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The work of Elisha, part 21

The Year of Joseph’s Manifestation saw the sixth, seventh, and eighth sign of Elisha between January and July 2010. The sixth occurred on January 7 when David Hogan imparted to me (and others) the promise of a Son (Isaiah 9:6, 7), which fulfilled the sign in 2 Kings 4:11-17.

The seventh sign was about resurrection, and so in late January the news reported a Polish man named Joseph who came back to life after dying. It ran parallel to 2 Kings 4:18-37. In March we held a Joseph conference in San Jose, California.

Later in the year we saw a further sign when the San Jose mine in Chile collapsed, trapping 33 miners for 70 days (August 5 to October 13). Seventy is the biblical number for restoration. The miners all came out of the pit—as if they were being restored from the dead. They were brought up in a capsule called Fenix 2, which suggests the legend of the Phoenix, which rises out of its ashes. All of the miners emerged as believers, according to the news reports.

Elisha’s Eighth Sign

The eighth sign of Elisha is found in 2 Kings 4:38-41,

³⁸ When Elisha returned to Gilgal, there was a famine in the land. As the sons of the prophets were sitting before him, he said to his servant, “Put on the large pot [seer, “pot, cauldron, basin, thorn”] and boil stew for the sons of the prophets.” ³⁹ Then one went out into the field to gather herbs and found a wild vine and gathered from it his lap full of wild gourds, and came and sliced them into the pot of stew, for they did not know what they were. ⁴⁰ So they poured it out for the men to eat. And as they were eating of the stew, they cried out and said, “O man of God, there is death in the pot.” And they were unable to eat. ⁴¹ But he said, “Now bring meal.” He threw it into the pot and said, “Pour it out for the people that they may eat.” Then there was no harm in the pot.

This sign occurred during a famine in the land. In times of famine, only barley had any chance of surviving the drought, because it was much hardier than wheat. So we understood that the “meal” that was put into the pot was barley.

Secondly, the Hebrew word for the “pot” (of stew) is sir, pronounced seer. It means a cauldron or a thorn, which prophetically suggests that this cauldron had become a “thorn in the flesh,” as it were (2 Corinthians 12:7) on account of the “death in the pot.” The sons of the prophets got food poisoning, but the poison was neutralized by the barley that was cast into the cauldron.

The Gulf Oil Spill

This sign was fulfilled in modern times from April 20 to July 15, 2010 through the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded on April 20, dumping billions of gallons of crude oil into the waters of the Gulf. It was finally capped on July 15. The Gulf of Mexico is known also as the Gulf Basin, or “caudron.” In 2010 Mexico’s president was Felipe Calderón. So one might say that this Gulf was the Gulf of Calderón, corresponding to Elisha’s cauldron, which was poisoned by the oil spill.

We discerned that this oil spill was fulfilling the eighth sign of Elisha. However, for the next two months we did not know what to do about it.

The Cauldron Healed

It happened that Stone Kingdom Ministries had scheduled a conference just north of Minneapolis for July 10 and 11. One of the speakers was Fran Fisher, a wonderful Bible teacher with a gift of wisdom. She was from Arizona. I had known Fran for some years, having taught the word at her ranch in Arizona a few times.

Fran had never been to Minnesota, so she asked if she could come a few days early so that she could see the source of the Mississippi River at Lake Itasca. We gladly accommodated her wish, and so the day before the conference, about 30 of us made the trip to northern Minnesota on July 9, 2010.

By this time, I knew that I was to cast barley into the headwaters as it flowed out of Lake Itasca. The river is only a few feet deep at that location, and there is a (flattened) log over the river, where people can cross to the other side. I understood that the barley was the solution to the oil spill problem. The barley would flow down the river to the great Cauldron to neutralize the “death in the pot.”

The group sang some songs at the headwaters, and then I took my small bag of barley meal to the center of the log and cast it into the river. I checked my watch and noted that it was 2:16 pm. That was an interesting number in itself, a number that had come up many times in prophecy, having to do with Joshua the Ephraimite and also resurrection life.

We did not know how long it would take for the “death in the pot” to be neutralized, or healed. We simply did what we were led to do by the Spirit, leaving the results to God. The oil spill was finally capped 144 hours and 9 minutes later at 2:25 pm on July 15, 2010.

https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/deepwater-horizon-bp-gulf-mexico-oil-spill

On April 20, 2010, the oil drilling rig Deepwater Horizon, operating in the Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, exploded and sank resulting in the death of 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon and the largest spill of oil in the history of marine oil drilling operations.  4 million barrels of oil flowed from the damaged Macondo well over an 87-day period, before it was finally capped on July 15, 2010.

The number 144 is the number of “the elect” or “the chosen ones” in the sense of the resurrected saints. In Romans 11:7, Paul uses the Greek term ekloge, which the KJV renders “the election” and the NASB reads “those who were chosen.”  This Greek word has a numeric value of 144. Likewise, the name Lazarus has a numeric value of 144. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead (John 11:43, 44).

The time, however, was precisely 144 hours and 9 minutes. We took note that 144 plus 9 was 153. We had previously seen the connection between 144 and 153, because the Hebrew term, “sons of God” (beni h’elohim) has a numeric value of 153. There is a close connection between the chosen resurrected ones and the sons of God. Furthermore, these are also represented as “barley” in biblical typology. (See my book, The Barley Overcomers.)

So when the oil spill was capped precisely 144 hours and 9 minutes after the barley was thrown into the headwaters of the Mississippi River, we knew that the eighth sign of Elisha had been fulfilled. The death in the pot (cauldron) had been overcome by the life represented by the barley.

Past Precedents

The BP oil spill itself began on April 20, 2010, which was Adolf Hitler’s birthday. We put barley into the Mississippi River on July 9, which first came into prominence in 1984 in our prayer campaign called “Operation Clean Sweep.” I wrote about this here:

https://godskingdom.org/blog/2021/03/my-journey-into-the-prophetic-realm-part-7

https://godskingdom.org/blog/2021/03/my-journey-into-the-prophetic-realm-part-8

https://godskingdom.org/blog/2021/03/the-delayed-calling-part-1

We saw this date resurface on the same date in 2008 as a precursor to my South Africa trip.

As for July 15, the main precedent occurred in 2001, when we achieved full victory after two weeks of spiritual warfare. The warfare we won on July 15, 2001 included defeating Apollyon (or Abaddon), the Prince of Persia. (See The Wars of the Lord, chapters 30, 31.) This victory seems to have established a precedent for the victory in 2010 when the eighth sign of Elisha was fulfilled.

Each year certain memorable dates tend to overlay on each other, as if each incident or battle was being repeated on a higher level or on a greater scale. So on July 15, 2021 we were led to go before the Divine Court with friends from Canada (a zoom call) to do a spiritual work relating to the fall of Jericho. In the Divine Court we officially recognized that all of the gold and silver in the fall of Jericho (Babylon) belongs to God alone and is to be put into His treasury (Joshua 6:19).

This court action built upon the previous victories that took place in 2001 and in 2010.