Holy Oil
For more than a year, a small group in the West-Metro Church of God had been praying for revival, when Jerry Pierce’s Bible began exuding clear oil that remarkably did no damage to his Bible, or to his notes and markings from his years of study.
As the flow continued the Bible was put in a large Ziploc bag, then on to larger clear plastic storage bins, even after they had filled over a hundred thousand vials, handing them out for free.
I asked my family if they would like to join me and visit a Messianic synagogue in Birmingham where the West-Metro team would be visiting with Jerry’s Bible. When we arrived the only seats were in overflow areas. The music and the speakers went on for quite a while and my wife, still smarting from an ankle fracture in three places, and our daughter, understandably a little skeptical and tired as it was getting late, eventually left and headed for her apartment.
It was clear to me that our oldest son, no less skeptical, intended to stay with me however late I wanted, to participate in whatever it was I wanted to participate in.
I think some of things the preacher Johnny Taylor was saying - about expecting miracles, physical and financial healings, all kinds of blessings – for everyone, just sounded too good to be true. And to my family it was sounding too much like hype. Although I have to say, if I had witnessed what he and Jerry Pierce had witnessed ever since the flow of oil began, I too would be over the top with enthusiasm. But I don’t think they saw it that way, and I was beginning to feel they were disappointed I brought them along.
For my part I wanted to stay, because I already had no doubt it was a real before we arrived. I know these people, decent folks praying earnestly for revival because they knew it was happening at other churches around the country and the world, and they were determined to continue prayer meetings until revival broke out, however long it took, for the benefit of their friends, their families and their community, and because of their confidence in the Lord. But they had no idea it would be by Jerry’s Bible exuding huge quantities of oil – and for me it was not the first time I concluded the Lord has a sense of humor.
The oil producing Bible was drawing a constant stream into their church in North Georgia, and the prayer team was being invited to churches all around the South. One would think it was quite a burden, making all these road trips and repeating their story over and over – staying up late at night in these anonymous services, until everyone was prayed for that wanted prayer. They said it never got old; they were still so overwhelmed by it all, more than a year later.
Rivulets of Holy Oil had been dripping from Russian and Greek Orthodox Icons around the world in recent years; miracles that were small, inconsistent, and foreign enough that even a mildly skeptical person could dismiss. But this was in our face; a massive amount of oil from a simple Bible, and that was continuous, and that, as the Johnny Taylor put it, ‘you can’t explain it, but you can’t deny it’.
I’m glad the Gospels only tell of Jesus turning water into wine, because if the Gospels recorded he had flowed copious amounts of oil from the Old Testament parchment or scrolls, our modern cynics would have howled. Yet a miracle took place in this little church that renders thousands of volumes of exegesis irrelevant, and the foundations of secularism obsolete.
This Bible has been sitting in its oil for 19 months, and it is restored rather than destroyed. Other Bibles were destroyed when people put Bibles in a container of mineral oil to see what would happen. Chemical labs have not been able to correlate the oil produced by this Bible with other known oils.
So our oldest son and I stayed, and waited in the long line down to the prayer teams stationed at the foot of the stage in the synagogue. As we reached the front I watched as a woman was ‘slain in the spirit’ and gently placed in the front pew with such a look of contentment in her smile, I wondered what she was experiencing. I had to step around an elderly lady lying face up flat on the floor, completely motionless, with no expression at all. I wondered where she was.
A young man stood behind me in case I collapsed while a gentleman with the team anointed my forehead with the oil, and I asked if he wanted to know what I wanted us to pray for. He said no, the Lord would tell him what to reveal to me, and I responded per our earlier instructions ‘Be it unto me according to thy word’.
It was difficult to hear what he said with all the music up on the stage, and maybe it’s not important that I heard. And while I don’t know what all he said, I did hear him clearly pray peace upon me several times and we hugged at the end. After the prayer I took a few pictures of the Bible submerged in oil.
I carefully weaved my way through the crowd and the ladies on the floor and met up with my son, and we left with little more than my hands saturated with oil.
I left the synagogue thinking that while ‘Peace’ is pretty generic, it fits me, I need peace. And though I had not been slain in the spirit, lying on the floor like the ladies did, I was satisfied that I got to see the Bible close up, and happy that my son and I went down for prayer together.
We climbed into the car and as my son drove us off to our daughter’s apartment, I sat in the passenger’s seat looking out the window along the winding neighborhoods of Birmingham.
But as we drove along I recognized in me a manliness that I had never experienced before. The way a man my age should feel; with an understated confidence, un-preoccupied, as if the undercurrents of anxiety that were ever present in my life was now a foreign concept to someone like me. Some people would call it being ‘comfortable in my own skin’, imperturbable, a role model. This ‘me’ that I was experiencing, it was far more than peace, peace was just a by-product. It was, hands down, the man I always wanted to be.
The next morning I was back to my old self, and a few weeks later I looked to see if a video of the service was posted on the synagogue’s website. I clicked on the spot were Johnny Taylor was making some introductory remarks, about some things he would say that night, that they hadn’t said before in all their church visits since Jerry’s Bible began to flow oil.
He said the Lord had placed a word on his heart for those of us who had come. ‘Take your finger, and point it to your chest, and say, I am not who I think I am.’
__
Thanks, Sean!
John