The day the sun stood still

NASA scientists were checking out the projected positions of the sun, moon, and planets for periods of hundreds and even thousands of years to pinpoint the positions of planets at certain points in time and to plot the future orbits of satellites. They ran the computer routines back and forth across the centuries. Suddenly, the computer stopped and flashed a red signal, indicating there was a glitch in the data. To their amazement, the scientists found that an entire day was missing in history. The scientists scratched their heads, not knowing how to resolve the problem. 

Finally, one of the scientists who happened to be a Christian remembered a Sunday School lesson about the sun standing still. He retrieved a Bible and turned to the book of Joshua. There in chapter 10 was an account of Joshua’s army battling the Amorites. Joshua asked God to made the sun to stand still (Joshua 10:12) long enough to give the nation of Israel sufficient daylight hours to conquer its enemies.  Joshua 10:13 states, “The sun stood still and did not go down for a whole day.”

The scientists again ran their computers going back to Joshua’s time and found that the elapsed time was exactly 23 hours and 20 minutes, lacking forty minutes being a full day. This forty-minute interval had to be found because this small difference in the reckoning of time could magnify itself over time to the point of rendering future calculations worthless. As the Christian scientist pondered the problem, he remembered a passage in the Bible stating that the sun went backwards. 

The scientists told him he was out of his mind, but they got out the Bible and sure enough paragraphs 9-11 of 2 Kings 20 provided the following story: Hezekiah was on his death bed.  The prophet Isaiah paid him a visit to assure him that he was not going to die. Hezekiah asked Isaiah for a sign as proof. Isaiah gave Hezekiah the choice of a sign:  did he prefer the sun go forward 10 degrees or backwards 10 degrees.  Hezekiah replied, “It’s easy for the sun to go forward, so have it back-up 10 degrees.” Isaiah prayed to the Lord, and the sun backed up in its orbit a full ten degrees. Ten degrees of the sun’s 360-degree daily orbit around the earth amount to exactly 40 minutes in a 24-hour day. Adding this 40-minutes (from 2 Kings 20: 7-11) to the 23 hours and 20 minutes ((from Joshua 10: 12-13) makes a full day. 

The objective of this story is to emphasize the power of God. Many scoffers question the above passages in Joshua and Kings as well many others in the Old and New Testaments including the virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus. If one believes the first verse in the Genesis that “God created the heavens and the earth,” he or she should never doubt the miracles described in the Bible.