Four Blood Moons

April 30, 2014

One of our Wednesday groups has asked me repeatedly to tell him what the "blood moon" has to do with the Bible, so I'm going to try to do that in this presentation.  As it turns out, the topic does have some basis in the Bible--in both Testaments--especially in those books usually labelled as "apocalyptic."  This term designates literature that deals with the end times and uses fantastic imagery.  The word "apocalyptic" comes from a Greek word meaning "revelation" or "disclosure."  Books like Daniel and Revelation in our Bible are categorized as apocalyptic.  Outside our Bible there are many apocalyptic books, perhaps the most famous being "The Book of Enoch."  As you may remember, there are several passages in our Bible that say that the moon will turn to blood or at least look like blood:

"And I will give portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke.  The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the LORD  comes."  (Joel 2: 30-31) (Revelation 6: 12-14)

Most of us do not take these passages literally.  They seem to use imagery that cannot be taken literally, such as "the sky falling to earth," to talk about things for which we do not have literal words.  So why all the interest in a "blood moon" now?  The answer lies in a book written last year by John Hagee, founder and senior pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, TX.  Cornerstone Church is a twenty thousand member evangelical, non-denominational church.  The book John Hagee wrote is Four Blood Moons:  Something Is About To Change.   Pastor Hagee is also the founder of Christians United for Israel, an organization that is based on the belief that all the prophecies about Israel in the Old Testament will be fulfilled by the current Israeli state, thus Christians must unite to support the government of Israel.  The book is a call to support Israel because of an impending intervention by God in world affairs which is being signaled by a series of full eclipses of the moon known as  "blood moons."  These particular eclipses of the moon are more significant to Pastor Hagee than others which have occurred or will occur because they come at significant times related to holy days in Judaism. Let's look first at what causes a "blood moon," that is, a moon that turns red during a total eclipse and then summarize the book and its thesis.

What Makes the Moon Turn Red

During a lunar eclipse, we see the Earth’s shadow creeping across the moon’s face. The shadow will appear dark, like a bite taken out of a cookie, until the shadow completely covers the moon. Then, during the breathtaking time of totality, the shadow on the moon’s face often suddenly changes. Instead of dark, it appears red. Why?  The reason stems from the air we breathe. During a total lunar eclipse, the Earth lies directly between the sun and the moon, causing the Earth to cast its shadow on the moon. If Earth didn’t have an atmosphere, then, when the moon was entirely within Earth’s shadow, the moon would appear black and invisible.  Thanks to Earth’s atmosphere, what actually happens is much more subtle and beautiful.
Earth’s atmosphere extends about 50 miles above Earth’s surface. During a total lunar eclipse, when the moon is submerged in Earth’s shadow, there is a circular ring around Earth – the ring of our atmosphere – through which the sun’s rays pass.  Sunlight is composed of a range of frequencies. As sunlight passes through our atmosphere, the green to violet portion of the light spectrum is, essentially, filtered out. This same effect, by the way, is what makes our sky blue during the day. Meanwhile, the reddish portion of the spectrum is least affected.   Because the makeup of our atmosphere changes (for example when a big volcano erupts), the amount of light that gets through our atmosphere and actually hits the moon varies.  Depending on the conditions in our atmosphere, the moon will appear somewhere between black and red to us.

What's About To Happen?

Every year there can be from zero to three eclipses of the moon.  Full eclipses can only happen when the moon is full (once every twenty-nine and a half days) and only then when the moon is directly and fully behind the earth.  There will be two total lunar eclipses in 2014 and two more in 2015.  The dates for these eclipses will be April 15 and October 8 in 2014 and April 4 and September 28 in 2015.  These particular lunar eclipses make up what is called a "tetrad,"  that is, – four successive total lunar eclipses, with no partial lunar eclipses in between.  Tetrads have happened many times but they are relatively rare.  In this century there will be eight tetrads.  In the five thousand year span from 2000 B.C. to 3000 A. D. there will have been 142 tetrads.   Thus the four eclipses that will occur in the next two years when taken together make up an unusual series of eclipses.
What makes this series of eclipses significant to some biblical interpreters is that these four dates correspond to major Jewish holidays.   The April 2014 and April 2015 total lunar eclipses align with the feast of Passover. The October 2014 and September 2015 total lunar eclipses align with the feast of Tabernacles.  This particular alignment of eclipses with the major Jewish festivals has happened only eight times since the time of Jesus.   Whether this alignment of astronomical processes with Jewish festivals is coincidental or a message from God is the subject of the books written by Pastor Biltz and Pastor Hagee.

What Does It Mean?

In 2007 Mark Biltz saw an internet film of a lunar eclipse over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and began to understand the significance heavenly signs play in deciphering biblical prophecy. In "Blood Moons" he "explains the importance of heavenly signs, the feasts of the Lord, keeping to the biblical calendar and being prepared for the coming Day of the Lord. He predicts that something imminent is on the horizon, that God is about to move mightily in the world."  In a promotional blurb about the book the publisher says, "From the beginning, in Genesis, God declared He specifically created the sun and the moon to be used for signs. These heavenly bodies would be used as signals of coming dramatic historical events when the Creator of the universe would intersect with human history. But how do we unlock the code to interpret the signals?  The key is found in the riveting new book "Blood Moons: Decoding the Imminent Heavenly Signs" by Pastor Mark Biltz. In 2007 Biltz first discovered the correlation between blood moons that fell on feast days and key historical world events. He found the divine link between prophecy, heavenly signs and historical events, and what has happened when they intersect."  While Pastor Biltz has presented his views in conferences and on television since 2008, his book has just now been published (March 18, 2014). Pastor Hagee was invited to be on the program with Biltz at a rally supporting Israel in 2012 and was introduced to Biltz's theories about the eclipses.  He then produced his own book which was released before that of Pastor Biltz.  As I write these words I do not have access to Pastor Biltz's work, so I am relying on John Hagee's presentation of the theory.
Pastor Hagee's thesis is that "These occurrences are not coincidental! This is the hand of God orchestrating the signs in the heavens. The final Four Blood Moons [that is, the ones occurring in 2014 and 2015] are signaling that something big is coming...  something that will change the world forever .. But the bigger question is, are we watching and listening?"    "The sun, moon, and stars are unmistakably connected to Israel and biblical prophecy-and that connection inspired this book. God will use them to light up the heavens with an urgent, top-priority message for all mankind.  What is God saying to us? How does the past hold the secret to the future?  What is about to happen on planet earth?"  
Specifically, Pastor Hagee builds his case along two fronts.  On the one hand, he says that the three previous times there were four blood moons in a row, they coincided with significant events in the life of Israel.   In 1493-94 the Spanish Inquisition was authorized and thousands of Jews suffered as a result.  In 1949-1950 the new Israeli state was just coming into being as the Jews took control of much of the land we know of as Israel.  In 1967-1968 the Israelis were attacked on all sides by their Arab enemies and won amazing if not miraculous victories that made their nation much more viable.  The implication to be gathered from these three "tetrads" is that God was at work on behalf of Israel and indicated that by highly unusual lunar phenomena.  The tetrads "announced a time of tears and tribulation that would end in national triumph for the Jewish people."
The other major point Pastor Hagee makes is that the next tetrad, the next four full lunar eclipses, which will occur April 15, 2014, October 8, 2014, April 5, 2015 and September 28, 2015, correspond to the Jewish holy days of Passover (Pesach) and Tabernacles (Sukkoth).  This is an extremely rare combination of lunar eclipses and Jewish holidays and to Pastor Hagee it means that God is announcing something of great significance for Israel by means of the eclipses.   This is especially true because this tetrad will also include a Jubilee year ("Shemittah," the year of release}.    Pastor Hagee points out that 2001 was a Shemittah year and we know what happened on September 11th of that year.   2008 was the next Shemittah year and  we experienced a great recession.  He concludes:

"What's next? The next Shemittah year occurs in 2014-15, which takes place within the series of the next Four Blood Moons.  God always sends a nation warning before He sends judgment; are we listening? Will America be at war? Will America's mountain of debt come crashing down, destroying the dollar? Will global terrorists attack our nation again with a force that will make 9/11 pale by comparison? ….The next Tetrad will end in September 2015, which will include the Year of Shemittah. Will a crisis happen as before? What earthshaking event will it be? This we know: things are about to change forever!"

Mark Biltz comes to a similar conclusion:

“All these signs, coming together at one time, are potentially the culminating signals that God is closing this chapter of human history,” he said. “This could be the final curtain call before the Great Tribulation mentioned in the Bible. God has always wanted to warn His people, and the rest of the world, before He intervenes. What better way to communicate to us than through the universal language of heavenly signs that speak to every tribe, tongue, and nation?”

Should We Be Concerned

There is no doubt that there will be four full lunar eclipses over the next two years and that they will coincide with the dates for Passover and Tabernacles.  There is no doubt that the coming together of the lunar eclipses and the Jewish holidays is unusual although not unprecedented.  (There have been seven previous coincidences like this since the birth of Christ. )  Apparently the first four did not indicate anything special for either Christians or Jews.  There are good reasons to assume that the coming lunar eclipses are not God's messages to us.

1. The conclusion that God is sending us messages from the heaven is based on a reading of the  Bible that is suspect.  The book of Genesis says:  "And God said, "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth. And it was so."     Pastor Hagee takes this to mean that God uses the sun, moon and stars to send us messages:  "Does God use the sun, moon, and stars to communicate with us? Does He use the heavens as His own personal, high-definition billboard to announce things to· come?  The answer is yes, according to Genesis 1:14... "   But this is certainly not what Genesis 1:14 means.  It is clear that the heavenly bodies served to communicate the seasons of the year not historical and theological messages.  They are lights in the heavens.  That's all.  Across the ages human beings have tried to find messages in the celestial bodies.  That practice is called astrology as distinct from astronomy.  Pastor Hagee says, "People who make choices based on the stars are seeking guidance for their lives from things created rather than from the Creator. This is a violation of the law of Almighty God (Romans l:20-21, Exodus 20:4). In this book, our discussion of the stars and moon in biblical prophecy is based on the Word of God, history, and the science of astronomy-and never refers to astrology."   Nevertheless, Pastor Hagee clearly thinks there is a message in the heavenly bodies.

2. The assertion that Passover and Tabernacles give special meaning to astronomical events is suspect.  There have been 142 sequences in the last 4000 years like the sequence we are about to experience.  Something happened in every one of those tetrads, but in most of them nothing significant to world history or to the history of salvation happened.  Lunar eclipses are the result of physical relationships between the sun, the moon and the earth.  Eclipses do not occur on exactly the same dates each year or month because the orbits of both the earth and the moon are not exactly the same.  Because of the slightly different orbit of one or the other,  the shadows do not fall on the moon (or block out the rays of the sun in a solar eclipse).   Since Passover and Tabernacles are tied to specific days of the lunar calendar, it is inevitable that sometimes the eclipses will coincide with the festival days.  This is entirely a predictable event that will happen no matter what historical events take place on this planet.   So Jewish festival days have only coincidental relationships to tetrads.  And for us Christians, one might think that if God chose to get our attention he would do so by coordinating some celestial event with Easter (close to Passover) and Christmas (close to Hanukkah)

3.  Finally, in addition to a suspect interpretation of the Bible and a suspect interpretation of astronomical data, there is a suspect theological basis for the significance of the blood moons.  Many of you were privileged to hear Dr. William E. Hull's magnificent treatment of the Left Behind series of novels written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.  The theological view which formed the basis of that series of novels is known as Dispensationalism.  Dr. Hull laid out the elements of such a view for us and his treatment is still available on a CD if you want to review it.   The current understanding of the coming lunar eclipses by Pastor Hagee and Mark Biltz is based on the same theological outlook.  Dispensationalism  divides history into a series of dispensations during which God relates to the world through a series of covenants.  The covenant with Israel is not yet concluded and, thus, dispensationalist like Hagee and  Biltz emphasize that prophecies in the Bible about Israel all point to the current political state of Israel.  (The first chapter in Pastor Hagee's book argues that Christians must support the nation Israel without reservation.)  It is because of Israel's special place in God's plan that the connection between the Jewish holidays and the eclipses is so important.  Unless one accepts the underlying theological assumptions, there is no basis for any special significance in the blood moons.

APPENDIX

TOTAL LUNAR ECLIPSE TETRADS FROM 2001 TO 2100

Tetrad #   1st Eclipse         2nd Eclipse       3rd Eclipse       4th Eclipse
1               2003 May 16    2003 Nov 09    2004 May 04    2004 Oct 28
2               2014 Apr 15     2014 Oct 08      2015 Apr 04     2015 Sep 28
3               2032 Apr 25     2032 Oct 18      2033 Apr 14     2033 Oct 08
4               2043 Mar 25     2043 Sep 19     2044 Mar 13     2044 Sep 07
5               2050 May 06     2050 Oct 30      2051 Apr 26     2051 Oct 19
6               2061 Apr 04      2061 Sep 29     2062 Mar 25     2062 Sep 18
7               2072 Mar 04      2072 Aug 28     2073 Feb 22    2073 Aug 17
8               2090 Mar 15      2090 Sep 08      2091 Mar 05     2091 Aug 29

F. Espenak, “Eclipses During 2014,” Observers Handbook: 2014, Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.