[AI translation] Indeed, this is a wonderful book, the Bible! It really is a book of life. Everything in the world that occurs and is found in this life is found in it. Here, even a necromancy. I could almost say that a quite regular spiritualistic séance has taken place here in the passage read. Just as usual. That is, in twilight, with a woman in a trance, with a spirit summoned from the afterlife, with the appearance of that spirit, with the exact fulfilment of the future - a quite regular spiritualist séance. I am not surprised that the advocates of spiritualism invoke this biblical passage in particular to justify themselves, saying that, well, there are examples of necromancy and necromancy in the Bible. Well, no doubt, we can see that there is. But it is not an example to be followed, it is a very discouraging one! It's not an encouragement that, well, it's possible, so that's how you do it! - but on the contrary, a great, great warning to beware, people, lest you fall into Satan's snare, as did this unfortunate King Saul. I am convinced that this whole incident at Endor is described in such great detail in order to expose the fact that whoever wants to penetrate into the secrets of the future, whether on earth or in the hereafter, by such occult practices, should be aware that he is knocking at the gates of hell. He invokes, unleashes upon himself the corrupting powers of the evil against which Jesus taught us to pray, "Deliver us from evil." We can see this from the details. Let us see the details:First of all, it is remarkable in what state of mind Saul found himself to turn to this woman of Endor, or spiritualist medium, for help. From the previous episodes, but also from this one, it is very clear that the threads of events around King Saul are becoming increasingly entangled. He was getting into a bigger and bigger maze, the ground was slipping away from under his feet. More and more, this poor man was on the verge of despair. So he was in a state when the control of reason is brought to a standstill by some great shock. Here, in Saul's case, the convulsive retention of, and adherence to, the shaken royal power at all costs. Of course, it could be other things. It can also be caused by a great, great disappointment in life. And especially a heartbreaking bereavement. I remember a woman once told me that when she was mourning her son, and I could see on her face that she was in mourning, and she was wearing a mourning dress, someone approached her in the street, a complete stranger, and said: 'Madam, I see you are in mourning, come with me, I will take you to a place where you can meet your dead again, where you can talk to them. You will hear his voice, and you will be comforted. There have always been and always will be people with sad souls and grieving hearts, and so the greatest danger lurks around the corner, in the form of the most touching and tenderest of condolences. So it is very emphatic in this story that a man shaken in his spiritual equilibrium seeks some sort of support for himself in such spiritualistic or occult craft or other superstitions and bondage. Not the healthy, sane man, for he has no need of it.
Then there is another thing very characteristic of Saul's mentality. This is also clear from the story we read. For some time - I would say for a long time - he has been in a controversy with God. Saul refused to acknowledge what the prophet Samuel had told him so many times while he was alive, that the kingdom would be taken from him for his many sins, and given to his rival, David. In no way did he want to acknowledge God's will, nor bow to God's judgment. And when he did turn to the Lord for help in his time of need, of course God did not answer him, because God cannot simply be pulled out of the noose when the noose is tight. Especially for someone who has never paid any attention to what the Lord says before. That's why we have this description here, that when Saul turned to the Lord for help, the Lord did not answer him either by dream vision, or by the Urim (a means of holy predestination), or by the prophets. So it is very important here - and this needs to be underlined - that when this incident happened, Saul was not reconciled in fellowship with God, his soul was not in harmony with God. From this it follows that it is always the man who is not in a speaking relationship with God, who is in disharmony with God, who seeks support for himself in occult practices such as this. The man who is truly in harmony with God never does, because he has no need of it. It is so often the case even today that the place of faith in the living God is taken in the souls of so many people by all sorts of superstitious bondage, right down to the amulet on the windscreen of the car and the talisman so carefully and jealously guarded in the pocket. Look out for Western magazines: in every issue you will find the weekly horoscope. For hundreds of thousands of the estranged, secularised masses are following the horoscope and arranging their lives according to it. So we need not be ashamed of our faith in the living God! Many people who are not in living communion with God believe in such substitute gods. I, then, will stick to the Lord God instead of all this necromancy and other superstitions!
Then there are other things that show that what Saul is doing here is not quite right. That it is not a very clean thing. What is written in verse 8: "And Saul disguised himself, and put on other clothes, and went away, he and two men with him, and came by night to the woman..." The darkness of the night in itself is almost symbolic of the power of darkness in action here, and the twilight of the evening, which is usual for such necromancy, in itself shows that something dark is involved here, something that does not like the light. Saul went at night, dressed in different clothes, to this necromancer. So it was as if he himself was ashamed of this affair, as if he himself felt that this step must remain a secret. It is never right that something should not be made public; it is never right that it should be done in hiding under cover of darkness, and it is always suspicious that something should remain secret. This darkness of the night is very fitting for the power of darkness, because they are somehow connected. In the Bible we read, "God is light and in him is no darkness". Jesus said of himself: 'I have come into the world as light, so that no one who follows me may remain in darkness'. Then Jesus also said, "I am the light of the world; whoever follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life"! - This in itself is just warning enough. But one might now say that the spirit of the Samuel who was summoned does appear. And this spirit does give certain messages, and what he says will be fulfilled word for word in a few days - I have not read this, it is written in chapter 29 - and will become reality. How can this be interpreted? Well, in such séances, there are certainly astonishing events. Mysterious knocks, the movement of barely touched objects, their rising, and even, in more serious cases, something as serious as the medium falling into a trance and beginning to speak, answering questions. From such phenomena, many people conclude that people really do come into contact with the souls of the dead, that the forces and phenomena of the afterlife somehow affect people. A woman once said to me: please, I am one hundred percent convinced that at the meeting I was at, the spirit of my dead husband really did appear, because he told me things that no one else knew about except him and me. These phenomena can be explained psychologically. Even if not so simply, but in any case, irrespective of any otherworldly influence, there are also completely psychological phenomena involved in these phenomena.
First of all, let me state in the strongest terms, and I say this in full awareness of my responsibility before God, that it was not the spirit of Samuel that appeared there. No! God's statement in the whole of Scripture protests against the possibility that anyone from the afterlife could be summoned back to this earth by any kind of magic. He could be summoned to appear before God and be forced to confess, to tell secrets about these worldly or otherworldly things concerning the future. No such thing, it is not possible! The real Samuel himself would have protested most strongly against such a thing, against such a power of sorcery. No human medium in the world has such power. Well, the woman did see someone. Let it be well observed: the woman saw! Saul did not see. That the woman did see someone, in whom, according to the description, Saul thinks he recognises the recently deceased prophet Samuel, is explained quite simply: the image of the prophet Samuel is very vivid in Saul's troubled mind, and that is how he saw Samuel in the last days of his life, that is, as an old man - as I read - with the characteristic prophetic mantle on his shoulders. This image was projected from Saul's soul, and this was the image that the woman saw. Experiments are being carried out today - and they are successful - to trigger thought images and electrical wave vibrations in the human brain, and these can be picked up on a screen, they can be visualised, you can almost measure the thoughts of a person. So Saul is the transmitter and the woman is the recorder. Because there are people with a sensitive nervous system who - especially in a trance state - come into such contact with the spiritual world of another person, especially the subconscious spiritual world, that they can see the thought images that are in that other person. The woman "sees" Saul's prophet Samuel from his soul. In psychology, these phenomena are known under such headings as mind-reading, remote viewing, telepathy, X-ray vision. There are such psychological phenomena. They are greater in some people, lesser in others, and in some people quite astonishing. So the spirit of Samuel does not appear in this séance, only the woman sees someone, and when she tells Saul who she sees, Saul, who does not see, believes from the telling that he discovers Samuel in her.
But one could still make an objection that what the woman says, based on this summoned spirit, is without a doubt really the prophet Samuel. But notice what the spirit says through the medium: exactly the same as Samuel the prophet had told Saul more than once in his life, and therefore the same as was then so much on Saul's troubled mind. The woman sees the thoughts that preoccupy and terrify Saul's soul, and she is fully absorbed in Saul's spiritual world, and she gives expression to these thoughts in words. She puts them into words as if they were being conveyed by the spirit she had summoned. So this is also a very general psychological phenomenon. But one could still raise an objection: how can it be explained that what this alleged ghost has predicted happens the next day, word for word? Let me say that this also does not prove anything in favour of the doctrines of spiritualism. It is common knowledge that time is relative, it does not actually exist, we just perceive things as happening in a temporal succession. Some people see it differently. Some see the past, the present and the future as one. He sees what we experience in stages as one. I had a very dear friend, a well-known writer - nothing to do with spiritualism - who, on more than one occasion, while lying in bed in the morning, even half asleep, experienced something very distinctly and very sharply. For example, he would even experience what we were talking about when I went to visit him. And one of the following days, everything that he had experienced before in a half-dream came true word for word. That I went to see him, and what we talked about, just like that. So the fulfillment of such a prophecy does not prove anything at all about the truth of spiritualism.
It would be all right up to now, there is nothing dangerous about it, because it is really about the mysterious depths of the soul, about psychic phenomena. The trouble in the whole thing is that Satan is tantalizing such phenomena and mysteries, which take place in the depths of the soul, and attaches his own corrupting and harmful spiritual world to them. (It would be anti-scientific to deny the existence of the spirit world.) And by such necromantic practices, the gullible soul opens the door to the demonic, harmful world. So, necromancy has happened here, yes - but not necromancy! And there is a big difference. It was not the spirit or ghost of the dead Samuel who appeared, but there was a spiritual effect, a demonic spiritual effect, a harmful spiritual effect, which is also symbolized in the description, that the woman sees this spiritual phenomenon coming up from the earth, from the underworld. That is why there is such a repeated, explicit prohibition in the Bible against dealing with such things. Let me quote only the most convincing of the very many, from Deuteronomy: "Let no man be found among you who shall carry his son or his daughter through the fire, neither diviner, nor conjurer, nor interpreter of spells, nor interpreter of miracles, nor sorcerer; neither sorcerer, nor diviner of charms, nor inquirer of devils, nor diviner of secrets, nor conjurer of the dead; for the Lord hateth all who do these things..." (Deuteronomy 18:10-12) There is no word so terrible in the whole Bible! It is said many times that the Lord hates sin, but that He hates the sinner occurs only here, and only in contrast to this practice.
And that there is indeed a devilish artifice here is proved by what this summoned spirit says: it is all accusation, a recollection of old sins. It is almost as if it were a way of driving the already troubled soul to utter despair. There is no question of Saul's repentance, no question of the possibility of mercy in God's judgment. There is no Gospel here, only a threat, only the fulfilment of an inexorable destiny, only a foretaste of a hopeless future, nothing else! The real Samuel, if he had been, would have said something else, a servant of God. He would have even said something like this: Saul, repent, humble yourself before God, and then you will see that His judgment may be turned into mercy for you! But that is exactly what Satan does not want, repentance, because he knows very well that he has then already lost the soul in whom repentance is. This is always the devil's way, to seduce first and torment to death later. And this is what he did to Saul, as the result shows. This particular communication from the afterlife does not help him, but rather pushes the unfortunate soul further down the slope. For these summoned spirits never give any real consolation, and in fact plunge the soul into despair, nervous breakdown, darkness. Saul finally ends his life with his own hand, as the next section testifies. This is the path of darkness.
Brethren, I cannot thank the Lord enough that we are not in need of such communications, such help, such advice and such guidance. I cannot thank the Lord enough that we do not need any human medium. I, for my part - I think, along with you - recognise only one medium as authoritative. A medium means someone who is an intermediary, a mediator. I believe in one medium, His otherworldly communication alone. But then I do. Upon that I then dare, with full faith and full trust, to lay my life here on earth and in eternal reality. You know who the only medium is, don't you? The One who dares to say of Himself, "He who sent me is true. He whom you do not know, but I know him, because I am from him and he sent me". And he who dares to say, "I am the bread of life which came down from heaven, that every man may eat thereof, that he may not die!" And he who said, 'But this is the will of him who sent me, that whoever sees the Son and believes in him may have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day'! Yes, brothers and sisters, we can believe in him, this one and only medium, Jesus, but then only in him, because he really came from this world and from this world he went back to this world. He alone can authentically tell us what is there and how and in what way we can get there.
So does anyone need a medium? We do! Jesus! We are so easily led astray, and sometimes we don't even know, just out of curiosity, or sometimes with quite serious intent, what peril our souls are playing at! Oh, forgive us, Lord, that we sometimes seek to penetrate your secrets by force, and to make you speak to us with a soul that is disobedient to you! And we wonder that Thou dost not answer us, when we do not even heed what Thou hast so often told us!
Amen.
Date: 15 February 1970 (Evangelization)