Reflections of Life

…and I couldn’t leave this portion of Scripture without at least putting in my ‘two cents’ about the implications of such a miracle as recorded in Joshua 10:12-14!

As the caption implies, this miracle was never repeated nor was it ever surpassed in magnitude…It was the greatest physical miracle EVER! “On the day the Lord gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the Lord in the presence of Israel: ‘Sun, stand still over Gibeon, and you, moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.’ So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself on its enemies. . . . The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the Lord listened to a human being! Surely the Lord was fighting for Israel!” God miraculously provided twenty-four hours of light to aid Israel in destroying their enemy, the Amorites.

First and probably foremost in God’s mind was to repudiate the worship of the sun and the moon in the eyes of the heathen nations Israel was bound to conquer. The Amorites’ own gods were powerless to aid their cause as the God of Israel moved heaven and earth to grant His people the victory!

How did God do it? Since God created everything that IS, He also has total and complete control over every physical and spiritual dynamic associated with that creation! To cause the sun AND the moon to sit motionless in the sky for a little less than 24 hours we must take Joshua 10 at face value—God performed a stupendous miracle which caused the sun to delay its “setting.”

God stopped the motion of the earth…which in turn caused it to cease in its orbit about the sun and the moon in its orbit about the earth, which in turn caused the planets in our solar system to cease in their discourse throughout the Milky Way Galaxy which in turn…only God knows! There are objections to this explanation, based on the physics of motion, but the God who created the world and established natural laws throughout the cosmos is perfectly capable of compensating for any collateral complications! We may not have a scientific explanation of how God performed this miracle, but He did!

Praise our mighty God!