The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before that great and notable day of the Lord come:
The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before that great and notable day of the Lord come. Great political and ecclesiastical revolutions, issuing in the entire overthrew of ancient and dominant systems, are symbolically expressed in the Old Testament by the derangement and obscuration of the heavenly bodies (as Isaiah 13:6-13; Isaiah 34:4-5; Ezekiel 32:7-8; Joel 2:10-11). This well-known prophetic language was employed by our Lord in his prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem (see the notes at Mark 13:24-25); and to this the prediction quoted by Peter beyond doubt refers, when he seeks to fix the attention of his audience upon "the great and notable day of the Lord" - the day that closed their day of grace as a nation; the day when, "the judgment being set, and the books opened," they were adjudged to lose their standing as God's visible witness upon earth, and to have their whole civil and ecclesiastical polity swept away.