“I am going to make Jerusalem a cup that sends all the surrounding peoples reeling.  Judah will be besieged as well as Jerusalem.”  (Zechariah 12:2)

“I watched as the Lamb broke the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake.  The sun became as dark as black cloth, and the moon became as red as blood.”  (Revelation 6:12)

The second in a series of four consecutive Blood Moons (total lunar eclipses), which fall on the Jewish holidays of Passover and Sukkot in 2014 and 2015, is quickly approaching.  With it, big changes seem to be taking shape in the Palestinian struggle for statehood, which directly affects the heritage of the Promised Land for the Jewish People.

Pastor Mark Biltz, founder of El Shaddai Ministries in Washington state, was first to discover the Blood Moon Tetrad pattern when he entered Jewish feasts dates into the NASA website.

“According to NASA, over 5,000 years you only average one total lunar eclipse every year and a half, and here we have four within a year and a half, and they’re falling on feast days,” Biltz explained to Sid Roth on It’s Supernatural recently.  “The last time it happened was when Israel recaptured Jerusalem in 1967 and 1968.”

The first of this series of Blood Moon Tetrads was in 1949.

That was the year after Israel was reborn as a modern nation in 1948 amidst the Arab-Israeli war.

In 1949 after the Blood Moon, the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) was moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and Israel’s first Prime Minister, Ben Gurion declared that Jerusalem would be the Eternal Capital of Israel.

Like the last Blood Moon Passover this year, the coming Blood Moon seems to be linked to momentous events in the making.

(Total eclipses are sometimes called blood moons because the moon reflects sunlight being filtered through the earth’s atmosphere, giving it a ruddy, bloodlike appearance.)

Abbas Courts World Leaders

For the first time since 1967, a high-ranking Kuwaiti official, Foreign Minister Sheikh Sabah al-Khaled al-Sabah, has visited the West Bank (Judea and Samaria).

On Sunday, al-Sabah met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and other Palestinian officials in Ramallah to sign cooperation agreements with the Palestinians and to discuss financial support.

The official Kuwait news agency stated that the visit “signals the long-standing commitment of Kuwait’s leadership and people towards supporting the Palestinian people in their legitimate struggle for restoring their rights on the Arab and international levels.”  (Times of Israel)

The visit comes as Abbas embarks on an international campaign to achieve Palestinian statehood, sidestepping negotiation with Israel in the process.

PA spokesperson Nabil Abu Rudeineh said the meetings come at a critical point that requires Arab coordination and joint action.

“Kuwaiti-Palestinian relations have a long history as Kuwait has been supporting the Palestinian Authority and its people at all levels,” he said.

He added that the Palestinian leadership appreciates al-Sabah’s unwavering efforts in support of Palestinians in their cause to create an independent state recognized internationally with Jerusalem as capital.  (KUNA)

Abbas is currently rallying support before heading for the annual United Nation General Assembly next week on September 24, which is Erev Rosh HaShanah (Jewish New Year’s Eve), at which time he will endeavor to gain support for setting a date for forcing Israel out of Judea-Samaria, Israel’s heartland.

The Arab League recently backed his plan to end the Jewish presence there within three years.

And according to the Arab news agency Ma’an, Abbas will be meeting with French president Francois Hollande this Friday to ask him to recognize the “state of Palestine.”

He is also expected to ask other European countries to do the same.

Abbas has been working for the last several years to gain international recognition for a Palestinian state without forming a peace agreement with Israel.

If he succeeds at this, it will leave Israel without any guarantees of security, nor will the Jewish homeland have gained anything in return.

An independent Palestinian state of any type will become a launching pad for further attacks against Israel as the Palestinians continue toward their ultimate goal of domination of the entire Biblical homeland.

The ultimate goal to conquer the entire Land of Israel is evidenced by the fact that every map of the Palestinian state displayed in PA classrooms and in all public logos show only one state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.  Their intentions are clearly to eliminate any trace of the State of Israel.

Due to the Palestinian Authority president’s efforts two years ago, on November 29, 2012, the United Nations voted 138 to 9, with 41 abstentions, to recognize Palestine as a “non-member observer state.”

While this vote fell short of granting the country independence, it did provide it with several privileges as a state, including the right to join the International Criminal Court and other international treaty bodies.  (Washington Post)

“Lord, confuse the wicked, confound their words, for I see violence and strife in the city.”  (Psalm 55:9)

Blood Moons Foretell of Changing Times

”The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD.”  (Joel 2:31)

Last year on July 29, 2013, Israel and Palestinians entered direct peace negotiations, and the world was very hopeful that at the end of the nine-month negotiations a final status agreement would be reached.

To bring the Palestinians to the bargaining table, Israel agreed to release 104 Palestinian prisoners, 14 of whom were Arab-Israelis.  Many were guilty of murdering Israeli civilians and suspected Palestinian collaborators.  They were to be released over time in four groups.

For this concession, the Palestinians agreed to not sign up for international conventions.

As talks progressed, it seemed that anything less than total capitulation to Palestinian demands was unacceptable, and Abbas was not willing to recognize Israel as the Jewish state.

As it became obvious that the talks would come to an end with no agreements, on March 28, 2014, Israel delayed releasing the fourth round of Palestinian prisoners.  By delaying it, Israel hoped to encourage the Palestinians to commit to extending the peace negotiations.

Consequently, on April Fool’s Day, 15 days prior to the first Blood Moon, in the midst of the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, Abbas moved to join 14 treaties and conventions and one United Nations organization.  The request was approved by UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon.

Included in the 15 was the Geneva Conventions which articulate the laws of war.

“We [Palestinians] have not only signed these [agreements], but we have become officially bound by them now,” Randa Siniora, the Director General of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR), told Al Jazeera in late April.  Most of the memberships became official in May. 

All of this happened at the outset of a very auspicious time: on April 15, 2014, the first of a series of four Blood Moons over a two year period occurred.  They coincide with the 2014 and 2015 Jewish festivals of Passover (Pesach) and Tabernacles (Sukkot).

Just after the first Blood Moon, Abbas announced the formation a unity government with the terrorist group Hamas.

Israel responded by formally cancelling the release of the prisoners and imposing financial penalties in the form of withholding tax levies collected by Israel on the Palestinian Authority’s behalf.

That government was sworn in on June 2nd with immediate discord breaking out over issues of security and over relations with the Israelis.

Hamas’ kidnapping of the three yeshiva students took place only three weeks after the unity government was announced.

Although Abbas initially said that he would dissolve the unity government if Hamas was behind the kidnapping, when Israel presented evidence of Hamas’ involvement nothing was done.

After Hamas launched an intensive rocket campaign against Israel, Israel responded with “Operation Protective Edge,” during which Hamas fired more than 4,500 rockets and mortar shells at Israeli population centers.

Following the ultimate collapse of the peace talks, Abbas proceeded to seek membership in a total of 63 international agencies and treaties, including the World Court in Geneva.

At the end of April, Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the PLO’s central council told reporters, “We will proceed with the [United Nations] treaties and gradually join different agencies and the last will be the International Criminal Court.”

If the PLO succeeds in gaining access to the International Court, they will be able to bring cases against Israel for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The current ceasefire is accompanied by Hamas’ full support of Abbas’ attempt to join the World Court. 

On August 23rd, the Associate Press reported that Hamas had signed a pledge to back any Palestinian bid to join the court.  While their intent might be to bring charges of war crimes against Israel, the reverse would also be possible.

Any such move on the part of Abbas would definitely cause relations with Israel to deteriorate, but it would also strain his ties with the US.

Nevertheless, if the Palestinians were to join the court, Hamas could be investigated for its indiscriminate shelling of Israel and the use of civilians as human shields.

Still, due to one-sided reporting during Operation Protective Edge and the number of civilians injured as Hamas militants fired bombs from civilian centers, many around the world hold Israel responsible for Palestinian civilian casualties. Abbas is counting on this tide of negative opinion against Israel as he lobbies for support for the Palestinian cause.

A Palestinian State in the Sinai?

“On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram and said, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates.’”  (Genesis 15:18)

Abbas continues to claim Judea and Samaria for his Palestinian state, along with East Jerusalem as its capital.

This despite an alleged apparent plan proposed by Egypt recently that offered land in the Sinai Peninsula to be annexed to the Gaza Strip to settle Palestinian refugees.  This proposal for a Sinai enclave is said to have come from the Israeli national security adviser Giora Eiland during the time in which Mohammed Morsi was Egypt’s president.

According to the plan, an area approximately five times the size of Gaza would be created in the Sinai and be referred to as “Greater Gaza.”

It would contain PA citizens together with Palestinian refugees living in other countries.  Under the plan the Palestinian Authority would continue to retain autonomy in Arab cities in Judea and Samaria but only if Abbas is able to maintain a viable administration in those areas.  (BIN)

Although some have denied that such a plan was even proposed, Abbas told a Fatah gathering on August 31 that the plan, which was originally Israeli and dated back to 1956, was now being proposed again.

“A senior leader in Egypt said that ‘a refuge must be found for the Palestinians and we have all this open land.’  This was said to me personally.  But it’s illogical for the problem to be solved at Egypt’s expense.  We won’t have it,” Abbas said.

Creating a Greater Gaza would disrupt Abbas’ greater goal: takeover Israel’s heartland.

“The Palestinian and Egyptian leaderships have one position, namely the establishment of a Palestinian state on the lands occupied in 1967 with Jerusalem as its capital.  President Mahmoud Abbas has updated President el-Sissi on his future moves on all levels to reach that goal,” a presidential spokesperson said recently.

Abbas and the Second Blood Moon of 2014

The second blood moon in the series of four is just a couple of weeks away.  It will occur on the first day of Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles) on October 8, 2014, just after Abbas once again goes to the UN.

According to Nabil Sha’ath, a senior Palestinian Authority official, Abbas now wants the UN to replace the US as the leading peace broker in negotiations between the Israel and the Palestinians.

Sha’ath warned that if Israel does not complete a full withdrawal from Judea-Samaria (the West Bank), the Palestinians will turn to the international community and request that it deal with Israel “as it did apartheid South Africa.”  Such a unilateral withdrawal by Israel is highly unlikely.

Noting that the Palestinian people are completely disillusioned with the US’s role in the peace process, Abbas’ top aide said that the Palestinian president will be asking the UN to set a deadline for a complete withdrawal of Israel to pre-1967 lines within three years.  (JPost)

Thus, it is at the time of the next Blood Moon that Abbas is expected to go to the UN General Assembly to demand that it take control of the so-called peace process and set a deadline for the removal of Israel from Judea and Samaria, Israel’s ancient heartland.

While the events of 1949 and 1967 Blood Moons were directly linked to Jerusalem, we await to see if more is to come during the Festival of Sukkot where the Jewish people will make their pilgrimage to celebrate the Jewish Biblical Feast.

Will the war from this summer start up again during the Biblical Fall Holidays?  The first missile was launched yesterday from Gaza into Israel, since the cease-fire.

In the meantime, Hamas is busy rearming itself and digging terrorist tunnels under Israel, again.

And Iran is arming Palestinians in Judea and Samaria.

Mohammad Reza Naqdi, the commander of Iran’s Basij paramilitary network, said on Iranian TV, “Arming the West Bank has started and weapons will be supplied to the people of this region.”

He also said that “much of Hamas’s arsenal, training and technical knowhow” had come from Iran.  (Times of Israel)

Abbas Claims Jerusalem as Capital

One of the central issues of a two-state solution is the Temple Mount.  Who will be worshiped there—the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or another god—and who will control its access—the Jewish People or the Palestinians?

Although ostensibly, Israel has had control of the Temple Mount since June of 1967, Moshe Dayan, who was Israel’s defense minister in 1967, gave Jordan control of the Mount through the Muslim Waqf or trust.

They have used this authority to mostly bar Jewish worshipers from praying on the Temple Plaza, even silently, harassing them while on the Mount, and sometimes banning them from entering all together.

Furthermore, visits from key Israeli leaders can have explosive results; for instance, when former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon entered the Temple Mount in September 2000, it resulted in the Second Intifada.

If Abbas takes the entire issue of a Palestinian state to the UN, there is no telling what the status of East Jerusalem might become.

The original UN Partition Plan of 1947 called for the internationalization of Jerusalem.

The rejection of that plan by the Palestinians and the following 1948 war when Israel declared independence resulted in Jerusalem once again being re-established as the capital of the Jewish People.

Nevertheless, Jordan captured the eastern portion that included the Old City, where the Jewish People have lived since antiquity, and the Temple Mount, where the First and Second Temples once stood, and kept control of it until 1967.

Today, the Temple Mount Faithful prepare for the construction of the Third Temple while we await the return of the Messiah who will come to the rebuilt Temple.

Only the Jewish People can rebuild that Temple, not the Muslims.

So it seems that in these “last days” it could be God’s plan that the Jews will maintain ultimate control of the Temple Mount and not the Muslims, regardless of what Abbas has planned.

That said, the Bible also indicates that in the Last Days, the anti-Messiah will establish a temporary, false peace in the Holy Land.

This Third Temple might also be built after the false peace begins the final seven-year period.  Half way through that period, the anti-Messiah will stop the sacrifices and declare that he is God (Daniel 9:27; 2 Thessalonians 2:4).

Abbas’ struggle for Jerusalem may be connected to these Last Days events, which is perhaps why his current activities are coinciding with the rare celestial cycle called a Blood Moon Tetrad.

“All these signs, coming together at one time, are potentially the culminating signals that God is closing this chapter of human history,” Mark Biltz recently said.  “This could be the final curtain call before the Great Tribulation mentioned in the Bible.  God has always wanted to warn His people, and the rest of the world, before He intervenes.  What better way to communicate to us than through the universal language of heavenly signs that speak to every tribe, tongue and nation?”