“When you see the Worst Thing Ever, standing where it never should” (get it, reader?)“those who are in Judea: Run for the hills! If you’re on the roof, don’t come down; don’t go in your house to get anything. If you’re in the fields, don’t bother to grab your coat. How sad for pregnant women and nursing mothers, in those days! Pray it doesn’t happen during winter. Those days will be tribulation like it’s never been. From the first thing God created, to now, it’s never been this bad .If the Lord didn’t cut off the days, no flesh would survive. But he chose to cut off the days because of his chosen people.” —Jesus,
This is where Jesus predicts what Christians know as the Great Tribulation.
Well, what most Christians know as the Great Tribulation. Dispensationalists, and the American Christians who follow their lead about End Times events, have a whole other theory about what the Great Tribulation looks like. They say it’ll happen in the future, when the Beast, or Antichrist, persecutes the Christians, tries to destroy Jerusalem, and fails.
But in point of fact, this prophecy was fulfilled in the year 70, when the Romans tried to destroy Jerusalem and did.
Daniel’s prophecy.
First, a little Old Testament backstory. Jesus’s statement, and some of his language, parallels a prophecy made in Daniel 9. Daniel had a vision of the future, and God sent one of his angels, Gabriel, to explain it to Daniel. Which Gabriel kinda did, in an apocalyptic way: He didn’t literally tell Daniel what would happen. He told him metaphorically what would happen. Namely this.
- “About your people and holy city:
- 70 sevens are planned out.
- The rebellion and sin are brought to an end.
- Guilt atoned for. Eternal righteousness comes.
- The vision and the prophet are sealed.
- The holy of holies is anointed.
- Know and understand:
- From
the time the word goes out,- from the return, the building of Jerusalem,
- to Messiah the prince:
- Seven sevens.
- In 62 sevens,
Jerusalem is rebuilt larger,- with fortifications, in a troubled time.
- After 62 sevens, Messiah is cut down, and has nothing.
- The city and holy place are destroyed by the people of the coming prince.
- It ends in a flood. Wars till the end.
- Ruin is the plan.
- He’s mighty.
- He covenants with many, for one seven.
- Half the seven, he stops the offering sacrifices
- on the edge of the Worst Thing Ever.
- Till the end, the
events of the plan- will be poured out on the Worst Thing.”
—Gabriel,
- 70 sevens are planned out.
Dispensationalists teach these metaphors actually aren’t metaphors; we’re to interpret them literally. Unless they’re obviously metaphors. Fr’instance, Gabriel referred to “sevens,” which a lot of bibles translate as “weeks,” but Jews understood to mean groups of seven years. Well, they’re not literally seven years. Do the math: From the time Jerusalem was rebuilt in 538 BC, to the coming of Messiah (or, the beginning of Jesus’s ministry) around the year 30, was not seven sevens. Even Dispys will agree it’s far longer than 49 years. So that part is metaphor. But the rest, they’ll take literally… unless, again, they can’t.
Hence, in the Dispensationalist timeline, “He covenants with many, for one seven” means the Beast will literally make a seven-year treaty (probably with Jerusalem, or Israel) which he’ll break halfway through, and unleash the Great Tribulation. Regardless of how “seven” doesn’t represent a literal seven years anywhere else in these apocalypses.
But back to Jesus. He likely taught his students this bit of Daniel, and they likely had it in mind when he made a reference to the Worst Thing Ever. And, to a lesser degree, they’d have thought of the Maccabees. I’ll explain.
The Worst Thing Ever.
The “Worst Thing Ever” is my translation of to vdélygma tis erimóseos, which is itself a translation of shiqquchím meshomém/“nasty rapey thing,” or its more popular euphemism, “abomination of desolation.”
Interpreters claim this is something so vile, so offensive, people run away rather than look at it. This is partly true. See, shamém doesn’t mean “empty” so much as “wrecked.” The Worst Thing Ever isn’t just offensive; it wrecks people when they see it. They feel violated. They feel dirty. They feel like the world’s gone wrong, or they’ve lost their minds. Author H.P. Lovecraft loved to write science fiction stories where his characters met or found aliens or gods, and their discovery didn’t just awe them or frighten them: It drove them crazy. They descended into raving madness. This’d be like that.
When Mark (and Matthew, quoting Mark in his gospel) inserted the comment, “Get it, reader?” it was a reminder that Jesus wasn’t talking about something we should be clueless about. We should know what the “Worst Thing Ever” was, ’cause we’ve read Daniel.
But there’s also this hurdle: The Jews of Jesus’s day assumed the Worst Thing Ever had already happened. In 168 BC, Jerusalem was under the Seleucid Empire, and their king, Antiochus 4, decided he wanted all the people in his empire to worship the same god—Zeus. (The LORD, some Greeks argued, was the same god as Zeus; just with a different name. Rubbish, but people still teach such things.) So Antiochus had an altar to Zeus built in the temple, and had a pig sacrificed to it.
If you know the story of Hanukkah, or you’ve read the books of the Maccabees, you know the Jews then revolted, drove out the Seleucids, and rededicated the temple. So the Pharisees commonly referred to this as the Worst Thing Ever. Nowadays, Jews consider the Holocaust the worst thing ever, and it probably was. But when they talk about the shiqquchím meshomém, they mean when Antiochus desecrated the temple.
So. Does Jesus mean the desecration of the temple wasn’t the Worst Thing Ever? Well, it certainly was one of the worst things ever. But I’d think we can agree the destruction of the temple, never to be rebuilt, desecrated it much worse than Antiochus ever did.
Years after the Romans destroyed the temple, they put an altar to Jupiter on its site, largely to spite the Jews. When the Roman Empire became Christian, the Christians put a church there instead—although they gave far more attention to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. When the Muslims moved in, Abdul Malek had the Dome of the Rock built there in 691. And while the Jews could rebuild the temple anywhere (like Shechem, where the tabernacle once stood) their rabbis have them convinced they can only rebuild it there. (The Dispensationalists, who insist many End Times prophecies still require a Jerusalem temple, would agree.) So it’s not rebuilt.
The coming of the Romans.
From the seventh seven to the 62nd seven, Messiah is around, and Jerusalem is built, and fortified a bit, “in a troubled time.” Namely when Herod 1 was king, and began his many building programs. He had the temple rebuilt, although that took longer than Herod’s lifetime, and still wasn’t complete by Jesus’s day. He also had the walls rebuilt (none of which still stand; the current “old” walls and gates were built in 1542). He had four towers added to the walls.
After Herod died, Augustus Caesar split Israel into four parts, and put Judea directly under the Roman emperor—with a procurator sent to govern it for him. Of course, the procurators were bureaucrats who only wanted the job for the wealth and prestige, and didn’t give a rip about the Jews they were meant to govern, nor their God. Cultural insensitivity sparked protests and riots. Fr’instance, when Pontius Pilate brought Roman eagle statues—which Romans considered a patriotic symbol, but the Jews considered idols—into Antonia, the fortress overlooking the temple, meaning you could see these idols from the temple, it sparked the first of many riots under his rule.
Pilate “cut down” Messiah in the year 33. And as we know, this wasn’t the end of the story: Messiah was raised, ascended to the Father, and started his church. But while that was happening, the Judeans’ uprising escalated. By the year 66, it was open warfare: The Judeans seized Antonia, killed its garrison, and set it on fire. Public buildings, and wealthy people’s houses, were also fired. General Cestius Gallus was sent from Syria to put a stop to it, but the Judeans actually drove him out. So the Romans sent their chief general, Titus Flavius Vespasianus, from Rome to conquer Judea once and for all. (He and his son have the same name; historians call the father Vespasian and the son Titus.)
Vespasian was elected emperor in 69 and had to leave, but Titus finished the war—decisively—in 70. Titus would be the coming prince in Gabriel’s narrative.
The fall of Jerusalem.
Contrary to Jesus’s order to run for the hills, panicked Judeans and Idumeans (i.e. Edomites) ran for Jerusalem, figuring its fortified walls would hold back the Romans, and the righteousness of their cause (and their God) would do the rest.
Titus put the city under siege for 134 days, starving them out. The sacrifices stopped about halfway through that time, on the 84th day. The Judeans refused to work together, fought one another and the Idumeans, and fell, one section at a time, to the oncoming Romans. The city was burned down, and Titus even had the foundations dug up. And more than a half million Jews, Edomites, and Palestinians were killed. The historian Flavius Josephus, who was there to see it, estimated 600,000 dead.
This was the fulfillment of Gabriel’s prophecy in Daniel. Yes, history might repeat itself, as usual. Something like this may happen again, as it has throughout Jerusalem’s history since. There’s the bar-Cokhba rebellion in 152; Chosroes of Persia destroyed it in 614; Hakim of Egypt burned down the churches in 1010; Isar el-Atsis massacred 3,000 people in 1077; the Crusader siege in 1098; the Tartar invasion of 1244; and so on. But none of these invasions and destructions, violent though they were, killed a half million people. (Arguably, not even all of them put together.) Even in the Dispensationalist timeline—where, instead of Titus, the Beast comes against the city—is there no mention of casualties, or the destruction of the city. Dispys assume God will defend his chosen city, even though he let it fall all those other times. Even their version of events can’t hold a candle to the death and mayhem of the year 70.
Jesus’s warning was clearly for that generation of readers. And they heeded his warning. His students, his followers, his family members, anyone who heard his words, who lived in the Jerusalem area, who saw the Romans come to conquer, fled. Like Lot escaping Sodom. They survived. The Jerusalemites didn’t.
So this prophecy was fulfilled. Yeah, maybe the Dispys are right and it’ll happen again. But if you know the history, you know it doesn’t have to be fulfilled again. This is not an unfulfilled prophecy which gets in the way of Jesus’s return. Nothing gets in the way of Jesus’s return.
Wait, so the Great Tribulation is over?
Yep.
This is not to say Christians aren’t still persecuted today—persecuted a lot—in many countries around the world. This is not to say they’re not under great tribulation. Nor is this to say Christians in free countries will never lose our freedoms, and get harassed or persecuted here too. We still have to be vigilant in the free countries, and still strive to end persecution everywhere else.
I realize I’m gonna hear it (as I have many times before) from Dispensationalists and their friends. They’ll claim I’m doing the Kingdom a great disservice by telling people there’s no tribulation to come. And like I said, I claim no such thing. Tribulation may come. Tribulation is already here. But this seven-year Great Tribulation they’ve imagined, which they’re using to spread paranoid fear? Already happened 19½ centuries ago.
You want something to be anxious about? Here ya go: Some day you will stand before Jesus. Hopefully sooner than later. Might be when he returns; might be when you die. And he’s not gonna ask you any lame question about, “Why should I let you into my Kingdom?” He knows your assignment already. Your fruit declares it. He’ll separate you, and me, and everyone, like sheep from goats. Later is not guaranteed, so figure out now whether you’re among his sheep. If you aren’t, join us. If you are, rejoice.