2 Kings 13: The Consciousness of Strength and Weakness

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Quick Insights

Jehoahaz and Joash embody recurring psychological cycles: oppression, pleading, partial victory, and relapse.
The prophetly figure represents the creative faculty of imagination, issuing instructions that shape outcome yet requiring full cooperation.
The king’s limited strikes reveal how hesitation and incomplete expectation truncate the realization of possibility.
Resurrection from the prophet’s tomb shows the latent power in memory and belief to revive what seems lost when touched by focused attention.

What is the Main Point of 2 Kings 13?

This chapter maps an inner landscape where outer calamities mirror internal states: oppression is not merely external force but a habitual pattern of thought; deliverance comes not as a random gift but as the consequence of imagination enacted, sometimes haltingly. The core principle is that attention directed by conviction yields change, but partial attention or half-hearted action yields partial results. The narrative invites recognition that the soul’s victories depend on persistent, precise inner acts that align feeling and assumption with the outcome desired.

What is the Spiritual Meaning of 2 Kings 13?

At the level of lived experience, periods of oppression correspond to extended identification with fear, scarcity, or limitation. When the speaker of inner authority—the one who knows a different story—pleads on behalf of the self, that is the moment of faith waking. Yet the history of the kings shows that entrenchment in old patterns causes repeated retreats; even when a new ruler is crowned within the mind, he inherits the landscape shaped by prior expectations. Compassionary forces within the psyche, comparable to covenantal mercy, prevent total annihilation of possibility, so that mercy preserves a seed of hope even when behavior repeats error. The episode with the prophet and the bow is an enactment of how imagination must be consciously taken up and synchronized with desire. The prophet places his hands on the king’s hands; this is the meeting of intention and instrument, the merging of higher vision with will. The command to open the window eastward suggests turning attention toward the source of light, toward new morning. The shooting of one arrow and the striking of the ground three times, however, dramatizes how partial belief yields limited conquest: the field of experience will shift only in proportion to the frequency and fidelity of inner affirmation. Death and resurrection in the burial scene testify to the power dormant in memory and symbolic acts. Burial is not annihilation but a state where potential lies hidden; contact with the relics of a realized imagination awakens that potential. The man thrown into the sepulchre and revived by contact with the prophet’s bones is the parable of how contact with an undiminished inner authority can restore vitality to neglected or dead projects and relationships. It insists that imagination is not mere fancy but an operative power that, when reengaged, brings the apparently lost back into life.

Key Symbols Decoded

The kings function as composite states of ego: a reigning self that often acts from inherited patterns rather than fresh perception. Their wars and losses symbolize internal conflicts where old stories conquer new intentions through inertia and fear. The Syrian oppressor is the recurrent negative assumption that raids experience and leaves it impoverished; its death signifies the eventual decline of a hostile belief when repeatedly confronted. The prophet is the faculty of creative consciousness that knows deliverance is possible; his gestures, words, and final acts are the methods of inner reprogramming—commands, visualization, and symbolic enactment. The bow and arrows are concentrated acts of directed imagination, tools through which future states are shot into present awareness. Shooting toward the east is an orientation toward possibility and dawn, the turning of attention to the source rather than the symptom. Striking the ground represents making belief tangible in some demonstrable way; the number of strikes is the intensity and repetition of assumption. The sepulchre and its bones are the preserved convictions of past realizations that can, when contacted, resuscitate confidence and possibility within the living psyche.

Practical Application

Begin by observing the repeated patterns that play the role of the Syrian oppression in your life—those assumptions that always seem to win. Consciously appoint an inner prophetic voice: create brief, vivid imaginal acts that place your hands on the desired outcome and speak the intent as though it is already fulfilled. Visualize clearly, then perform a symbolic action that anchors the imagination—open a window, write a single declarative sentence, breathe and see the arrow fly toward a specific scene of resolution. Repeat this with focused feeling until the image stabilizes; note that the potency of the change often corresponds to the consistency and fullness of your attention. When progress stalls, seek the buried authority within memory: recall a time when you felt fully alive and efficacious, and use that recollection as a living relic to touch current desire. Lie down, close the eyes, and let that recovered sensation infuse the new image; allow it to move through you as if awakening the bones. Persist without hurry, knowing that incomplete gestures produce limited outcomes, but persistent, embodied imagining will dissolve the old oppressor and bring about the restoration you intend.

The Inner Stage: A Psychology of Conscious Creation

2 Kings 13 reads like a compact psychological drama enacted entirely within the landscape of human consciousness. Seen inwardly, its kings, prophets, armies, invasions, and miracles are not external events but living states of mind, each representing a quality of awareness or an imaginal habit that shapes experience. Reading the chapter this way reveals a sequence of inner movements: defeat by an oppressive idea, the cry of desire, the emergence of deliverance, incomplete faith, the power of presence, and finally the residual power of imagination even after the guiding voice has fallen silent.

The narrative opens with Jehoahaz beginning to reign and doing that which was evil in the sight of the Lord. Jehoahaz is therefore a state of consciousness that has surrendered to familiar limiting beliefs. He follows the sins of Jeroboam, which are patterns that deceive and repeat. Psychologically, Jeroboam represents a recurring, false identification with limitation: the acceptance of lesser realities, the settling for what seems safe, the construction of inner groves where unexamined idols thrive. Jehoahaz inherits and perpetuates that pattern; he is not an isolated ruler but the active mind that governs behavior while bound to these habitual identifications.

The chapter then introduces the assault by Hazael and Benhadad, kings of Syria, who destroy Israel’s fighting strength until the people are reduced to dust. In inner terms, the Syrian kings are oppressive thought-forms: anxiety, fear, and the tyrannical attention that grind creative capacity into smallness. The imagery of being made like the dust by threshing is the subjective experience of being overwhelmed, scattered, and diminished by relentless negative thinking. The loss of chariots and warriors denotes a perceived loss of power, initiative, and the ability to act. It is the mind under siege.

Jehoahaz besought the Lord and the Lord hearkened; Israel had a savior and they went out from under Syrian hand. This turning inward and petitioning the Lord is the movement from outer complaint to inner appeal: the I AM, the sense of being, the higher imaginative faculty is addressed. The savior that answers is not a rescuer from outside but a shift in imaginal stance. To beseech the Lord is to awaken to the creative power of consciousness, to refuse helplessness and to imagine a reversal. The deliverance that follows demonstrates the operative principle: change the inner state and the outer correspondences follow.

Yet the text says they departed not from the sins of the house of Jeroboam. This is crucial: a single deliverance can lift oppression but does not necessarily uproot the underlying habits that invited it. In psychological terms, a temporary relief from anxiety or a brief success will not transform a life if the old interpretive patterns remain. The grove in Samaria that remains is the inner idol that continues to attract attention; symbolic comforts and justifications that keep a person tethered to limitation.

The succession from Jehoahaz to Joash (also rendered Jehoash) continues the theme of repeating patterns. Joash also does that which is evil in the sight of the Lord; he too remains within the horizon of accepted limitation. But then we arrive at the poignant scene with Elisha. Elisha, the prophet, is consciousness awakened to the creative imagination: the presence that speaks the language of I AM. When Joash comes and weeps over Elisha, calling him father and the chariot of Israel, we witness a son confronting his own higher self as that self declines. This is a moment in which the reflective capacity recognizes its source: the restorative imagination that can mobilize power.

The prophecies given through ritual objects are rich with psychological meaning. Elisha hands Joash a bow and arrows, asks him to put his hand upon the bow, and puts his hands upon the king's hands. The bow is potential power; the hand upon the bow is an act of touch between aspiration and capacity. Opening the window eastward is a letting in of light, a deliberate orientation toward the origin of new possibilities. When Joash shoots the arrow, Elisha calls it the arrow of the Lord's deliverance. This arrow is a precise imaginal act: a focused image released into the subconscious. It is the intention formed and shot with knowing regard for its source.

Then comes the test: Elisha commands Joash to smite the ground with arrows and he smites thrice and stays. The prophet's anger at the stay indicates that the effort is insufficient. Psychologically, smiting the ground repeatedly is persistence in imagining the desired reality; doing it only three times when five or six were required reflects a wavering faith, incomplete persistence, or a lack of conviction. The creative imagination requires sustained and embodied attention. The prophet's rebuke reveals that inner promise can be blunted by impatience or by not seeing through to the end. The outward victory that Joash will enjoy is thus proportional to his inward persistence and faithfulness.

Elisha then dies, and yet after his burial a man cast into Elisha's tomb is revived when his body touches the prophet's bones. Even in death, Elisha's power remains. This tells us a remarkable truth about consciousness: the imprint of awakened imagination persists beyond the immediate voice that issued it. The bones are the residual structure of belief, memory, and lawfulness that remains after the living presence is gone. When the dead person is brought into contact with that structure, life returns. In practical terms, this means that habits of vision and the disciplines of imagination leave a legacy; they become levers others may touch to revive their own faith.

The continuing oppression by Hazael, offset by divine compassion because of covenant with the fathers, adds another layer. The covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob symbolizes long-standing potentialities seeded in consciousness: ancestral capacities for expansion, promise, and identity. Even when present states oppress, there is a deeper fidelity within human awareness that prevents ultimate annihilation. This grace is the latent power of identity that can be recollected and reactivated. It operates quietly, maintaining the possibility of return to fullness.

Finally, Joash recovers cities from Benhadad three times. Three is a number of completion in the text, though Elisha had desired five or six smites. The three victories correspond to what the king's inner conviction actually supported. They are real victories, born of actual shifts in attention and action, yet they are partial. They show the law at work: imagination, sustained and acted upon, recovers territory. But the degree of recovery is always proportional to the fidelity of the imaginal practice. Partial victory is still victory, and it reveals the path for deeper change: increase the interior smiting, extend the imaginative act to five and six times until consumption of limiting forces is complete.

Throughout the chapter, the recurring motif is that states of mind imprison or liberate. The kings of Syria are oppressive moods and interpretations. The groves are inner idols and soothing deceptions. The prophet is the operative imagination that can both declare deliverance and instruct the will in how to exercise it. The king's failure to strike enough times is not a moral condemnation so much as an instruction in technique: to effect total transformation you must imagine the finished scene, persist in that scene, and act in accordance with it until the world of appearance yields. The revival at Elisha's bones is the testimony that imagination leaves durable structures in the psyche that others may contact and thereby reanimate.

Read as biblical psychology, 2 Kings 13 invites a practice: when under oppression, do not merely lament. Appeal inwardly; see and feel the deliverance as already achieved; enact the scene that follows the fulfillment. Persist. Make the image so real and repeated that it reshapes habits, rewrites memory, and recruits outer events to match. Trust the covenantal reserves in your own being and work to reawaken them. Remember that the prophet's presence can be extinguished, but the power of his imaginings remains as a resource. The chapter is an instruction in how imagination creates reality, how states of mind govern fate, and how the disciplined, repeated act of envisioning and feeling will free what has been bound by fear and habit.

Common Questions About 2 Kings 13

How can Bible students use 2 Kings 13 as a practical guide to conscious creation?

Read as an instructional parable, 2 Kings 13 offers tools for conscious creation: receive the bow and arrows as your imaginative faculty, open the mental window eastward to view the rising fulfillment, aim with specific, feeling-filled scenes, and act outwardly to confirm inner conviction. Persist with repetition until the inner state becomes unshakeable; do not stop at tentative requests, but assume the end and live from that end. Bible students should practice vivid imaginal acts accompanied by the feeling of reality, expect deliverance as a law, and measure success by the steadiness of state rather than immediate outer change (2 Kings 13).

What do the 'arrows of victory' in 2 Kings 13 symbolize in Neville Goddard's teaching?

In the inner reading, the arrows of victory are not literal weapons but concentrated acts of imagination and assumption sent toward a desired outcome; Neville Goddard taught that imagination is the creative faculty and that each imagined arrow represents a clear, felt assumption aimed at fulfillment. When Elisha gives bow and arrows and tells the king to shoot eastward, Scripture is showing the means and direction of focused belief: take up the instrument of imagination, aim it deliberately, and release the conviction that delivers. The multitude of arrows suggests repeated, directed assumptions that culminate in visible change, aligning the inner word with outward events (2 Kings 13).

How does Elisha telling Jehoash to strike the ground relate to the power of imagination?

Elisha’s instruction to strike the ground is an external parable for the inner action of assaulting unbelief with persistent imagination; the ground represents the outward circumstance, and striking it symbolizes the impressed assumption that must be applied until the invisible yields to the visible. The prophet’s hands on the king and the command to strike indicate that spiritual power is communicated and must be acted upon; imagination is the active element, while bodily motion answers to and confirms the inward state. Thus faith is not idle hope but repeated mental enactment until the scene imagined becomes the experience recorded on the outer face of life (2 Kings 13).

Why did Jehoash only strike three times and what spiritual lesson does that teach about persistence?

Jehoash’s three strikes reveal a limit in his belief and a lesson about insufficient persistence: Elisha’s anger at his stopping shows that halfhearted or timid imaginings achieve only partial deliverance, while full victory requires sustained, repeated assumption. Spiritually, this teaches that one must maintain the desired state until it hardens into reality; intermittent faith produces intermittent results. The corrective is to stay in the feeling of the wish fulfilled, to continue impressing the mind with the end completed, and to refuse to be satisfied with less than the full manifestation, for the abundance of victory corresponds to the intensity and duration of the inner conviction (2 Kings 13).

What does Elisha's posthumous prophecy (coming from the grave) reveal about states of consciousness and assumption?

The account of life returning when a dead man touches Elisha’s bones illustrates that a prevailing state of consciousness outlives the body and can revive what appears lost; the prophet’s presence, even in death, symbolizes an enduring assumption that restores life. This teaches that a fixed inner state operates independently of physical circumstance and, when contacted, can resurrect possibilities long dead. In practical terms, one may contact the memory or state of a realized end and be enlivened by it; assumption is therefore not transient but a persistent force that reanimates hope and brings the invisible into visible demonstration (2 Kings 13:21).