Now Elijah had a student, a prophet in training named Elisha ben Shaphat from the no-account town of Abel-meholah. Elijah originally found Elisha doing the old year-in year-out plowing the fields routine. And since Elisha was the twelfth with eleven other yoke of oxen being driven by guys in front of him, you can bet he had spent plenty of years eating everyone else's dust. So it's not to be wondered that when Elijah walked by and threw his cloak on him that Elisha knew that his big day had finally come. Of course, Elisha, a dutiful student, made very very sure never to get on Elijah's nerves.
On the day of his departure, Elijah wanted to put to the test Elisha's seriousness about being his successor. Being a prophet to Israel, especially in the awful times they lived, was no easy task, and not for lightweights or slackers. But in any case, Elisha was going to be Elijah's replacement because the LORD had already picked him. Elijah tried the ploy of talking Elisha into staying put somewhere comfortable while he moved on. But Elisha was stubbornly persistent and wouldn't be talked out of sticking to Elijah like Gorilla Glue. Once they had crossed to the other side of the Jordan river, Elijah told Elisha that if he saw him depart he'd get his request, which was to get a double-shot of the Spirit that was upon Elijah. And when Elijah made his final fiery ascension, his cloak or mantle got blown off and was left behind. Elisha picked it up because he already had the authorization to take it.
On the other hand, I've seen the ploy of "grabbing the mantle" happen much too often when it shouldn't, especially when people have no real permission to grab things that are not theirs. But it's a game that too many charismatics like to play among themselves nowdays. They look back on a move of God that has happened in the past and at how He worked through some individuals. Next they end up coveting for themselves what those individuals once had, and consequently err in supposing that they can somehow usurp those things entirely on their own perogative. In contrast to this, Elisha already had a calling from God to succeed Elijah; his sticking with him to the end was a test of his perseverence, the proof of what God had already put there. The LORD, the author of all things, had already decreed the mantle, and it came from Him. Picking it up was the end of the Elisha's final exam.
There are many examples of presumptuously or falsely grabbing the mantle. I cite the following only because it is probably the most blatant specimen that I could find. You can see what I am talking about in the following two video clips: Lonnie Frisbee's Mantle Part 1 and Lonnie Frisbee's Mantle Part 2, which were posted back in October of 2008. There's such a tangle of confusion here that it will require difficult dissection. However, my intent is not to single out and pick on this particular minister since essentially what he is doing here is something that dozens of other people also mistakenly suppose they can do.
The Internet is a curious place. Try googling on "Lonnie Frisbee" and you could come away with widely divergent and conflicting ideas depending on which of the 11,000 or so links you might click on. Clicking some links will exalt Lonnie into a towering spiritual colossus who almost single handedly started the Jesus People Movement back in the early 1970s. Clicking others will anathematize Lonnie as having been Satan's dastardly emissary of deception, a drug-addled and deluded heresiarch who led countless thousands down to eternal damnation. And some links will carry you to places where people venerate him as somehow being the irrefutable proof that lately God has changed His mind about sin and now is blessing homosexual behavior.
I don't think the truth lies with any of these echos, which is one reason why I have learned not to rely too much on the Internet for doing biographical research. In fact, there's not that much on the Internet you can trust; it's a vast echo chamber of confusion, lies, and half-truths. A complete, definitive, and "authorized" biography about Lonnie hasn't yet been published, although somebody named Roger Sachs has been promising for several years now that he will put out one. Maybe, but I'll believe it when the day comes that I can walk down the street to Borders Books and buy a copy. Somebody did produce a "documentary" film about Lonnie once. I disregard it for having been a distorted, one-sided hatchet job that mostly aimed to blackwash Chuck Smith and the late John Wimber. But that's just my opinion.¹ All I can say is "caveat emptor."
Getting back to my main point, in a way it doesn't matter who Lonnie Frisbee was. But I can say I know one thing for sure: whoever Lonnie Frisbee was, he never had a special "mantle" that could be passed on to anybody, least of all, a mantle that you could disinter and re-deploy for your own aggrandizement.
First of all, the minister and the woman in the videos mistakenly suppose that the Old Testament provides a complete picture of how a relationship with the Holy Spirit works out, and that what applied then must also apply to us today as a perfect fit. It doesn't. The coming of Christ, and His death and resurrection, radically changed the picture, and therefore we don't have the same relationship with the Holy Spirit that Elijah and Elisha once had. Secondly, Lonnie Frisbee could only approach God the same way that every other man can: as a sinner who is saved through the precious Blood of Christ. Lonnie Frisbee never had any standing before God that exalts him above any of the young people in the audience that we see in the videos above. Furthermore, Jesus Christ is the One who baptizes us in the Holy Spirit. And the One and the Same Spirit apportions the gifts according to His will and not because of our perogatives or education or smarts.² The minister in the video has a confused concept in his mind; it's as if he were looking in all the wrong places, trying to do things he can't nor even needs to do. He had only to call upon Christ who knows what is needed, and who will give it according to the promise of God the Father. There was never any need to dig up and drag into the scene the long departed Lonnie Frisbee—there is no transferable "mantle" that once belonged to Lonnie that the minister in the video can exhume and bestow; and anything Lonnie might have once had, he had to receive from the same Source just like anyone else. So I would tell the people in the audience: Get the true compass, you who have need to be baptized by Him, and therefore go to Christ Jesus. He is the Source. He is our true mantle.
As further evidence the focus has gotten shifted to all the wrong places, in the video, we also see the minister making big deal about Lonnie's old painting easel, as if it were a holy relic. I don't know whether to laugh or weep at this. I suspect that if Lonnie were still here he might say something like "what is wrong with you guys? It's just a stupid easel!" In the part 2 video, at around the 2:30 mark, I noticed that the lady said that Lonnie claimed to be carrying one of the "seven lights of Kathryn Kuhlman." I have no way of verifying that Lonnie actually said this, but I was very curious about the "seven lights" and I did track down their origin in chapter nineteen of Jamie Buckingham's authorized biography of Kathryn Kuhlman, entitled "Daughter of Destiny":
At the funeral service at Wee Kirk o' the Heather in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, Oral Roberts told what happened to him when the news came to him that Kathryn had died.In the rest of that chapter, Jamie Buckingham goes on to give his own spin on what Oral Roberts said. Yet having a charismatic gifting doesn't confer a "get out of jail free" card, so to speak, and Lonnie Frisbee died much too young. If you sow to the flesh, you will reap corruption. As far as I know, Lonnie never went on to have a "healing ministry," or at least nothing of the magnitude that Oral Roberts seems to be suggesting in the above quotation. We do have plenty of phony, mercenary healers struting about on the stage today, but I am afraid that Oral's "seven lights, twelve people" prophecy—if that's what he intended it to mean—has never been fulfilled.³“My whole concern was about the healing ministry. Then I remembered her words, and they hit me like thunder claps. ‘It is not Kathryn Kuhlman. She cannot heal anybody. It is the work of the Holy Spirit.’Then I saw seven lights, and I saw twelve people. I said to God ‘what do the lights mean?’ He revealed to me that the light came to people…they were not choosing, they were being chosen. There will be special people raised up out of this. These seven lights will shine out across this land, and in her death, her ministry will be greater than in her life.”
¹ For one, the "documentary" never really gave Smith's nor Wimber's side of the story.
² See I Corinthians 12:4-13
³ At about the 4:23 mark in the second video, the lady also makes the peculiar assertion that Lonnie had traveled for ten years with Kathryn Kuhlman all over the world. Given that Kuhlman died in 1976, I don't see how this could ever have happened chronology-wise. Frisbee along with Duane Pederson and Chuck Smith did appear one time together on a television show with Kathryn Kuhlman. And, years later, if I recall, probably after 1980, Lonnie did some evangelizing overseas. So I suspect the lady has conflated in her mind that later time in his life with his one time early appearance with Kuhlman and then somehow expanded it into "ten years" of traveling with her. Here is an earlier note concerning one contemporary's recollection of Frisbee.