Blood Moon

Whenever people feel threatened by the scourge of death or wars of destruction or natural disasters, such as earthquakes, volcanoes or meteorites, they tend to not see things clearly. Appealing to absurd explanations serves as obvious haven for confused people.

Some time ago, American scholar Kenneth Waters, associate dean and professor of the New Testament at Azusa Pacific University, wrote an article published in CNN Arabic, dealing with the lunar phenomenon known as “blood moon” and alluded to some of the outlandish mythological explanations taken from ancient sources.

What’s scary is that the ancient sources speak of this “blood moon” phenomenon signaling the end of the world. At least, that’s what some Christians think.

According to Waters, this type of well-known eclipse, called a “blood moon,” colors the moon red when the Earth comes directly between the sun and the moon. When this happens, the Earth’s shadow is cast onto the moon, mixed with sunlight, resulting in a redness.

At this, Christians point back to a line from the Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 2: “And I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke; the sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day.” (Acts 2:19-20, ESV).

John Hagee, a televangelist and famous pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, preached a sermon series called the “The Coming Four Blood Moons”, and further developed these sermons in his book “Four Red Moons: Something Is about To Change.” In it, Hagee explains that the lunar eclipses foreshadow a “world-shaking event,” taking place in the Middle East between April 2014 and October 2015.

These kinds of apocalyptic time predictions of coming disasters and the end of human civilization come up all of the time: the end of time coming in 2012 as predicted in the Mayan calendar, the end of time coming with the beginning of the millennium, etc.

Usually these apocalyptic expectations coincide with either disastrous events throughout humanity, wars or external features like natural disasters. Sometimes people are lured in by the numbers of specific dates, like a thousand, or perhaps just to break up the boredom. But this kind of thinking becomes dangerous and starts to really matter when people become fully convinced, to the point that their ideas are reflected in actions, behavior and even criminality. Such was the case with the Temple David group in America, or Juhayman al-Otaybi’s group, which occupied the Grand Mosque at the end of 1979 because they actually thought that the awaited Mehdi was among them, or the insane terrorists currently in Syria and Iraq who think that their leader was alluded to in the Hadiths and ancient traditions.

The idea of Blood Moons is nothing more than a new spin on the old habit of drawing from the ancient well of humanity’s psychological depths, which people do whenever they don’t want to face up to the responsibility of what they’ve done wrong.

Blood is shed because of what people do; the moon is blameless.