The Day The Sun Stood Still

taken from 'Scotlands Shangrila' by Bee Jay

I have to bring to notice an amazing matter that happened in 1971 to a group of astronauts and space scientists at Green Belt, Indiana, U.S.A. They were checking the position of the sun, moon and planets out in space as to where they would be 100 years and 1,000 years from now. They have to know that, in order not to send up a satellite should it collide with something later on in Time, on one of its orbits, so that nothing will go wrong. They ran the computer measurements backwards and forwards over the centuries when suddenly the computer stopped, showing a red signal indicating there was something wrong either with the information fed into it or with the results compared with the standards.  They found there was a day missing in space in elapsed time. Puzzled, there seemed to be no answer.

Then one man in the team remembered from his Sunday School days, of the 'Sun standing still'. The reference was found in the book of Joshua, chap. 10, verses 12-13...namely, 'the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, and hasted not to go down about a whole day'. "There is the missing day,' the space man said; and when they checked the computer going back into the time it was written, the answer was close, but still not close enough. The elapsed time missing, back in Josha's day was 23 hours, 20 minutes - not a whole day. Forty minutes had to be found because it can be manipulated many times over in orbit.  It was then that the scientist who had some Biblical knowledge remembered at some place or other in the Bible, 'the sun went backwards'. In searching the Bible, they found how King Hezekiah on his death-bed was visited by the prophet Isaiah, who told him that he was not going to die, and Hezekiah asked what the sign should be. And Isaiah said, "This sign shalt thou have of the Lord, that the Lord will do the thing that He hath spoken: shall the shadow go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees?' And Hezekiah answered, 'It is a light thing, for the shadow to go down ten degrees; nay, but let the shadow return backward ten degrees.' And Isaiah cried unto the Lord, and He brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the (sun) dial of Ahaz (2 Kings 20).

Ten degrees is exactly forty minutes. Twenty-three hours and twenty minutes in Joshua, plus forty minutes in 2 Kings made the missing twenty-four hours. So the scientists in Indiana in1971 had to log in the log book the cause of the missing day in the Universe.