The Witch of Endor
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land. I’m joined today by Emily Maxson and Greg Uttinger, and I am Bryan Broome hosting today.
We’re going to be talking today about the penultimate point in Saul’s life, the culmination of his rebellion against God, his visit to the witch at Endor. For Star War’s fans, it’s not that Endor, it’s a different one.
In this particular instance we have, as I said, the culmination of Saul’s rebellion, before he had explicitly gone against God’s commands and done exactly what God said a king would do. Now he’s doing all the other things that God said kings would do, which leads to this last point here. Greg, why don’t you take it from here?
Okay. The Philistines are still out there and Saul’s been fighting them a good while. Later on, David will put into song his tribute to Saul warring against the Philistines, and yet for all that there’s still more Philistines. Saul, as before, is becoming afraid and he’s particularly afraid because we’re told –
And when Saul enquired of the Lord, the Lord answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets.
He wants assurance. He wants supernatural assurance. No dreams. The Urim and Thummim, those stones or gems or whatever they were, whereby the high priest could get yes or no answers from God, were with David in the wilderness so he had no access to them.
Prophets? Well, David had a prophet. Saul had no prophet. Samuel was long dead, which is how 1 Samuel 28 starts out. Samuel was dead and all Israel had mourned him. It’s not like Saul and Samuel were on the best of terms anyhow. Samuel had stopped visiting Saul because of Saul’s rebellion, so Saul is very afraid, very worried.
We’ve seen this from the beginning. Every time the Philistines have shown up he has been afraid – afraid to go into battle, afraid he’s going to lose, afraid the people won’t follow him. So now, reaching the depths of despair he turns to his servants and says, “Seek me a woman that hath a familiar spirit.”
The ancient world understood this concept maybe better than most of us do, but it’s still something that mediums and ghost whisperers and such try to play on today. The idea was this. Certain people resonate with the other side and they’ve found a spirit who will come and talk to them.
This spirit is very handy and useful and obliging, and if you tell the spirit, “I’ve got somebody here and he wants to talk to his Great Aunt Tessie,” then said spirit will go off into never-never land and come back with Great Aunt Tessie, who will now speak through the mouth of the medium and you can have a direct conversation with Great Aunt Tessie. The spirit that you’re familiar with is thus “a familiar spirit.” That’s the con.
In most times and most places it probably was strictly a con. It probably in most times and most places was an act that was fake. There was nothing. It was the ghost whisperer or medium faking the presence of somebody else, ventriloquism or something imitating the voice and all that, but at least sometimes – and this is one – God allowed demons to go talk to people and visit them.
Now, whether the medium understood what was going on is yet another question. Did the medium know that the demon is shamming all this? Because neither mediums nor demons have the authority and power to pull saints out of heaven or sinners out of hell. When you’re dead, you’re beyond the reach of anything but God himself. So anyone who pretended to be able to call back people from the dead either was consciously lying or was himself deceived by the demon who was pretending all this.
It's not completely clear here what this woman has in mind, but she has a familiar spirit. The text is pretty clear about that. The thing is, the law required that such be put out of the land. They could leave of their own volition or they could stay and be executed, but the death penalty for witchcraft applied to an overt act committed in the presence of two or three witnesses.
Saying “I’m a witch” didn’t get you executed. Saying “Witches are great and cool” and having bumper stickers that say “I love witches” did not get you executed. Your elders would probably visit with you and say, “What’s that all about?” but it was not a civil matter. You had to actually do something that in some form appealed to that which you claimed to be demonic and spiritual, or with which you were trying to hurt somebody.
Witchcraft was often mixed up with potions, hallucinogenics, or poisons of various sorts. The Greek word for sorcerer is pharmakeia, someone who uses pharmaceuticals, so there was a broad range of what could be going on, but at least in some cases the demons were real. That’s what Saul is hoping for apparently, because the other is no good.
Interestingly enough, the servants seemed to know pretty fast where they could find one.
It’s almost like he set up an entire – for lack of a better term – Cabinet that’s just as corrupt as he is.
“Well, my wife knows this lady…” or “I know a girl…” So the servants come back and say, “At the town of Endor there’s this woman who has a familiar spirit,” so Saul disguises himself in non-royal clothing, goes with two men at night and comes to this woman and says –
Again, the word divination means more than fortune-telling. To us, fortune-telling simply means you look down the corridors of time into the future and you see what’s there and you report. Divination in the ancient world was that you control and create the future by your magic powers.
Yeah, or what passes over on the other side to a divining rod or St. John the Divine. That doesn’t mean he’s God-like, it means he’s a prophet. The Westminster Divines – they preached Christianity, took it and gave it that twist of, “Oh, someone who knows and speaks the Word of God.” But in the ancient world the magic was supposed to be created. Remember that Balaam was a diviner and he was expected to put upon Israel a curse that would actually alter the military history of the two nations involved.
So Saul wants some kind of magic guarantee that things are going well, not just, “Oh, yeah, I see the future and you’re so dead.” That’s not what he’s looking for. He wants magic that will protect him and his armies, and he tells her so. “Use your familiar spirit to bring up the one I’m going to tell you about. I’m going to name somebody and I want your familiar spirit, your friendly ghost, to go find this person,” and she objects.
“King Saul has cut off all the oracles and ghost whisperers and mediums and witches and sorcerers out of the land. It would be worth my life to do such a thing. It’s capital punishment. Is this a trap?”
As the Lord liveth, there shall no punishment happen to thee for this thing.
It’s that enthusiastic, without a blink,“Who shall I bring up to thee?” He says, “Bring me up Samuel.”
That may have caught her off-guard a little bit because who comes to a witch to ask her to raise a godly man? But, you know, superstition comes in all kinds of flavors and packages and all levels of stupidity.
Right, so she’s ready to go through with this, which means that she’s going to talk to her demon. Her demon is going to walk out on her and come back and pretend to be Samuel and speak through her. But something goes horribly wrong, from her point of view.
And here a pause for a moment. A number of commentators have said, “Well, this can’t possibly be Samuel,” and a number of reasons follow. “Once you go to heaven you’re there. You don’t get to come back to earth. This is a wicked woman practicing evil things. How would God ever stoop down and use this thing? If the message the so-called Samuel brings is simply one of doom and destruction and there’s no offer of the gospel, then this can’t possibly be Samuel.”
We’ll address those as we go along, but the most obvious reason for believing it’s Samuel is, “The woman saw Samuel.”
And secondarily, her reaction is not like, “Oh yeah, this is totally Samuel.” It’s like, “Oh whoa! That didn’t work the way it normally does.”
And later on, “Samuel said to Saul…” The text says at least three times that it’s Samuel.
“How could God do such a thing?” He’s God and can hijack anything. We were talking about Balaam and the false prophet and Balaam’s donkey. He hijacked both of them. Earlier he had hijacked Saul at the beginning of David’s run. He put the spirit on Saul, and Saul babbled or prophesied or something under the spirit’s influence, so God can use anything he wants.
Remember that after the resurrection of Lazarus, the Pharisees and Sadducees are bemoaning the fact that the whole world has gone after Jesus, and Caiaphas the high priest stands up and says, “You know nothing and consider nothing. It is expedient for one man to die that the whole nation perish not.” And John as editor/writer, says, “And this he did not speak of himself, but being the high priest that year he prophesied.”
Now, Caiaphas meant one thing. “We’ve got to plot to get rid of this guy,” and yet John says that was a divine prophecy. Because of his office, God put it in his mouth. He didn’t know what he was talking about or what it really meant, but what it meant was Jesus is going to die for his people.
That’s a very interesting thing. There’s been a discussion online this week about how many meanings any one passage or verse in scripture has. Some people say, “There’s only one. There’s only ever one meaning.”
That’s it. One of the arguments I saw against just one universal meaning was that when people in the Old Testament wrote about things, like for instance David wrote psalms and we look back at them and see, “Wow, that is about Jesus,” did David necessarily know they were about Jesus? I don’t think so. He probably thought he was writing about himself, his own troubles, the things that he was going through, and God still inspired it and gave it a multitude of meanings.
I also think of the phrase you would always say in class, “Never do something for one reason when you can do it for three.” Never write something in scripture when you could have multiple meanings instead of just one.
All that has to be true is that those meanings are not at odds with one another. They have to come sort of like a bundle of wires feeding into your computer. They all work together to accomplish a goal and they’re not at odds with one another.
I think some of the Psalms seem to be very self-consciously messianic, but some of them just seem to be David suffering as a godly man. Part of the problem here is that since we’re all images of God, overlap happens.
I remember talking to a pastor, who eventually left the ministry, and in one of my older notes in my Bible class I had spoken of Song of Solomon as an allegory about the marriage of Christ and his Church, which is not exactly how I would take it now, but I do believe it’s primarily – well, first of all, I don’t know if primarily is the word, but it is first of all obviously a love story between a man and woman. But because of that, it is necessarily also about Jesus and his love for the Church.
That’s always the question I have when people bring up Song of Solomon, like “Is it this or is it that?” Isn’t one an image of the other?
Yeah. An interesting thing – this pastor said to me, “Well, by that reasoning my marriage would be an image of Christ and the Church.”
I believe that’s what Paul actually says, so with all due reference to the traditional Presbyterian Reformed exegetic approach to scripture, let’s be a little careful, guys. God can say more than one thing.
Let me give you another one that we kind of skipped over. There’s this incident that happens later when Saul has decided he’s going to kill David and hasn’t told Jonathan, so Jonathan doesn’t know but David knows. Jonathan says, “No, my dad wouldn’t do this.”
“Fine. I’ll sound out dad and find out what’s going on, and then we’ll meet in the field. Actually, we won’t meet but you’ll be there on the fringes, kind of hiding, and I’ll go out and practice with my bow. I’m going to shoot at something, and if I tell the boy who’s collecting my arrows, ‘Come this way, it’s closer,’ that means, David, it’s safe for you to come in. But if I shoot past the mark and say, ‘Go on, go further, keep going,’ that means run for it!” and it’s played out.
The question is why did God put that there? If they had a signal it would be enough, but I think at least part of what’s happening there is Jonathan’s words were exactly literal. He was telling the boy, “Go get the arrows. I shot further, go get it.” But for David, those same words meant something else because there was a background understanding.
Now, if David had just walked in out of nowhere and heard that and said, “You know, I feel in my heart that what he’s really trying to say is he’s telling me to run,” no, that’s bad exegesis. But when you’ve been told, “This kind of thing is coming. Watch for it,” then that’s a lot different.
When you’re told, for instance, that the sacrifices in the tabernacle and temple are images of Christ, then you’re not out of line when you start saying, “So, the poles and the posts mean this, and the incense means this…”
No, we’ve been told it is. We’re supposed to figure out the details, and that’s biblical.
Like when Jesus begins Revelation by saying, “These candlesticks are the seven churches.”
“Wink wink, nod nod. I’m telling you stuff, and if this is this and that is that, then assume that everything else also has a double or triple meaning.”
To quote Benedict from Much Ado About Nothing. “There’s a double meaning in that.”
Mountains are kingdoms, but it begins to get complicated. I’m pretty sure what the earlier exegetes are trying to warn us from, and rightly so, is don’t get imaginative. In some ways they mean against the earlier fathers and some medieval exegetes who had various levels of interpretation, and you had to walk through each one of them, and the literal was the last and least important oftentimes.
When God says, “Take you a bullock,” he means go get a bullock. “Kill the bullock” means kill the bull and offer it. “Slice and dice it, take the skin off, put it on the altar and burn it.” He literally means that.
“No, that’s actually the primary meaning, because we need to know about the book, and the book is about Jesus. That’s always the primary meaning.”
It may not be the literal meaning but it is the primary meaning, and the literal meaning is there to minister to the primary meaning. So I think there’s some basic hermeneutical rules that could be made more clear. I don’t think we necessarily need to recast them, and I don’t want to be called up for heresy for suggesting that scripture is scattered or something, but let’s face it. The Bible presents clear alternatives to, “This can only mean one thing.” It can mean a bundle of things that are all interrelated.
The tabernacle is a type of Christ, and therefore it’s a type of the Church because the Church is the body of Christ. But every Christian is a Christ-ian, a Christ one, and a member of the body of Christ, and therefore the tabernacle is an image of man restored in Christ. And before Christ himself, the ultimate tabernacle was heaven and we’re told explicitly the tabernacle and temple were pictures of heaven. But then the garden of Eden was also a picture of heaven, so the tabernacle is a picture of the garden of Eden.
I think one of the problems – and I may be overreaching, but in my experience some of the most sound theologians, Bible teachers, and systematics think like lawyers. They think, “What is the one meaning here? This and this, and I deduce this. There.”
If you’re a theologian with a lawyer bent, read a little bit of Shakespeare and Spenser and Bunyan and Milton, and even Hawthorne and Hemingway, for that matter, or T.S. Eliot, and see how it’s done. Alice in Wonderland, for that matter. These are standard literary techniques and they don’t turn the text into nonsense. They simply allow there to be nuances and hints and foreshadowing and images and echoes at the same time. There’s nothing wrong with that.
“But that brings in the imagination, and the imagination is fallen and dangerous.”
So is your intellect. Let’s talk about Arius, who was one of the greatest rationalists of all time. He prided himself on how reasonable he was and how great his intellect was. Yeah, look what that got him. Our whole mind, our whole soul, or whole aesthetic temperament needs to be bound by the word of God.
So the woman saw Samuel. She cried with a loud voice because she’s not expecting to actually see Samuel.
And the woman spake to Saul saying, Why hast thou deceived me? For thou art Saul.
It may be at this point that she notices that he’s like 7’6”, which should have been a big hint a lot earlier, but she wasn’t paying attention.
Apparently – and here we’re touching on the fringe of how occult things work, and we should not inquire too closely – Saul could not see what she was seeing. God hijacked her and her mediumistic ability, however that works and however it’s achieved. That thing that allowed her to see demons when no one else could, God hijacked that and let her see Samuel, because Saul can’t see what she sees. He has to say, “What are you seeing? What are you seeing?”
Elohim is the word. Now, the Bible uses Elohim in a number of ways. Yes, the true creator God. It’s also used of false gods. It’s also used of angels. It’s also on several occasions used of judges and civil rulers. In the Psalms, “I have said you are gods and you are all the children of the Most High, but you should die like men because you haven’t judged the people.” He calls the judges of Israel gods.
It may mean that she saw spirits. I’m more inclined to think that what she saw was a man dressed like a judge, wearing a judge’s mantle, because that’s what she says.
And he said unto her, What form is he of? And she said, An old man cometh up and he is covered with a mantle.
Again this is apparently insubstantial phantasmal invisible to Saul’s eyes, but she sees something and God says, “Well, let’s let her look to him like he looked alive,” so she sees him dressed as a judge.
Again, it doesn’t say he saw him and said, “Oh, hi Samuel,” but he’s clear that this entity that’s present is in fact Samuel. Again, the text, the inspired writer doesn’t correct him. It doesn’t say, “This he said, being deceived.”
Yes. I thought that was kind of an odd response, but then again this whole thing is odd to begin with. However, it does fit with what we know of Saul from this and from previous occasion encounters, that Saul is very superstitious in all the wrong ways.
You would think his superstition would lead him to, “Oh, I’ve got to follow what God said to do to the letter,” but no. It’s like he goes to this necromancer, for lack of a better word, and says, “Bring me up Samuel. I want him to divine good fortunes for me on the battlefield against the Philistines.” Then Samuel actually shows up, and instead of being like – I don’t know, it’s kind of like he treats Samuel as though he is the one with the power that only God has, which is also reflected in what the witch says when she says, “I see gods coming out of the earth.”
It's almost like Saul goes, “Yeah, you’re right. It is. Let’s bow.” It’s very superstitious. He’s lost his grip of ultimate reality and now it’s just his own false presumptions.
If we do take the word here in that sense, or maybe again a double sense. The ancient world worshiped its ancestors. When you died and went into the grave you became a god, so when great-grandad comes back and rattles his chains because you haven’t been feeding him properly, the ancient world – children of Ham, Canaanites and Egyptians and such, but also the Greeks and Romans – they assumed that ghosts were great-granddad coming back because we haven’t taken care of him.
We need to feed him more. We need to keep him happy. If we keep him happy by bringing the proper sacrifices and such, then he will bless us and protect us. If not, he’s one starved ghost and he’s out to get us, so that’s bad.
It’s not Marley coming back to rattle his chains in warning to Scrooge. It’s quite something different.
It’s something very, very different. And in passing, if anybody wants a clear idea of how the ancient world regarded their dead ancestors, there’s lots of technical books but I would recommend Agatha Christie’s mystery story, Death Comes As The End, which is set in ancient Egypt. Since her husband was an archeologist and she had lots of archeologist friends, she was able to make sure that what she was presenting was historically and archeologically accurate.
It centers around a family where dad is getting old and he’s the family priest and he’s taken care of the sacrifices to the ancestors, but if he dies who’s next in line? Whoever is going to be next in line also gets the inheritance so he can take care of everybody who’s died, and then murders begin to happen.
It’s a really good story and I recommend it, but it will give you the flavor of, “They really believe this stuff?” Yup. You can also see the Disney movie, Coco. It’s very, very similar ideas.
So this is not Marley coming back to warn you and give you good advice. This is scary, and Saul makes his plea –
Usually this is the point where godly kings say, “But actually what they’re doing, Lord, is warring against you and attacking you and insulting your name, and what will you do for your name if you don’t intervene?” No, for Saul it’s all about him.
…and God is departed from me, and answereth me no more, neither by prophets nor by dreams: therefore, I have called thee, that thou mayest make known unto me what I shall do.
Yeah. “Dad wouldn’t answer me, mom, so while we’re in the pantry together can you tell me…”
Then said Samuel, Wherefore then dost thou ask of me, seeing the Lord is departed from thee, and is become thine enemy?
Arminians of all flavors have a hard time with that, because you know God loves everybody and God is trying to save everybody and God is desperate to keep people out of hell. Why would God ever say such a thing as, “I’m your enemy”? Well, because read the Old Testament and then read the book of Revelation.
Yeah, Psalm 5 is a good start. Then read the book of Revelation. Then read some of the things that Jesus says to the Pharisees – Jesus who talks more about hell than any other person in the Bible.
Oftentimes American Christians have read or had read to them selectively the parts of the Bible that seem good and comfortable. “God is love. God is nice. God is gracious. God is merciful. God never hurts a fly. That’s obviously in some text someplace,” but here it’s very much not that. Samuel as God’s prophet, his spokesman, his covenant representative, his covenant lawyer says, “You are now officially on the enemy list.”
People have objected to that, and yet there is mercy. A lot of people go through life not knowing that they’re God’s enemies and that God is theirs. It is a great blessing to be told before you die, “By the way, God is your enemy,” because that implies a couple things. First, you’re in a lot of trouble. Secondly, maybe there’s something you should do about that.
Since Saul has grown up in the full light of the gospel as it was revealed to Israel, he knows what he needs to do. It’s one last warning – from the dead, something nobody else ever gets – so there’s great mercy here.
We can think of the rich man and Lazarus. He wanted someone to come back from the dead to warn his family, and Jesus said, “No, they don’t need one,” and that’s what Saul gets, even though Jesus said it’s unnecessary.
And won’t help. It’s not only unnecessary, it won’t help. It won’t change anything. Here is Saul talking to the ghost of Samuel come back from heaven, and he’s terrified. He falls into despair and despondency. He does not change at all and continues to pursue his wicked course, feeling sorry for himself all the time.
And the Lord hath done to him as he spake by me: for the Lord hath rent the kingdom out of thine hand and given it to thy neighbour, even to David…
Up to this point Samuel never named David. Saul had to figure it out, and it was kind of obvious, but now for the first time, being dead, Samuel says, “Yeah, the man after God’s own heart, the neighbor that’s better than you. It’s David. You got it. You figured it out. How in the world do you think you’re going to get around God?”
We can think too of Jonah’s message. You were talking about mercy. Jonah didn’t preach mercy, and even the Ninevites were like, “Maybe if we change course, God will relent.”
Because thou obeyedst not the voice of the Lord, nor executedst his fierce wrath upon Amalek, therefore hath the Lord done this thing unto thee this day.
It’s not because he visits the witch. It’s not because he killed all the Lord’s priests. It’s not because he’s been chasing after the Lord’s messiah to assassinate him. This was all signed, sealed, and delivered from the day that Saul refused to kill somebody for God, and there again is a hard thing for most American Christians.
Yes. He’s a king. He bears the sword not in vain. That’s his job, and God told him so in no uncertain terms. There’s no room for being vague or, “I’m not sure if that case law applies here that way.”
And remember it was at that time that God said, “Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft,” and here we are.
Yeah. He would not listen to God’s prophet, and so he ends up finding his own ‘prophet,’ his own false religion, his own way to God or the supernatural, and now it’s brought damnation on him.
Moreover, the Lord will also deliver Israel with thee into the hand of the Philistines, and tomorrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me.
Some have said, “Oh, so they’re all going to repent and go to heaven.” That’s not what that means, because Saul does not repent. He kills himself, and there’s no evidence that between the time he falls on his sword and he expires that he did anything but feel sorry for himself and writhe around in pain. It simply means you’re going to be dead. You’re going to be in the grave.
Again, warning! Samuel does not say, “And you have absolutely no possibility of repentance. Don’t even try. The gospel doesn’t reach to you.” He does not say that. Saul already knows the path of repentance, and Samuel is just saying, “The clock is ticking, bud. You’re running out of time. Are you going to do something or not?”
When he says, “You and your sons shall be with me,” he’s in Sheol. He’s in the land of the dead. He’s basically just saying, “You’re going to die. You’re going to be with me.”
I think it’s so interesting how the witch, when Samuel first appeared, saw him coming out of the earth, whereas we think of him coming back from heaven. Would he come down from the sky? Nope. It was out of the earth.
The Lord also shall deliver the host of Israel into the hand of the Philistines.
The signal is broken apparently at that point, because Saul falls straightaway all along the earth. There was a lot of him to fall.
And there was no strength in him; for he had eaten no bread all the day, nor all the night.
So the visitation is over. Saul has collapsed and has no strength. He hasn’t gotten himself ready for battle even by eating.
It is significant that she’s the woman. She’s a woman. She’s a witch. We’re never told her name. No doubt people knew her name, but it’s irrelevant. She’s the witch at Endor. The television sit-com Bewitched took Endor and turned it into a proper name, Endora, which became the name of Samantha’s mom, played by Agnes Morehead.
It’s important to consider the witch-ness of this. We have seen people who are “the woman” who bring forth “the child” and who drop stones on the bad guy. Here we have a woman who represents something else. This is femininity twisted in the worst possible way, because here she comes as a nurturer.
She saw that he was sore troubled and said unto him, Behold, thine handmaid hath obeyed thy voice and I have put my life in my hand and have hearkened unto thy words which thou spakest unto me. Now therefore, I pray thee, hearken thou also unto the voice of thine handmaid and let me set a morsel of bread before thee, and eat, that thou mayest have strength when thou goest on thy way.
The witch offers to feed him, to prepare a meal for him as a witch, because remember that’s all we’ve got. She’s the witch and she offers him food. Saul initially declines and says, “I will not eat.”
The language there of “Hearken to the voice of your handmaid,” is also the language used of Abraham listening to Sarah when she suggests bringing Hagar into the mix.
Which is also interesting because the virgin Mary describes herself as the handmaid of the Lord. It’s like these people are basically saying, “Look, I am your handmaiden, you earthly individual,” but Mary rightly places herself as the handmaid of the Lord instead. Her identity is found outside of the earthly authorities. Even though she may be rightly under them in some sense, she places her identity as, “I’m the handmaid of the Lord.”
I think you’ve made an interesting parallel that’s easy to miss, because if you talk about the occult and magic, unless you’re heavily into some virgin cult, Mary is probably the last name that’s going to come up, because when we consider Mary biblically there’s nothing witchy about her. There’s no occult. There’s no magic. There’s nothing.
Her conception of the baby Jesus was not magic. It’s not her manipulating God. She did not do something to acquire divine power or status or divine presence. She simply submitted to the word of God, “…be it according to your word.”
But here this woman, taking on the role of Saul’s handmaid, she’s trying to play the nurturing role by giving him food, but there are some women you should not want to nurture you. Saul’s instincts are good at first. He says, “I’m not going eat,” but then his servants – as you say, his Cabinet – they kick in and together with the woman they compel him. They make him eat and he hearkens to their voice.
Now, it’s an image, it’s a figure, but here he is sitting on the bed of a witch, eating food at her hand that she’s prepared. It doesn’t get much worse than this, at least in terms of the imagery involved. Now, he doesn’t actually have sex with her, but it’s telling that the intimacy has reached a point that the Bible points out, “Yeah, he’s on her bed and she’s feeding him.”
Counter this with Jael. “Yes, come in! I’ll bring you some milk. I’ll bring you a blanket. I’ll stand and tell everybody, ‘There’s no man here.’” It’s a different way of being feminine.
So the woman had a fat calf in the house. I still don’t understand why people just have fat calves lying around, but she did, and she hastened and killed it. This is going to take some time because you’ve got to kill the thing and bleed the thing…
And at the same time you’re making bread, but unleavened bread. There’s not time to let it rise overnight. At this point it’s night and we’re serving unleavened bread. There’s a little hint of Passover here, but what a Passover.
And she brought it before Saul and before his servants and they did eat. Then they rose up and went away that night.
It’s not an accident that this is happening at night. This was part of the stage dressing. Yes, Saul did it for a practical purpose so people wouldn’t recognize him, but God draws attention to it. Judas was told, “Go do what you do quickly” and the text says, “And it was night.” Of course it was. Jesus had said, “This is the hour of the power of darkness.”
Saul has fallen under such an hour. He’s abandoned the light of God’s word. He himself brought it upon him that there should be no prophets, no Urim and Thummin, that God is his enemy, and now he turns towards the devil to find some kind of solace, some kind of comfort, some kind of direction, and it all fails. I believe in the next lesson probably we see Saul’s suicide.
As you said, this is the pinnacle of Saul’s rebellion, and yet there is one more step. He kills himself. He murders himself, because he’s not courageous. He’s not strong. He’s not full of faith. He can’t handle it and in the end he collapses and just gives up on life and fulfills Samuel’s prophecy and goes to hell.
It’s a very sad story. It’s one thing to say, “Well, he deserved it.” Yes, of course he did, but so do we all. God had been so merciful and given him so many chances, and he does the same for us most of the time. This is the kind of thing you mourn over.
I’m sure David is relieved when he hears of Saul’s death, and yet at the same time we don’t hear that relief verbalized. What we hear is great mourning. God had used this man to do great things. “Yeah, he was trying to kill me, but at the same time God used him to protect and preserve Israel, and to make her economically more successful than she had been,” so David weeps for him. He does not triumph in that sense over his enemy’s death.
It’s interesting too that that reaffirms the fact that David is the one in the right, because he recognizes the unfitting-ness of the authority that God has put in place to go out that way, in a violent self-inflicted way. He mourns over it because he recognizes the authority that God had placed in Saul, even if God was the one who took Saul out of that authority in his providence.
A couple things now about magic and demons and such today. We read throughout not only Jesus’ ministry but particularly also in the book of Acts – well, let’s go back further. Even in the Old Testament there were demons, but if God’s prophets were on the scene they were on a short leash.
Sure, the Egyptian magicians cast down their rods and they became snakes. It was an optical illusion. The text says they became snakes. Moses threw down his and it gobbled theirs up. God would sometimes let demons show off a little, only to squash them all the more thoroughly.
Another time you can think of the prophets of Baal calling on Baal, and the text says, “There was none to hear, none to answer,” and our rationalistic 21st-century minds would say, “Of course not, because Baal is not real.” That’s not the point. There were demonic powers at work there and God had shut them up. They would have loved to have propped up Baal worship in Israel, and God had said, “Shut it.”
Whatever response these priests of Baal were used to getting, they weren’t getting it. They suddenly were all on their own and God wasn’t letting anything interfere. And so throughout the Old Testament when demons do try to flex their muscles and God’s prophet is on the scene, they’re stuck. They can’t do anything.
Then Jesus comes. In the beginning, the first one or two times he encounters demons they try to cop an attitude and that doesn’t work, and before too long he just shows up and they say, “No! No! It’s not the day yet! Not today, not today! Let us go to the pigs, please!”
I bet that was amusing. But we come to the book of Acts, and particularly at Ephesus Paul has some interesting encounters. He wins to Christ a great many people who were dabbling in the occult arts, and in coming to Christ they eventually take all their books on magic and burn them. Burning books is a thing that we kind of associate sometimes with Christian fundamentalism and the temptation to see evil in things and to make a big show of it.
Years and years ago I would be told by my students, “Yeah, there was this big rock and roll burning party at our church.” I think was even before D&D, so this was probably still when we had vinyl records. “We were all supposed to throw our rock and roll records into the fire. And when we did, we started hearing squealings and screamings, and we were told that was the demons coming out of them.” No, that’s what happens when you burn plastic.
But in Paul’s case there was an obvious approval. “Yes, these books – you don’t need to be reading them, and you don’t need to be selling them to Goodwill so someone else can read them. They need to go away, just like idols,” so there was a great burning, and we were even told in the text how much. It was a lot of money that these people had invested.
Something else that was going on is that there were roaming Jewish exorcists who tried to cast out demons on their own and were having some apparent level of success. In other words, the demons played the game with them. But these exorcists had found a new magic word. It was the word Jesus, because they watched Paul do this, and Paul was so successful at casting out demons, so they said, “Let’s try that ourselves.”
Yeah. These seven sons of Sceva went to a man who was possessed and they say to the demon, “We command thee in the name of Jesus, who Paul preaches, that you come out of the man,” and the demon through the man’s vocal cords says, “Jesus I know and Paul I know. Who are you?” then jumps on them and beats them and pounds them and bloodies them and tears their clothes off until they run out of the house screaming and naked and everybody hears about this.
The true champions of God’s word were able to dispose of demons without any difficulty. The people who just tried to play the game got themselves in a lot of trouble.
There’s one other story that was actually in Philippi. Paul and Silas come to Philippi and they’re preaching and a young woman who is a prophetess, a seer, a diviner, demon-possessed begins following them and claiming, “These men are servants of the most high God, who shows us the way of salvation,” so Paul and Silas are getting advertising from Satan for free.
After a while they decide they don’t want that, for I would think obvious reasons. There are some people you don’t want sitting on the platform with you at the revival meeting. “We’ve got a Buddhist guy over here. We’ve got a Hindu guy. We’ve got our Jehovah’s Witness, and they’re all in favor of this revival.” No.
It said this woman had the spirit of a python. A python is a symbol of Apollo. The pythoness was the Oracle of Delphi, a fortune-teller, demon-possessed – yes, with a little help from some strange guests as they popped in. But this woman actually had some kind of demon, and again Paul with a word just dispatches it, and so on.
When the gospel confronted a demon-infested world, the demons ran away screaming. We get a taste of this in St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation of the Word. One of the proofs he uses to show that Jesus is indeed divine is that the world was full of demons. There were oracles and magicians and diviners and all that, but any time the gospel shows up the oracles would shut down, the magic would vanish, and the demons would run for their lives. Just the very presence of a worshiping church in a city pretty much meant that that was over.
The Jews didn’t have it that good because how many times did Jesus go into a synagogue and find someone possessed of a demon. Think about going into church next Sunday and saying, “Oh, there’s Bud. You know, we all know he has a demon.”
Try going to your average Pentecostal church and you’ll see that happens a lot.
I was about to say that. I’ve had Pentecostal students say, “Yeah, there’s this guy who goes to our church who’s demon-possessed.”
I’ve got a friend right now who is really struggling with these kinds of thoughts because in his home things tend to move on their own. Now, I’ve seen enough of the world and enough of life to believe that such things are quite possible. I’ve actually had friends call me and say – the first one asked for the phone number of a friend of ours, and I found out later why – “Because there’s something moving things around in my house and I would like it to leave my bedroom, please.”
Then I got the same kind of call from one of my students. “My girlfriend used to practice the occult a lot and she’s trying to break with that, but there’s some thing in her room that keeps moving things,” so it’s possible, but it’s not always that. I am, after all, a scientist of sorts. I have a degree in physics and I love mysteries, so my first thought is, “Okay, I’m open to the possibility of a haunting – not ghosts but demons. However, let’s look into some medical things first and let’s check your wiring.”
I think we’ve found some answers that don’t require demon involvement, but my friend was very terrified of these things, and I’ve had to remind them, “You know, my friend, I don’t care if Satan comes in after church and sits down with you on your couch on Sunday. So what? Satan walked around with Jesus for an entire day during the temptation. That didn’t mean Jesus somehow had failed in his faith and holiness.”
Yes, so this has been the case. Now, where the gospel has not yet gone, on the mission field we still get reports of weird demonic kinds of things. Some people are inclined to brush them off as, “Oh, that’s superstition and hearsay and merely anecdotal,” but we keep hearing about it.
What happens generally is once the gospel takes firm root, such things go away. The antidote to magic is the preaching of the gospel. We don’t need to engage in pseudo-white magic. There are manuals on how to cast out demons. “First, talk to the demon and get its name.”
Why are you talking to a demon? This is not smart. Jesus did, but he’s Jesus. The rest of you – no. Don’t be talking to demons. If you’re going to say something to them, say “The Lord rebuke you.” Talk to Jesus about them. He’s the one who’s in charge. Let him deal with it, and then you can start preaching. You can start singing hymns. They don’t like that at all.
This reminds me of a story my mom told. She went to missionary school and I think it was one of her professors who had known someone who people were suspecting had a demon. He had come back from outlandish places, so there was some legitimate concern. So the professor took this guy on a car ride and just every now and then would ask him, “Hey, did Jesus Christ come in the flesh?” and the guy would always go, “Yes. Yes, he did.” So they finished their car ride and it was like, “I don’t think he’s demon-possessed. Check his thyroid.”
[laughing] You both know my story, because it’s not mine, it’s my mentor Pastor Powell’s story, and this really happened. Some people are like, “Oh! Oh! It’s this story! Good!”
There was a faithful Sunday School teacher in southern Oregon. I don’t know his last name or don’t remember, but my pastor always called him Brother Randall. Brother Randall was teaching Sunday School one day in church, and for some reason he got off on the subject of Ouija boards and just said, “Yeah, and a Ouija board is something else you should never have in your house.”
And some guy, who I now call Brother Smith, kind of snorted at that, and Brother Randall, being the kind of guy he was, didn’t let it pass. “Brother Smith, you got one of those things in your house, don’t you?”
“All right. I’m not going to tell you to get rid of it, but I’m going to tell you the next time you’ve got that thing working, you ask it a question. You ask, ‘Did Jesus Christ come in the flesh?’”
Sometime later Brother Smith came back to Brother Randall very shaken. He said, “You know, I thought you were full of it. I thought you didn’t know what you were talking about, because I’ve used the Ouija board lots and lots of times, and nothing bad ever happened. But I had promised you, in front of a lot of people, that I would ask it the question, ‘Did Jesus Christ come in the flesh?’ so I did.
“It had been working just fine, and suddenly it stopped. It was weird because it always answered, so I tried again. ‘Did Jesus Christ come in the flesh?’ and letter-by-letter it spelled out the words ‘No, damn you,’ and stopped working.”
But those things are increasingly rare, or they were and generally are, until the gospel begins to decline. In the 1960s when we took a full turn toward the East and decided to study magic and the occult and eastern philosophy, suddenly we began to get these kinds of things again. When flames burn low we start seeing the eyes out there in the darkness. The solution is not white magic. It’s not some kind of how-to book on casting out demons. It’s the faithful preaching of the gospel and the disciplines of godly faith and obedience.
There’s a danger. To one of the churches in Revelation, Jesus says, “You keep talking about knowing the deep things of Satan. Stop that. You don’t need to know all of the devil’s doing. You don’t need to know all about the occult. You just need to preach the gospel. You need to be faithful to my Word and call on me. I’ve got the demons covered.” The blood of Jesus covers that. As you say, greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world.
That doesn’t mean that the devil is not occasionally a problem, but if he is allowed to manifest physically he’s no threat. He’s like a barking dog who is on a leash, and he knows he can’t break the leash. He’s just hoping we don’t. Just call his bluff. Start singing psalms and start preaching the gospel, and pretty soon he’ll drift away.
Lewis in The Screwtape Letters says that there are two opposite mistakes we can make about the devil. One is to deny him in our rationalism, not believing in the supernatural or, as Christian rationalists say, “Well, that may have happened one time, but it’s not today. Now those reports are just nonsense.” But the other is an unhealthy fascination. This can come not only from those who are actively consciously involved in occult magic things, but from Christians who are doing things that are in principle just as magical, but they call it something else.
Back in my hometown there is a certain church which I will not name. Once it was a champion of truth, but over the years it drifted. A few years ago it was advertising its services, and as you read them basically they were promoting a healing ministry that sounded exactly like white magic. They even had a resurrection team. If someone had died they would send out the resurrection team and try to raise you. Somehow it didn’t work, which surprised them I guess, and then COVID closed it down – the irony continues.
We can also think about when Christ died and rose – kind of the combination – and that was him stepping on the serpent’s head and crushing it. It’s still writhing around, but it’s dying. It is failing and falling away.
Honestly, at least for the Christian, we shouldn’t be worried when the worst thing that a demon can do is nudge something on a table three inches.
Yeah. My cat normally knocks it off. When the demons can’t even do what a cat can do…
One last thought in light of the note that you wrote earlier. When we get to the book of Revelation we see a tyrant called the beast, and he’s backed up by a false prophet. It’s the false prophet who actually animates the image of the beast and gets people to worship it and to get the number and all that stuff.
There’s a combination, a treaty, an agreement between apostate civil government and apostate religion, and they play to one another and back up one another, and yet Jesus has both their numbers. Yes, they can cause some damage, but in the end they end up in the lake of fire, where Jesus is in the process of slaying them. He continues to ride through history wielding the sword from his mouth and slaying anybody who gets in his way.
We do get to end optimistically. Jesus has won and Jesus keeps on winning. If you have been having trouble with occult manifestations, demonic activity, or something like that, 1) get over it, 2) call on Jesus, 3) learn more of the gospel. Turn to Christ. The devil does not like the full light of the gospel. Then Luther suggests laughing at him too, but that’s not quite as spiritual.
I remember years and years ago when my parents and I first moved into our house that we lived in for many years, we had a couple people come from the church. My parents were and still are Word of Faith Pentecostals, and I remember we all stood in the living room and it was probably an hour and a half – which to 7-year-old me felt like years – and the whole time it was them praying.
I’m not going to come down on praying. Get people to come over and pray together, that’s great. But it kind of felt a little bit white-magic-y because it was like, “We are here. We’re consecrating this house and we’re praying against all the demons and all the things and they’re not going to come in this house. We’re telling them now.”
I had forgotten about it until like two weeks ago, and now just looking back at it I’m like, “That is the wrong way to do things.” It’s like, “Well, we’ve already prayed up in this house so nothing can get through. We’ve taken the pinch of incense and we’ve thrown it on the cornerstone of the house and everything is dandy. This one is good for 15 years. The warranty is on it.” It’s not great.
No. You understand the idea of wanting God’s protection over your home and wanting to dedicate what you have to God, and as you say there’s nothing wrong with praying.
No, there’s not. But when you start turning it into ritual, you get the feeling that maybe there’s a misunderstanding here. Maybe it’s just a tradition in the way people are raised and maybe we should not criticize, but it depends on who’s doing it, why they’re doing it, and how they’re doing it.
When someone comes along and says, “But if you do these things, then we will guarantee that,” prayer is not magic. Prayer doesn’t guarantee anything. No kind of dedication or rededication project ever forces God to do anything, nor supplies some kind of metaphysical boundary against evil spirits.
What you do is you call on God to be your God and to help you and to take care of you, and trust that he knows what that means.
I have learned to pray for my daughters, for their safety and for our family’s safety. Growing up I just kind of thought, “Well, I’m a good Calvinist and all things work together, so I’m not even really going to think about this.” A number of people, particularly our Headmaster Richard Batista, have made a big deal about praying for protection very consciously, very regularly, about very specific things – parking cars in the parking lot where there are 200 cars coming in, and other things that are constant everyday things where yes, kids could get hurt.
I’ve learned from that that it’s wrong to presume upon God. God knows everything, but he likes to be asked. It is good to regularly ask God for his protection and his care and his intervention on a physical level, but also on a spiritual level.
If things started moving around my house without any conscious entity seeming to do so, 1) I would look for the wires and levers and magnets, but 2) I would also ask God to kick out anything else that might be there. But when we start turning it into, “Here is the ritual whereby you sanctify your house to God and the demons will never get in…
On that point too, one of the things that I’ve noticed I’ve become a lot more particular about is every day thanking God for safe travel, especially since I live in the Midwest in winter. I drive country roads to work every day, this week excepted.
Pardon the pun but I’ve had a nice crash course in driving in snow and somewhat on ice. Most of the time the ice is melted, the roads are plowed and salted. Even the country roads get pretty well taken care of. I think the only real exception is there are two turns on the way to work right towards the end that are very country and do not get very much attention.
All that to say, life is unpredictable and driving is unpredictable in even the best of weather states, so I’ve noticed that I am very more particular about it and I thank God every day. “Thank you for giving us safe travel to church and back, from work and back, and that I get to be at home uninjured enjoying dinner with my wife.” It’s all grace and all blessing. It also doesn’t hurt to continue to pray for that and say, “Please continue to give us safe travel.” I’ve prayed that multiple times. But also, “Thank you for your grace and mercy in having given this to us.”
For those people who can’t tell from my voice, I’m currently ill. Being sick with something really makes you remember all the times you weren’t sick and all the times that God has kept you well. I went two years through this pandemic thing and didn’t catch the dreaded coronavirus, and now I’ve got it and it just kind of comes across like, “God, you really did prevent me from getting this. I don’t know why you didn’t give it to me before, because it seemed like everybody was getting it, but now everybody is getting it and I’ve gotten it. Thank you for taking me away from that.”
I don’t know how far through this I am. I’ve stopped keeping track, but I’m okay and God has preserved my life. He’s preserved the life of me and my wife together and that is something to praise God for.
Absolutely. You don’t need to go out and buy talismans and magic charms and St. Christopher medals. You simply can talk to your heavenly father.
With that, we probably should turn toward recommendations. I’m hoping both of you have some.
I have one. I was thinking about this because of what we were saying about the worst the devil can do to us is move things around our house pretty much, and that’s true for us as those in whom the Spirit of God dwells. But I also really have appreciated a podcast called Cultish. I’m not sure if I’ve recommended it before.
I don’t agree with all of their theological perspectives necessarily, but they have done some really interesting work in pulling together some ideas of different cults and UFO stuff and different occult stuff and try to look at this like, “Is this a spiritual reality? And what is the story God’s telling with the people he brings out of that?”
They had several different guests. One of them, Andrea Schwartz, I believe…
I apparently don’t know her back story, but she works with Chalcedon now, and when we were trying to get an online learning program going with the school, she volunteered her daughter as a test case. So she got to watch our class online and then eventually came and visited us one day, just to see, “Who are all these people whose voices I keep hearing?”
Her mom is also the lady who hooked me up with the gentlemen for whom I ghost-wrote for so long, who owns Heirloom Audio Productions, so I’ve talked with Andrea a number of times. So anyway, you were saying?
She is one of many fascinating guests that have appeared on this podcast. I could only do it in really small doses because I do get freaked out too much, but an episode here and there is a really good reminder, kind of like reading Augustine’s City of God where it’s like, “Oh, no. Serving demons is really, really oppressive and terrible and a horrible life to live,” which is easy to forget. You forget that it’s real in this safe and clinical gospel-drenched society that we still have, even though the gospel is kind of…
Well, we’re working on it. It’s so easy to forget the reality of how awful demons are. That’s why I recommend Cultish.
Greg, do you have a serious recommendation or a whimsical one, because I feel like we should end with a serious one and mine is whimsical.
Okay. My recommendation is to watch bad movies with your loved ones so you can mock them together. It’s just a fun time spent together. You’re together, you’re doing something, and you can also talk about story and why this thing doesn’t work as a story or what they could have done better, which in the case of the movies we watched this week were literally anything. They could have done anything to be better.
If you’re curious, we watched The Divergent Series and it’s so bad. I’m not even going to talk about it. I’m so upset about it.
I don’t know what this is. I’m afraid to ask now. I’ll ask you afterwards.
I’ll explain when the call is over. But my wife Emily and I watched it. We’ve been sick so this was like our “sick week at home movie night” thing this week and it was really fun because we’re also exhausted. By 9:30 we’re both like, “Turn it off. We need to go to bed,” so three movies have lasted us this whole week.
It doesn’t have to be bad movies. You can watch good movies with your loved ones and it’s the same end result. You can talk about what the movies do well.
Exactly. That’s the ideal. So that was our activity in the evenings this week and it was really quite fun and enjoyable, even if the movies themselves were not.
I’m going to recommend a book I kind of alluded to but didn’t name. It’s by Os Guinness. It’s called The Dust of Death: The Sixties Counterculture and How It Changed America Forever. It’s published by InterVarsity, or was back in 1979. I don’t know if it’s still available new, but I’m sure you can find a used copy someplace.
He looks at the counterculture of the 60s and at various phases of it. One chapter is called “Encircling Eyes.” His was the image I borrowed of, “The campfires are burning low and look out there and you’ll see the eyes looking in from the darkness.”
His comparison was that’s what demonism is like for a culture. As long as the fires of rationality and faith are burning, the demons stay out there where you can’t really see them, but when those fires burn low, when there’s no faith and therefore no reason, the eyes start showing up all over the place. Things are watching you, and he addresses it from a Christian point of view. That’s Dust of Death by Os Guinness.
Thank you all so much for joining me and for those excellent recommendations. You can follow us on YouTube and Rumble. You can follow our Facebook, where we drop dank memes occasionally. You can subscribe to us on any podcast catcher that you happen to use. If you hated tonight’s episode and want to tell us all about it, you can email us at [email protected].
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