God’s signs are obvious. There is no mistaking them for coincidences. They are big, bright, bizarre, and performed in front of masses. His signs cannot be ignored by the eyes mankind, but they are rejected by their hearts. Confusion among the church has been weaponized by the enemy to create swirling eddies of disunity and misinterpretation regarding prophetic signs from God, especially regarding the Blood Moons, which in turn has affected the preparedness mindset Jesus admonished us to have in Mark 13:33-37. A lot of bullets have been fired about the four-fold occurrences of these special eclipses which have occurred in 2014 and 2015, the latter of which will culminate in September over the Jewish holy day of Sukkoth. Supporters and detractors have come forth with arguments both weak and strong about what may happen, yet still there remains a rift in the church regarding pertinence of the tetrad. The problem? We have forgotten, or worse, some may not even know, what a sign from God is supposed to look like. This mentality leads to problematic doctrine about God’s “rules” for what a sign is.
It is tradition among believers that a prophetic sign from God most commonly manifests in circumstances of miraculous tidings, but there isn’t one single way to typify God’s direction to man. By example the bible shows us that a sign is a portent of God’s impending will, a stamp of authentication on declarations of His promises. The clockwork nature of the universe is God’s most brilliant billboard to mark an occurrence beyond man’s capability to coordinate. Reading in Genesis 1:14, God declares
"Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years…”
We have weather and nature to tell us when the ecological seasons are on the rise, and so God reserved his cosmic creations to be a sign of things to come.
On the other end of the spectrum in Ezekiel 5:1-4, God commands his prophet,
On the other end of the spectrum in Ezekiel 5:1-4, God commands his prophet,
1 "As for you, son of man, take a sharp sword; take and use it [as] a barber's razor on your head and beard. Then take scales for weighing and divide the hair. 2 "One third you shall burn in the fire at the center of the city, when the days of the siege are completed. Then you shall take one third and strike [it] with the sword all around the city, and one third you shall scatter to the wind; and I will unsheathe a sword behind them. 3 "Take also a few in number from them and bind them in the edges of your [robes]. 4 "Take again some of them and throw them into the fire and burn them in the fire; from it a fire will spread to all the house of Israel.”
There is no miracle here. Speaking is one of God’s basic abilities. The material used was normal human hair chopped from the head of a prophet. I can only imagine what it was like to see Ezekiel doing these things. Again we see God command Ezekiel in chapter 4:1-3,
1"Now you son of man, get yourself a brick, place it before you and inscribe a city on it, Jerusalem. 2"Then lay siege against it, build a siege wall, raise up a ramp, pitch camps and place battering rams against it all around. 3"Then get yourself an iron plate and set it up as an iron wall between you and the city, and set your face toward it so that it is under siege, and besiege it. This is a sign to the house of Israel.”
In this manner, signs work in reverse. God set before the rebellious house of Israel an astonishing hindsight. They scoffed until Babylon cast up its ramps and broke the city to rubble, and they could scarcely believe what had happened to their homeland as they were bound as slaves to a foreign land. After the judgement, the memory of the sign was there to make them and future generation fully aware of the enormity of their sin. Jesus warned the religious leaders of his day with a similar rebuke,
54 And he said also to the people, When ye see a cloud rise out of the west, straightway ye say, There cometh a shower; and so it is. 55 And when ye see the south wind blow, ye say, There will be heat; and it cometh to pass. 56 Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time?
But what does this have to do with Genesis 1:14? What do signs in the heavens look like and how do we discern their meaning? What times and seasons is God talking about? Are they only those which are directly referenced in Revelation and the Prophets? Or can we expect more? The bible establishes that even the hair of a prophet can be used as a sign, even in requiring the cooperation of the prophet himself, a co-act of divine origin. So why are we ignoring the signs in the heavens laid bare before the entire world?
The first clue to understanding a sign from God is the sovereignty of God himself. As stated before, this universe is beyond our ability to choreograph. We cannot manipulate the position of the stars or the time of the rising of the moon or the passing of comets. God also decreed the times we are to celebrate Him with feasts and holy days, traditions worthy of devotion. This brings us to our current tetrad of blood moons. Just as with his warning to the son of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 5 (‘mene, mene, tekel, uparsin), as well as the pharaoh’s double dream of the coming famine in Genesis 41, God has twice made His intentions known by timing these moons to the biblical feats of Passover and Sukkoth and not once but twice. We know that the days of these biblical feasts were not moved to accommodate these events, as Leviticus 23 and 25 firmly lay out, nor could they have calculated astronomical movements to such a precise degree to merely make it seem preternatural.
Thus, to dismiss this as mere cosmic coincidence is impossible.
Yet despite the impeccable timing, people continue dismissing these things as non-scriptural and naturalistic, understandably jumping off a crazy train of end-times prognosticators who have chosen to levy false predictions of biblical prophecy when no sign was given them but a worsening of things in the world. What did Jesus say about this?
The first clue to understanding a sign from God is the sovereignty of God himself. As stated before, this universe is beyond our ability to choreograph. We cannot manipulate the position of the stars or the time of the rising of the moon or the passing of comets. God also decreed the times we are to celebrate Him with feasts and holy days, traditions worthy of devotion. This brings us to our current tetrad of blood moons. Just as with his warning to the son of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 5 (‘mene, mene, tekel, uparsin), as well as the pharaoh’s double dream of the coming famine in Genesis 41, God has twice made His intentions known by timing these moons to the biblical feats of Passover and Sukkoth and not once but twice. We know that the days of these biblical feasts were not moved to accommodate these events, as Leviticus 23 and 25 firmly lay out, nor could they have calculated astronomical movements to such a precise degree to merely make it seem preternatural.
Thus, to dismiss this as mere cosmic coincidence is impossible.
Yet despite the impeccable timing, people continue dismissing these things as non-scriptural and naturalistic, understandably jumping off a crazy train of end-times prognosticators who have chosen to levy false predictions of biblical prophecy when no sign was given them but a worsening of things in the world. What did Jesus say about this?
“When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be frightened; those things must take place; but that is not yet the end. 8“For nation will rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will also be famines. These things are merely the beginning of birth pangs.” Mark 13:7-8.
We know the end is coming, and no matter which side of the line you are on we are required to retain our urgency for things to come. We here do not believe the tribulation is here, but we believe the blood moons are a sign of God's impending move and we must prepare in our hearts for the Lord’s will in the coming days, whatever it may be. We refuse to fall into creating false definitions of signs to come and surrounding them with personal expectation. It is, after all, an unshakable mandate which Jesus put to every single generation to come,
“Take heed, keep on the alert; for you do not know when the time will come. Like a man away on a journey, upon leaving his house and putting his slaves in charge, to each one his task, also commanded the doorkeeper to stay on the alert. Therefore, be on the alert—for you do not know when the master of the house is coming, whether in the evening, at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning—in case he should suddenly find you asleep. What I say to you I say to all, Be on the alert!” Mark 13:33-37.
Amen. Come Lord Jesus. If you, the reader, are in fear over these things then I ask you to take peace. The safest place you can ever be is in the will of God, that your soul is secured in Christ Jesus and his work on the cross. Follow Him, and you'll be seen through troubles innumerable (Psalm 91). Call out to Jesus today. He will not reject your heart's cry.