GettyConsidering the lengthy heatwave the United Kingdom is currently going through, you’d be forgiven for thinking the end of days is truly upon us.
However, doomsday theorists are convinced the end of the world is nigh as the blood moon, which will light up the sky later this evening, is a sign judgement day has truly arrived.
The doom merchants believe tonight’s blood moon is a precursor to a cataclysmic event which will wipe out life as we know it. It’s a road we’ve been down before as no year seems complete without someone predicting an end to our blue and green planet – the only surprise is this one is the first of 2018.
As an avid gamer when I think of the blood moon, I think about last year’s breathtaking masterpiece The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and monsters respawning over the lands of Hyrule. But for those who appreciate Christian scripture verbatim, the blood moon points to a prophecy in the Bible of the impending end times.
Christian ministers John Hagee and Mark Biltz first theorised the ongoing ‘tetrad’ – four consecutive lunar eclipses – is a sign which points towards the end of the world, prophesied in two sections of the Bible, Acts 2:20 and Revelation 6:12.
The first one took place in April 2014, reports the Mirror, this was followed by blood moons in October 2014 and April and September of 2015. This evening’s lunar eclipse – when the moon passes behind Earth and into its shadow – will go on for a duration of one hour and 43 minutes.
PAIn the Book of Joel, it states:
The sun will turn into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.
While in the Book of Revelations, which is a fun read if you want to learn about the end of humanity and your eternal damnation on the impending judgement day, 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.
PixabayMinister Irvin Baxter, who has an excellent track record of inaccurately predicting the apocalypse since the mid-80s, is one of the many religious zealots who believes the clues to the world’s end lies in these biblical verses. In particular, the aforementioned Book of Joel.
Baxter claims:
The Bible teaches that end event is coming just ahead of us now and that will be the greatest prophetic fulfilment in the last 2,000 years.
However, astronomers and experts have dismissed these notions, instead offering up a more logical explanation. They claim the Rayleigh scattering of sunlight through the Earth’s atmosphere is the reason for the red hues we’ve been seeing as of late. It’s also the cause of the red tint during sunsets.
In February this year, the canals of Venice struck a different picture from which we were used to. Gone were picturesque postcard images, instead, cold winter weather, low tides, and little rain caused the city’s vital waterways to dry up.
The low tides were caused by the ‘super blue blood moon’ and resulted in some of the water levels dropping by up to 23 inches in some cases that month.
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