2 Ki. 4: All I Need Is 4 Miracles

2 Kings 4:35 "Elisha turned away and walked back and forth in the room and then got on the bed and stretched out upon him once more. The boy sneezed seven times and opened his eyes."

Elisha has this whirlwind of miracles. The renewing oil, the widow's son, saving the stew, and feeding 100 people. There doesn't appear to be a recurring theme in all four stories, other than that they are miracles. In three of the four, there is more or plenty where there was nothing, or not enough.

The first one is with the oil. This widow tells Elisha that her husband is dead, and a creditor is coming to take her two boys as slaves. I don't know what that's all about. Slavery was not forbidden, and Israelites could own other Israelites as slaves. At least until Jubilee. Anyway, Elisha has her collect as many jars from her neighbors as she can, and then has her pour her little container of oil into all the jars. Her little jar fills all these other jars up. I don't know how many, but the sale of it was enough for her sons to live on, so it must have been a lot.

Here's a case where someone had very little, and God multiplied it, preserving a family. But it wasn't extravagant, or showy. When the jars ran out, the oil ran out. God didn't give her too much.

Then next one is another barren womb. A woman, out of the goodness of her heart, and probably expecting nothing in return, provides a place for the traveling prophet to stay at her house. Because of this generosity, Elisha promises her a baby. Even though she was old, like Sarai was. But that's not the only miracle. One day her son is working in the field and has a fatal migraine or something. Elisha invents CPR, and restores the boy who was dead (v. 20). Its a rather bizarre ritual, Elisha stretching out on top of the boy, completely covering him. It was total. The boy came back to life. Would the Shunnamite woman be satisfied if the only miracle was her actually having a son? If God hadn't restored the boy, what would she have thought, after she was done grieving? I think the faith she had in sending for Elisha is pretty amazing. She knew this wasn't the end of it, as her husband probably did. Also of interest is the inadequacy of the actions of his servant Gehazi, who Elisha sent first to touch his staff to the boy's faith. Why didn't that work? Did Elisha know that this would fail? Its an interesting question to me.

The next one is a little strange. There's this gathering of prophets, and of course they get hungry. The servant gathers gourds to put in the stew, but it freaks out the prophets who calim there is death in the pot? Death? Was it gross? Or too thin? Would people have died? Elisha calls for flour in the pot, and it counteracted the death. Weird, man.

The final miracle is kinda similar to the first but different. A man brings Elisha 20 loaves of barley bread and some heads of grain to feed a hundred men. And at first blush, it looks like enough to me. How big does a loaf have to be to feed 5 men? Pretty big. Apparently, this twenty wasn't going to cut it.

The prophet says the LORD told him, "They will eat and have food left over." In this case, God provides the plenty, but then goes beyond that. Why? Was it important to God to show that he can give more than what we need? Should we expect that from him?

And God solves problems differently than I would. In the first miracle, I'd just poof some gold into existence so the lady could pay the creditor. In the second...I can't really imagine a way I'd do something different, except I wouldn't let the boy have a headache. In the third...I'd just poof some stew into existence. In the fourth...a hundred sandwiches. And why wouldn't the bread just keep appearing in the basket? Maybe it did. I don't know. I'm not God. I didn't write this thing.