The Abomination of Desolation - St. Marys Coptic Orthodox Church

SIGNS OF HIS COMING II 39
together. Fox explains his method by saying, “the old forms of worship
are boring,” arguing that his mass can help prevent social ills like
teenage pregnancy! On the way out, one middle aged woman turns to
her friend. “I haven’t been to church in years. That was such a moving
experience.”
Writing in the second century, Hippolytus wrote the following about
evil that will abound before the coming of Antichrist:
The temples of God will be like houses, and there will be overturnings
of the churches everywhere. The Scriptures will be despised, and
everywhere they will sing the songs of the adversary. Fornications, and
adulteries, and perjuries will fill the land; sorceries, and incantations,
and divinations will follow after these with all force and zeal. And, on
the whole, from among those who profess to be Christians will rise up
then false prophets, false apostles, impostors, mischief-makers,
evil-doers, liars against each other, adulterers, fornicators, robbers,
grasping, perjured, mendacious, hating each other. The shepherds will
be like wolves; the priests will embrace falsehood; the monks will lust
after the things of the world; the rich will assume hardness of heart; the
rulers will not help the poor; the powerful will cast off all pity; the
judges will remove justice from the just, and, blinded with bribes, they
will call in unrighteousness. 1
DISTRESS OF NATIONS WITH PERPLEXITY:
Luke 21 is the equivalent of Matthew 24. It speaks about signs of
the end. One of these signs is the “distress of nations with perplexity.”
(Luke 21:25) Never did I understand the meaning of these words until
recently! Watching the daily news over the last several months, I
became acquainted with these newly coined phrases, “Asian contagion,”
“Russian melt-down,” “South American collapse,” “financial market
roller coaster,” and “World-wide recession.” I watched in amazement
as the world’s greatest brains tried to make sense of what was
happening in the global financial circles. The word most often used by
the “experts” was: confusion. The markets are confused! the investors
are confused, even the experts became confused. Governments tried
to intervene, only to find that the results are opposite to what the
interventions were designed to achieve. Conflicting advice came from
1 Treatise on the end of the world and on Antichrist