Joshua 10
“Daylight Saving Time”
March 14, 2010 - Fourth Sunday in Lent

         Beth and I rushed into the lecture hall at Notre Dame early last September, figuring that we had missed just 10 minutes or so of the talk we had come to hear. As we slipped into seats at the back we were surprised that the speaker was answering questions. We eventually realized the lecture was over; we were 70 minutes late. After refusing for decades, St. Joseph County in Indiana began observing Daylight Saving Time in 2005. Notre Dame was now running an hour later than Chicago from where we had just driven.

         The sermon title is correct, by the way, both for our modern clock-changing practice and for our text. It’s Daylight Saving Time, “Saving” singular, not “Savings,” plural. What we all did with our clocks last night or this morning was first conceived by Benjamin Franklin as a way to save daylight into the evening hours, when people could enjoy it at home after the day’s work. It took until the mid 1960s for our country to finally adopt a consistent and nearly universal Daylight Saving Time policy. But states and local areas were allowed to decide for themselves. Several counties in Indiana used to hold out; Arizona still doesn’t do it. They figure they have enough sunshine as it is.

         I  didn’t plan it this way. Only last week I noticed that the Sunday I scheduled for preaching Joshua 10 is the start of Daylight Saving Time. But what better day could there be for this text? We all arrived today a little bleary-eyed after adjusting our clocks to gain some extra daylight, and we get to hear a Scripture story about God adjusting the whole world to gain a extra day’s worth of sunshine for Israel.

         It’s those Gibeonites again, the folks we met last week. In chapter 9 they conned Joshua and his lieutenants into making a peace treaty with them. Now just a month or so later they call on Israel for help. A coalition of Amorite kings has decided to attack Gibeon, really one of their own cities, because they are now Israel’s ally. It’s like the United States going to the aid of Britain and France in World War II. When your allies are under fire, you respond.

         Last week our text in chapter 9 verse 26 said that, after the Gibeonites tricked Israel, Joshua saved the Gibeonites from the revenge of the Israelites. Now in verse 6 of chapter 10, they ask Joshua to save them again. Five Amorite kings and their armies are gathering to attack them and they expect their new allies to come to the rescue. And Joshua does just that, with an all-night march of the best men of Israel, pushing up the hill from their camp at Gilgal, and a surprise attack on the five kings in the morning.

         This time, they have clear direction from God. In verse 8 the Lord promises that He has given this evil alliance of kings into Joshua’s hand. God says yet one more time to Joshua, “Do not be afraid of them.”

         This battle is different from anything we’ve seen before for Israel. It’s different from anything the Israelites themselves have yet seen. The enemy was first routed and thrown into confusion by the surprise attack. Then, since Joshua and his forces came from the east, the Amorites ran uphill northwest to Beth Horon, then downhill southwest, headed for the coastal plain of the Mediterranean. They ran for more than twenty miles with Israel in hot pursuit.

         We almost don’t notice it because of the big miracle of this chapter, but God actually worked two miracles against the five kings and their armies. As they ran down the slopes from Beth Horon, God called up a hailstorm and began knocking down the Amorites with hailstones. Verse 11 says, “more of them died from the hail than were killed by the swords of the Israelites.”

         Now we come to central story and miracle of chapter 10. In verse 12, Joshua speaks to the sun and the moon… and they stand still. The sun quits moving westward toward the sea, the armies’ shadows grow no longer toward the east, and the day and the battle goes on and on until Israel is finished saving the Gibeonites by slaughtering the Amorite coalition. Verse 13 says the sun delayed going down about a full day. In other words, the daylight was doubled. Sunset was about twelve hours later than normal.

         You can raise scientific concerns about this miracle. To start with, we now know that the sun moving across the sky is only a matter of perspective. It’s not actually the sun that moves, but the earth that rotates beneath its radiance. So if the sun appeared to stop or slow down that day for Joshua, it was actually the planet beneath his feet that stopped turning or slowed its rotation.

         For those who are skeptical about miracles, this one seems particularly hard to swallow because there are so many side issues. What would stopping the world’s spin mean for weather patterns? Why wouldn’t the earth overheat on one side during that time? What about the moon’s orbit? Wouldn’t this anomaly exert gravitational forces that would throw the whole solar system out of kilter? Yet those questions aren’t really much to the point. If God really did make the sun and the moon and this earth, and is powerful enough to stop it spinning, then He’s surely able to take care of the details. No, if you believe God can work miracles, then this one’s no harder to accept than any other.

         On the other hand, for over a hundred years, there’s been some really silly Christian misinformation about Joshua’s long day preached in sermons and now circulated on the Internet. These days the story goes something like this: While using NASA computers to calculate the future orbital positions of the sun, moon and planets, scientists ran into a problem. There seemed to be a missing day in their calculations somewhere in the past. Suddenly one of the scientific team who is a Christian hauled out his Bible and solved the mystery by pointing to Joshua 10, when God stopped time for a day. Other older versions of this myth argue that the same problem was “discovered” and “answered” by a Yale astronomy professor.

         Well, that’s all hogwash. The truth is that in 1890 a man named C.A. Totten, who briefly taught military science at Yale, published a book in which he claimed to have discovered a missing twenty-fours in the history of the universe. His solution was to point to Joshua 10, claiming to find there a missing 23 hours and 20 minutes (verse 13 says it was about a day) and to Isaiah 38, where God makes the shadow on a sundial go backwards for king Hezekiah 10 degrees, the other 40 minutes. But Totten’s calculations were scientific nonsense even then, starting with his claim to have figured out the exact date of the world’s creation (Sunday, September 22, 4,000 B.C., in case you’re wondering).

         Joshua 10 is not about astronomy or scientific apologetics. The key is verse 14, “There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the Lord listened to a human being.” That sentence is confusing because there have been many days when God listened to human beings, even answered their prayers. What we miss is that the Hebrew word used here for “listen” actually means something like “obey.” This is the first time in Scripture when that word is used for God responding to a single human being. And the next time comes long after Joshua was written. The day was unique because of God’s immediate and direct response to Joshua’s command to the sun and moon. God “obeyed;” He did just what Joshua asked in order to save the Gibeonites.

         Why would God condescend to obey a human being? Why would a being who can touch our planet and slow it down like you step on the brakes and slow your car, pay attention to, much less obey one of us? Our clue to that this morning is the question raised by our Gospel lesson from Luke 15. Why would a rejected father wait so long and so patiently for his prodigal child to come back to him? Only because of what the rest of verse 14 implies when it says, “Surely the Lord was fighting for Israel!” God was on Joshua’s side. God is on our side. God is on your side. God is on the side of anyone who asks Him for help. God wants to save us.

         It was daylight saving time there in the Valley of Aijalon, as God fought for Israel and for their allies the Gibeonites. God extended the opportunity for victory over their enemies to be complete and final. So we learn that God is extending the opportunity for our salvation, for our victory over sin and death to be complete.

         There are some people who would like to have Daylight Saving Time all year round. My wife is one of those. Who cares about getting up in the dark if you have more light in the evening? Joshua 10 and Luke 15 show us that God’s Daylight Saving Time is continual. He is constantly extending His invitation and welcome. He is always patiently waiting for His children. He wants us to have light to find our way home. He wants to save us.

         As I get older I pray more and more often for Jesus to come back soon, to return and bring His kingdom and make this world what it should be. I’m tired of seeing people I care about suffer heartache and sickness and death. I’d like to see the sun go down on all that and a new day rise. So I pray what Christians prayed from the beginning, “Lord, come quickly.” And I add my own question, “Why so long?”

         Yet then I turn over to II Peter 3:9 and read, “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise… He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” You’re racing down the airport walkway, pulling your suitcase as fast as you can. Your incoming plane was late and your connecting flight is leaving in ten minutes. You’re praying for a kind, patient flight agent who will keep the door open, who will want everyone to make the flight, leave no one behind. That’s God. He’s keeping the door open. He’s waiting for every last person who wants to get on board. He’s extending the daylight hours so that all who are seeking can find their way home.

         God is on our side. He’s on the side of everyone who will believe and trust in His grace through Jesus Christ. That’s the message for us in the long day of Joshua’s battle. It’s there in verse 14 and again at the end of the chapter in verse 42, “the Lord, the God of Israel, fought for Israel.” God fought for you and me. He fought sin and death by sending His own Son to die on the Cross. That was the greatest battle. That was the truly longest day our world has seen yet, because the Day of Salvation, the day to believe in Jesus and come home to the heavenly Father has not yet ended.

         The rest of Joshua 10 is pretty brutal. Joshua finds the five Amorite kings hiding in a cave, hauls them out and publicly executes them. Then he throws their bodies back in the cave and seals it up with rocks. Then he and Israel systematically work their way round those five Amorite cities, destroying and killing everyone in one town after another. For reasons that only God knows and that I can’t understand at all, the opportunity was done for those Amorites. Their day of salvation was over and the day of judgment arrived. I’d much rather hear about the loving Father in the parable of the Prodigal Son. But there’s a warning here in Joshua not to be missed.

         It’s partly a warning for us. Jesus said it in John 9 verse 4, the night is coming. Work while it’s day. Receive salvation and bring it to others while it’s still light. When the night comes, no one will be able to work any longer. Paul said it in Ephesians 5:8, “Walk as children of light,” not of the darkness. God is on our side. God is patient. His Daylight Saving Time is long, long, long, longer maybe than you or I can imagine. But it’s not forever. Isaiah 55:6 says, “Seek the Lord while he may be found.”

         It’s also a warning for and about those to whom God is sending us. God sent the Israelite army out to save those conniving tricksters at Gibeon. God sends us out while it’s still day to bring salvation to the people around us. Our epistle lesson from II Corinthians 5 has that note of God’s patience in it, that “that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them.” But then we read in verses 19 and 20 “And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.”

         God’s holding the sun still, prolonging the daylight so that you and I can finish our work as His ambassadors. Back then, Joshua and company were ambassadors of a violent salvation we can’t really comprehend. But just as God extended their day to complete saving the Gibeonites, God is patiently extending our time to reach out and offer His love and grace to those around us who will otherwise perish in the night.

         So we keep doing what we do, which is to be people living in the daylight of God’s salvation, displaying the grace and love of Jesus. It gets long. We’ve opened this building up once a year for shelter to homeless families for nearly twenty years now. Sometimes it feels like it’s not doing much good. There are more and more families on the street. Some of them never make it into standard housing. It feels like a never-ending, hopeless task to minister to folks like them. Yet God is patiently waiting for us to do that work, to offer them love and grace in His name, because He’s patiently waiting to welcome those men, women and children into the Home He has for them.

         We keep on. Daylight Saving Time will not end until our Lord comes back. We keep on even though like Joshua we meet opposition, even hatred. And we do our best to be children of the light, of the day. This morning we pray for Matthew Rossi. He’s accused of setting fires at Faith Center and possibly at other locations in Eugene. We pray because God wants to bring Matthew into the light. He doesn’t close the door on anyone, so neither will we. The Father is waiting. The day is extended along with His arms extended ready to embrace anyone who will come home. Let’s keep trying to find them. Let’s use the daylight God has given us.

         Maybe this morning God is waiting for you. Perhaps you’ve been trying to stay on the other side, fighting against Him and His patient love. It’s still daylight for you. There’s still time to accept the saving grace of Jesus, believe in Him, and join God’s side. If you would like to talk about receiving His salvation, becoming a Christian, I would be glad to meet with you and help you find your way to His arms. Just say the word.

         For the rest of us, let’s look for the people for whom we carry the good message of reconciliation and salvation. Let’s really be ambassadors to them, finding ways to show love, to talk about Christ, to make the most of the Daylight Saving Time that God has given us and given them. Let’s serve at the shelter. Let’s minister to the children God is bringing here. Let’s combat the evils of poverty and abuse and sickness and loneliness and all the other dark forces attacking the people around us.

         We live in a long Day, a day of salvation. Yet our fear and joy, our warning and hope is that this Day will end. Then comes the longest Day, the never-ending Day, when all that we’ve done on God’s side will have eternal consequences and eternal blessings and we will live forever in His light.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2010 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj