On April 15, 2014, there was a total
lunar eclipse.
It was the first of four consecutive total eclipses in a series, known
as a tetrad; a second one took place on October 8, 2014, third one on
April 4, 2015 and the remaining one took place on September 27, 2015. It
is one of eight tetrads during the 21st century AD.
[1] As with most lunar eclipses, the moon appeared red during the April 15 eclipse.
[2][3] The red color is caused by
Rayleigh scattering of sunlight through the Earth's atmosphere, the same effect that causes sunsets to appear red.
[2] Hagee also connects the
solar eclipse of March 20, 2015 in the middle of the sequence.
The idea of a "blood moon" serving as an omen of the coming of the end times comes from the
Book of Joel,
where it is written "the sun will turn into darkness, and the moon into
blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes."
[4] This phrase is again mentioned by
Saint Peter during
Pentecost, as recorded in
Acts,
[5]
although Peter says that date, not some future date, was the
fulfillment of Joel's prophecy. The blood moon also appears in the book
of Revelation chapter 6 verses 11 - 13,
[6]
where verse 12 says " And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal,
and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as
sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood".
Around 2008, Biltz began predicting that the
Second Coming
of Jesus would occur in the fall of 2015 with the seven years of the
great tribulation beginning in the fall of 2008. He said he had
"discovered" an astronomical pattern that predicted the next tetrad
would coincide with the end times. When the prediction failed, he pulled
the article from his website, but continued to teach on the
"significance" of the tetrad.
Hagee would later seize on Biltz' prediction to write
Four Blood Moons, which would become a best seller, spending more than 150 days in
Amazon.com's top 150 by April 2014.
[3] For the week ending March 30, 2014, it was the ninth best selling paperback, according to
Publishers Weekly.
[7] By mid-April, Hagee's book had hit No. 4 on the
The New York Times best-seller list in the advice category.
[3] Hagee's book (and subsequent sermon series at his home congregation,
Cornerstone Church)
did not proclaim that any specific "end times" event would occur (as
did Biltz in his original prophecy), but claimed that every prior tetrad
of the last 500 years coincided with events in Jewish and Israeli
history that were originally tragic, yet followed by triumph.
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