The Abomination of Desolation - St. Marys Coptic Orthodox Church

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SIGNS OF HIS COMING
The second seal reveals a red horse, “And power was given to him that
sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one
another; and there was given unto him a great sword.” (Rev 6:4) This
represents war.
The third and fourth seals represent famine and pestilence. We
are then told that these three plagues (war, famine and pestilence) will
kill one fourth of the world. (Rev 6:8) This agrees with what the Lord
told His disciples in Matthew 24, “And ye shall hear of wars and
rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must
come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation,
and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and
pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the
beginning of sorrows.” (Matt 24:6-8)
Wars, famine and pestilence are probably as old as civilization
itself, however, recently, they have been escalating at an alarming rate.
The first half of the twentieth century has given us a new concept
of war; the world war. Yet, as brutal as the two world wars were, they
seem like child’s play compared with what mankind is capable of
inflicting on itself should another world war arise.
The second half of the twentieth century gave us the concept of
ethnic war; where ethnic groups within a country fight each other. The
ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and the war between the
Hutus and the Tutsis, in which close to a quarter of a million died, are
examples of what the Lord meant by “nation arising against nation.”
The world has known famines since the time of the Patriarchs, but
the extent of famine has probably never matched what has been
happening in Somalia and the Sudan. Recently, North Korea, a country
with major war capability, has joined the ranks with thousands dying of
hunger, as the newscasts tell us.
Even in highly industrialized countries like Canada and the U.S.A.,
food banks are faced with major challenges to feed the hungry in the
lands of plenty!
As far as disease is concerned, in spite of all the advances in
medicine, yet all is not well in today’s world. New diseases like AIDS
and Ebola are causing major threats to man’s life, with no cure in sight.
Old diseases that medicine is supposed to have conquered are making
a frightening come back. TB is rampant among aboriginals as well as
in prison populations, and newer drug-resistant strains are emerging.