Counting the Blessings

I learnt a hymn decades ago as a little church boy.  It said, “Count your blessings, name them one by one” (Johnson Oatman, Jr., 1897).  Now, let’s attempt to ‘count’ some of the many blessings brought about by those hallowed bones of Elisha the Jewish double-prophet.  Those bones:

1. raised a dead man to life;
2. healed him instantly of whatever ailment or injury had killed him;
3. changed his status and identity – from ‘dead’ to ‘living’;
4. gave him instant vitality in that paralyzing zone of death – Ã¢â‚¬Å“he jumped to his feet”;
5. gave him power over what had more strongly been holding him down until then;
6. put him on his feet where all others before him in that place had been lying forever on their backs;
7. made him invisible and invincible, untouchable and unkillable by the dreaded raiders from whom even his abler bearers or lifters had fled;
8. abruptly terminated the death-‘business’ of undertakers over his life;
9. restored him to where malicious death had suddenly or gradually sacked him from;
10. gave back to him what Death had suddenly taken from him;
11. took off his grave clothes, dressed him afresh in beauty, changing his outlook;
12. changed his path or direction from ‘grave-ward’ to ‘home-ward’;
13. changed his name back from ‘corpse’ to ‘man’;
14. made him a living exception in that location and ‘congregation’ of all-dead;
15. turned his family and friends from mourners to merry celebrators;
16. removed his name from the pitiable Obituary columns to the headlines of fame;
17. made him a trending topic in the land;
18. made him a mammoth attraction instead of the decaying and stinking repulsion that he had been;
19. brought praise to the God of the long dead prophet;
20. and many, many more… still counting…

News Without Reporters

The power to do so much had been present in those out-of-town dead bones.  Only those who contacted the bones discovered the powers they possessed – far, far away in the graveyard where they lay soundlessly.  If that dead man had not been thus thrown in, who would have known anything about the powers in those bones in that place?  Who would have known, or told? 

Is it possible that those bones had been effective in that environment in other ways that nobody had been there to observe and report?  Who knows how many dead animals it had raised to life before then or thereafter?  Who knows how many dead plants it revived?  Who knows how many evil forces it drove off from that place?  Who can tell how many travellers passing that path who stopped beside those nameless, faceless bones had their fortunes at once transformed, without knowing the source of their sudden benevolence?  Is it possible that those bones had been active in that environment in other ways that nobody had been there to observe and report?  And what if they had been the bones of a Luciferian high priest?

Unknown Truths and Anonymous Skeletons

It had never been known that dead bones could possess such powers over the living.  It might have been a lost debate if anyone had attempted to suggest such a ‘controversial’ theological topic before that encounter with the bones of the late prophet.  That it had not been known until that day did not mean that the bones had not always been potent.  That somebody had not until then ‘discovered’ the mystery about dead bones did not mean that it had not been so.  Mars had been a planet long before it was known.  Continental America had been there long before it was ‘discovered’ by Amerigo Vespucci.  That I was not the one that discovered it, or have not discovered it for myself, does not make that discovery fake.

If Elisha’s bones could raise the dead, they might also have been able to kill the living who assessed them from the wrong point.  The actors in the case of Elisha’s faceless skeletons could connect what had suddenly happened with the name of Elisha because that tomb was marked.  Suppose they had not known whose bones those were, would they have been able to connect their recent fate with those apparently voiceless, soundless, anonymous skeletons?  Not likely.  That somebody did not know whose bones they were would have made no difference to how potent those bones had been.

From The Preacher’s diary

July 7, 2019.