How could the sun stop (Joshua 10:13-14)? Wouldn't the earth have had to stop, instead, and everything go flying off?
How could the sun stop (Joshua 10:13-14)? Wouldn't the earth have had to stop, instead, and everything go flying off?
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 human being. Surely the Lord was fighting for Israel!
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Asked July 02 2018
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Jack Gutknecht
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Tim Maas
God, as the creator of an orderly universe, designed it to function in accordance with predictable principles that humans were given the intelligence and ability to discover and benefit from. At the same time, as the omnipotent originator of those principles, God had, has, and always will have the authority, power, and right to suspend or alter them at His pleasure for His purposes, without the effects that might be expected from the standpoint of human scientific knowledge. Also, in the case of Joshua, God was acting in response to a specific request made by the leader of His chosen people, in a contest in which (as noted by the verses cited in the question) He was not neutral or impartial. Granted, the stopping of the earth in its orbit around the sun is demonstrating such power on the grandest possible scale. Yet, people who question it might just as well question any of the other "miracles" that God or Jesus performed in either the Old or New Testaments (including the resurrection of the dead) that violated or overrode the normal "laws" of physics, chemistry, or other sciences. And yet, people (including skeptics) seldom (it seems to me) express the same incredulity toward them as they do with the account of the sun standing still, due to the cosmic scope of the event. But, for the Christian, God can lengthen the day as easily as He can perform any other action that would be considered "impossible" from a worldly, human perspective.
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