So Jesus uses the phrase "abomination of desolation" (which comes from Daniel) to give His hearers a sense of the sort of destruction that was about to fall upon Jerusalem and the temple. Remember, He wants to impress the Jewish Christians that they need to flee at the first sign of the "abomination of desolation". If they waited until ensigns were actually set up in the temple or pigs sacrificed (as dispensationalists suppose) it would have been too late for the believers to flee.Do the dispensationalists have an answer?
yes, we have an answer for it-it is wrong.
Christians did not flee at the arrival of the armies, but when they withdrew for a time
Moreover, Matthew isn't speaking to Jewish Christians, it is speaking to Jews, since the book of Matthew is a book directed to the Jew (note the genealogy back to Abraham), while Luke is a book for Gentiles, going back to Adam.
Good point. And on that note, here’s an interesting quote from Thomas Newton (1700s) re “abomination of desolation”:
“Whatever difficulty there is in these words, it may be cleared up by the parallel place in St. Luke, ‘And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh. Then let them which are in Judea flee to the mountains...’”
“The Roman army is called ‘the abomination,’ for its ensigns and images, which were so to the Jews. As Chrysostom affirms; ‘every idol, and every image of a man, was called an abomination’ among the Jews.’
“For this reason, as Josephus informs us, the principal Jews earnestly entreated Vitellius, governor of Syria, when he was conducting his army through Judea against Aretas, king of the Arabians, to lead it another way; and he greatly obliged them by complying with their request.”
“We farther learn from Josephus, that after the city was taken, the Romans ‘brought their ensigns into the temple, and placed them over against the eastern gate, and sacrificed to them there.’”
“The Roman army is therefore fitly called ‘the abomination’ and ‘the abomination of desolation,’ as it was to desolate and lay waste Jerusalem : and this army’s besieging Jerusalem is called ‘standing where it ought not,’ as it is in St. Mark, xiii. 14; or ‘standing in the holy place,’ as it is in St. Matthew; the city, and such a compass of ground about it, being accounted holy.”