"And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the LORD come."
--Joel 2:30-31
Tonight marks the occurrence of the "Blood Moon" -- a combination of a normal total lunar eclipse and a "supermoon" (i.e., when the moon is at the nearest point to earth in its elliptical orbit). Pretty cool, although I wasn't able to spot it low on the horizon from where I live, being surrounded by trees, street lights, and other obstacles. As I write this (at 8:45 p.m., PDT), the moon appears as a crescent, as I view it as it leaves eclipse mode and rises in the eastern sky.
But the excitement, according to some, is yet to come.
Irvin Baxter, well known philosopher and theologian of "Endtime Ministries" of Plano, Texas, notes that tonight's occurrence marks the fourth "blood moon" in the past four years, a coincidence that constitutes a "tetrad." These tetrads suggest big events in the offing. Baxter believes this one precedes the signing of a peace agreement between Palestine and Israel.
I don't need to tell you that such a treaty would be a certain indication that only Seven Years remained until Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ. Which would mean the end of the New York Stock Exchange and the World Cup Soccer matches, among other disturbances to our daily lives.
Tetrads are only minimally rare. We had one in 1982, and will have another in 2033. In cosmic terms, or even biblical terms, those are fairly short periods of time. Although it's true that bad things occasionally happened to the Jewish people at roughly the time of past tetrads -- the Spanish Inquisition, the Six Day War -- that coincidence doesn't sound too amazing, and it leaves a lot of tetrads occurring when not much exciting happened. That would include, of course, the most recent 1982 tetrad.
NASA assures us that nothing in the natural order seems to threaten life on earth in the next decades. The Church of Latter Day Saints denies that the current tetrad means anything. Pope Francis leaves America seeming cheerful and unconcerned. The Bible itself seems fairly clear that only God knows the hour and the day when Christ returns (Matt. 24:36), and that He will come "unexpectedly as a thief in the night." (I Thess. 5:2)
All this should be reassuring. Or if not reassuring in the larger sense, at least reassuring with respect to tonight's "blood moon."
But Baxter and others seem to feel that although only God may know the time of the Second Coming, he has slyly inserted a few clues in portions of the Bible for the benefit of canny and crafty scholars like Irvin Baxter. In other words, God has inscrutably leaked secret information under the guise of "a usually reliable source."
Perhaps the heavens will indeed soon fall. But I'm not losing any sleep tonight over the prospect. The heavens will fall for each of us as individuals, I suspect, long before the Final Catastrophe wipes away the old earth on which we live.
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P.S. It's now 9:10 p.m., and the moon appears as though a mouse had just taken a small nibble off one side of its round disk of green cheese. It's bloody days are over, for now, and it shines down upon us mortals with its usual silvery radiance.
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