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Hohenwald SDA Church

Norman McNulty

When the Sun Goes Dark

The title for the message today is When the Sun Goes Dark.

Before we get into the message, I'm going to ask the Lord to be with us.

Father in Heaven, thank You so much for bringing us to church today to worship You.

I pray that the message today will help us and bless us and challenge us and bring conviction where it is needed and I pray that you would guide my mind as I speak I pray in Jesus name you know this past Monday April 8 My family was in Bloomington, Indiana and we saw the total solar eclipse and I know we're not the only ones I know the burritos were in Ohio I know I'm dusty and her kids were somewhere with a Kentucky or yeah, and I Think the prisoners were in Texas that anybody else go to the totality that I didn't mention?

Yeah, it was, you know, the difference between 95% or 98% totality and totality is the difference between night and day.

And if you've never seen it, the good news is 21 years from now, come through Alabama and Mississippi.

But I've got to say, it's an amazing experience.

And the verse that Matthew just read, I'm going to read again.

Scripture says, When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have ordained.

You know, we are such small specks, so to speak, in the cosmic universe, and yet God cares about us personally.

And you stand there and it was so interesting.

I mean to me the experience was breathtaking and really otherworldly.

It's like it doesn't feel like Earth anymore when the sun gets blocked out in the middle of the day.

The colors start changing before the sky goes totally dark.

And you know, I had my eclipse glasses on, I could see the sun going completely black, but when I took the glasses off, it was just this amazing feeling when you look up in the sky and the sun is completely eclipsed.

There's just this little ring of light around it.

We were with people from Quebec, in Canada, Wisconsin, somebody from Oakland, California was at the place we were and it just so happened that we found a place on the map right at the very center of totality.

So there's like this red line that shows you exactly where the very center of totality is.

We were fortunate enough to find a place that was right on that center line and other people found it too.

And so The sky went dark where we were for 4 minutes and 3 seconds, which is pretty long.

We went back in 2017 to the eclipse to where I grew up in Portland where Highland Academy is because I wanted to be somewhere familiar.

We'd never been there before, probably will never go there again.

But this lasted over a good minute and a half longer, almost a minute and a half longer than 7 years ago.

And just a really, really neat experience.

And for me, as a believer in God, you see God's handiwork at place.

Just the math behind an eclipse is rather remarkable.

I mean, the sun is 400 times larger than the moon.

But the moon is 400 times closer to the earth than the sun, so therefore there are certain times when they are aligned just correctly where you can have a total solar eclipse.

And really only God's handiwork can account for that.

Now, you know, we have become sophisticated enough that even in times past, people smarter than me could calculate exactly when an eclipse would come.

And of course now scientists are so advanced, I mean, They know the very second the eclipse is going to start.

They know the exact route that it's going to take.

And they have the eclipses mapped out for years to come.

When I was a sixth grader, I was 12 years old, we went to a planetarium in Bowling Green, Kentucky for a field trip, and they were telling us this would have been 1989.

They were telling us, hey, you guys are from Portland, Tennessee, you are in a perfect spot for the next total solar eclipse.

All I knew was that on August 21, 2017, there would be this really neat eclipse that would come through Portland, Tennessee.

And, you know, I moved different places and came back to Tennessee between 1989 and 2017, but I still remembered that we had been told all those years, 28 years earlier, that we were in a perfect spot for the next eclipse.

But you know, I have a few observations, because I'm not just going to talk about like standing up and looking at a sky for the next 30 minutes.

It's very interesting and again if you've never ever been to 1 and if you have a chance to go you should go if time should last.

I have a few observations about what just happened.

First of all, maybe I wasn't paying attention as much back in 2017 as I was this time in 2024, but I didn't hear any doomsday, the world is going to end predictions back in 2017, like I did this go around.

And it's interesting this go around there were some evangelical Christians out there who came to the so-called discovery that there's 8 towns by the name of Nineveh in North America that were in the path of the eclipse.

Now if you look more closely only 2 were actually in totality.

The other 6 would be like 80 or 90 percent, but not totality.

I knew about this, and we had gone to Gatlinburg, because I was speaking at ASI Southern Union last Sabbath.

So then to get closer to the eclipse, we stayed in Cincinnati Sunday night.

So we're driving from Cincinnati, Ohio, into Indiana, because that's where the weather looked good for Monday And we're driving to really a spot We didn't know for sure we would get to until we found it and on our way to wherever we were going I look at the road sign and there it was Nineveh, Indiana turn left.

I looked at Joelle, I'm like we could go to Nineveh.

But if we had we would have been in totality.

You know, I guess what was a little bit surprising to me was I saw an online ministry that's affiliated with the Adventist Church, not as part of the organized church, but just people who are Seventh-day Adventists who have a ministry, who released a series of videos who started to make a really big deal about the fact that there were going to be towns called Nineveh on the path of an eclipse.

And they talked about how the eclipse from 2017 went 1 way and the eclipse from 24 went another way and that forms the shape of a cross and then you have Nineveh and then these evangelicals who are not Adventists are talking about how well Nineveh had 40 days to repent So America is going to have 40 days to repent.

And I just want to step back and say something here.

We have a more sure word of prophecy where we have very clear prophecies of Scripture from Daniel and Revelation and Matthew 24 and Mark 13 and Luke 21.

And there's other passages as well that describe the signs of the coming of Christ and of the end of the world.

Now, is it true that scripture says that the sun, the moon and the stars are signs that will be used for signs for seasons for days and you're sure that's true but we have not been given inspired evidence that total solar eclipses are a specific sign of anything in particular other than the fact that it shows that God is the creator of heaven and earth, and that he is in control of the stars and the moon and the sun and that he is fully in control.

You know, this ministry that released these videos also started to make some connections to statements from Ellen White about fireballs over Nashville and suggested, gave the strong impression from what I could see watching their videos, that this total solar eclipse of 2017 where the city of Nashville was in totality, Now in 24 it was not, it was like 95%.

They were trying to suggest that these total solar eclipses are a sign in the heavens of what God is going to do to Nashville.

Now I have to say this too, that is pure speculation that you cannot prove.

And as Seventh-day Adventists, we have to be very, very careful about what we say, because there is a more sure word of prophecy, and yes, are there things that are coming to the cities?

Not just to Nashville, but to all the cities.

If you study inspiration, it's not just Nashville that is going to face judgments of God at the end of the world, it's all of the cities.

But we have to be careful that we don't make specific connections to specific events that don't exist.

You know, I want to point out, when you look at these total solar eclipses, mathematically speaking, the odds of you living in a place that will experience a total solar eclipse in your lifetime, it occurs about once every 360 years.

Although sometimes places will have them within a few years of each other So for example, Southern, Illinois was in the path of totality in 2017 and it was again in 2024 So there was a town in Southern, Illinois near Marion, Illinois, actually very close to 3ABN, that got both total solar eclipses.

But most people, or most locations, these eclipses occur once every 360 years.

But somewhere in the world, there's an eclipse happening pretty regularly.

So for example, we just had this eclipse in 2024.

The next eclipse in the world is August 12 of 2026, which goes through Greenland, Iceland, and Spain.

Then there's 1 in August 2 of 2027 that goes through Egypt, Northern Africa and Southern Spain.

Now this 1 would be something to go to you now Probably you won't make it but this particular eclipse will last nearly 6 and a half minutes now the mathematically the longest eclipse that could occur if everything lined up correctly is 7 minutes and 41 seconds.

And that had occurred about a thousand years ago and there might be another 1, I believe, in another over 100 years from now.

So that can happen, but for example, the eclipse in 2017 in Portland was about 2 minutes and 40 seconds.

So it depends on how close the moon is to the sun.

And if you go through the list of eclipses, there's going to be 1 in 28, 20, 30, 20, 33, 20, 34, 20, 35, 20, 38, 20, 39, 20, 41, 20, 42, 20, 43, 20, 44, and then on August 12, 2045, if time should last, I'm interested in this 1 because it's my anniversary.

It goes through Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and then all the way through the heart of the country out to California.

So if time should last, I'm gonna try to go to that 1.

So when you look at the fact that eclipses occur every 1 or 2 years, we can't then say that because the sun and the moon align just at a perfect spot every couple of years somewhere in the earth that then this means that 40 days later there will be coming destruction to the territory that does not repent.

It's really sensationalism is what it is.

Because now, in fairness to all that I've talked about, it's the evangelicals who have suggested this idea that just as Jonah came to Nineveh with a message that they had 40 days to repent, now they are the ones that are suggesting America has 40 days to repent.

We know as Seventh-day Adventists that we are not to give a message to this world that is based on time.

That since 1844, our message that God has given to us is a message that is not based on time.

And in fact, we heard of a woman outside of our denomination who thought that the rapture was coming when the eclipse came, and she was going around and giving away money because she thought that time would be no more after the eclipse.

Now here's where I want to place my focus.

You know, as Seventh-day Adventists, we clearly believe in the imminent, literal, second coming of Jesus Christ in the clouds of heaven.

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When the Sun Goes Dark

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