Matthew Chapter 24

VERSE 29 continued, “Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”

The Falling Stars

“Half a century passed before the next sign appeared the falling of the stars from heaven, as when a fig tree casts her unripe fruit when shaken of a mighty wind. (Bear in mind those 50 years might seem like quite a while for us, but it was but a mere blink of the eye for the Lord.) Our Lord’s words found a fulfillment (though not their complete and only fulfillment, as we shall see later) in the wonderful meteoric showers of the early morning of Nov. 13, 1833. Those inclined to quibble by urging that “the fixed stars did not fall” are reminded that our Lord said nothing about fixed stars falling, and that fixed stars could not fall: their falling would prove that they were not fixed. The Scriptures do not distinguish between stars and meteors as is commonly done in our day.

Shooting stars and even meteoric showers are not uncommon every year, and some years more than others. It is computed that 400,000 small meteors fall to our earth annually. But these are nothing in comparison to the great shower of Nov. 13, 1833, in which millions upon millions fell.

Prof. Kirkwood, in his work entitled Meteorology, says– “Until the close of the last century they [meteoric showers] never attracted the attention of scientific men.”

Prof. D. Olmstead, LL.D., of Yale College, wrote:

“Those who were so fortunate as to witness the exhibition of shooting stars on the morning of Nov. 13, 1833, probably saw the greatest display of celestial fireworks that has ever been seen since the creation of the world, or at least within the annals covered by the pages of history…This is no longer to be regarded as a terrestrial, but a celestial phenomenon, and shooting stars are now to be no more viewed as casual productions of the upper regions of the atmosphere, but as visitants from other worlds, or from the planetary voids.” New Haven Press

 Mr. Henry Dana Ward, at the time a New York merchant, later an author and Episcopalian minister, wrote:

“No philosopher or scholar has told or recorded an event, I suppose, like that of yesterday morning. A Prophet eighteen hundred years ago foretold it exactly, if we will be at the trouble to understand falling stars to mean falling stars. …Truly the stars of heaven fell unto the earth as in the Apocalypse. The language of the Prophet has always been received as metaphorical; yesterday it was literally fulfilled.” Journal of Commerce, Nov. 14, 1833

“On the night of November 12-13, 1833, a tempest of falling stars broke over the Earth… The sky was scored in every direction with shining tracks and illuminated with majestic fireballs. At Boston, the frequency of meteors was estimated to be about half that of flakes of snow in an average snowstorm. Their numbers… were quite beyond counting; but as it waned, a reckoning was attempted, from which it was computed, on the basis of that much-diminished rate, that 240,000 must have been visible during the nine hours they continued to fall.” – Agnes Clerke’s, Victorian Astronomy Writer

We quote the following account from The American Cyclopedia, Vol. xi, page 431:

“The year 1833 is memorable for the most magnificent display on record. This was on the night of Nov. 12, and was visible over all the United States and over a part of Mexico and the West India Islands. Together with the smaller shooting stars which fell like snowflakes and produced phosphorescent lines along their course, there were intermingled large fire-balls, which darted forth at intervals, describing in a few seconds an arc of 30 or 40 degrees. These left behind luminous trains, which remained in view several minutes and sometimes half an hour or more. One of them, seen in North Carolina, appeared of larger size and greater brilliancy than the moon. Some of the luminous bodies were of irregular form, and remained stationary for a considerable time, emitting streams of light.

At Niagara the exhibition was especially brilliant, and probably no spectacle so terribly grand and sublime was ever before beheld by man as that of the firmament descending in fiery torrents over the dark and roaring cataract. It was observed that the lines of all the meteors, if traced back, converged in one quarter of the heavens, which was Leonis Majoris; and this point accompanied the stars in their apparent motion westward, instead of moving with the earth toward the East. The source whence the meteors came was thus shown to be independent of the earth’s relation, and exterior to our atmosphere.”

Prof. von Humboldt devotes fifteen pages of his work, Personal Narrative, to this phenomenon; and declares that it was visible over an area of eleven million square miles.

M. Beupland, a French savant, who witnessed it in Humboldt’s company, says of it: “There was not a space in the firmament equal to the extent of three diameters of the moon that was not filled at every instant with bolides and falling stars.”

The phenomenon was to a limited extent repeated in 1866, but the event of 1833 seems to have accomplished the purpose of the sign; and indeed, in connection with the preceding sign, it evidently had considerable to do with the first arousing of the Virgins to meet the Bridegroom, prophesied in the next chapter. Matt. 25:1-5

We will begin our look at the more important (that is to us) symbolic fulfilment of this verse in our next post.