On April 8, 2024 the shadow of a rare total solar eclipse will sweep across America from Texas to Maine. Although it is the second such eclipse to cross this nation in under seven years, it will be the last to do so until August of 2045 when the path of totality will cross from California to Florida. The rarity of this celestial event combined with the rampant moral decay of our nation has many Christians focused upon this eclipse as a sign of coming calamity.

Some believe the line drawn by the shadow of totality of the April 8th solar eclipse that crosses from Texas to Maine combined with the line drawn by the total eclipse of August 2017 forms the “X” shape of a giant paleo-Hebrew “Tav”, thus marking a final judgement against America. Other prophetic scholars have taken note of the numerous coincidences of eclipses and calamities throughout recorded history and rightly concluded that some disaster must follow the eclipse of this April.

Certainly, our nation is overdue for righteous judgement.

Will the judgment come as an earthquake centering on the New Madrid fault line? Does the crossing of totality over a region called Little Egypt in southern Illinois portend economic collapse? Or will the war between Israel and Hamas spiral out of control and end in a nuclear attack?

All of these are legitimate possibilities and any combination of them would likely bring an end to the United States as we know it.

While Ezekiel 33:1-6 commands us to be watchmen who warn sinners of coming judgement, it is important as followers of Christ to avoid a condition I call “doomsday bias”, the tendency to focus only upon destruction and calamity.

If eclipses are signs of God’s judgement, believers can take comfort in the fact that a righteous judge not only condemns the guilty, but separates the good from the evil in judgement, and in some cases orders restitution to the injured party.

Abraham famously asked God: “Will you also destroy the righteous with the wicked?” (Genesis 18:23). The answer is: “…the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trial, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the Day of Judgment.” (2 Peter 2:7-9)

We can see his hand at work through the deep division this nation has experienced since the past eclipse of August 2017. Evil boldly declares its presence in our society. Pride is no longer a secret sin of the heart, but is openly flaunted in the street. Most notable and painful of all, this process of separation is at work within the body of Christ.

John the Baptist warned the religious hypocrites of his day that there was one coming: whose: “fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean His floor…”  (Matthew 3:12) During COVID, many churches closed never to reopen again.  But God does more than simply condemn the unrighteous when he judges.

Consider this fact concerning our nation. A little over a century ago, in the autumn months of 1918, the devastating second wave of the “Spanish” flu pandemic ravaged the world shortly after a total solar eclipse crossed this nation from Washington to Florida. Scientists estimate 50-100 million people died globally in the plague. There is also substantial evidence that the plague originated in the American Midwest and not Spain. Had anyone observed the sign foretold by the eclipse of June 1918, they might have concluded that America would perish in a plague before she could even come to the aid of her European allies.

The result of the plague, however, was not the destruction of America and the world. It was deliverance.  When America entered WWI in 1917, the best military experts estimated that the war would continue for four more years. It didn’t. The war ended five months after the eclipse of June 1918, coincidentally as the second deadly wave of “Spanish” flu was beginning to wane.

Several other things came to an end following the eclipse. The Ottoman Empire which controlled the Middle East for 400 years collapsed and surrendered to the Allies on October 30th. The Democrats’ draconian stranglehold on free speech, congress and the White House also ended; and the following spring while negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, President Woodrow Wilson fell ill with the flu and was unable to promote his vision of a one world government.

Over the ensuing century America experienced economic boom and collapse, was victorious in a second world war and landed a man on the moon. What person alive in 1918 would have foreseen those triumphs?

Returning to our present time, there is no argument that America is declining on every front—spiritual, economic, scientific; but is it possible that the divine judgement foreshadowed by the recent eclipses over America and the one soon to come will actually change America for the better? Instead of reaching terminal velocity, will the coming judgement slow the moral free fall this nation has been experiencing since the 1960’s? Perhaps we are already seeing the early fruits of this judgement in the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

I’m not saying the judgment that is coming won’t be painful, but it’s all a matter of perspective. The upcoming solar eclipse may mark the long overdue judgment of the wickedness of this country, and for those of us who have repented and put our trust in Christ, it just may be our long-awaited deliverance.

“He who keeps his command will experience nothing harmful; And a wise man’s heart discerns both time and judgment.”

Ecclesiastes 8:5