BIBLE RECORDS | 124 MIRACLES (58)

1. What are "Miracles"?

a) Miracles are those acts that only God can perform; usually superseding natural laws. Baker’s Dictionary of the Bible defines a miracle as “an event in the external world brought about by the immediate agency or the simple volition of God.” It goes on to add that a miracle occurs to show that the power behind it is not limited to the laws of matter or mind as it interrupts fixed natural laws. So the term supernatural applies quite accurately.

b) Miracles are also known as Signs and Wonders.

c) Here we have one of the 124 miracles recorded in the Bible.

2. Miracle 58: WATERS OF JERICHO HEALED by Elisha’s casting salt into them (2 Kings 2:21-22). 

a) Water of Jericho healed.

2 Kings 2:21-22 New King James Version (NKJV)

²¹ Then he went out to the source of the water, and cast in the salt there, and said, “Thus says the Lord: ‘I have healed this water; from it there shall be no more death or barrenness.’” ²² So the water remains healed to this day, according to the word of Elisha which he spoke.

b) Salt.

i) Used to season food (Job 6:6), and mixed with the fodder of cattle (Isaiah 30:24, “clean;” in marginal note of Revised Version “salted”).

ii) All meat-offerings were seasoned with salt (Leviticus 2:13). To eat salt with one is to partake of his hospitality, to derive subsistence from him; and hence he who did so was bound to look after his host's interests (Ezra 4:14, “We have maintenance from the king's palace;” Authorized Version marginal note, “We are salted with the salt of the palace;” Revised Version, “We eat the salt of the palace”).

iii) A “covenant of salt” (Numbers 18:19; 2 Chronicles 13:5) was a covenant of perpetual obligation. New-born children were rubbed with salt (Ezekiel 16:4). Disciples are likened unto salt, with reference to its cleansing and preserving uses (Matthew 5:13). When Abimelech took the city of Shechem, he sowed the place with salt, that it might always remain a barren soil (Judges 9:45). Sir Lyon Playfair argues, on scientific grounds, that under the generic name of “salt,” in certain passages, we are to understand petroleum or its residue asphalt. Thus in Genesis 19:26 he would read “pillar of asphalt;” and in Matthew 5:13, instead of “salt,” “petroleum,” which loses its essence by exposure, as salt does not, and becomes asphalt, with which pavements were made.

iv) The Jebel Usdum, to the south of the Dead Sea, is a mountain of rock salt about 7 miles long and from 2 to 3 miles wide and some hundreds of feet high.