What's All This About Blood Moons?

I woke up at 3a two nights ago and looked for the moon. Sure enough, it was darkened and red, but with a sliver of light along the side. Eventually cloud cover obscured my sight, but three more times in the next hour, my wife and I got out of bed to see it. 

I’d seen lunar eclipses before, but this year is different.

Have you heard all the talk about the four blood moons and their relationship to prophesy? John Haggee has a best seller out describing his theory (borrowed from by Mark Biltz) that four blood moons are God’s way of signaling to earth dwellers that significant events are about to occur with Israel. Since there are four of them coming over the next year, Haggee is predicting something big is about to go down in Palestine.

Is it a credible prophecy?

First, there is nothing in Scripture indicating that four lunar eclipses have ever or will ever prophesy anything. There are prophetic passages that speak of the moon turning to blood (a lunar eclipse makes the moon appear reddish in color) such as in Joel 2:31, but in every case, those passages also indicate that the sun will darken and the stars will either become invisible or will fall to the earth. These passages do speak of future catastrophic happenings in the celestial bodies, but they are not talking about eclipses. There has never been nor could there ever be a lunar and solar eclipse at the same time, just by virtue of what these eclipses are. And while we just had a lunar eclipse and will have three more in the next year, the stars and sun are not scheduled to darken.

That’s my real problem with this theory. There is no Biblical basis for it.

But there are other problems. Haggee’s and Biltz’s historical references to past blood moons are all stretches. The most significant events in Israel have no correlation to lunar eclipses (destruction of Jerusalem, the Holocaust, etc.) and those that do, are off by years and even decades, and sometimes the predictive eclipses actually happened after the event. While lunar eclipses do tend to coincide with Jewish holidays (part of their theory) that would make sense for a nation and religious system that is built on the lunar calendar with holidays purposely scheduled to coincide with full moons (blood moons only happen with a full moon). And then there is the problem of the times four blood moons appeared in the past when no significant event happened in Israel.

But this is a safe prophesy. Something significant will take place in Israel over the next decade (plenty close enough to satisfy prophetic alarmists). We know that just by watching the news. When something big happens, those who are selling books about this sensational theory will claim that their prophesy is being fulfilled.

I’m concerned because it cheapens real Biblical eschatology and marginalizes prophetic Scriptures in the minds of those who observe Christian sensationalists. Every couple of years someone is predicting the end in some fashion with convincing Bible athleticism, and every couple of years a high percentage of Christians are embarrassed for falling prey to their predictions.

Let’s instead take seriously Jesus’s words that no one will know the time of the end. We should be paying attention to world happenings and how they may lead into prophecies of the end times, but we dare not read current events into the Scriptures. When the prophecies relating to the end times are being fulfilled, there will be no doubt about it to followers of Jesus.