Oil Company Stockholders on Spiritual Quest in Israel

Oil Company Stockholders on Spiritual Quest in Israel
By Richard Bartholomew Sat Jun 23, 2007 at 05:19:52 AM EST


Earlier this week saw Christians United for Israel Dallas City Director Rev Stephen Swisher address the Stockholders' Meeting of Zion Oil & Gas. Swisher chose an appropriate Bible verse for his audience:



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I've been following the fortunes of Zion Oil & Gas for several years now; back in January I noted that it was the first new listing of 2007, and that the CEO and director had been given the honour of ringing the AMEX bell in New York on the first day of 2007 trading. The company was founded by John Brown, an oilman and Christian Zionist who believes that the Bible provides clues to finding massive oil deposits in Israel, and that his involvement was predicted in 1 Kings (8:41), which mentions "a stranger, that is not of thy people Israel, but cometh out of a far country for thy name's sake". Despite this unpromising background, Brown has built up a significant exploratory company, which employs serious business-people and qualified geologists (one of the ironies of the Zion Oil website are references to drilling through "Triassic" and "Permian" layers of rock - troublesome labels for Biblical literalists). The current director, Richard Rinberg, is actually a rather dry and eloquent British-Israeli businessman.

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The Stockholder's meeting also saw Brown express his deep gratitude to Ralph DeVore, to whom he also made a presentation gift. This was unexpected, since, as I blogged in 2005, documents on the Zion Oil website suggest that DeVore had had quite a spectacular falling-out with Brown and had resigned from the organization. DeVore had claimed that the reason Zion had failed to strike oil was because the Jewish involvement amounted to "syncretism" and that this had angered God ("The MIXING OF GOD'S WORD WITH OTHER RELIGIONS! THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE CALLS THIS REBELLION TOWARDS GOD!"). Brown had been deeply offended by DeVore's comments, to judge from the correspondence - but with DeVore being a director of Hal Lindsey Ministries, and a cousin of Lindsey, the potential media exposure is doubtless just too good to turn down. We can only guess why DeVore has chosen to make up - despite the "syncretism" now including a rabbi who cites kabbalists and who tells his evangelical audience that God's bridge with the world is actually Israel.

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