(WND)—On Monday, March 25, 2024, the sun, earth and moon will perfectly align, creating a penumbral lunar eclipse two weeks after a total solar eclipse transverses the continental U.S.
WND spoke with Pastor Mark Biltz of El Shaddai Ministries about the celestial events. Biltz deeply understands the connection between eclipses and biblical holidays.
The scientific explanation of a lunar eclipse is that it takes place when the earth passes between the sun and the moon, and the moon passes through the earth’s shadow. A penumbral eclipse occurs when the outer part of Earth’s shadow blankets the moon. About 35% of all eclipses are of the penumbral type, which can be difficult to detect even with a telescope. Another 30% are partial eclipses, which are easy to see with the unaided eye. The final 35% or so are total eclipses.
In the upcoming lunar eclipse, the Earth’s shadow will block out 97% of the moon’s surface. This eclipse will be a “blood moon,” the result of atmospheric conditions that give the moon a reddish tint rather than black when it moves into the shadow. The red color comes from some of the sunlight passing through Earth’s atmosphere where it gets bent and colors like blue and green are filtered out, leaving behind longer wavelengths like the color red.
While the science is clear, Biltz emphasizes that the deeper significance of these phenomena is biblical.
“From a biblical point of view, an eclipse is meant to be a sign from God,” said Biltz, citing Genesis 1:14: “And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.”
“The number one reason for an eclipse is to be a sign,” he explained. “It is a sign that is beyond man’s control, something he cannot manipulate.”
Pastor Biltz emphasized that the Hebrew calendar must be studied to understand the significance of these celestial signs.
“Our Gregorian calendar is based only on the sun. It’s a great calendar, very scientific, but it’s not the one God uses,” he emphasized. “God said to let both the sun and the moon determine the times. And we can only have a total lunar eclipse or a solar eclipse on a full moon. What good are eclipses if you’re not recognizing when they can occur? Passover and Sukkot are on a full moon, but the Hebrew calendar does have a solar element. It’s adjusted so that the holidays occur in the same season every year. The month begins with a new moon, but the years are adjusted with a leap year. So, for example, Passover is always in the springtime and we adjusted through the use of a leap month.”
“Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time for everything, but by using a solar calendar, most of Christianity’s plucking at planting time and planting at plucking time, because they don’t know what time it is,” Biltz said. “They don’t know what the season is.”
He explained that a leap month is added seven times over a 19-year cycle because the lunar and solar cycles come back together again every 19 years.
“This is also why, on the solar calendar, you have to add one day every four years,” Biltz added.
While lunar eclipses occur on average one or two times a year, Pastor Biltz explained that when they fall on the biblical holidays, they are significant. This convergence is what Biltz refers to as a “blood moon tetrad,” a phenomenon he first identified in 2008.
His blood moons prophecy is based on a series of four consecutive total lunar eclipses coinciding with Jewish holidays with six full moons in between that have no intervening partial lunar eclipses. This series is referred to as a tetrad.
The most recent tetrad began with a total lunar eclipse on April 15, 2014, the first night of Pesach (Passover). This marked the first of four consecutive eclipses. The second lunar eclipse took place on Oct. 8, 2014, marking the second night of Sukkot. The third lunar eclipse was on April 4, 2015, the second night of Pesach, and the fourth occurred on Sept. 28, 2015, the second night of Sukkot.
“NASA declares you can mathematically only have one total lunar eclipse in a year and a half,” Pastor Biltz said. “But here, there were four total lunar eclipses in a year and a half. This is like hitting the lottery.”
Indeed, in the past 2,000 years, a blood moon tetrad (four sequential lunar eclipses with no partial eclipses in between) has occurred on the Jewish holy days of Passover and Sukkot only eight times, most recently in 2014-2015.
However, the tetrad in 2014 was the second of eight tetrads to take place during the 21st century. This is remarkable, as in the past millennium, only four documented tetrads have occurred on or around the Jewish holidays of Passover and Sukkot, and each one was followed by a major event that shifted Jewish and global history. Those tetrads occurred in the years 1428-1429, 1493-1494, 1949-1950 and 1967-1968.
For instance, the Tetrad in 1428-1429 marked the end of a big wave of forced conversions for the Jews in Spain, and the Tetrad in 1493-1494 signaled the end of the Spanish Inquisition, which concluded with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Then there were the blood moon tetrads of 1949-1950 (corresponding with the creation of Israel as a nation in 1948) and 1967-1968 (with the unification of Jerusalem occurring in 1967).
The notable exception was the blood moon tetrad that occurred in 2014-2015. No major war or significant event happened that year.
“I was trying to figure out what it was, but it was October 7 that showed me what that Tetrad meant,” Pastor Biltz said. “The 1967-1968 tetrad of blood moons was a seven-year warning of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Yom Kippur in 1073 was the very first day of the Jubilee cycle. And then the 2014-2015 Protective Edge incursion into Gaza and the Blood Moon that accompanied it were a seven-year warning before the October 7 war which happened on Simchat Torah, the very last day of that same 50-year Jubilee cycle. So, the last Jubilee cycle was bookended with wars and blood moons.”
Pastor Biltz emphasized that not only will a total solar eclipse traverse North America on Monday, April 8, 2024, but it will be followed by an “almost” blood moon tetrad.
“The first eclipse will be a partial lunar eclipse,” Biltz noted, “But then there are three total lunar eclipses in a row. There are four lunar eclipses in a row, which is phenomenal, but only three are total.”
“But they are all happening on the feasts, two years in a row,” Biltz said. “That should be a wake-up call to Israel.”
The first lunar eclipse on March 25 will coincide with the Jewish holiday of Purim. Biltz noted that it was fitting that the moon should be eclipsed on Purim, as Esther literally means “hidden.”
“Purim is not in the Torah, but it is important for the Jews because the story of Esther is about the dangers of assimilation,” Biltz said. “No one knew Esther was Jewish. The Jews wanted to assimilate, but God miraculously delivered them. The Jews have enemies, but they have to fight the assimilation as well.”
Pastor Biltz referred to the Talmud in its discussion of eclipses (Sukkot 29a), which specifically described solar eclipses as being a bad omen for the nations who base their calendars on the solar cycle. He noted that since the United States became a nation in 1776, only eight total solar eclipses have completely crossed the continent.
“And when did they occur?” Biltz asked rhetorically. “The Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Vietnam War.”
He remarked that the upcoming total solar eclipse will cross the border into Canada, passing over a city called Economy in the end.
“I think this is a warning we’re going to see an economic tragedy coming to the whole world,” Biltz said. “It will begin in the United States, but it will reverberate throughout the whole world.”
Thankfully, the next blood moon tetrad that falls on the biblical feasts will not take place for another 500 years. It should be noted that a prophecy in the Book of Joel indicates that the coming of the Messiah will be preceded by a blood moon.
“Before the great and terrible day of God comes, I will set portents in the sky and on earth: Blood and fire and pillars of smoke; The sun shall turn into darkness And the moon into blood. But everyone who invokes the name of Hashem shall escape; for there shall be a remnant on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, as God promised. Anyone who invokes God will be among the survivors.” (Joel 3:3-5)
This is also stated in the New Testament in Acts 2:20 and Revelation 6:12.
Pastor Mark Biltz’s new book “America at War 2024-2026: The Sons of Light vs The Sons of Darkness” is available for preorder.
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.