The Sun Darkened and the Moon Turned to Blood: What Are the Signs in the Sky?

Jesus did not invent this language. That is the single fact that changes how the verse reads, and most treatments of it never mention the fact at all. Long before Matthew 24, the Hebrew prophets used a darkened sun, a lightless moon and falling stars as the standard way of announcing that a kingdom was about to fall. Isaiah used it over Babylon. Ezekiel used it over Egypt. Amos used it over Israel.

So the question is not first "will the sun literally go out". The question is what this way of speaking already meant to the people who heard it, and whether Jesus was using an old idiom or breaking with it. Every one of the four readings is an answer to that question, and each of them knows exactly what the others say.

The verse

Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken. Matthew 24:29

It comes third in the sequence, after the birth pangs of verses 4 to 14 and the abomination of desolation in verses 15 to 22. The whole chapter is walked through in Matthew 24 explained.

The prophets said it first

Here are the passages Jesus is drawing on.

For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine. Isaiah 13:10

That is spoken over Babylon. The chapter is headed as a burden against Babylon, and the fall it describes came at the hands of the Medes and Persians in 539 BC. The sun kept rising after Babylon fell.

Ezekiel 32:7 does the same thing in a lament over Pharaoh, king of Egypt, ahead of Egypt's defeat by Babylon: "I will cover the heaven, and make the stars thereof dark; I will cover the sun with a cloud, and the moon shall not give her light."

Amos 8:9 is the plainest of them: "I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day". Isaiah 34:4 supplies the falling stars: "all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll". And Joel 2:31 adds the phrase everyone knows: "The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come."

This is not a scattering of coincidences. It is a settled convention, in which the collapse of the heavens stands for the collapse of a political order, and the point of the image is that the event is world ending for the people inside it.

What each reading does with that

Preterist

The preterist argument here is the simplest one to state. If Isaiah could say the stars would not give their light over Babylon, and Babylon fell without the stars going out, then the language does not require a literal cosmos to end. Jesus, speaking to first century Jews steeped in the prophets, used the idiom in its ordinary sense, and what fell was Jerusalem and its temple in AD 70. The end of the old covenant order was, in prophetic terms, the sky going dark.

N. T. Wright has argued at length that this kind of language in second temple Judaism loaded historical events with theological weight rather than predicting the end of the space time universe. R. C. Sproul and Kenneth Gentry take the same line for Matthew 24 specifically. More on the wider position in what is preterism. Preterists take the word "immediately" at face value: verse 29 follows the tribulation of verses 15 to 22 with no gap, which places both inside one first century window.

Futurist

Futurists reply that an idiom does not forbid a literal fulfilment, and that prophetic language often works twice, once in a smaller pattern and once in full. Isaiah's Babylon oracle uses vocabulary that outruns 539 BC, and Revelation 6:12-13 takes up the same imagery in a passage most readers place at the end.

They also note the scale of verse 29. Jesus adds that the powers of the heavens will be shaken, and follows it in verse 30 with the Son of man appearing and every tribe of the earth seeing him. Whatever the sun and moon are doing, that arrival is public and universal. John Walvoord and J. Dwight Pentecost argued this way, and it is the reading most familiar from popular prophecy writing.

Historicist

Historicists looked for the fulfilment in the historical record, and named dates.

Two events became fixed points in nineteenth century Protestant preaching. On 19 May 1780 the sky over New England and eastern Canada darkened so far that candles were lit at midday. On the night of 12 to 13 November 1833 the Leonid meteor storm produced tens of thousands of meteors an hour over the eastern and southern United States, remembered in the American south as the night the stars fell. Both were read as Matthew 24:29 arriving on schedule, and both fed the Millerite expectation of the 1840s.

Honesty requires the rest of the story. The 1780 darkness has a natural explanation: fire scar evidence in tree rings from what is now Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, published by United States Forest Service researchers in 2008, matched a major 1780 forest fire whose smoke, held low by fog and cloud, drifted over New England. The 1833 Leonids are an annual shower that intensifies roughly every thirty three years as the earth crosses the debris trail of comet Tempel-Tuttle, and the storm recurred in 1866 and 1966. Historicists who keep the identifications argue that a natural cause does not rule out providential timing, which is coherent, though it is a different claim from the one first made.

Idealist

The idealist looks for neither a date nor an event. On this reading the darkened sky pictures judgement itself, true wherever God brings a proud power down, and verse 29 tells you what every fall of every kingdom means rather than which one is meant. William Hendriksen wrote in this vein. The strength is that it takes the prophetic convention seriously without needing a single referent. The weakness, its critics say, is that "immediately after the tribulation of those days" is a time marker, and time markers point at something.

Peter at Pentecost

One passage outside the Gospels has to be accounted for by everybody in this argument. On the day of Pentecost, explaining to a crowd in Jerusalem what had just happened, Peter quoted Joel.

And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke: The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before that great and notable day of the Lord come. Acts 2:19-20

He introduced it with the words "this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel". And the sun did not go dark that morning. The moon was not red. Nothing visible happened in the sky over Jerusalem at all.

Preterists take this as close to a demonstration. An apostle applied the moon into blood language to a day on which the moon did nothing unusual, so the language cannot require literal astronomy.

Futurists answer that Peter quoted the passage as a block because one part of it, the outpouring of the Spirit, was being fulfilled, and the cosmic clauses remain outstanding. Many others read it as inaugurated eschatology: the last days began at Pentecost and run to the end, so "this is that" means the era has opened, not that every line of Joel was discharged that morning.

A word on blood moons

The phrase attracts attention on its own, so it is worth being plain about the astronomy.

A total lunar eclipse turns the moon copper red for an ordinary optical reason. The earth blocks direct sunlight, so the only light reaching the moon has passed through the earth's atmosphere, which scatters the shorter blue wavelengths and lets the longer red ones through. It is the same physics that reddens a sunset. Every total lunar eclipse looks like this, and eclipse dates are calculated centuries ahead.

Mark Biltz and John Hagee drew wide attention to a tetrad, four consecutive total lunar eclipses on 15 April 2014, 8 October 2014, 4 April 2015 and 28 September 2015, several near Jewish feast days. Hagee's book Four Blood Moons sold heavily. Criticism came from every direction, including from futurist writers who share his broad framework, on the grounds that a predictable eclipse visible only from parts of the earth is a poor candidate for a sign Matthew 24:30 says every tribe will see.

Where that leaves the verse

The Old Testament background is not a preterist trick and it is not a futurist embarrassment. It is the vocabulary Jesus was using, and every serious reading has to start there and then decide what he did with it.

Which is the thing to hold on to. The argument over verse 29 is not really about astronomy. It is about whether the third sign belongs with the first two in the same first century, or stands at the far end of the whole age. That question is settled, if it is settled at all, by reading the three signs in order rather than one at a time.