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Blood Moons and The End of The World (Maybe)--Part 2

So what is the thing that that those claiming that blood moons are part of Biblical prophecy leaving out? I'll give you a clue.

In Acts Chapter 2, starting in verse 5, it says that there were people in Jerusalem from "every country in the world." (Good News Translation) or "out of every country under heaven" (King James Version). And what is meant by "every country"? Does it say that there were people from the Americas, from Australia, from the Scandinavian countries, from sub-Saharan Africa, from China and Japan, as well as from around the Mediterranean and the Middle East? No. It does not. "Every country in the world" means only those countries around the Mediterranean and the Middle East: Parthia, Media, Elam, Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya, Rome, Arabia and Crete (verses 9-11). There's a lot more countries left out of this listing of "every country" than are included. And this is significant because when Peter gets up to speak to this crowd, he tells them that what they are hearing (the apostles speaking all these languages) is a fulfillment of what Joel the prophet said about the last days about God pouring out His Spirit on everyone. But Peter goes on to quote the rest of what Joel said, that the sun would be darkened and the moon will turn red as blood before the coming of the Day of the Lord (Acts 2:14-21).

So? What everyone seems to forget here is that eclipses and blood moons are local phenomenon, not global. This first of the series of four blood moons could only be seen in part of the world, and that part is a long way from Jerusalem and the Middle East. In fact, it was so isolated from the rest of the world that the majority of Europeans, Asians and Africans didn't know about it until after 1492!

When Peter was speaking to his audience he and they were making an assumption about the world that we now know is not true. They were assuming that eclipses and blood moons could be seen everywhere on earth by everybody. That only holds true if the world is flat and limited (as the list of countries in verses 9-11 shows.) It does not hold true for a globe!

So the question I would have to ask, how does a blood moon that can only be seen in what we call the Western Hemisphere or New World fit into Peter's prediction? It's clear from the context that he and his audience had a very limited view of the size of the earth and did not know that eclipses and blood moons cannot be seen worldwide. The whole blood moon/eclipse Last Days scenario falls apart once you realize the world is a globe. The Biblical writers had no interest in what might be taking place in the skies over the Americas because they did not even know that the Americas existed! As far as Bible prophecy is concerned the only blood moons and eclipses that count are those which can be seen from modern Israel and surrounding areas! So it doesn't matter how many blood moons there are between now and 2016 if none of them can be seen from the Mideast!

Well, the blood moon/End Times hypothesis makes a good story as long as you don't look at it too closely . . .

Comments

Not to mention that the prophetic verses in the Bible about the moon turning red also mention the sun turning black (if that refers to a solar eclipse, that happening at the same time as a lunar eclipse is obviously impossible), and Revelations 6:13 also mentions the stars falling from the sky as this happens. That would be quite an extraordinary event that, unfortunately, none of us would be around to witness for very long since even one star getting anywhere close to the earth would instantly burn us to a crisp (and of course, one could argue that if "stars" include asteroids, plenty of them have fallen from the sky already, including one about 65 million years ago that created a catastrophic event that would be hard to top). I'm not saying any of this to mock anyone's deeply held beliefs, I'm just very curious about how any of it works logically without basically discarding the past 2000 years of knowledge about the physical universe.

Also, just for the record, the moon turning red has nothing to do with blood (it looked much more orange than any blood I've ever seen when I looked at the moon last night at 2 am) but with the earth's atmosphere absorbing the rest of the visible spectrum as it passes through the earth's atmosphere.
 
What I find interesting is that the brightest minds among the Greeks had figured out that the world was a sphere or globe as early as the 4th or 3rd centuries BCE and possibly even as early as the 6th century BCE, when much of the Hebrew Bible was being composed. During the second and first centuries BCE, the Greeks invaded and controlled Israel. The Apocrypha, especially the Books of Maccabees, describes Jewish protests and revolts against the Hellenization of their land. Yet apparently very little of the Greeks' scientific knowledge filtered down into Israel and surrounding territories. The Book of Acts, which I quoted, was written in the mid to late first century CE by a Greek who was apparently unaware of his countrymen's discoveries.

I just had a discussion elsewhere with an Evangelical who believes that the Biblical days are 24 hours long as measured sundown to sundown, no matter where you are on earth. When I pointed out that this is not true in the Arctic or Antarctic, especially around the solstices where sundown to sundown can often stretch for days or not happen at all, and how very different the days of Genesis would be from that perspective had the writers lived in the Arctic, they replied, it is a good thing that no one lives there. (Facepalm) I think the Inuit would not be pleased to hear that they are "no one."
 

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