Joshua 10, two friends named Billy and Chuck, and why every word of Scripture deserves our faith

There has never been a day like it, before or since. The Bible says so plainly: in the middle of a battle in Canaan, the sun stopped in the sky and did not hurry to set for about a whole day.

At the start of every week, our staff gathers from all over the world. The day we recorded this episode, Cuba and Colombia were on the call. We often have India and Kenya with us, and sometimes Vietnam. We go over some business, we pray together, and either John Ensor, our president, or Mark Nicholson, our executive director, leads a devotional thought to set the tone for the day and the week. Last week, John took us to Joshua chapter 10.

On this week’s episode of the PassionLife Podcast, we pick up where that devotional left off. We came to the conversation with almost no preparation, on purpose, because we wanted raw, candid thoughts rather than a polished talk. We even ended up thumbing through our Bibles on camera.

Five Kings and a Long Day

Here is the setting. The people of God have gone into the promised land under the leadership of Joshua, who received it from Moses. They have attacked Jericho and Ai and conquered them. They have made a treaty with the Gibeonites. And now five Amorite kings, with a large army behind them, are joining forces to attack and destroy them.

Israel is soon in the middle of defeating five very large armies, in a mop-up mode, so to speak, and they want to finish the job.

There is a delicate balance in this part of the Bible. The Israelites go out to do battle, but God does the battle for them, because this is his sovereign judgment on the nations of the promised land. And then comes the jaw-dropping part. Joshua asks the Lord to extend the daylight, and the sun stands still so that the judgment of the Lord can continue and the victory over these five kings can be won.

The wording of the story leaves no doubt about how long it lasted. The sun stood still in the sky for about a whole day.

A Day Like No Other

Here is how Scripture tells it:

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, in the Valley of Aijalon.” And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies.… The sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day. 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. (Joshua 10:12–14)

It is hard to say which is more remarkable.

There is the event itself, which is hard to explain from a modern scientific perspective. Taken at face value, it would mean the earth stopped rotating on its axis for about a whole day, just so the Israelites could finish the job before them.

And then there is the prayer. Joshua simply prayed for this to happen, and the Lord said, Okay.

It calls to mind what Jesus told his disciples in Mark 11: if you say to this mountain, Be taken up and thrown into the sea, and do not doubt in your heart, it will be done. There are remarkable moments when God’s absolute power to pursue his own will coincides with our petitions.

The two passages complement each other. Both describe something that seems incomprehensible from a physical standpoint. But there is a difference. Jesus’ mountain is an illustration of faith; we have no historical record that anyone ever threw a mountain into the sea. Joshua 10 is different. The Bible tells us it happened, and that there was never a day like that day, before or since, when the sun stood still in the sky.

“It Sounds Like a Miracle to Me”

Throughout history, people have reinterpreted passages like this one to take the miracle out of them.

Take the water into wine. God didn’t really do a miracle there, the argument goes. He just kind of supercharged the natural process. Well, that sounds like a miracle to us.

The sun standing still is even more stunning, and the Bible states it matter-of-factly. The author is not overly concerned about our modern sensibilities. There is no chapter devoted to explaining how it happened. It just says it happened.

There are plenty of theories, about refracted light and this or that and the other. But almost all of them start from the same place: Since this cannot possibly be true, we must look for some other explanation that is more satisfying.

We don’t find any of those alternatives satisfying, because they all force you to say that what you are reading isn’t true, and then let me fix it.

It is not only this story. There are many places in the Bible where people who would rather explain miracles away by science than receive them by faith offer all kinds of reasons why the Bible is not saying what it is actually saying. Balaam’s donkey speaking to him. The disembodied hand writing on the wall at King Belshazzar’s banquet in the book of Daniel. Jesus walking on the water. Lazarus raised from the dead. Fire coming down from heaven. Jonah swallowed by a great fish. That could be explained scientifically, people say, or that’s just a metaphor. He wasn’t really swallowed by a fish. Noah’s ark was a metaphor too, because we know that couldn’t happen.

Speaking From Where We Stand

In fairness, it is worth acknowledging that the Bible sometimes speaks in unscientific ways, and that is not a problem. It speaks in completely natural and understandable ways.

We all talk about the sun rising and the sun setting. That is not scientifically accurate, but it is the normal way everybody speaks. It is perspective.

Some critics have pointed to Psalm 113: From the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the LORD is to be praised! The sun doesn’t rise and it doesn’t go down, they say, so the Bible is in error. But from the perspective of the person writing, it does. And we would bet that the same people who say that’s not scientific will look out over the horizon some evening and say, What a beautiful sunset we’re enjoying tonight. The sun isn’t setting. The earth is rotating. But from where they stand, it is setting. It is a completely natural way of talking.

So the real difference is not between science and Scripture. It is between two postures of the heart. Are you cynically looking for reasons not to believe the Bible as the authoritative revelation of God, given to lead and guide us in how to live before him and be holy before him? Or do you come with a childlike spirit, full of wonder at the amazing things you read there?

Two Friends

That question brings to mind a name that most people today have never heard: Chuck Templeton.

In the 1940s, Youth for Christ International had just been founded. Billy Graham was among the first mass evangelists recruited to work with them, and alongside him was a young Canadian evangelist named Charles Templeton. Together, the two men helped get Youth for Christ off the ground, a ministry that is still at work around the world today. Around the time of World War II, it was Chuck and Billy doing the work, filling football stadiums and leading evangelistic crusades.

They were very good friends, and they were very different men.

Billy Graham had been raised in a Christian household and trusted Christ at a young age. He wasn’t fancy or sophisticated in the way he spoke. He was down to earth.

Templeton had come to Christ later in life, after a life of sin and errant ways. When he came, he came powerfully. He spoke eloquently, he was a sophisticated debater, and he had a strong command of Scripture from a logical standpoint. At the time, many people thought it would be Chuck Templeton, not Billy Graham, who would turn the world upside down with his evangelistic gifts.

“Intellectual Suicide”

But at some point, Templeton’s intellect began to raise doubts in his mind about whether the Scriptures could really be trusted literally.

He began sharing those doubts with his young friend. Billy, he said, in effect, you can’t keep talking about all these things as if they really happened. You’re committing intellectual suicide, just taking it all on faith.

It threw Billy Graham into a crisis of faith, a real questioning of the Scriptures.

The Bible on a Tree Stump

The story is well known. In 1949, in the mountains outside San Bernardino, California, Billy Graham walked out into the woods in the middle of that crisis. He laid his Bible on a tree stump, got down on his knees, and prayed something like this:

Lord, I can’t answer all the intellectual questions that come up about the Scriptures and about your faithfulness. But from this moment, I commit myself by faith to trust that every single word in this book is your Word. And even when I can’t explain it, I am going to understand that as you being beyond me.

It changed his life. It led directly into the 1949 Los Angeles crusade, one of the most famous crusades of his ministry.

If you know Billy Graham’s history, you will notice that it was right around that time that he developed the cadence he became known for: The Bible says. The Bible says this. The Bible says that. It became the hallmark of how he spoke about Scripture. He took it as solid, because the Bible said it and God had willed it. He had worked through his doubts to the place of believing, by faith, that every word that came out of that book was the trustworthy Word of God, and, as Paul told Timothy, profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.

Whatever Happened to Chuck Templeton?

So whatever happened to Chuck Templeton?

We don’t know his name today. He fell out of prominence. He went through a painful divorce. He rejected his faith entirely. A few years before he died, he published a book called Farewell to God, explaining why he had rejected the Christian faith and why, essentially, you should too.

But that is not the end of the story. Lee Strobel, the well-known apologist, interviewed Templeton in his final years, as his health was failing, and recounted the conversation in his book The Case for Faith. By then, Templeton had called himself an agnostic for many, many years. Strobel asked him what he thought of Jesus now.

Even after writing Farewell to God, Templeton spoke of Jesus with deep admiration, as the most important human being who ever lived. And then, his voice breaking, he said: I miss him.

Many people have wondered whether Templeton was more of a prodigal than anything else. He was a complex human being, a man who in many ways never brought his mind under the authority of the gospel, but whose heart and spirit yearned for it nonetheless. You can see the conflict.

Beyond Our Intellect

Today, very few people know who Charles Templeton was. Yet you would be hard-pressed to find anyone in America, even an atheist or an agnostic, who doesn’t know the name Billy Graham. Think of the influence he had on American Christian history, and the way he became a spiritual advisor to so many presidents. It was an amazing life.

Charles Templeton might have lived that life, except that he lost his faith. He lost his way. He allowed intellectualism to keep him from coming to the Scriptures with an innocence and a faith. Not an innocence of intellect that says, I don’t care, I’ll just believe it even though it doesn’t make sense, but a humility that says, God, your ways are higher than my ways. And even though I can’t explain everything, that doesn’t mean that because I can’t explain it, it isn’t true.

For decades, American Christians have wrestled with two errors here. One is a purely intellectual, academic approach to the faith. It creates a real problem when you try to approach God and the Scriptures only through the intellect.

But the answer to that is not anti-intellectualism either. Look at Billy Graham. He may not have been educated at the best schools or had a strong academic background, but he wrote books, studied, and learned. He was not anti-intellectual, not by any means.

The question we would have loved to put to Charles Templeton is this: What does it mean to love God with all your mind, as well as with all your heart and all your soul? Because the Bible is not anti-intellectual. It is just beyond our intellect sometimes.

It is a tragedy that Templeton went down that road.

A Pothole in American Christianity

You have probably seen it too. In some circles of Christianity, it remains a temptation, a kind of pothole in American church life. You find Bible studies where the attitude is, We’re the intellectual crowd. We’re the sophisticated academics.

Academia and faith can hold hands with each other. Mark knows two men who were theologians at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina. They are massive intellects, and they love and trust Jesus with all their hearts. There are plenty of people like that.

But there are also plenty of people like a friend of Mark’s from college. Mark admired him for his strong and mature faith even back in school. He went on to become a New Testament professor and an academic. Mark doesn’t know that he has recanted his faith, but he no longer believes in the full inerrancy of the Scriptures, and that never leads anywhere good in the end. It usually begins a slippery slide. Mark yearns for him, and to be honest, he worries about his faith and about his soul.

The Church Needs Scholars and Curious People

So there are errors on both sides that we need to shore up.

On one side, the church needs scholarship. It needs gifted academics and researchers. We are grateful for real scholars in Greek and Hebrew, in ancient literature and archaeology, and in all the disciplines that help us understand the Bible’s world. We need those gifted people.

On the other side, we don’t need people to be anti-intellectual either. We need curious people.

The gifts of intellect and the mind that God pours into the church are meant to build up our understanding of the gospel and the Word, to the point of emboldening us to action: acts of good works and faith. By faith they did this. By faith they did that. The whole point of the revelation of Scripture is to embolden us to live bold lives of holiness and resolve, with a willingness to suffer, and that is true for the scholar and for the uneducated poor person alike.

Wordle the Word

For anyone struggling to place their faith in the Scriptures, or in God at all, the Scriptures themselves offer affirmation. Some will call that circular reasoning, but the Bible attests that it comes from God. Peter tells us the writers of Scripture did not write on their own; they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. Paul reminds Timothy that all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable.

And the same Bible is honest about how hard some of it is. Peter himself acknowledges that some things in Paul’s letters are hard to understand. Scripture testifies to our human experience of saying, I don’t understand that. I don’t see how that fits.

John likes to describe his own approach to Scripture this way: you wordle the Word. Remember the game Wordle? You observe, and you put things together. When you come to Scripture, you are trying to see the message. How does this sentence line up with that one, and that one with the next, and which one is the action point? You hover, you absorb, and you think. And you recognize that there are places where you will have to say, I don’t understand that. Peter said as much.

Faith for the Easy Parts Too

If there is one admonition we would leave with you, it is this: all of Scripture, even the parts that are easy to understand, needs to be received with faith.

We need to be a people characterized by trusting God, and by understanding that his ways are higher than our ways.

Come join the family of PassionLife, and watch by faith what God is doing around the world.

This article is adapted from the episode transcript.