#402

Decoding The Eclipse

It Was Impressive

Here I am talking about the Great American Eclipse of 2024 for a third time and to some, it may seem like I’m just milking this for all it’s worth. I do realize it seems like this topic is done and should be over with since the eclipse happened and nothing catastrophic happened. No earthquakes happened, no weird pandemic-like after affects for the people looking up at it occurred 72 hours and I could go on and on. And yet I am addressing it for a third time. I am fully prepared to face criticism over rolling out the eclipse now, but I do have a method to my proverbial madness. You see, it’s good that we are talking about the significance or insignificance of seemingly natural phenomena because of one major point and that is that God does speak to us through them and far too many people, especially Christians miss what He is saying. So part of my reason for bringing the eclipse up again is, at a base level, raising the level of attention to the divine breaking through the daily in our lives and then asking God about it. And yes, I have a few more things to add as I debrief us on the after affects, if any of what I considered a spectacular stellar showing of our Creator.

God Was Speaking

The heavens are telling the glory of God; they are a marvelous display of his craftsmanship. (Ps 19:1, TLB)

We heard this verse over and over again in the lead up to April 8th and for good reason. It may sound somewhat odd, but this verse and the one following it in The Message translation makes the point nicely:

God’s glory is on tour in the skies, God-craft on exhibit across the horizon. Madame Day holds classes every morning, Professor Night lectures each evening. (Ps 19:1-2, MSG)

Class was being held for a moment in time that day and maybe some only saw it as a little more than a common blocking of the sun by the moon during the daytime, but to God it was more. It was at least at its simplest another way of telling anyone who is willing to listen that God wonderfully set in motion a whole host of events just like this even before time began and the fact that eclipses do happen and can be predicted speak of the order put into creation by a powerful Creator. In this case, Madame Day and Professor Night taught at the same time. So, if you take nothing more than that away from the eclipse, it was a major success. If you are ready to admit that first, there is a Creator and then that He cares about the affairs of man enough to speak to them and then second that what He has to say is important enough to discern, well that’s a really important takeaway from it.

God Is Still Speaking

Then He said, “Go out, and stand on the mountain before the Lord.” And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; 12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.

13 So it was, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood in the entrance of the cave. Suddenly a voice came to him, and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (1 Kings 19:11-13, NKJV)

You see, those verses in Psalms make a point that also needs to be explored. We tend to only notice the big events and pick apart the meanings of them from a Biblical perspective. To some, it is a fulltime job and, maybe they see things that aren’t there by obsessing over the numbers and the histories. However one thing we can and should agree on is that God is constantly speaking to us if we’re willing to listen. Yes, natural phenomena can speak loudly to us and yes, God is right there using those events as a large megaphone as He should. But lost in all the cacophony and bluster of people debating on just what He is saying is the fact that He didn’t stop speaking to us once the sun came back out again. God is constantly communicating with us whether we hear Him or not. There are times when He speaks more loudly and demonstrably than others, but just because it is a still small voice for the majority of the time misses the point that He never stops communicating. Elijah had just come from a major moment where God spoke to the prophets of Baal in a rain of fire and here he was cowering in fear that Queen Jezebel wanted him killed and wanted God to respond to his cries clearly and loudly. I like how an article from gotquestions.org explains this:

The point of God speaking in the still small voice was to show Elijah that the work of God need not always be accompanied by dramatic revelation or manifestations. Divine silence does not necessarily mean divine inactivity. Zechariah 4:6 tells us that God’s work is “not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,” meaning that overt displays of power are not necessary for God to work.

Because He is God, He is not confined to a single manner of communicating with His people. Elsewhere in Scripture, He is said to communicate through a whirlwind (Job 38:1), to announce His presence by an earthquake (Exodus 19:18), and to speak in a voice that sounds like thunder (1 Samuel 2:10; Job 37:2; Psalm 104:7; John 12:29). In Psalm 77:18 His voice is compared to both thunder and a whirlwind. And in Revelation 4:5, we’re told that lightning and thunder proceed from the throne in heaven.

Nothing Happened At All

In the past few days I’ve listened to quite a few people, some Christians who either said that God wasn’t trying to tell us anything special or that it was just another eclipse devoid of any spiritual meaning. To them, it was another time when the moon covered the sun and everything got darker or totally dark for a few minutes. People took time off work and travelled to experience the totality of the eclipse, which I have to tell you is really impressive. So those in the camp of not noticing any out of the ordinary in the eclipse were all over social media doing a few things, one was ridiculing all the doomsayers and calling them false prophets. They accused them of stoking the embers of fear in people until it became another one of those “the end is near” events. Some accused the so called prophets of doom of just trying to either get their 15 minutes of fame or, worse, bilking innocent and gullible people of money to protect themselves with sprays or some other “special” protection. While there may have been cases of that happening, for the most part saying that nothing special happened at all is not accurate either. It is, in my opinion, just as extreme as saying that civilization was on the brink of the apocalypse. But for some who don’t think there is a God, not seeing the New Madrid Fault spring back to life was validation that it was in fact, just another eclipse.

Give It Time

Often, when spiritual people of any stripe from the Biblically literate to the spiritual and new age-ish believe that something is going to happen during these special signs from the Heavens they often make the mistake of expecting things to happen immediately. Rarely is that the case. The total eclipse in 1811 didn’t see the New Madrid fault come to life at the same time, rather it was three months later before it unleashed the most devastating fury of any earthquake in American history. I certainly don’t want to give people who made outlandish claims room to still clamor about their theories of certain doom, but the cause and effect timeline of these stellar signs are not always, if ever instantaneous. So to categorically say that nothing changed is not a good thing to maintain, either. Hindsight is almost always going to allow us to glean the most from these celestial occurrences and in this case, we may not know all the things God warned us about until much, much later. My point is that just because all Hades didn’t break loose on April 8th doesn’t mean the eclipse was a big fat nothing burger. Personally I think there were things to learn from it and it wasn’t just small thing. We should have what I call an active patience now. Just like animals started to sense something before the New Madrid Fault earthquakes, we too may start to sense things. The key is what to do about these feelings of heightened sensitivities.

Let’s Just Imagine

There have been a ton of prophetic words given over the past three or four years and, quite frankly we are in a period of prophetic overload. Granted, social media access is giving anyone a chance to be heard when they say God spoke to them and even a casual perusal of these platforms will glean a myriad of words from the Lord, but the downside is that we can just get to a point where we can start to just tune them all out. But for the sake of making a point, let’s imagine that the New Madrid Fault getting active again is part of the eclipse warning and in July or August of this year the middle of America is devastated by a massive earthquake. What good is a warning if is just to become some kind of Biblical “I told you so.” If the first reason is to get the Body of Christ to pray against it happening, well then we need to start interceding now. Another reason could be to prepare to help if such a disaster would occur. And God could be asking His Church to stand in the gap much like He did when he sent Jonah to Niniveh and encourage anyone we can to pray and repent. What I’m trying to say is that life is uncertain with or without an eclipse to make us perk up and rather than spend a lot of time debating about all the various interpretations of what this eclipse meant we should use it as a way to get ready to be the Church when the world needs to see it the most. No, it wasn’t just a natural occurrence devoid of spiritual meaning. And no, it wasn’t an apocalyptic overreaction. God is speaking and now it’s up to us to decode the message. Avoid the hype or lack of hype. Talk on your knees before you act or speak next. If the only thing that happens is for people to pray more, well that’s a very good thing all by itself.