“Silent witnesses: the Sun”
Joshua 10:12-13
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.
Moving at a speed of 448,000 miles per hour, at a distance of, as we speak, 93,000,000 miles, brighter than most every other star in the Milky Way, the sun shines at the heart and center of our solar system. It’s our primary source of heat, energy, and light.
And it’s big, really big. For starters, it’s more than 2,700,000 miles around and 865,000 miles across, making it big enough to hold 1,300,000 earths inside. That’s a lot of earths! Even more, every second(!), it fuses 600,000,000 tons of hydrogen into helium and converts 4,000,000 tons of matter into energy.
And it’s hot, really hot. While lava is 2,200 degrees and lightning is 53,000 degrees, the sun, at its core, is 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot!
And while it’s the leading cause of problems such as skin cancer and sunburn, it provides countless benefits. It increases our level of serotonin, a hormone that makes our minds feel calm and clear, it wards off any number of diseases including cancer, high blood pressure, and even the flu, and it boosts our Vitamin D, what doctors say is absolutely essential for our teeth, muscles, and bones.
It warms our seas, generates our weather, and gives energy to growing green plants, which in turn provide food and energy for life on earth.
And think of its beauty! Without the sun, we couldn’t have solar eclipses, or rainbows, or sunrises, or sunsets.
And if there was never a sun, John Denver couldn’t sing, Sunshine on My Shoulders, the Beatles couldn’t sing, Here Comes the Sun, and Annie couldn’t sing, The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow.
We absolutely can’t live without it! In fact, without the sun, the earth would be nothing more than a lifeless ball of ice-coated rock, wandering aimlessly through the cold, dark chasm of space.
The Bible talks a lot about the sun. Genesis chapter 1 says, “And God made the two great lights--the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night” (Genesis 1:16). A psalmist wrote, “From the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord is to be praised!” (Psalm 113:3). And the prophet Joel wrote, “The sun will be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and awesome day of the Lord” (Joel 2:31).
And in the sixth book of the Bible, the book of Joshua, we hear about the sun once more. I’ll read the words of Joshua chapter 10, starting at verse 12: “At that time Joshua spoke to the Lord in the day when the Lord gave the Amorites over to the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, ‘Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, the Valley of Aijalon.’ And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies” (Joshua 10:12-13).
Let me give you a little context, to see what’s going on.
The book of Joshua chapter 10 opens as the people of Gibeon are under attack. Five Amorite kings were about to attack, so the Gibeonites begged Joshua for help. So immediately he marshaled his troops and ordered an all-night march for a surprise attack on the enemy.
But it wasn’t easy. Not only would they have to march, double-time, at night, for a distance of some twenty-five miles, most of the way was uphill, with absolutely no chance to rest.
Still they hoofed it up the steep ravine toward a city called Ai, then south to Gibeon, where they attacked the unsuspecting Canaanite army. Even more, the Bible says God threw the enemy forces into confusion, so the armies of the five kings fled. Then He rained down hailstones from heaven, killing more than the swords of Israel.
But the battle was dragging on, and Joshua knew he needed more time. So what could he do? He needed to strike down that Amorite army as quickly and completely as possible, not tomorrow, and not next Thursday. He needed to do it today. He was that desperate.
So he prayed a prayer, a powerful, remarkable, unprecedented prayer, a prayer like no one else had ever prayed before. Verse 12: “Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the valley of Aijalon.”
Then what happened? At Joshua’s request and at God’s command, the sun and the moon stood still for an entire day. And, as the Bible says in verse 14: “There has been no day like it before or since, when the Lord heeded the voice of a man, for the Lord fought for Israel.”
If you think about it, it is a bit much to ask--to make the sun and the moon stand still. What could possibly have made Joshua think God would answer a prayer like that?
The reason was simple--Joshua believed in a big God.
Think, for a moment, of who Joshua was and where he had come from. As the people of Israel left Egypt and made their way to the Promised Land, he was Moses’ second-in-command. And he had seen God work time after time.
He walked across the Red Sea, on dry land. He ate quail and manna, bread from heaven, and drank water from a rock.
Then when Moses died, God used him to lead his people into the Promised land. Not only did he walk across the Jordan River on dry land, he marched around the city of Jericho, and watched as walls came tumbling down.
Of course, Joshua believed in a big God. He knew He could do anything. That’s why he could so boldly and humbly pray, “Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the valley of Aijalon.”
But how did God do it? How did He make the sun and the moon stand still?
We don’t have a clue. In fact, as far as we’re concerned, God would have to break every law of time and physics just to get it done.
But why couldn’t He? After all, think of the words of Psalm 74: “O God, the day is Yours, and Yours also the night; You established the sun and moon. It was You who set all the boundaries of the earth.” Or Jeremiah 32: “Behold, I am the Lord...Is anything too hard for Me?”
As one author put it: “If a man has enough sense to make a clock, he certainly has enough sense to stop it.” Or, as another put it: “Either God can do anything, or He is not truly God after all.”
Is it any surprise He’d do something like this? It shouldn’t be. He gave Samson the strength to kill a lion with his bare hands, and sent fire from heaven to consume Elijah’s sacrifice. He made a donkey talk and multiplied a widow’s grain and oil. Daniel spent a night in a lions’ den and Jonah survived three days in a fish’s stomach.
And when Jesus lived and worked among us, the blind could see, the deaf could hear, the lame could walk, and lepers were cleansed.
As the angel Gabriel once said to a simple peasant girl named Mary: “Nothing is impossible with God.”
And so I ask you today--how big is your God? Do you believe He can do anything, that He’ll do what He says He’ll do? Or are you content to believe in a strong, but not too strong, powerful, but not too powerful, big, but not too big, really rather small kind of God?
How big is your God?
Just like Joshua, each of us has some sun-stand-still kinds of prayers that we need to pray. What is it that you need Him to do?
Do you believe He’s strong enough to meet your needs, and wise enough to know what they are? Can He heal your heart? Can He bring peace to your family? How big is your God?
Born in July of 1941, John “the Bull” Bramlett was a football linebacker who, throughout his career, played for four teams--the Broncos, the Dolphins, the Patriots, and the Falcons.
In high school and college, he won numerous honors and awards, and was named “All State” and “All American.” After college, he even played baseball, signing on with the St. Louis Cardinals.
But that’s when things started to go a little south. Apparently, he got in trouble a lot, so the Cardinals had to let him go. That’s when he got picked up by the Denver Broncos. In 1970, when he played for the Patriots, he was named MVP.
But it didn’t take long, and things didn’t go so well there either. In fact, he became known not only as “the meanest man in football,” he was known as “the meanest man in professional sports.” He had no respect for authority. And worse yet, he was reckless, wild, and abusive at home as well as on the field...
...Until one night in 1973, when two men came to visit him to tell him the story of Jesus. They told him He loved him and died for him.
Did it make any difference? Apparently it did, for all of a sudden, this cursing, lying, cheating, drinking, “meanest man of professional sports” suddenly got up, went to another room, and got out his wife’s Bible. Then he turned to the words of John 3:16.
And when he read the words, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son,” and got to the “whosoever believeth in Him,” it touched his heart. He said, “Hey, I’m a whosoever!” Then he got down on his knees and believed in Jesus. He said, “For the first time in my life, I had peace.”
Later, whenever anyone asked for his autograph, he always wrote “Romans 1:16” after his name: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.”
How big is your God? Can he heal your wounds? Can He change your heart?
Joshua’s God, our God, once made the sun and the moon stand still. And if He can do that, He can do anything.
How do we know it? Because on one dreadful Friday, on a hill called “Calvary,” for three long hours, the sun refused to shine. And while most anyone would have called Jesus’ death a defeat, for us, it was the greatest victory of all time.
As a children’s song once put it so well: “The rivers are His, the mountains are His, the stars are His handiwork too. My God is so big, so strong, and so mighty, there’s nothing that He cannot do.”
Dear Father, though our needs are great, we know that You are greater. Make us ever so confident to pray our sun-stand-still kinds of prayers, whatever they might be, and, by Your grace, hear us, for Jesus’ sake. Amen