The Missing Day

Did you know that the space program is busy proving that what: has been called "myth" in the Bible is true? Mr. Harold Hill, pres­ident of the Curtis Engine Company in Baltimore, Maryland, and a con­sultant in the space program, relates the following development:

I think the most amazing thing that God has for us today happened recently to our Astronauts and space scientists at Green Belt, Maryland.

They were checking the position of the sun, moon, and planets out in space as to where they would be 100 and 1000 years from now. We have to know this so we don't send up a satellite and have it bump into something later on in its orbit. We have to lay out the orbit in terms of the life of the satellite, and where the planets will be so the whole thing will not bog down!

They ran the computer measure­ments back and forth over the cen­turies and it came to a halt. The computer stopped and put up a red signal, which meant that something was wrong either with the informa­tion fed into it or with the results as compared to the standards.

They called in the service depart­ment to check it out and they said, "It's perfect."

The IBM head of operations said, “What's Wrong?” “Well, we have found there is a day missing in space in elapsed time.”

They scratched their heads and tore their hair. There was no an­swer!          

Then a religious fellow on the team said, "You know, one time I was in Sunday School and they talked about the sun standing still." They didn't believe him, but they didn't have any other answer so they said, "Show us."

So He got a Bible and went back to the book of Joshua where they found a pretty ridiculous statement for anybody who has "good common sense." There they found the Lord saying to Joshua, "Fear them not, I have delivered them into thy hand, there shall not a man of them stand before thee" (Josh. 10:12-14).

Joshua was concerned because he was surrounded by the enemy and if darkness fell they would overpow­er them, so Joshua asked the Lord to make the sun stand still! That's right! The sun stood still and the moon stayed and did not go down for about a day.

The space men said, "There is the missing day!" Well, they checked the computer going back into time to the time it was written and found it was close but not close enough. The elapsed time that was missing back in Joshua's day was 23 hours and 20 minutes, not a whole day. They read the Bible and there it was, about (approximately) a day.

These little words in the Bible are important, but they, were still in trouble because if you cannot account for 40 minutes you'll be in trouble 1000 years from now. Forty minutes had to be found because it can be multiplied many times over in orbits.

Well, this religious fellow also remembered somewhere in the Bible where it said the sun went backwards.

The space men told him he was out of his mind. But they got out the Book and read these words in II Kings 20:5-10. Hezekiah, on his death bed, was visited by the proph­et Isaiah who told him that lie was not going to die. Hezekiah did not believe him and asked for a sign as proof. Isaiah said, "Do you want the sun to go ahead ten degrees?" Hezekiah said, "It is nothing for the sun to go ahead ten degrees, but let the shadow return backward ten degrees."

Ten degrees is exactly 40 minutes. Twenty-three hours and 20 minutes in Joshua plus 40 minutes in II Kings make the missing twenty-four hours the space travelers had to log in the log books the missing day in the universe.

Isn't it amazing, how our God re­veals His truths through modern man?        

PAGE 11 / THE PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL / MAY