Miracles in the Mundane
Miracles in the Mundane
Joshua 10:14 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.
The story of Joshua and the day the sun stood still is one of those legendary biblical accounts that everyone who grew up in Sunday school has heard. It’s up there with David killing Goliath and Moses parting the Red Sea and Samson getting conned by Delilah. But the fact is, even for someone like me who grew up hearing the Scriptures exposited week after week, and who graduated from a Bible college, and who finished graduate work in theology, and who even had the privilege of travelling to Israel and hearing a lecture from this very Gibeonite ridge, I couldn’t have specified till now what made this particular miracle so significant. If asked, I wouldn’t have been able to give the context for the miracle, that is. Oh, but thank the LORD for fresh journeys through the inexhaustible terrain of His Word! Thank God for the daily opportunity to walk down familiar paths and still witness new spectacles. To come away from every fresh venture with the thought, “How have I never seen this before?!”
From now on, friend, when you think of Joshua and the day the sun stood still, remember the context. For review, the king of Jerusalem has just recruited four kings to join him in taking out the Gibeonites, and the Gibeonites have run to Joshua for help, and Joshua has summoned his most valiant fighting force and prayed this extravagant request to God. Which means that God performs one of the most mind-bending miracles ever recorded in Scripture for a fairly mundane cause. Let that sink in for a moment, friend. See, we’d assume God might go so far as to stop the earth on its axis in, say, a battle of Armageddon, where the devil and his legions gather for one final showdown in the penultimate war of human history, but not for the sake of Gibeonite waterboys in a relatively small skirmish between a few tribal kings nobody’s ever heard of.
Ah, but that’s the wonder of it all! That God responds according to the greatness of our need, not according to the greatness of the occasion. Remember that today as you bring your own requests to the LORD.