Standing on the Shoulders of Giants by Steven Brooks Read Free Book Online Page A

financially, but it must come in His timing. Often there are many tests that the Lord will allow His children to go through before He takes them into their wealthy place, but by walking in the love of God and exercising faith and patience, all the promises of God can be obtained.
    Let’s not overlook the
rest of the story
concerning how some time down the road the Lord eventually blessed Elisha with financial abundance.
    Elisha went to Damascus, the capital of Aram, where King Ben-hadad lay sick. When someone told the king that the man of God had come, the king said to Hazael, “Take a gift to the man of God. Then tell him to ask the Lord ‘Will I recover from this illness?’ ”
So Hazael loaded down forty camels with the finest products of Damascus as a gift for Elisha.
He went to him and said, “Your servant Ben-hadad, the king of Aram, has sent me to ask, ‘Will I recover from this illness?’ ”
(2 Kings 8:7-9 NLT).
    God blessed Elisha with forty camels loaded with the finest products of Damascus. A camel’s long, thin legs have powerful muscles which allow the animal to carry heavy loads over long distances. A camel can carry as much as 990 pounds, but a normal and more comfortable cargo weight is 330 pounds. The weight they were carrying is not exactly known, but it’s obvious there were a lot of valuable items taken to Elisha because of the large caravan of camels sent, and the fact that the Scripture tells us the camels were burdened, or fully loaded. Theterm describing the present that was given as the
finest products
can also be translated as
the rarest and most exquisite of the land
.
    Too bad Gehazi was not around when the camels showed up. He would have gotten a whole lot more than two suits and a few hundred dollars that he sold out for. The covenant we have with God through the shed blood of Jesus includes financial provision. We should not make this the primary focus of our lives because it is just one facet of the many blessings of God. But we should not ignore it or apologize for it either.
    The blessing of the Lord brings wealth
, and he adds no trouble to it
(Proverbs 10:22 NIV).
    That leaves us with the question of what happened to the original mantle of Elijah? Elijah passed his mantle to Elisha but we do not find it openly revealed in Scripture who it was that received the mantle of Elisha.
    One thing I have discovered in my walk with the Lord is that nothing from Heaven comes cheap. The gifts of God are priceless and if there is not a qualified candidate to receive them, then the gifts will be kept in holding until the right person is available.
E LIJAH’S M ANTLE —W HERE I S I T ?
    What happened to Elijah’s mantle? Fortunately, we have a reliable and well-preserved Jewish tradition that sheds light onto this mystery. Jewish tradition teaches that after Elisha died, there was not a suitable individual to receive Elijah’s mantle. Upon the death of Elisha, the mantle was taken and placed in the holy place of the tabernacle just to the right of the altar of incense . There it was kept until the prophet Jeremiah removed it from Jerusalem and took it into hiding to protect it from the invading Babylonian armies of Nebuchadnezzar.
    From the time of Jeremiah we skip hundreds of years forward to the time of Zacharias and Elizabeth. The first chapter of Luke’s Gospel tells us that both Zacharias and Elizabeth were old, and that they had no child because Elizabeth was barren. It’s amazing to notice how the majority of the great women of the Bible were barren. Elizabeth, Sarah, Rachel, Leah, Elkanah, Hannah, and the mother of Samson were all unable to conceive seed. Yet, God did a miracle in each of their lives and they all became pregnant and gave birth.
    Zacharias was of the priestly order of Abijah and was chosen by lot during his week of service to burn incense when he went into the temple. As he was in the temple carrying out his duties, a supernatural encounter took place.
    Then an