What's Cooking In Your Pot?

2 Kings 4:38 And Elisha came again to Gilgal: and there was a dearth in the land; and the sons of the prophets were sitting before him: and he said unto his servant, Set on the great pot, and seethe pottage for the sons of the prophets.

The Prophet Elisha went down to Gilgal, which was located in the mountains of Israel, not far from Bethel. Bethel means “House of God”, and it seems fitting to me that Elijah and Elisha had established a school for prophets near there. We are told that there were about 100 students in the school, each of them with a call of God upon their lives and all of whom were trying to follow in the footsteps of Elijah.

Even though Israel was God’s chosen nation, and the land that they inherited was described by God as a “Land that flows with milk and honey”, it seems that the milk had stopped flowing and the honey was all dried up, for there was a famine and a drought in the land. Food and water were scarce and, if you found food, it was inflated to a very high price because the supply was much less than the demand. There’s always those people who will try to make a profit over the suffering of others. It was no different in the days of Elijah than it is now.

These 100 prophetic students all lived together and with that many people to feed, trying to find enough food to go around in the time of famine was really hard. They were like most preachers, they didn’t have a treasury to draw from to go buy all that they needed, so they just had to trust God and search for whatever they could find. We call that scrounging!

Has anyone here ever gone scrounging in the refrigerator or kitchen cabinets for something to eat? I’m sure you have. But let me ask you a question; Has anyone here, except maybe for someone who has been trained in survival schools in the military, ever gone scrounging for food in the pastures, woods and fields around your house?

I don’t know what you’d expect to find, but I don’t think the mushrooms growing out of the rotting trees and dried up cow patties would make a good choice. How about the little red berries on the holly trees; they really look good? How about pine cones? Have you ever tried thistle and crabgrass salad? How about a pine cone soufflé? Only Ewell Givens could enjoy that!

Now I know that there are muscadines, black berries, and other plants that are often used for medicines and some are really good for food, but if you’re going to send someone out to scrounge in the woods for food, you’d better send someone that knows what’s good for food and what isn’t and can recognize the difference in the plant life.

All these students of the school of the prophets were men of the scriptures, men of God, studying to be the ministers to Israel. It’s highly doubtful that they had ever had even one class in Botany.

But the time came that the growling of their empty stomachs was louder than the instructor in the classroom so they had to find a way to find something to cook. So they pulled out the big kettle, put some water in it, set it on the fire and began to boil the water to purify it and make it ready for whatever else they could find to throw in.