When Joshua was fighting in battle he prayed for the sun to stand still to allow them to have more daylight to win.
The sun stayed still, giving them more daylight.
There are several ways to take this:
1) The sun halting in its rotation around the earth....
2) The sun SEEMING to halt in its rotation around the earth, although in reality it was the earth’s rotation that stopped.
3) The victory speeded up so that they accomplished a day’s worth of victory in an hour.
A thousand years ago we might have argued for the first choice.
A few hundred years ago we might have argued for the second choice.
I think that today we would likely find a lot of folks arguing for the third option, but feeling uncomfortable about it.
The second option (that the earth stopped spinning for a while) would be an astonishing miracle given the momentum of all the mass of the planet. Simply stopping the planet without stopping everything on it would cause the oceans to flood the continents while all people would suddenly be airborne to crash miles away in a dead heap. But, still, God could have done it – simply stop the planet rotating and everything on it and cancelled inertia at the same time to keep us from launching halfway into orbit. I’m perfectly comfortable with that.
I prefer the third option, but the second option is certainly doable.
What is NOT doable is the first option. God cannot stop something that isn’t happening in the first place. If the sun isn’t rotating around the earth then God can’t stop it because it’s ALREADY stopped.
Now let’s think about that for a moment. How many of us have even considered the first option? Very few indeed. We already know that the earth rotates around the sun, so when we read that passage about the sun standing still in the sky we intuitively understand it to mean that the sun SEEMED to stop. Either they got all they needed accomplished quickly or the earth stopped, but we know that the sun didn’t stop. And even when we read that the sun stopped we don’t try to erase everything we already know about physics and the solar system. We just harmonize that passage with what we already know and don’t even worry about it.
I would suggest that a hundred years from now folks will be doing the same when they read Genesis 1. They’ll see that God created man from the dust of the earth and think in the back of their heads about all of the miraculous process that science teaches now, harmonize it in their heads, and not worry about it one bit.
In other words, a lot of the arguments that we have, we don’t need to have. We don’t have to believe that the sun rotates around the earth to appreciate the miracle of Joshua’s victory. And we don’t have to believe that the universe is 6000 years old to appreciate the miracle of life.
The sun stayed still, giving them more daylight.
There are several ways to take this:
1) The sun halting in its rotation around the earth....
2) The sun SEEMING to halt in its rotation around the earth, although in reality it was the earth’s rotation that stopped.
3) The victory speeded up so that they accomplished a day’s worth of victory in an hour.
A thousand years ago we might have argued for the first choice.
A few hundred years ago we might have argued for the second choice.
I think that today we would likely find a lot of folks arguing for the third option, but feeling uncomfortable about it.
The second option (that the earth stopped spinning for a while) would be an astonishing miracle given the momentum of all the mass of the planet. Simply stopping the planet without stopping everything on it would cause the oceans to flood the continents while all people would suddenly be airborne to crash miles away in a dead heap. But, still, God could have done it – simply stop the planet rotating and everything on it and cancelled inertia at the same time to keep us from launching halfway into orbit. I’m perfectly comfortable with that.
I prefer the third option, but the second option is certainly doable.
What is NOT doable is the first option. God cannot stop something that isn’t happening in the first place. If the sun isn’t rotating around the earth then God can’t stop it because it’s ALREADY stopped.
Now let’s think about that for a moment. How many of us have even considered the first option? Very few indeed. We already know that the earth rotates around the sun, so when we read that passage about the sun standing still in the sky we intuitively understand it to mean that the sun SEEMED to stop. Either they got all they needed accomplished quickly or the earth stopped, but we know that the sun didn’t stop. And even when we read that the sun stopped we don’t try to erase everything we already know about physics and the solar system. We just harmonize that passage with what we already know and don’t even worry about it.
I would suggest that a hundred years from now folks will be doing the same when they read Genesis 1. They’ll see that God created man from the dust of the earth and think in the back of their heads about all of the miraculous process that science teaches now, harmonize it in their heads, and not worry about it one bit.
In other words, a lot of the arguments that we have, we don’t need to have. We don’t have to believe that the sun rotates around the earth to appreciate the miracle of Joshua’s victory. And we don’t have to believe that the universe is 6000 years old to appreciate the miracle of life.
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