BLOOD MOON PROPHECY

"How long, dear Lord, our Savior / Wilt thou remain away? / Our hearts are growing weary / Of thy so long delay"

— Millerite Hymn

It seems like the world is always about to end, doesn't it?

That was the thought on my mind the evening of September 27, 2015, as I hiked up a hill in Reservoir Park here in my hometown, Milwaukee, with a small group of friends. The top of the hill was soon scattered with people sitting on blankets and lawn chairs, armed with telescopes, binoculars, and cameras. This was the night of the blood moon, a rare alignment of the sun, moon, and Earth. At first, there was an air of disappointment as the sky was obscured with gray clouds. But then the clouds drifted away and there it was! A gigantic, magnificent deep orange of a moon suspended in the night sky.

Looking around the hilltop, I noticed that people seemed excited about the astronomical event, but in a calm, wonderstruck type of way, not in an "Oh no, the sky is falling" way. Not everyone on Earth was having such a casual evening, though, for this night had been predicted as the End. The blood moon prophecy, as it was referred to, had originated from calculations in 2008 by a pastor named Mark Biltz of El Shaddai Ministries in Washington State.

According to Biltz's calculations, the blood moon was the final sequence of a tetrad of total lunar eclipses that had begun on April 15, 2014. Piecing together clues from the books of Joel, Acts, and Revelation, he connected the lunar eclipses to a clear portent of the end times.

Biltz pointed out the lineup: blood moons on April 15, 2014, and October 8, 2014; a full lunar eclipse on March 20, 2015; more blood moons on April 4, 2015, and then boom, September 28, 2015. Four blood moons and a full lunar eclipse lining up like an apocalyptic slot machine in the sky. The significance, Biltz said, like so many end-time predictions, could be found in a couple of short verses from the Bible. In this case, the main point was found in Acts 2:20: "The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before that great and notable day of the Lord come." Oh! And then there's Revelation 6:12: "And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as a sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood."

Biltz wrote a book about his theory in 2014, Blood Moons: Decoding the Imminent Heavenly Signs, and his prediction grew legs. John Hagee, the founder and senior pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, and CEO of Global Evangelism Television began promoting the blood moon prophecy and wrote his own book on the topic, the bestselling Four Blood Moons: Something Is About to Change. The prophecy was further spread through an online push by an Internet-based congregation called the eBible Fellowship.

Apocalypse predictions make for good ink, and soon the story was picked up by major media outlets such as USA Today, the Washington Post, CNN, and other major media outlets. Both the astronomy website EarthSky.org and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints received so many queries that they had to issue statements.

EarthSky.org explained that the blood moon prophecy didn't quite make sense from an astronomer's view, as the blood moon and a lunar tetrad are two entirely different things.

The Church of Latter-Day Saints told Mormons via a public statement that they should remain calm and be "spiritually and physically prepared for life's ups and downs" but should avoid "being caught up in extreme efforts to anticipate catastrophic events."

Angry God

Despite the hoopla, the blood moon set, the sun rose, life went on, and Angry God did not bring the hammer down on us. Happy God is the one who created the Earth and gave us fruit trees and grass, the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, and every living thing that moveth on the Earth. Happy God made Adam and Eve and gave them everything they could possibly want in the Garden of Eden.

Angry God, however, kicked them out of the Garden of Eden after they ate the forbidden fruit, forced them to toil in the fields for their food, and imposed the pains of childbirth. He also flooded the Earth and killed everyone except Noah and his ark full of family and animals. Then there was the time he rained down ten vile plagues on Egypt — turning the Nile River into blood; sending swarms of frogs, lice, locusts, flies, and a bad case of boils; killing livestock and the firstborn; sending darkness for three days and fire and brimstone raining on the Earth. One time he even punked Abraham into almost sacrificing his son Isaac in a test of loyalty. The Old Testament God is the Angry God who created the Earth, but like a temperamental artist, also wants to destroy it. And this is what has worried people that the End is near ever since the ink dried on the first draft of the Bible.

The Great Disappointment

Predictions of when the world will end, as foretold in the book of Revelation, have placed the apocalypse just around the corner for thousands of years.

In American history, one of the first well-known end-of-the-world scares was predicted by William Miller, a New England farmer who grew up near the small town of Low Hampton on the border of New York and Vermont. As a young man, Miller developed a passion for reading, putting in a long day of chores and reading stealthily by candlelight at night — his father thought his late-night reading would affect his work performance. As an adult, he was elected to civil offices, including deputy sheriff and justice of the peace. Miller fought in the War of 1812 where he rose to the rank of captain and worked as a recruiter. After the war and the deaths of his father and one of his sisters, Miller began to ponder the afterlife and renewed his Baptist faith. He became especially interested in eschatology, the part of theology that studies death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul.

Speculation about end times escalated throughout the eighteenth century. New England preachers portrayed the French and Indians during the Seven Years' War as tools of the Antichrist, and patriot preachers during the Revolution painted the British and Anglicanism in the same lurid colors.

Miller owned English reverend George Faber's Dissertation on the Prophecies, published in three editions between 1804 and 1811, which examined the end times discussed in the Bible. Sprinkled throughout the New England region were sects like the Shakers, who believed Jesus had already returned and instituted the millennium. A similar...