The great 'Blood Moons' deception
The modern notion of the blood moons in the Rugby Christadelphians video is lifted entirely from an American evangelist named Mark Blitz who apparently looked at NASA data for eclipses in the hope of finding something to tie in to bible prophecy. He found the series of four full lunar eclipses happening on 2014-15 all fall on Jewish feast days! Passover and Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles) in both years. The video tell us that this is beyond co-incidence!
But it's not really beyond co-incidence at all. It is design! The Jewish calendar is based on lunar months always starting with the new moon, and Passover and Sukkot are celebrated on the 15th day of the month - at the time of the full moon. The only time when a lunar eclipse can occur! Since a lunar eclipse can occur in any month you would expect that about 1 in 6 chance in any given year of it occurring on one of the feast days. Not really a long shot!
But there are four in a row on Jewish feast days? Well, this would be expected to occur from time to time given the way the Jewish calendar works. And of course it has happened before, and Blitz again looked at the data of two previous concatenations of lunar eclipses and feast days and noted that it happen in 1493-94 and in 1949-50. He couples these dates respectively with the Jews being expelled from Spain, and the establishment of modern Israel. It's a pity that the banishment of the Jews from Spain happened in 1492 and modern Israel was established in 1948, making these signs from heaven a little tardy to say the least!
The video then tells us that even more remarkable is the solar eclipse that will happen in 20 March 2015 - 1st Nisan in the Jewish calendar - the day Israel was set free from bondage in Egypt. A sure sign to Israel that something is about to change! One slight problem with this is that if you put that date into the Hebrew to Gregorian date converter here you find that 20 March 2015 is equivalent to 29 Adar 5775 - the day before 1 Nisan. Again, not such a great sign after all!
The real clincher is that NONE of this eclipses will be particularly noticeable in Israel - and if they are God's sign to Israel wouldn't he make sure that they were? The first of the three lunar eclipses are totally invisible from Israel, only the last will be seen at all as a partial eclipse. A partial eclipse does not make a blood red moon!
The Solar eclipse - this great sign to the world - will only be seen in totality if you are in the Norwegian Sea, all the way up to the North Pole. The only place it will be visible from land is on the Norwegian Island of Svalbard - which has a population of less than 3000 souls.
If this is God's great sign that "something is about to change" you would think he might consider making it visible to rather more people!
At about 4:20 the video tells us that "The blood moons are a Sign to Israel" quickly followed by a picture of the western wall in Jerusalem like the one at the head of this post with a huge red moon in the sky. By now I won't have to tell you that that picture is utterly bogus!
The plain facts of the matter are that eclipses are natural phenomena that we have a good understanding of and are able to predict. By pattern seeking and some confirmation bias Mark Blitz has spun a story about these perfectly normal natural events being "signs" to Israel and to the world that the second coming is near, and the Rugby Christadelphians have been taken in.
I have a notion that many Christadelphians would share the view that the whole blood moons yarn is bogus and would probably want to disassociate themselves from the nonsense put out by the Rugby Christadelphians Bible Truth Prophecy Video Vault. Would any Christadelphian readers care to comment?
