I received a book for Christmas called, “Four Blood Moons”, by an evangelical named John Hagee. One doesn’t need to be a Christian in order to find biblical prophesy interesting. It can be very amusing for anyone to analyze the failures of many evangelicals to interpret biblical eschatological prophesy, and analyze exactly why it sounds to compelling, while at the same time almost never holds true.
The general problem is with misunderstanding the nature of coincidences. Some things that look like 1 in a million coincidence, are not, because the sample being drawn from is not random. It is chosen because it matches the other side of the “coincidence”.
They take apocalyptic literature filled with symbols that can mean a lot of different things, and apply them to a very large sample like major events in world history. The fact that they’re able to be matched up some way is not coincidental at all. The fact that they match up any particular way is very coincidental, but that’s why it is picked out of all the other interpretations. The very reason we’re hearing about those coincidental interpretations is because a mind looking for coincidences found it, and because those kinds of coincidences get popularized.
I haven’t read the whole book yet, but from what I’ve found Hagee has to actually stretch the truth in order for his coincidences to exist. So for him, a “blood moon” in eschatological prophesy means four full lunar eclipses which fall at the same time as Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles in a Shemittah year. Why this particular interpretation? Because this is the one he can make coincidences with.
He claims that the last three tetrads (which is four full lunar eclipses in a row) which coincide with the two Jewish feasts aligned with significant events for the Jewish people. Why these particular events in Jewish history rather than, say, the holocaust? Because these are the events he can make coincidences with.
It isn’t coincidental at all when aspect A and aspect B of a coincidence are being deliberately chosen out of a large stock of choices.
Even with his stretching of the interpretation of biblical prophesy to meet major events in world history, the years he cites leaves wiggle room. So the Jewish Expulsion from Spain occurred in 1492, while the Tetrad began in 1493 and lasted until 1494. In his talks, he actually talks about the Tetrad of 1492, he’s a little bit more honest in the book. True coincidences don’t get wiggle room where close enough counts. And either way, the blood moon doesn’t work as the “warning” he makes it out to be if it occurred after the event in question.
The same thing again with the next Tetrad. Israel became a nation in 1948, and the tetrad was in 1949-1950. Again, this doesn’t work as a warning. We’re also seeing wiggle room to how close the Tetrad is allowed to be in order to give this coincidence significance.
The third Tetrad begins the same year and two months after Jerusalem was reunited with Israel after the Six Day War, 1967-1968.
Here is a list of significant events in Jewish History which Hagee would have to choose from no matter where the tetrad fell. Some of them don’t sound as important as the one’s Hagee mentions, but it is easy to imagine Hagee saying something like,
“in 1867 the Jews, at long last, were finally emancipated from Hungary. And God lit up the heavens as a sign!”
And again, really? No Holocaust? And yet the Jewish expulsion from Spain? Significant is a word that means a lot of things to a lot of people. Certainly Hagee makes each and every event sound significant. “These three dates are the most important dates in all of Israel’s History!” Without exaggerating, it is hard to see why that’s the case.
This kind of thing is pretty usual in evangelical eschatology. The only problem I actually have with Hagee in particular is when he argues against the other side. His understanding of what non-rapture people and replacement theology says is severely crude and disrespectful. He argues against them in areas where there is common ground, as if they disagreed when they don’t.
