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I learned something last weekend that just blessed my socks off! (Well, I learned a lot of things last weekend that blessed me, but anyways.) We were learning about how God is true to his promises and the great power that we can operate (yes, you and I). Elijah and Elisha both operated this power. We’ll see just how much in a minute here.

Before we get started though, some people (me) sometimes confuse these two men of God. Elijah came first in the bible, then Elisha. You can remember this because “j” comes before “s” in the alphabet.

(We’ll get to the whole list of which miracles they each preformed in a second here, but one of Elijah’s miracles we had read about leading up to this was that he had God light his burnt offering. The fire burned up the offering and the wood. And the dust around it. And the water around it. And the *stones* around it. It was pretty hot. You can read the whole story in 1 Kings 18.)

So when Elijah was getting was getting tired of being the only prophet of God, so he asked God for some help. And God gave him someone: Elisha.

Elijah and Elisha worked together for a while, and near the end of the records of Elijah, he asked Elisha if there was anything he could do for him:

2 Kings 2:9
And it came to pass, when they were gone over, that Elijah said unto Elisha, Ask what I shall do for thee, before I be taken away from thee. And Elisha said, I pray thee, let a double portion of thy spirit be upon me.

and then a few verses later it says

2 Kings 2:15
And when the sons of the prophets which were to view at Jericho saw him, they said, The spirit of Elijah doth rest on Elisha. And they came to meet him, and bowed themselves to the ground before him.

Note, that it doesn’t say anything about a double portion though. So did he get it? You bet he did! The bible records 8 different miracles that Elisha preformed:

1. Shutting heaven 1 Kings 17:1
2. Oil multiplied 1 Kings 17:14
3. Widow’s son raised 1 Kings 17:22-23
4. Fire from heaven 1 Kings 18:38
5. Rain 1 Kings 18:40
6. Fire on 50 2 Kings 1:10
7. Fire on 50 2 Kings 1:12
8. Jordan 2 Kings 2:8

And care to guess how many miracles it records for Elisha?

1. Jordan divided 2 Kings 2:14
2. Waters healed 2 Kings 2:21
3. Bears from wood 2 Kings 2:24
4. Water for kings 2 Kings 3:20
5. Oil for widow 2 Kings 4:1-6
6. Gift of son 2 Kings 4:16-17
7. Raising from dead 2 Kings 4:35
8. Healing of pottage 2 Kings 4:41
9. Bread multiplied 2 Kings 4:43
10. Naaman healed 2 Kings 5:10
11. Gehazi smitten 2 Kings 5:27
12. Iron to swim 2 Kings 6:6
13. Sight to blind 2 Kings 6:17
14. Smiting blindness 2 Kings 6:18
15. Restoring sight 2 Kings 6:20
16. One after death 2 Kings 13:21

From 8 to 16: a double portion. That very last miracle that Elisha preformed is pretty amazing too, because Elisha died about a year before it happened!

2 Kings 13:21
And it came to pass, as they were burying a man, that, behold, they spied a band of men; and they cast the man into the sepulchre of Elisha: and when the man was let down, and touched the bones of Elisha, he revived, and stood up on his feet.

They were burying a guy and they put him in the same sepulchre (tomb) as Elisha. And as soon as the dead man touched Elisha’s bones, he came back to life! How amazing is that!

Just look at how thorough God is to keep his promises. Even after the man died, God still kept his word! And God is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34), he is willing to do that for each and every one of his believers!

I might in a future post touch on how we are not limited to any number of miracles. That spirit that was “upon” them; that spirit is “in” us! The differenced is pretty big, but the punchline is that I don’t worry about “wasting one” when I fix my shower by speaking to it in the name of Jesus Christ! (Which I did this weekend – that was cool :)

(Major kudos to my Companion Bible – I had half a mind to go and look up all of those different miracles, but E.W. Bullinger had already done it for me! It was in the margin notes, laid out plain as day! :)

In album Moblog

In album Moblog

In album Moblog

I wanted to be able to search the Blue Letter Bible from my firefox search bar the way I can with google.I knew they had a way to add search plug ins to it, so I figured it couldn’t be that hard. I was right.

I followed mozilla’s instructions and it was easy as pie! (Except I used motobits image converter instead of the one they recommended)

To add the search plug in you have to make a web page and put a special tag in that page. Firefox and internet explorer both recognize that tag and add an install option to the search bar at the top. IE even gives you a preview of how it would look if it were installed!

But, since I had to make a web page anyways, I figured I might as well make it look good. And I wanted to play with a couple of cool things I had heard of: the Yahoo CSS grid generator, and the Stripe Generator 2.0 (which both rock, btw)

So I threw together a simple web page, wrote up a quick how-to for installing the plugin, and had it all ready to go in no time! I’m pretty impressed with the outcome.

The web page is nfriedly.com/blb, go check it out for yourself.

I also emailed BLB and mentioned it to them.

That’s it for now, back to work. Bless you all!
-nathan