It happened…again.  That celestial event that had schools closed, airports overcome with travelers, highways resembling parking lots and me suddenly planting flowers in the dark. A total solar eclipse! It was pretty amazing being in the path of totality where at three in the afternoon it was suddenly dark enough for the street lights to come on. It was fun Monday afternoon working outside and glancing sunward every few minutes through our high-tech cardboard glasses to see the progress of the moon overtaking the sun.

It was amazing to read all of the doomsday, apocalyptic articles tagging the eclipse to the end of the world, the second coming of Christ or ?climate change?.  It was a little upsetting. I mean they treated this like it was some rare phenomenon. When in fact it happens every 1-3 years somewhere in the world. That’s more often than I go to the dentist. What has me upset is that in their attempt to make this regular thing point prophetically into the future, they have in fact eclipsed the miracle of the eclipse. (See what I did there?)

The miracle is not that it happened last Monday, April 8, at 3:00 pm. The miracle is that weeks before it happened we knew that at 3:00 pm, Monday, April 8 it was going to happen. And we know when it will happen again, August 12, 2026. And our high tech glasses? They were from August 21, 2017, the last time this happened. The miracle of the eclipse is not pointing into the future but into the past, the waaaayyyy in the past past. Like all the way back to when God set the sun, moon and stars in the heavens and set the whole universe in motion. A motion that somewhere between 6,000 years and 4.5 billion years ago (depending on who you believe) can still be accurately predicted today. The eclipse isn’t random, the sun and moon don’t travel randomly. It wasn’t an accident what happened Monday afternoon.

If you want a celestial miracle:
Joshua 10:12, “On the day the LORD gave the Amorites over to Israel…The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day.” (Allowing Joshua to win the battle)

2 Kings 20:11, “Then the prophet Isaiah called upon the LORD, and the LORD made the shadow go back the ten steps it had gone down on the stairway of Ahaz.” (the sun reversed it’s course) See Isaiah 38:7-8 as well. 

Matthew 27:45, “From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land.” (the last 3 hours of Jesus hanging on the cross)

Eclipses, sun standing still, sun moving backwards, darkness at noon all are miracles pointing to the God of Creation who is still active both celestially and terrestrially today.  Let’s not try and make these things something they are not but allow them to do what they are designed to do. Namely point to a creator God who has given order to his universal creation. It is a tough case to claim random chance to what happened on Monday, April 8 and what we know will happen again August 12, 2026.

The Eclipse is just God saying, “Every day is sun up, and sun down like clockwork. But occasionally? “Watch this!”

And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to make sacred times, and days and years, and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.”  And it was so. God made two great lights – the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning – the fourth day.” Genesis 1:14-19 (NIV)

(Photo credit to my friend Jeremy Martin)