Does God communicate with us through signs in the heavens?
Blood Moons: Decoding the Imminent Heavenly Signs (WND Books) by Mark Blitz is the second book that I’ve read on the subject of the tetrad due to occur on Jewish feast days in 2014 and 2015. (A tetrad is the name that astronomers give to the phenomenon of four successive blood moons.) The first, Four Blood Moons by John Hagee, did not thoroughly persuade me that blood moons, at least when falling on feast days, are significant in the fulfillment of Bible prophecy. Blitz hasn’t erased my doubts, but he doesn’t confirm them either. Blood moons? There may be something to it.
A blood moon is an eclipse in which light traveling from the sun to the moon is blocked by the earth. The moon turns blood red as a result. In the Bible, there are warnings about signs in the sun and moon as we enter the last days. In Matthew 24:29, we read that “Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened and the moon shall not give her light.” In Revelation 6:12, there’s this: “And I beheld when he opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.”
Blood moons are not uncommon, but four in a row, a tetrad, all on Jewish feast days, is unusual. When they occurred in the past, they preceded or followed major events of prophetic significance. In 1967, the first of four blood moons became visible prior to the Six Day War in which Israel reclaimed Jerusalem. The four blood moons in 1949 and 1950 occurred after Israel became a nation in 1948. Blitz believes these signs were “God’s way of telling the world it was His doing . . .” The inconsistency in the timing, with blood moons preceding one event and following another, has made some prophecy students question Blitz’s theory. Blitz thinks they “are totally missing the point.”
What is intriguing is how rarely a tetrad takes place on feast days. It happened only twice in the 20th century. Prior to that, there were no tetrads for 300 years. Between 1400 and 1500, two of four tetrads fell on feast days (1428-29 and 1493-94). During the first, Jews sought protection from the pope. One year before the latter tetrad, the Jews were ordered to leave Spain. The blood moons of 2014-15 will be the only tetrad to fall on feast days in this century. This is interesting, indeed.
One difficulty that a reader may encounter with Blitz’s book is the author’s reliance on the Torah which means he refers to Jesus throughout as Yeshua, explaining in a footnote that “Jesus is a totally manufactured name. It is a distorted transliteration of the original Greek into Latin, and then into the various evolutions of the English language.” I don’t doubt that this makes for a more accurate reading of Scripture, but if you’re accustomed to reading the King James Version of the Bible, the effect is jarring at times, and confusing at others.
The nature of those feast days is also a surprise for anyone who accepts the modern definition of a feast as a “banquet” (formal dinner). In Hebrew, the word is “moed,” meaning a “divine appointment.” Blitz writes, “The feasts of the Lord are the divine appointments, when God predetermined that He would interact with human history.”
Whatever they mean, the blood moons are coming - ready or not. Expect the first on Passover, April 15, 2014.
Brian W. Fairbanks
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