Sun! Stand still!
What can God do?What can't God do?
Various commentators try to explain what happened on the day of Joshua's battle against the Amorites. The text is plain: A man named Joshua, in the heat of a battle he was winning against dangerous enemies, asks God to make the sun stand still so that there would be sufficient daylight to complete the battle and bring it to definitive conclusion.
The explanations are interesting: Some suggest that this is just poetic language indicating that the victory was so significant that it was as if time slowed down and the day felt unusually long. Others suggest that the original Hebrew could be interpreted to be describing an eclipse in which the moon partially obscured the sun so that the sun looked like a ring of fire. Another view is that there were clouds on the horizon which refracted the light of the setting sun to the extent that it made the day longer.
While each of these explanations is interesting, the simple question remains: "If God could create to entire universe by saying 'Let there be light!' and if He can make dead cells start to live again when He raised Jesus from the dead, then is this too hard for Him?" Is there anything too hard for God?
Now I won't be going to war over this issue and I won't push the story about NASA scientists who put the orbits of the sun and planets into a computer simulation and found a missing day when they ran the simulation backwards (This story is an unfortunate fabrication that has been around since the 1980's)
BUT what I am perfectly happy to believe is that God can and could have changed the earth's rotation speed so that the day was longer. My small brain and our limited understanding of the laws of physics and astrophysics are boggled by this, but we are talking about the One who created these laws....
So, whether it was poetry, eclipse, refraction or a miracle on a planetary scale, I really, really, really believe that God met Joshua and his troops on the battlefield and they experienced His might and power.
| On the day the LORD gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the LORD in the presence of Israel: "O sun, stand still over Gibeon, O moon, over the Valley of Aijalon." 13 So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself on its enemies, as it is written in the Book of Jashar. The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. 14 There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the LORD listened to a man. Surely the LORD was fighting for Israel! (Joshua10:12-14) |
