Back on April 1 last year, Hal Lindsey used his WorldNetDaily column to promote shares in Zion Oil:
A man named John Brown – without much more than his faith – has put together an oil company and purchased leases in a specific place in Israel. It is a in a location that is very much a part of some important prophecies in the Old Testament. He founded the Zion Oil and Gas Company as the result of studying prophecies God proclaimed to two of the sons of the Patriarch Jacob.
Lindsey then did some bizarre Biblical exegesis to prove that there is oil in Israel, and concluded:
At this moment, Zion Oil and Gas is selling stock in order to finish its first well. It is right in the center of an area that geologically looks promising. I believe the main reason others have failed to find oil is that they did not drill deep enough.
Investment in oil exploration is always a big gamble. But, I believe this is a gamble worth taking for the sake of Israel. Besides, I believe God’s Word is giving some pretty good clues here.
What Lindsey didn’t mention was that one of the directors of Zion Oil was Ralph DeVore, who had an 18.1% share in the company. As I noted in an update to my original blog entry on this, not only is DeVore also a director of Hal Lindsey’s ministries, he is actually Lindsey’s cousin – and so Hal was using his WND column to puff his cousin’s shares, without disclosing his family’s interest.
But now, a January 5 pdf report on the Zion Oil website has announced that DeVore resigned at the end of December 2004, and includes some juicy correspondence between him and the other company directors. It seems the problem began in July, when DeVore sent a breathless letter, full of Biblical quotations, exclamation marks and bizarre capitalisations, to Brown and his Vice-President Glen Parry:
Last night (Sat., 7-24) the Lord woke me up. I could not go back to sleep. He was troubling my spirit about Zion Oil! Lately I have been intensifying my prayer time, asking the Lord Jesus why Zion has not reached its minimum offering. I have been asking Him to show me what, if anything, is standing in the way of completing at least the $6.5 million minimum offering before August 31st.
…The following is what the Lord Jesus through His Holy Spirit revealed to me concerning the present state of Zion:
After complaining about the lack of corporate prayer, DeVore gets down to what’s really bothering him:
IS ZION OIL PRIMARILY AN EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN CORPORATION? IS ZION OIL PRIMARILY A JEWISH ORGANIZATION? OR IS ZION 70% EVANGELICAL AND 30% JEWISH or THE OTHER WAY AROUND? IS ZION 50% EVANGELICAL AND 50% JEWISH? Some belief will dominate!…If the majority of Zion’s Leadership is guilty of vacillating between Christianity and Judaism, then the Word of God states that we are guilty of “Syncretism”! The MIXING OF GOD’S WORD WITH OTHER RELIGIONS! THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE CALLS THIS REBELLION TOWARDS GOD! IF THIS IS TRUE ABOUT THE MAJORITY OF ZION’S LEADERSHIP, THE WORD OF GOD ALSO SAYS WE ARE BEING “DOUBLE MINDED”.
An another memo, to CEO Gene Soltero, DeVore wrote:
…I personally believe that over 90% of the shares that have been purchased from our current IPO are due in some way to Hal [Lindsey]‘s TV reporting on Zion’s oil exploration activities. On his TV show, Hal openly spoke about John Brown & Zion Oil being an Evangelical Christian organization with Evangelical Christian Leadership!
John Brown then wrote to DeVore, urging him to resign or face being removed after the next board meeting in Tel Aviv. Concerning this meeting, Brown writes:
if you do attend, then I will expect that you will openly share your true feelings and concerns and tell our Jewish brethren exactly how you feel about them as non-believers in Jesus taking over Zion.
Needless to say, in his next communication DeVore takes offence to the suggestion that he is a religious bigot. But it is in the final document, from Soltero to DeVore, that the real reason for DeVore’s sudden objection to non-Evangelicals in the company can be divined:
Prior to and during the public offering registration process you repeatedly committed to organize presentations by John [Brown] to large groups of prospective investors in the Houston area. After the effective date of our registration you failed to organize a single meeting. Based on your representations and commitments we went through the expensive process of qualifying by exemption to sell to Texas residents. This required us to have a minimum offering of $6.5 million which we failed to meet. Your inaction severely harmed Zion in two ways. If we hadn’t relied on you for Texas investors we could have not required such a high minimum and our offering would have succeeded with the $3.7 million we did raise. We didn’t see any of the money we thought would be coming from your arrangements and commitments…Please do not call my cell phone again or bother me at home. You may communicate with me solely at the office.
In other words, the company failed to reach its minimum offering because they took DeVore’s advice, but DeVore failed to keep his end up. DeVore then received a message from God blaming the fiasco on the fact that too many Jews were involved with the company, undermining its Christian character. Another great moment for Christian Zionism…
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