The Long Day of Joshua - Chuck Missler

acts 17:11 as you are well aware by now is where Luke reminds you not to believe anything chuck Missler tells you but rather to be like the Bereans in on the one hand to receive the Word of God with all readiness of mind but to search the Scriptures daily to prove whether those things be so and I love to cling to that scripture because first of all it will put you where you ought to be that is checking what the word says rather than any crazy scheme that I should surface I also like that passage because it helps relieve the responsibility off of me as a teacher I maintain that I'm not a teacher I've read what James and some of the others say about teachers and that's a little heavy so I don't call myself a teacher I I dug that Appalachian when it's thrown at me but rather I regard myself as having a gift perhaps to stimulate you to get excited and interested into your own study so my real motive tonight especially will be to try to stretch your horizons broaden your viewpoints or as how Lindsay sometimes accuses me of blindfolding your prejudices I love that phrase of his he described he use that once of me as a perhaps a unique gift the idea is is that many of our problems in understanding the scripture are born of our own myopia our own notions nothing can be more disastrous than our own presuppositions and constraints so the main thing we're going to do tonight is we're gonna go way off in left-field I'm gonna share with you some things those my critics often accuse me of this sort of thing and tonight they'll be correct I'm really going to go off in left-field my only excuse is that I think the side we're going to take will be stimulating will broaden your horizons and allow you to come back at the scripture perhaps with a look a more refreshed point of view I'm going to share with you some findings and theories and ideas that may not be correct but will be useful nevertheless in showing us things that we just presume without challenge and so obviously I'm using as I'm using Joshua chapter 10 that is the long day of Joshua is my excuse we read it last time we were together and we'll course look at it again before the evening is over but I'm really going to use that as an excuse to explore some background some some ideas that have become very very meaningful to me in fact frankly in reviewing my old notes and references that I used some years ago reviewing them again for this session I have to be candid with you I've just have been fascinated with some of the things that have been available for some time I'm just not sure they're you know most of us is even those technicians in the field are probably unaware and what has come out of all this for me at least is to make real those people that lived so long ago you and I have a tendency to look back at the Egyptians or Canaanites or hammerites or Assyrians or whatever sort of artificially I think most of us tend to view them as being so far back in time that their quaint unreal stick figures written on monuments and and so forth I think when we begin to realize what they were up against I think we're gonna have a much greater sense of reality as to what they were faced with now you know everybody when they read the scripture probably has their own unique little problems in other words as you go through the Bible and you see various things in the Bible some things that don't bother you may hang up somebody else and something that something hangs up your friend may not bother you everybody I imagine if we had a little contest everyone if I ask you what but what the thing that you have the hardest time with in the Bible what's interesting if we collected those little slips of paper you probably find a lot of different points of view in other words some people would say gee I I like the Bible I understand but I really have a tough time with angels I have a tough time relating to the reality of angels others of you may say that's no problem but I really have a trouble with the Noah's Flood or this letter the other thing or the six days of Genesis that's that'd be a popular item imagine most people's minds but and I'm and it's uh we all probably have our myopia or hang-ups with something in the scripture that we believe because God says so but we may have a tough time visualizing it well for you and I in our modern scientific age probably have to admit to ourselves that we kind of have a tough time with a long day of Joshua I mean it's one thing for Jesus to walk along the shores of Galilee and heal a leper we sort of can relate to a medical kind of miracle I think most of us probably can we can talk about winning certain battles with the Lord intervening or putting the enemy to confusion there are many things that we can sort of deal with because there perhaps in the psychiatric or medical or biological arena and but when we come to something as cosmic as the idea that the Sun Stood Still where Joshua needs more time during that Bay so he prays to God to have the Sun stand still and it does well we have kind of a hang-up with that and may the commentators try to work with the language and says gee son be thou silent which is one reasonable construction of the Hebrew and that's neat if that was all it was said but it's all the way through there you know it's clearly some interesting things happened on that day we have a tough time because we can't really quite visualize the son standing still in fact the quaint critics like to point out that that was just an evidence of the myopia of the ancient writers that because we know the Sun doesn't move it's the earth that's spinning and so for that to happen the earth has to stand still or slow down or something and of course the fact that he tells the Sun to stand still and the moon on that same day because they're both visible the Sun over Gibeon and the moon over the valley of a Jalan indicates that maybe Joshua wasn't so dumb and we still speak of sunrise and sunset so I don't think the quarrel with his use of idiom but obviously the more exposure you have to the solar system or planetary movements and what-have-you probably the more trouble you have coming to grips with the idea of the long day of Joshua and by the way your problem the not stop there because there's also the thing that comes up later in the sundial of a house where Hezekiah is given an extended lifetime and the Lord to prove it to Hezekiah that he heard his prayer and so forth gives him a sign he lets the shadow of the sundial go back 10 degrees and we have trouble with that for the same reason now there you can figure well gee maybe he altered the atmosphere to alter the refraction of the Sun to move I mean we can sort of maybe you know the idea of stopping the earth in its orbit or in its rotation on its spin axis there's a little heavy I mean we can quickly visualize what would that happen to the earth if you slowed down its rotation for a little bit let alone have it go backward or what have you so most of us probably whether we admit it to our pastor or not sort of skim through those passages figuring well let's get on with the next story I mean it's a-you know we don't like we say gee the Bible's literal it has no errors and yet there are certain passages that have to be sort of a bone in our throat when our neighbor says hey do you really believe this stuff and we start Lee say of course and yet they're probably a little hard pressed to explain that so it's in that spirit I want to share with you some things that you might find interesting and this happens to be a very timely subject because we're hearing a lot about Halley's Comet these days it's interesting when you go back in history when Halley's Comet passed near the earth how it was prominent in advertising and so forth people whenever Halley's Comet makes its pass what is it once every 76 years or some such thing it's a big to-do right well I can tell you candidly except unless you're an astrophysicist or an astronomer I think Halley's Comet is going to be a big fizzle because you're gonna have a tough time finding it if you can see it isn't gonna be too exciting unless you're sending something up there closer to get a better look at it but this raises an interesting question that ought to be bothering you because as we study the ancient cultures and I mean all of them the Hindus the Chinese the Romans the Teutons the the you know and I and and and what-have-you we can't help but notice and I'm going to take you through some examples that they were preoccupied with the plants really preoccupied with the plants and you know we have the city of Rome founded on the whole concept of Mars is the God of War and we have the names of our days of our week the months of our calendar but more importantly the gods they worshiped all these ancient cultures worshiped all kinds of gods with different names but when you peel behind those names you discover it's always Mars Venus the other planets that are operative as the gods they worship now that ought to bother you not that they don't worship weird things it's amazing what men will choose to worship okay in fact one of the most amazing things to get a little bit sidetracked on our side track here is some great intellectual minds who have a tough time accepting the Bible and Jesus Christ as the Son of God we'll then after rejecting that take up and if you'll excuse the expression the damnedest things to worship okay begin into the Eastern religions and they get into all kinds of bizarre substitutes but don't let these odd things of the past blind to the fact that the man and woman of the ancient cultures almost universally around the earth for thousands of years was terrified of the planets by their various names now you can put together a myth the culture a belief system but it gets modified as time goes on it gets watered down it gets mixed up with other things why is there this consistent terror and yielding to the planets you know the ancient kinda dramatized what I mean those people didn't have telescopes that didn't come in till 1610 or so in Galileo and the telescope so we live in a day where we got telescopes binoculars you can go to every toy store and pick up an instrument that one of the guys as recently as a few hundred years ago would give his left arm for so we live in an enlightened age NASA man on the moon the whole routine right would you feel that you're more educated about the solar system than they were probably could you find Mars in the night sky tonight if your life depended on it I don't think so or Venus maybe Venus was a little brighter and so forth but mercury Saturn Jupiter could you find them and yet these people without the education you have lived in terror of them that's ridiculous but it ought to sort of put a flag in our mind that something doesn't compute hmm now one of the reasons we have a problem is that we're victims if you will of a guy by the name of Manuel Kant who wrote the general history and the nature of the nature and theory of the heavens in 1755 and Immanuel Kant as a philosopher and a writer proposed a concept that has been carried down throughout our culture to the present day I would imagine some substantial portions of the greatest minds on the earth today in the Western civilization subscribed to the principles of Immanuel Kant and his basic concept is that this that the solar system grew out of gas that congealed around planets and Sun and so forth and and it came together by natural causes it's this is part and parcel if you were of the old the general flavor of evolution and we say that when we speak of evolution we mean biological you know the Darwin kind of thing which is a biological thing but even broaden it the same concepts that is summarized in what is would be called uniform uniform ism when we look up in fact you'll hear you listen when you hear movies or newscasters when they talk about that which is really certain they talk about the Siberia of movements by which time is reckoned they take for granted we all do that the planets and their satellites and the Sun and the stars are predictable dependable reliable there's nothing as certain as a Sun rising and setting and the movements of the earth as it spins around its axis that is revolves around its axis and then I should say excuse me rotates around his axial axis and revolves around the Sun and it's 365 and a quarter days journey throughout what we call the year and as we talk about all these movements with the most amazing computers there precisely predictable and so we have a presumption that's always been that way and all the theories and all the philosophies that you've probably been exposed to subtly and overtly imply uniform ISM and that's a legacy we owe Immanuel Kant and others and it's the basic premise upon which our general cultural background is based except we've got some problems if you do any current reading let's not be too current by the way some of these concerns go back and some of them are very timely today the whole concept of the origin of our solar system as it's generally presented in the National Geographic or in our school textbooks doesn't deal with some very serious questions we have nine planets that revolve around the Sun they have incredibly different densities and it turns out the more you try to explain those densities the more difficult they are because they don't fit any theory to give you some idea of the variants Saturn which is a huge satellite has a specific gravity of 0.7 one that is if you had it here it would float in water okay and and there's others that are that are very very heavy that the variation is enormous but more importantly they all have different spin rates if they evolve through some kind of initial initial bang or what have you why don't all why are they all spinning it at different rates Jupiter or the biggest moves in a forward direction and in about ten hours Venus goes backward in about 242 days see the directions and the rates are dramatically different and no one has the more you try to study this by the way Venus is also resonant with the or the earth which is kind of interesting with your Earth's orbit almost very close in recent day the the the County Congress that investigated the extraterrestrial intelligence conference between the Soviet scientists in the u.s. scientists 1971 that the papers which are fascinating reading as these unbelieving scientists get together to speculate about life in the universe they intrinsically argue about the very origin of life as we know it here and they play in the solar system they point out its unique event with no statistical basis but they're one of the things they point out that they cannot explain one of the big problems in cosmology is why do the planets have 98% of the angular momentum when the Sun has 99% of the mass as you start attacking these things mathematically you come up with all kinds of insoluble problems so the first thing that gets our attention is the scientific theories that deal with cosmology have more problems than answers so let's get the whole concept of the gaseous hypothesis of Kant raises the question why any of these things should be spinning in the first place let alone in different rates in different directions there's also the issue of diverse tilts they all tilt at different angles and spin at different rates except Mars and the earth the earth happens to be about anyway about 24 to Mars has an angle it's tilted about 24 degrees and the earth about 23 and 1/2 degrees that's not precise of you in in in later on my notes well it's actually well I'll find it exact if you want it more precise I don't have a summer here why do some of the planets have satellites and others don't have any these are all the more you think on these subjects the more trouble they are why are the eccentricities of the orbits and the semi-major axis that is the line of AB cities and the ecliptic plane all different yr8 of the planets in one ecliptic plane and Pluto's quite diverse something that's just beginning to be analyzed in relatively recent years is the recognition that the orbits of all the planets have a resonance there's a concept of orbital resonance now in case you don't know what resonance means if I have two tuning forks say that are both tuned to the middle C and on the piano okay and if I hit one across the room and it you hear the tune that the tone of middle C if I have another tuning fork that's tuned to the same frequency and if I listen closely it'll start to resonate with the one that's across the room there'll be sympathetic vibrations between the two because their physical properties or such as to make them resonate with one another when you tune a radio you simply are putting a circuit in the radio in resonance with the circuits that of the transmitter it's generating the broadcast the whole confident tuning a radio has to do with resonance so the concept of resonance in physics has been understood for as long as we've had serious studies in physics but what's interesting is it's only in recent years with our computers and our orientation to space travel that were really starting to study the concept of orbits being in resonance all physical bodies have mass and gravitational effects when you have man objects rotating in space around orbits and they come near each other they influence each other and so it's not surprising to find these orbits somewhat in residence Saturn to Jupiter to Mars to earth are in a ratio of 2 to 5 to 30 to 60 or putting another way Jupiter Mars and Earth are 1 to 6 to 12 now something you may have noticed there G Mars and the earth are almost 2 to 1 unchanged approximate by the way these aren't quite precise one reason it hasn't been noticed in the past is that the ratios are not perfect they're imperfect but it's interesting that they're almost in resonance and we're going to come back to the Mars Earth orbit in a minute now why am I getting into all this well the first point you should recognize is that our concepts of our solar system are frail when you examine them closely they don't stand up to scientific scrutiny and so there's a lot if you're in the field of cosmology there's lots of dialogue and concerns about all of these things and you'll find they have more questions and answers this angular momentum thing may bore you to death but let me tell you candidly among cosmologists it's not really insult in unsolvable problem now you and I aren't scientists we don't have computers at home that can handle celestial mechanics and so forth most of us wouldn't know a pavilion or perihelion or a perigee or something if it our life depended on it but I tell what we can do we can take a look at the moon through a telescope now if you want to propose the idea that the solar system was orderly smooth constant free of difficulties in its origin you look at the moon and that poor guys been beat up a bit there are so many craters there are so there's so much scar tissue on that guy he's been in some bad fights for a long time no one can sell you at them whatever you know instinctively but looking at that you can tell it was it is a victim of catastrophe a buffeting of things that always haven't been uniform and separated if you fly coast to coast from LA to New York during the day rather than a night flight you'll probably fly in your Flagstaff Arizona and your pilot make conversation will point out to you near Winslow Arizona a thing they call the meteor crater okay you probably have seen it if you haven't you will it's a you'll see it in postcards and text there is a moon like crater in Arizona that clearly appears to be just exactly what the moon looks like it looks like it's been hit by a meteor it's probably been a bolide rather a meteor but that's a technicality meteors are made of iron nickel and silicon and they they are hard like rocks they sometimes will burn up completely before they hit the earth but in general they're like rocks a bolide as a material is a meteor that is made of combustible material when these things come into our atmosphere about 30 thousand miles an hour they tend to burn and explode and in 1908 in Siberia there was what most people did that some people call a comet or a meteor but if you're technically correct it was probably a bolide that was heard hundreds of miles away and maybe thousand miles away it scorched forests for like over a hundred miles and distance and fortunately it was an uninhabited portion of Siberia but there was all kinds of evidence and it's it's been much writing written about if you're in this interested in this sort of thing so what am i leading up to well you've probably been wondering yes well you and I are victims of uniformitarianism in effect on the other hand if we look around the earth we'll discover that there's all kinds of evidences that the theories we've been growing we've grown up with don't fit one of the examples and I'm gonna give you a list of some paradoxes that people have been pondering people who have nothing else to do but ponder these things is there's a lot of evidence that the earth at one time had a universal climate you've probably read about the prehistoric animals that have been encased in the ice in Siberia that have even food in their digestive tracts which proves they were not only frozen but frozen very quickly and they didn't decay in other words and there's evidence that at one time the arctic areas have evidence of a tropical climate and there's all kinds of theories about how that happened that there wasn't ones either a universal climate or the earth rotated differently or what have you but that's an enigma more importantly for your interest in mind there's something else that's worth noting and that is that every ancient culture had a 360-day calendar the Mayans the Aztecs the Chaldeans the Hebrews the Chinese the Hindus the Egyptians the Carthaginians the Etruscans the Phoenicians that Tilton's all had 360 day calendars with 30 days per month because the implying that the moon also rotated on a 30 day basis up until about 701 BC something happened for two from from about 2500 BC which is the earliest reliable records we have - about 701 BC all ancient cultures seem to get along pretty well with a 360 days calendar 12 months of three days each something happened apparently in 701 BC that caused all these calendars to need adjustments each culture addressed the problem differently Rome was founded about 70 750 BC and maybe as a result of some of the things we're going to talk about and the second Emperor first Emperor is kind of a brigand that the second Emperor adjusted their calendar by adding five days to each year to get 365 and a quarter days they also added a leap year subsequently in what-have-you the Hebrews did something else they added a month every five or six years to inter calorie month the Phoenicians did their trick the Etruscans there is each calendar dealt with the the inadequacies of a 360-day calendar after 701 BC different ways why no it's interesting if you read the rabbinical literature the Talmud the mission of these kinds of things they all wonder why Hezekiah added the month the way he did and he did it in kind of a strange way and all the rabbis argue why he did it the way he did what's fascinating is no one asked why did he have to do it in the first place why wasn't that 360-day calendar that had served them well for so long no longer valid something else that is observed and that is that if we examine the ancient records in Babylon we discover that there's four naked-eye planets visible in the little inscriptions not five there's also some suggestions but it's inconclusive that the earth rotated the other way around this comes to do with some star maps that are found there and things in the implication from some of the sketches is that the Sun rose in the West and set in the east which is a little disconcerting there's all kinds of evidence on the earth that the polarity of the earth has reversed there's iron deposits and other things which suggest more than once the polarity of the earth has changed now what am I getting at well there is a book which is probably wrong but fascinating reading that was published in 1950 the title of the book was called worlds in collision by a writer by the name of Immanuel Velikovsky and you can find this book in most secular bookstores he's not a believer he's not a biblically he's not a biblical believer and and so I you may say gee why am i recommending a non-christian book well only for one reason it's interesting reading this guy published a book in 1950 that at first was laughed at by many of the classical scientific establishment but as thirty years have gone by you'll discover there increasing numbers of serious articles about the validity of his theories his particular hypothesis is probably wrong but his awareness of the problems and his unearthing of facts is staggering his theory to explain all this is that there was a comet that passed near the earth more than once several times and this comet ultimately gets captured by the solar system and becomes the planet Venus why he picks Venus is not important he just that's the missing planet in his mind he points out though that Venus in the comet in the sky would be visible to the naked eye and has horns and sort of a tail and gives rise to calf worship not only in Egypt but also in India and elsewhere that's still with us today in a sense and what he the main thing he does his basic premise is that the earth was subject to catastrophes of of a solar of a cosmological kind and at recently enough to be recorded in the memory of man in terms of his history and his legends and his myths and what he does each course takes the Bible as one of the better records of what happened but only it only is an unbeliever bear in mind he is fascinated with EB primarily focuses on the exodus of Egypt and tries to explain much of what happened there by means of the first pass of this comet but he also addresses the long day of Joshua as the recap you know of some fifty years later and he picks 52 years for certain reasons we're going to find some other reasons why it may not been quite that far there's some dating issues but the main point is is that he in exploring this discovers and documents the legend of the long night among the Mayan Indians The Legend of the long night in China all dated roughly the same time as Joshua's long day and so even though you need not buy his particular hypothesis what he does do is help substantiate the reality of some bizarre events on the planet Earth now he gets into this issue of Friday the 13th it's Velikovsky that points out that the reason Friday the 13th is unlucky is that the 14th of Nisan when the Hebrews had that what we call the first Passover the 14th of Nisan and the Hebrew calendar starts at sundown their day starts at sundown the night that the death angel went through Egypt was the evening of Friday the 13th for the Egyptians very unlucky and gets codified yeah and gets codified throughout gentile history why that's why Friday the 13th unlucky and Velikovsky by doing his this laborious research in the myths and legends of all the cultures you get to get his hands on you know comes up with law stuff he points out the 52 year period between Exodus and a long day of Joshua and links that to the Jubilee year and I don't misunderstand I'm not saying that's valid just interesting that he sees behind us now I'm not here to sell balakov skis hypotheses because he has some real problems in my mind explaining how a comet could select only the firstborn in Egypt to die he does point out that as you pass near these bodies they have magnetic fields that tend to collect debris and as we pass near them we passed through meteor fields and it's not surprising to have our past lies accompanied by meteor showers and that explains how these armies were wiped out and all that sort of thing he's got a bit of a problem with Joshua 10 because the marksmanship was dynamic to have these meteors only kill the Canaanites and not hit one Israeli so now you probably I forget whether he says if I'm sure he ascribed some of that just to editing and so forth so fine that's his view and of course this whole idea of being a predicted prophet a prophetic record that these things were predicted by prophets and recorded is something that is glossed over from our point of view are but we're going to see that God intervenes on behalf of his people and we're going to be just flabbergasted as to how now before we get into some of this I would like to highlight some of the things the Bible says that may surprise the cynic on these things I think we have looked at Psalm 19 before I'd like to us to turn the psalm 19 did we mention this before the last time we met Psalm 19 the son the tabernacle for the Sun if not let me just bear with me if it's a repeat but I'd like you to turn to Psalm 19 and hear what the biblical writer has to say one of the amazing things you're going to discover before we're through this evening is that the Bible is not only more accurate than secular history the Bible will describe things that you and I regard as figurative language and they're not they're eyewitness accounts of what really happened but first of all a broader view let's take Psalm 19 verse 1 says the heavens declare the glory of God the firmament showeth his handiwork and we can take that as a departure to study the mazzaroth that is the zodiac but in Hebrew terms and when we do that we discover that it lays out the gospel of Jesus Christ that's a bizarre idea but a subject for a whole nother evening but also we should not be surprised to see the heavens declare the glory of God as he deals with the nation Israel and we're going to see that before the evening sober but the psalmist goes on just day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night showeth knowledge so your study of the heavens is not misplaced Psalm 19 suggest you do that in fact he says there is no speech nor language where their voice that is the voice of the heavens is not heard their lion is going out through all the earth there's probably a theory of gravitation there if you like but let's go on and their words to the end of the world in them that is the heavens he hath set a tabernacle for the Sun in other words a dwelling place for the Sun which is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber and rejoices like a strong man to run a race his going forth is from the end of heaven and his circuit unto the ends of it and there's nothing hid from the heat thereof I won't digress into the second law of thermodynamics and all that relative of that but what is interesting is the Bible says that the Sun moves from one end of heaven to the other and you will probably encounter people who chuckle at that and say see how quaint this is a victim of the Ptolemaic cosmology Ptolemy argued that the Sun revolved around the earth and of course we're smarter than that today we're the beneficiaries of Copernicus some many thousands of years some well more than a thousand years later pointed out that the earth is going around the Sun and the planet all the planets have orbits around the Sun and Copernicus incidentally was a clergyman sold that I well had a tough time selling that idea but the point is that we were we have what's called a Copernican view of the solar system which of course is astronomically sound and this of course is an anachronism it obviously is a victim of the Ptolemaic cosmology well not really it just says that the circuit of the Sun is from one end of heaven to the end of it and if we don't look at our solar system but the galaxy we recognize that the Sun moves in a twenty five thousand year kind of orbit around our our galaxy the rest of it you see it what we call the Milky Way and so this is accurate now something else I discovered much to my amazement before Ptolemy the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Hebrews also recognized that the planets revolve around the Sun there's all kinds of indications of that so this idea of the Ptolemaic cosmology is a naive point of view it turns out well I don't spend more time here but it might be useful to take a look at Jobe the book of Joe is probably the oldest book in the Bible probably published by Joseph when he was in Egypt and of course interesting to the Hebrews as they increasingly were put under taskmasters the whole idea of suffering why do the righteous suffer that all is quite consistent with the era in which Joseph lived they gradually when the amorite Kings took over Egypt and increasingly you're going to cover the em rights by the way are the source of anti-semitism and the slavery idea and and subjugated when they took over Egypt subjugated the Hebrews the six hundred years of amirite power and Canaan was was finally broken at the Battle of beth horon and joshua chapter ten so there's lot going on there Abraham went when God prophesied all this to Abraham he pointed out the Abraham that after 400 years they would return to to Canaan and what but they couldn't until they sent the iniquity of the EM rights was full in Genesis 15 but we might take a look at Joe because kind of a provocative book if you're interested in cosmology because all through job we have some interesting interesting passages you might turn to to job chapter 9 and he says all kinds of things he says in verse 6 or let's take verse 5 it's it speaks of it he it is who remove the mountains and they know not who over turneth them in his anger you ever seen a mountain overturn we see them shank a lot maybe right if you landslides here and there maybe a volcano or two we don't see them turn over do we so that must be just a figurative language perhaps verse six who shaketh the earth out of its place the pillars of it did tremble who commanded the Sun and it rises not and see lift up the stars and spread out the heavens and and treadeth upon the waves of the sea who maketh icterus Orion and the Pleiades and the chambers of the South who do with great things past finding out yay and wonders without number job is raising some interesting questions here cosmological issues if you will there's more of this but let's just be get a little more you know one step further let's turn to chapters 26 germán chapter 26 verse 7 he stretches out the north over empty space oh really no Turtles our backs of Atlas syrup these quaint ideas that we encounter in the old cultures he hang with the earth upon nothing that could sound contemporary to you that's kind of an amazing insight for a guy that lived at the time of Joseph perhaps and Egypt certainly before the Torah was written he bind it up the waters in his thick clouds in the cloud is not torn under them and so forth verse 11 the pillars of heaven tremble and are astonished at his reproof he divided the sea with his power and by his understanding he Smita through the proud and by his spirit he hath garnished the heavens in his hand hath formed the crooked serpent wonder what the crooked serpent is that's Scorpio could be if we get to chapter 38 of job and I'm just sampling here to give you some flavors because it's interesting to reconcile this with what we're starting to find out about the the world chapter 38 I mean yeah chapter 38 raises some questions and are some fascinating questions I'll have a tough time focusing just what I want to pick out of this let's do it verse 31 he sees the raising question God says canst thou bind the sweet influence of the Pleiades or loose the bands of Orion Kent style bring forth the mazzaroth in its season the word Nazareth means a zodiac but also some evidence that it was ancient hebrew word for the planet Mars which is a whole other subject as we get to chapter 40 and 41 I won't take the time now but you're going to discover in chapter 40 and 41 two strange creatures are mentioned okay the Leviathan in chapter 41 and there's a behemoth there are another kind of strange creature mentioned in chapter 40 and you will find people say that this is a hid pot up hippopotamus maybe and a crocodile but I won't take the time now because we want to get on to other things but if you read that you're gonna have a tough time reconciling that to either the hippopotamus or a crocodile the language is much more bizarre and I'm going to suggest to you after tonight you go back and read that and see if they don't correspond perhaps with what you learned tonight there might be Mars and Mercury Mars and Mercury so now to give you a further insight let me point out we talked about all the ancient cultures worshiping the planets the Phoenician word for Mars was Bale the Phoenician word for Venus was Ashtaroth Mars was the God of War to whom you gave child sacrifices ashteroth was the god of fertility to whom you had sexual orgies and things to get the crops and all that stuff but we while we study from time to time our studies of the Bible bring us in touch with these idolatrous cultures don't lose sight of the fact that there's some reason why they're all tangled up with the planets well enough of this what am I finally driving at I suppose you've been asking not Jed I want to give you a few other things I don't want to pick on any one culture part of what I want to get across see we could pick on the Canaanites and they were Idol worshipers let's take a quick survey let's look at look at Greece some of their ideas retract back to a mathematician by the name of phallus who lived about 642 546 BC and the main gods that that they worshipped were Aries who was a name for Mars in its sting how it if you've studied the ecliptic and how interesting the first and remember that in march is called the first point in Aries the constellation Aries but it may be a pun because areas was also at the different spelling the same pronunciation was in April Mars Aphrodite was a name for Venus Zeus was a name for Jupiter Apollo meant Mars originally but later gets changed to be the son Hermes was mercury Chronos was Saturn and so on again their key gods in Greece were named after planets interesting let's turn to Rome 750 BC the first thing that may strike us cuz we're going to when we get to 701 BC I'm going to develop some things that I'm going to suggest that there was a major catastrophe on the earth that changed the calendar Rome was founded about 750 BC it's on the river tight on the Tiber why is it 15 miles inland and on the host be good port right everybody wonders why it was Rome found on the Tiber 15 miles upstream its where you'd put it if you were afraid of getting hit with 100 or 200 foot tidal waves okay Rome was founded with a preoccupation of the god of Mars we still hear the term martial arts right the God of War Aprilia is a name for Venus my as' was actually named for mercury Juno for Jupiter and so the months are named and so on now and their calendar started in March 21st by the I the the first point in Aries and all that the the top of the vernal equinox later under Janus in 364 ad correction 364 I think it's BC it gets to change the January 1 but for a while March is the key month of the year a lot of the other cultures are going to pick October October 25th is a key date March 21 is a key date why October it gets all to do with Halloween I'll come to the Teutons in north Europe the Teutonic ideas name the seven days of the week that you and I use sonned egg was that the day for Sun Moon dig the a eg if you will is obviously Monday tuyas TI w es ty west day is there a Teutonic name for Mars because you've got the Sun the Moon and Mars next I wonder why then Odin stacked or worden stack becomes Wednesday for Mercury Thor's day Jupiter Thursday fryi Tok who was their name the teutonic name for Venus and of course Saturday for Saturn so the days of the week that you and I use it go back to the teutonic naming of our days wonder why and why is there Halloween October 31 there's a whole thing there about the Druids the celtic year ended at October 31st and they had bonfires and it was a bad-luck time because of fears that surrounded October and there's a you can compare that with the Phoenician themes of bail and asteroth and all of that now some of this Velikovsky take takes on but what I want to do now is share with you something that again may be wrong but it's interesting so just be patient with me three guys published some papers back about ten years ago with over ten years ago gab a Macdonald patent Ronald hatch and Lauren dr. Lauren C Steinhauer and I want their ideas just to stretch your minds I'm not here to sell them but to give you a flavor of their backgrounds patent was a geographer historian an author and has done some writing about creation the Biblical Flood Ronald our patch was a mathematician a physicist an orbital analyst he wrote the computer programs for developing satellite-based navigation he worked with Applied Physics lab John Hopkins University for the Navy satellite program worked for Boeing and Magnavox and others can satellite you know computer models of orbital mechanics dr. lawrence e Steinhauer is a theoretical mathematician he taught aerodynamics and method in orbital mechanics and applied mathematician mathematics at hybrid MIT in the university of washington so these guys are kind of you know neat dudes so they have a high pot they have done some studies and they have a hypothesis that may be wrong but I think it's worth sharing with you they have noticed all the things I've mentioned so far and they're obviously well aware of Velikovsky's work but they have a different view and they have access to different information and Allah Kowski did they notice that if they study the Bible and the Talmud and the Mishnah and the ancient Hebrew records that in the Bible one can identify seven major what they call catastrophes this includes sodom and gomorrah the exodus incidentally they separate the flood as a special situation I won't get into that right now but the and of course they start actually what they do is they start with the days of Peleg the Tower of Babel Sodom and Gomorrha some catastrophes occurred during the days of job the Exodus the long day of Joshua some things that happened the days of Deborah and Samuel two things that happened the days of David elisha joel amos and and the big thing of the big one that we want talk as on Isaiah during the time of Isaiah and 701 BC now when they looked at all of this and they start analyzing if they discover some interesting things they discover first of all that all of these things appear to have occurred in either March or October which is kind of interesting October 25th or March 20th or 21st they also discover that there's about a hundred and eight years or some multiple of that between each one of these and they said gee that's that period is kind of interesting and to get to along to make a long story short they are those couple things that three of them are clear March 20th 21st for their marker on October 25th out of the major seven two of them are clear in the eighth century BC two of them occur in the 15th century BC and two of them occur in the twentieth century so they're fascinated by the fact they seem to some of them you know they seem to occur in pairs and yet separated by multiples of 108 years now I'm going to sort of get ahead of the story but so you can see where I'm headed they notice that Mars has an orbit of 687 days the earth 365 they're not quite two to one they have built a computer model which if correct goes to explain most of what we're going to talk about tonight they believe that there's good evidence to suspect that Mars was originally on a two-to-one orbit to the earth take the earth at 360 days Mars at 720 and overlap the orbits so that Mars the orbit of Mars would intersect the orbit of the earth every March knocked Ober but it would be two to one it would thus intersect the earth every 54 years but not necessarily close by and when they go through this model they notice that on a couple of cases it would pass very closely going back to the days of Jobe it would come within 120,000 miles the earth is about 212 to give you some feeling here let me back up Mars furthest distance from the earth would be about 210 point seven million miles it's way way out there the earth is about 240,000 miles from from the earth the earth to give you some feeling is is at perihelion that is the point it's closest to the Sun it's about ninety million seven hundred thousand miles about eight minutes per the speed of light when it's farthest from the Sun called a pavilion perihelion is when it's close to Sun aphelion is first from Suns about ninety three point seven million miles in other words about three million miles difference from ninety point seven to ninety three point seven million miles Mars would come as close as eighty one thousand nine hundred thousand miles now it's closer to the Sun than the earth certain times and go way further out 210 210 point seven million miles and it's a pavilion but it crosses the earth in two places the orbits do in March in October and she can probably gather from time to time Marge would pass very close to the earth how close well days of Joe about 120,000 miles at his nearest point during the days of exodus sixty thousand miles on an outside flyby in a long day of Joshua about seventy thousand miles on the northern polar orbit we'll come back to that in the days of Deborah about 150 thousand Sammy 150 thousand David two hundred thousand 120 Elisha 150 thousand Joel Amos about hundred twenty thousand you know the days of Isaiah seventy thousand now when something like Mars comes close that close to the earth some impressive things could happen first of all you and I may not realize that there are crustal tides on the earth we know there's water tides by the moon and the Sun and so forth mostly the moon bends closer and they're about two or three inches what max if Mars was ever than seventy thousand miles pass of the earth you would have crustal tides of more than 85 feet that tends to be a little rough on buildings on walls of cities now we're going to discover that the ancients expected this they didn't know how bad it would be but they knew that about every 108 years something might happen and they even planned their battles that way when the Assyrian army camps outside Jerusalem there's some evidence to believe they were hoping there'd be a catastrophe to bring the walls down what they didn't know is a bolide would wipe 185 thousand of them out if a bolide isn't the explanation of the angel described in the in the scripture one of the theories that I'm obviously leading up to is when Mars let's say I forget which way it is if it leads if it leads if it leads the earth it picked it loses energy gives energy to the earth if it lags it picks up energy in other words there's an energy transfer between the orbit of Mars and the orbit of the earth when they come near each other and it is believed by the scientists they have the most data of the most recent one which is 7 1 BC that at that past the last of these 7 it there was enough energy transfer to shorten the Mars orbit from 720 days to 690 there's still three days between then and today something else happened they have some theories but they're not sure the earth went from 360 days to 365 and a quarter so the calendar adjustment they attribute to the near pass of Mars in the days of Isaiah where all these calendars all over the world changed that raises a question of gee if there's that also involves several things with the earth not just the orbit changing but it also involves the spin axis changing the location of the poles changing and and such there's a change in axis it changed the number of days per year at some field reversals and now let me give you a little feeling for well I mean let me focus first of all on ATS on bc 701 at the time we're talking about we have a number of interesting eyewitnesses Rebecca Sennacherib Sheba Micah Habakkuk Hezekiah Manasseh and Isaiah and if you go through the scriptures and pick up the language out of particularly Habakkuk chapter 3 psalm 46 Isaiah 36 and so on and so forth you hear them speak of the mountains melting being uprooted and moved out of their place as you read that as you and I read those passages we call it figurative language poetry and and we ascribe too much of what Habakkuk says in Chapter three is just being literary what will shake you up after understanding the orbital mechanics of what could what could be the explanation for all this they're describing eyewitness accounts of the last of the 70,000 mile passes it might be before see before I get into that let me let me give you some more facts the the current perihelion of well let's see I don't sure if you all these statistics mean a lot to you maybe I should get off this we're going to get into discussions a little bit here of the spin axis and so forth one of the things that's interesting Steinhauer hatch a patent and hatch predict that if this happened on the earth it also probably happened on Mars that is an adjustment of the spin axis and those kinds of things because it's it turns out that Mariner 9 pictures from Mariner 9 shows a number of 200-mile square mile plates on the earth on Mars that have a number of colored lines and one of the theories to explain the colored lines is that it's caption captured frozen dust and it gives rise to the theory that Mars is orbit shift of the axis shifted at least four or five times maybe six or seven times in its history six or seven intrigues me because of the seven passes that hatch and and this had predicted maybe it would be useful to take a look at Habakkuk chapter three now back at chapter 3 if nothing else will be useful because it'll at you find Habakkuk page 953 in your new Schofield okay as you read through this it may be just figurative language of a prophet that's in player and in and in praise and so forth but it's kind of interesting to see that language of Habakkuk who lived by the way about the 7th century BC and he's praising God in verse 3 says God came from teman and from the Holy One four-month Ron Schara his glory covered the heavens and the earth was full of his praise his brightness was like delight he had horns coming out of his hand and there was and there was the hiding of his power before him went the pestilence and the burning coals went forth at his feet and he stood and measured the earth and beheld and drove asunder the nation's and the everlasting mountains were scattered and the perpetual Hills did bow his ways are everlasting I saw the tents of Kushan in affliction and the curtains of the land of Midian did tremble was Lord displeased against the rivers was thine anger against the rivers was thy wrath against the sea that thou didst ride upon thine horses my chariots of salvation thy bow was made quite naked according to the oath of the tribes even thy word and he and he goes on like this the mountain saw thee and they trembled the overflowing water passed by and so on the Sun the moon's Stood Still and their habitation at the light of thine arrows they went at the shining of thy glittering spear now it's march through the land and indignation that did Thresh the nation's in anger and so on this is this is Habakkuk it sounds like he may have been an eyewitness as the suggestion okay if you read Mike a chapter 1 we won't take the time now in chapter 7 6 and elsewhere you'll find that Micah makes reference to catastrophes in sodom and gomorrah Exodus and a long day of Joshua before in talking about a situation that he's facing there and he wrote approximately the eighth century BC you but you might turn to psalm 46 we all know psalm 46 we encountered from time to time but in this spirit it's kind of interesting to see the the prayer of the psalmist here God is our refuge and strength a very present help in trouble therefore we will not fear though the earth be removed and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea hey that's not your everyday worry is it though the waters thereof roar and be troubled though mountains shake with the swelling thereof hey you can talk about volcanoes and stuff but doesn't come close to what he seems to be afraid of there is a river the streams thereof shall make glad the City of God the holy place of the Tabernacles the Most High God is in the midst of her and she and she shall not be moved God shall help her in that writerly the nation's raged the kingdom's were removed actually removed he utter if his voice the earth melted the Lord of Hosts is with us the God of Jacob is our refuge Sayla come behold the works of the Lord what desolations he hath made in the earth he maketh war his decease unto the end of the earth he breaketh the bow II cut it the spear asunder he burn it the chariot with fire be still and know that I am God I will be exalted among the nation's I will be exalted in the earth the Lord of Hosts is with us the God of Jacob is our refuge there are these kinds of passages in the Psalms and you read these well see it's a little flowery language maybe a little you know poetic license maybe not maybe not maybe that's written to a people who had something to sweat no we could go through more of these things Isaiah 13 is a good chapter and you know maybe that's not let's not shortchange this this is as long as I took you to Velikovsky and and that the Stein our book let's not shortchange them the more reliable record namely the Word of God itself so let's just take sort of a swing through let's talk to Isaiah a little bit we could go into others didn't the mic and what-have-you but let's take Isaiah trying to chapter 13 okay and just sort of here Isaiah a little bit chapter 13 verse 4 the noise of a multitude in the mountains as of a great people it tumult of snows of the kingdoms of the nations gather together the Lord of Hosts must rip the hosts of battle they come from a far country from the end of heaven given the Lord and the weapons of his indignation to destroy the whole land now this could be of course prophetic in terms the end time or it might be and maybe it's double both in other words maybe it's the end times maybe it's cosmological or maybe it's both and speaks of the day of the Lord of course now get down to verse 13 therefore I will shake the heavens and the earth shall remove out of its place oh really I mean the orbits changed yeah and the wrath of the Lord of Hosts and in the day of his fierce anger and uh and on he goes we might turn to chapter 24 let's turn to chapter 24 of Isaiah the interesting verse that opens chapter 24 behold the Lord maketh the earth empty and maketh it waist and turn if it upside down and scatters abroad the inhabitants thereof now that might be future that might be you know a revelation correlated kind of verse or maybe it had something to do with the Tower of Babel or maybe several we can skim on here but let's just pick it up about verse 18 and shall come pass on that day he that flee it from the noise of the fear shall fall into the pit and he that cometh up out of the midst of the pit should be taking this snare for the windows of the from on higher open in the foundations of the earth do shake the earth is utterly broken down the earth is thoroughly dissolved the earth is moved exceedingly now this might refer to you know endtime stuff no question about it but notice verse 20 and the earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard and shall be removed like a booth and the transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it and it shall fall and not rise again and shall come to pass in that day the Lord for shall punish the hosts of the high ones that are on high and this is obviously in time in many ways the earth showreel to and fro how interesting does that sound like a wobble like an adjustment in the precession of the earth there's evidence that the latitude of Jerusalem has changed at least five maybe twelve degrees over the last several thousand years and one of the explanations is a shift of the poles shift to the precession a shift of the location of the poles and a change in the spin axis there's about a five minute difference in the day by the way if that really bothers you no wonder the day seemed shorter the day or we can we can look at chapter 28 and pick up a few things verse 2 behold the Lord like a mighty and strong wind like a tempest of hail and destroying storm like a flood of mighty waters overflowing shall cast down to the earth with a hand and goes on well there's more one more 34 chapter 34 might be an interesting stop by as we sort of swing through this you might look at verse 4 of chapter 34 Isaiah on all the hosts of heaven shall be dissolved in the heaven shall be rolled together like a scroll and all their hosts shall fall down and like a leaf fall up from the lines just like a falling fig from the fig tree these of course are possibly very likely in time day of the Lord prophecies on the one hand on the other hand they may also have had a more local fulfillment than either one of us have ever suspected okay now getting back to the the idea of this Mars near pass I want to dramatize that a little bit for you if Mars comes that close as a perturbation obviously the Earth's orbit there's an energy transfer and there's two kinds of opportunities with if the Mars is little ahead of the earth getting at the junction point or a little after the earth and especially if it's a polar orbit it comes over the North Pole it really alters things and so that when you go through the orbital mechanics it explains something like 30 to 45 days lost in one case and on Mars case and the earth three to four days and that explains incidentally the Mars going from 720 down to 690 there's still three days because today at 687 there's the supposition that it's all so entangled with Jupiter in some respects what we see is the solar system of its efforts settle down and gotten in balance what the history of the earth may still have record of is while it was still going through some adjustments and that's really what patent had Hatchin Steinhauer suggests reversal of geomagnetic fields a severe crustal tides have mentioned that severe tidal waves and a wobble of course our change of precession of spin axis polar migration change in tilt and change in spin rate now let's talk about 701 BC according with the computer model would have predicted on the 20th of March in 701 BC about two hours after sunrise at 8:00 a.m. well it see mathematically it's just after Sarah we see coming out of the Sun about that time Mars with its dark side to the earth but a very thin Crescent extremely bright it's gradually overtaking the Sun on an inside flyby at the midday at about 6 p.m. in Palestine it would be at about 70,000 miles it would appear about 50 times the size of the moon in area okay it was about 8:00 p.m. start to be diminishing it would have started going further away by this time you'd see three quarters of it as a crescent this is at night be pretty bright it's reflecting the Sun of course we'd see about 80-foot crustal tides bo lot we would be have we will have entered in anticipation both before and after the magnetic sheet around Mars which is carrying all this debris asteroids probably from a fragmented planet called electro which is a speculative mathematically there's a missing planet and they think it broke up because when two of these things get within certain radii of each other the gravitational poles will fraction eight one of them and they think that's what happened to two to our planet which the arbitrarily call electric but the point is these these bowlines and meteors enter the earth about 33,000 miles an hour and cause all kinds of interesting things that happen about five a quarter days are picked up on the Earth's orbit 70 percent of that of the of the that is from orbital expansion and about 30 percent do the spin rate increase and so on and this gets into a whole discussion of the the Sun Dial of Ahaz which shows up in second Kings 20 I won't take the time now it ends up or by though excuse me about of the five and a quarter days about three and a half to four days are accounted by this passed by alone now the earlier passed by is probably added a day or two but it wasn't often enough to really get everybody shook up you with me total of five and a quarter end up being needed before it's all over now we know the most about the one in Isaiah cuz it's 701 BC it's most recent best documented in a variety of ways custom as I say accompanied with tidal waves and what-have-you as we go back through history biblical history the further back we go the less certain we are other than the computer model dating and what they have done at some length is to try to integrate the evidence from not only the scriptures but the Talmud and the rest and they can pretty well the long day of Joshua appears to have occurred on October 25th and if it happened probably 1404 BC now what's interesting here too by the way before we leave this idea is to talk about the Phaeton myth there is a strange myth in Greek mythology in the case of Phaeton and there is the same myth among the Maori tribes in New Zealand and the Greeks called him Phaeton he's the son of Helios in their structure and he was responsible for a chariot they called the Sun in in Murari legends the guy's name is Maui probably I guess it's the same name after the island of Maui that's all another issue but the story the Greek mythology has Phaeton who's the son of Helios he wants the car hey Dad can I Drive the car tonight ok he talks Helios up against his better judgment to take the chariot of the Sun wraps his hand so he won't get scorched takes over the chariot of the Sun and as he starts driving it through the zodiac he loses control the steeds go out of control they bang a couple against a couple of constellations and Zeus seeing that unless he did something is going to scorch the earth and destroy it strikes him dead with a thunderbolt and from that point on Helios never let someone take the car out again now in this whole legend and then in the folklore of the Greek mythology this Phaeton myth has been much studied by the cosmologists because they build there's some in the details that I'm sparing you of the legend as to which constellations he bumped into and so forth there is a striking similarity to the time of Joshua and the day of the Sun and so forth we're incidentally according to their model it isn't that the earth reversed its rotation as Velikovsky suggests which is a bit extreme they point out that all you have to do is adjust the spin axis a little and that lengthens the day the Joshua talks about and so as a as a piece of thing now some of you are probably saying Chuck that sounds kind of interesting but boring because whoo you can't really believe that Mars came that close to the earth that's all sort of it's cute I incidentally as an aside so you sort of know where I'm coming from I think there's so much that they have discovered and tied together in the model I think the models probably has a lot of credibility but I'm also beneficiary of something else that I haven't shared with you yet how many of you know the stood Jonathan Swift and Gulliver's Travels have you all remember Jonathan Swift and Gulliver's Travels you probably never realized how valuable that book would be to you tonight but tonight I'm going to share some things with you Jonathan Swift was an Irish wit or satirist he published a series of stories fiction stories that he the travels of Lemuel Gulliver and he goes to all these interesting place and most of us remember a little of the little place of the little tiny people but there's a a place called La Putin where Gulliver travels and what Gulliver discovers there is that the astronomers in this land described in Gulliver's Travels make fun of the earth because they've discovered the two moons of Mars and in the story of Gulliver's Travels these guys mention the size and the orbits and the details of the two moons of Mars and know what's interesting here is they don't get them quite right because by today's astronomers they'll tell you that actually Phobos the Phobos and Deimos are the two two satellite there's two satellites of Mars Swift's said they were about twelve thousand four hundred twenty miles in effect and they we now know they're only about eight thousand Swift said they had a ten hour period around Mars but we now know it's actually seven hours and 39 minutes a demo switch Swift said was about twenty thousand seven hundred miles in effect we know it was actually sixteen six seventy and he said that period was about 21 and a half hours in the opposite direction of the previous one we know it's actually 30 hours and 18 minutes in the opposite direction of previous one so Swift was a little bit off but let me tell you some interesting things Swift published Gulliver's Travels in 1726 might just remember that day the telescope was invented by Galileo in 1610 okay and he discovered with that telescope in 1610 four moons of Jupiter pretty neat because they're pretty bright and pretty conspicuous he also discovered Saturn's rings now this is 1610 essentially we can move along to about 1781 when Sir William Herschel discovered Uranus 1787 where he discovered the two moons of Uranus in 1789 we discovered the two moons of Saturn leviair in 1846 discovered Neptune and its moon Triton now recognized 1610 the telescope invested invented Jonathan Swift writes and talks about the two moons of Mars in 1726 right it's some 50 years or more later that Herschel discovers Uranus and their moons and so forth 1846 which is 120 years after Gulliver's Travels he discovers Neptune it's one moon it's not until 1877 a hundred and fifty one years after Jonathan Swift published Gulliver's Travels that a guy by the name of Asaph Hall in 1877 shocks the world by using the staff of the United States Naval Observatory with a 15 year old telescope that was pretty hot stuff in those days so he says he discovers the two moons of Mars and the world is in shock because all the textbook said Mars had no moons they said that for you know more than a century now why was it so hard to find the two moons of Mars well Phobos is actually only eight miles across it has only a 5% albedo which means it's reflectivity to sunlight is very little it's the darkest thing in the solar system doesn't reflect much light and it's very small it's also fairly close to Mars it's 1/100 the width of the moon I believe the Deimos basically Phobos and Deimos are named fear and panic the reason they are as fear and panic were the the companion of the god of Mars in the ancient mythology now as I point I went through the numbers how Swift was not quite right and modern now what's interesting about this you start scratching your head and say well wait a minute how the Dickens did Jonathan Swift know that Mars had two moons at all a hundred and fifty years in advance did he have a telescope well he could have had Galileo's but if he did find something wouldn't have reported it to the Royal Society rather than just write it as a piece of fiction in his folklore okay and why would people like Sir William Herschel and all the astronomical world in those days be blind to the fact that there were two moons and Mars they all knew there weren't because they looked and not see any so the real question is how did Jonathan Swift know that Mars had two moons it's clear as you read the Swift record although slightly corrupted somehow there was knowledge available the Swift that Mars had two moons they went counter to each other and they were approximately those orbits and so and spins right the only rational answer is that Swift was drawing on some records from earlier folklore that had to have its origin in the eyewitness account if Mars was close enough to see these with the naked eye it would be like 70 80 90 thousand miles away and the Jonathan Swift Gulliver's travel document turns out to be one of several corroborations if you will to the idea that the planet Mars was at one time close enough to the planet Earth that its moons very difficult to see were visible to the a to an eyewitness and somebody in one of these catastrophes wrote down enough to get a feeling for their size and period the period estimates are amazing they're surprisingly close and that record corrupted though it may have been was a piece of folklore but Jonathan Swift could drop on to to you know put his tongue in his cheek and color his satire which color which travels of course is a satire on man and it's institutions and so forth so I think that's kind of an interesting thing as I look at all of this and try to synthesize it sure it expands my view of what the Bible is all about because it makes me a little less uncomfortable with a long day of Josh when we'll come back to that manger before we close but something else just comes home to me you know we look at these guys in their ancient cultures and their abstractions they're little the records on on cute Egyptian monuments are there they're they're sort of unreal people we read about of flat so many thousands of years ago can you imagine these guys living in a world where nothing is certain can you imagine them knowing from their records and from their histories and from the folklore then about every 108 years something weird can happen heavy building cities it ain't permanent because the entire cities get wiped out every 108 years or so and as those that saw it or read the records of their grandparents who saw it or what have you here are these records of how Mars comes up out of the Sun and appears in a matter of a day comes and goes where it's 50 times larger than the moon and it's accompanied by lightning bolts volcanoes eruptions tidal waves meteor showers that land and kill people Bowl ides that explode and wipe out entire country sides all associated before during and after the near miss and that this becomes a repetitive thing the belief that these guys have but I don't think it's been proved is that Stonehenge may do more than just predict solar eclipses and it may it's real purpose may have been to try to predict the next catastrophe scheduled by the ancients there is evidence as they look at it there's hints I should say that the ancient tribes were aware of the cycle at least to some degree and planned their battles accordingly that's one reason they in scouts at different times to take a city because there's a probability that a catastrophe will drop the drop the the walls which would favor the attackers rather the defenders and those kinds of things so as we read the these terrified people's we can't help but be sympathetic and perhaps we can be at least in a humanistic sense a little more tolerant that they would tremble at the names of Mars or Venus or mercury or Jupiter or Saturn because the movements of these heavenly bodies correlated with their future there are upheavals their victories their defeats and as we read these these strange practices of the Canaanites with bail and asteroth obviously we can't condone them because they're blind in the God of Israel who revealed himself as a God who cares a God who redeems the God who intervenes in the lives of men different different scenario we might turn unless we totally take this excursion without at least focusing on Joshua chapter 10 my Joshua chapter 10 let's just skim through it again we did I think last time but that we obviously have the Gibeonites made a treaty that rattled the five kings that to make an alliance in chapter 10 Adonai Zedek king of jerusalem gets his buddies together and they make a league against kid against Gibeon it's interesting start against Jia shoots against Gibeon and so they camp against Gibeon now bear in mind if you from the from Gilgal where Joshua is which is near that we're near the Jordan you go inland a little bit there's Jericho you go uphill a little further as AI you go over the hill and you come to Gibeon and the Gibeonites of course find themselves attacked by this league of these five kings under Adonai zedek and verse 3 whereupon z-tech king of jerusalem sent the whole ham king of Hebron and the pie room the king of Gerar moot and Jaffe and the the king of lay shish and unto the bier the king of Eglon saying come up unto me and help me that we may smite Gibeon for it hath made peace with Joshua and with the children of Israel there's obviously spiritual overtones here too is that when you are at you know when you have allied yourself with with the God of the universe you can expect that your enemies will align themselves against you and that's exactly what they give you Knights discover and of course verse 5 therefore the five kings of the amorite so that is the king of Jerusalem the king of Hebron the king of germ of the king of relationships and the king of Eglin gathered themselves together and went up they and all their hosts and encamped before Gibeon and made war against it so so they lay siege in the uphill in the hills around the valley that and Gibeon Gibeon is up on a slight rise itself verse six and the men of Gibeon senator Joshua into the camp to Gilgal saying relax not thy hand from my servants come to up to us quickly and save us and help us for all the kings of the amorite s' that dwell in the mountains are gathered together against us in the chapter nine they had made this treaty with Joshua and we as recovered then it was kind of a pretty sneaky conniving kind of fraud they perpetrated but nevertheless Joshua made his commitment and they all lived with it and they made this league and they honored it and we get right to chapter 10 and they're already calling their Trump they want Joshua to comin and save them from their previous allies but now they're enemies that are encamped around them now Joshua does a remarkable thing he travels about 15 miles uphill through the mountains with all of Israel in a period of about 36 hours because apparently in fact if you read the battles of the Bible the military analyses of this they're impressed oh the March these guys went right through the night and you'd think they'd be exhausted by the time they get there they really push though so it says verse 7 so Joshua send it from Gilgal he and all the people of war with them and all the mighty men of valor and the Lord said to Joshua fear them not for I have delivered them into thine hand they shall not a man of them stand before thee boy the extent that God goes to the deliver to you is pretty interesting Joshua therefore came unto them suddenly and came up from Gilgal all night no it's an overnight crash program so they marched a whole men of war of Israel March up from Gilgal and they catch them by surprise is a sort of glossed over but obviously the the fire the League of five kings against Gibeon didn't expect this they knew Gilgal was a long way away they probably didn't expect Joshua to honor it in the first place and they probably are all kinds of reasons for believing that they wouldn't keep their commitment maybe because they knew there was some chicanery involved and figured that would nullify it or maybe they figured they were they would spend a day or two having committee meetings or what-have-you or certainly even if they decided to come they wouldn't make it in one day so they obviously were caught by surprise and so that's what happens here in in verse 10 and the Lord routed them before Israel and slew them with a great slaughter at Gibeon and chased them along the way that goeth up to beth horon and smote them to a Zakai and Makeda that's looking a little bit and it came to pass as they fled from before israel and were in the going down to beth horon that's the valley on the other side of the mountains that they going southward that they're going to flee they're just there they're shocked they're surprised so they're in retreat there they're charging down this valley valley of beth horon that the lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Ezekiel and they died there were more who died from hailstones than they whom the children Israel's flew with the sort hailstones from heaven meteorite showers maybe some Bowl IDEs we're not sure these sound like meteors incidentally to the extent that we're correct in the Steinhauer model and that Mars and start to make its appearance early in the morning early in the morning just about sunrise maybe a short li thereafter it all fits because of the whole timing here but also we would be entering into the sheath the the magnetic and gravitational sheath that surrounds the the planet Mars and be encountering the asteroids and what have you that tag along on these orbits and so it's it would be very very cosmological or astronomically if you will astrophysically whatever you term you want to use appropriate to expect these hailstones now where we get into I don't want to make this all sound like it just make sure it happened this way it's kind of impressive held stones because they clobber Israel's enemies we're going to find out later in a chapter that all of Israel returns to Gilgal so apparently the chapter leads us to believe there were no losses now whether it might have been a few minor ones not recorded it's possible but the scripture says are they all of Israel returns so in a in a spiritual sense we accept that that's the holy that the weapon of a spear would have us believe it clearly though there is some very interesting discrimination by these meteorites because they seem to be able to tell an Emer right from a Hebrew and that's better than we could probably do who met either one of them they do pretty well now verse 12 is the one that gives everybody the the heartburn then spake Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the EM rights before the children of Israel and he said in the sight of his real son stand out still upon Gibeon now see it's early it's still there in the in the in the east and a sense stand still and get upon giving and Val moon in the Valley of Agilent agilent's over on the other side the moon is separated somewhere in the valley Evangeline and the Sun Stood Still and the moon stayed until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemy and is that's not written in the book of Jasher and so the Sun Stood Still in the midst of heaven and hastened not to go down about a whole day now this can be explained incidentally by simply the shift of the orbits by the way that's not obvious until you model it and play with it but the point is by shifting the polar orbits and some other things that would cause the Sun not to set in its normal time so you don't really interestingly enough you don't have to have the earth stopped to have this happen that's the fallacy that most of us would assume when you think about it naively but if the polar orbit is shifting and the tilt of shifting combination of those can keep this can extend the day and now what we don't know is what the day standard it says did not go down for a full day is that 12 hours it's about a whole day is that 4 6 8 hours is it hours of daylight there's all those issues and I won't get into that here the the the the studies tend to hit that hit on belicoff ski does and so does the best on our patch models but anyway verse 14 summarizes it in the biblical sense there was no day like that before it or after it that the Lord hearkened them to the voice of a man for the Lord fought for Israel now the Lord is pretty neat because he anticipated this by quite some time because the mechanic mechanics that he invoked are you know put up in advance and that may seem strange and yet shouldn't surprise is because the Lord is outside our time to mean when you have a prayer you're not gonna surprise him he knows what you're gonna pray about this before you ask it and he also knows whether he'll answer it before you ask it and he can have anticipated that so I recommend you pray without worrying about time to me you sees pretty neat that way and think of Joshua at that time because what the Lord had to arrange do take care of the Battle of beth horon was long before you know they crossed the Jordan and long before they were even in Egypt it was the Lord apparently put this all together sometime early earlier he said when he goes into battle he's prepared for it and kind of neat no day like that before it or after it and that the Lord hearkened to the voice of man and fought for Israel I will pick up verse 15 on where they clean up the main idea here is this battle we're going to discover that in the book of Joshua we had of course the Battle of Jericho which is a very special firstfruits kind of battle a lot of mystical overtones we talked about that we had the Battle of AI which they suffered their defeat they repented and corrected it and then succeed and now we have the Battle of that horn what's going to happen now when we get by the end when we get to chapter 12 we'll be through with the battles at the end of chapter 12 essentially a list of all the cities city Kings there's 31 of them those of you that are mystics may know that the word for God in Hebrew is L which numerically adds up to 31 what that's got to do with 31 Kings may have nothing to do with it but you know it's all included in the price of admission right I thought I don't you do that piece of information but alright but the point is is we're gonna discover from this point on that the summaries of the battle get more and more cursory the Holy Spirit is chosen to describe these first three in some detail because each one of them have lessons for us Jericho has its lessons that in my mind point to revelation very strongly AI had spiritual lessons in terms of what it takes to win and lose and that Poron gives us some insight there's just how far God will go to intervene on your behalf and mine but the rest of these battles will be summarized in a more you know cursory fashion as we move in further into the book but I've taken this time together to really go way out of orbit to talk a little bit about some of the the insights we have from current thinking doesn't mean they're right they're not scriptural they're just observations but they do involve synthesis if you will of information about our ancient color cultures and histories and events recorded in in the Bible but also in many other records too that give us a suggestion that the earth was not always the way we seem to have been taught and I think the more we venture into space when you get a chance to page through a picture book a lot of these around of NASA photographs from the Viking Ranger Mariner series and so forth and you see pictures of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and whatever close-ups fascinating yeah pock marks just like the moon and you look at Mars and you find this large gash is 2500 mile valleys that have been carved through by collisions and things and as we look at all this it doesn't take any imagination to realize the catastrophe theory of history if I can call it that makes much more sense than some kind of uniform some clock that's been wound up and been running uniformly ever since some cosmic Big Bang or something clearly there been adjustments and give and take in these orbits and it looks like God may have orchestrated these to serve his purposes to to pace the biblical history and so as we read the scripture it's interesting that you and I with the Bible in our laps can read a record that's more accurate more authoritative more descriptive or precise than the textbooks that we may have been grown up with his kids or that may be in our library shelves today and and perhaps are more accurate than the textbooks that will be revised and put on our library shelves tomorrow that God himself has spoken in in a way that his transcends man theories be they these ones that we've shared today or others and so as we read this in my mind at least and the guy who is basically a technologist and engineer by training I get far less uncomfortable with things like the long day of Joshua or Noah's Flood or what

Channel: Ben Fogelson

Views: 92,683

Rating: 4.7355146 out of 5

Keywords: Missler, Mars, Planets, Bible, Catastrophism, uniformitarianism, Emmanuel Kant, Worlds in Colission, velikovsky, Book of Joshua, Battle of Beth Horon, Miracles

Id: IiU6qMmeX_g

Length: 91min 3sec (5463 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2019