. 137-63). This seems to make the best sense of the passage and allows us to take seriously Jesus’ utilization of prophetic perspective. (Kim Riddlebarger,
The Man of Sin: Uncovering the Truth About the Antichrist, pp. 68-72)
As the Book of Daniel is so interwoven in the prophecies of Jesus in the Gospels, and in the Book of Revelation, I want to recommend a simple, brief, and clear exposition in accord with both Riddlebarger and with the books on Revelation I spoke of in
. There are other excellent Reformed commentaries which go into great detail, but Olyott’s stands alone for brief, understandable, and sound exposition.
), but certainly one could see "all these things" (signs) and "all these things" (fulfillments) both in the same generation. 
