Communicating with God’s World of Spirit – its laws and its purpose | Pastor Johannes Greber

- 144 - The Israelites had acquired the practice of inquiring of the spiritually ‘dead’ in Egypt and many of them had become addicted to idolatry there. That is why the prohibition against inquiring of the dead was among the first injunctions laid upon them by God after their exodus from Egypt. Leviticus 19: 26: ‘You shall not practice fortune-telling or witchcraft.’ Leviticus 19: 31: ‘Do not go to mediums who conjure up the dead or to fortune-tellers; do not consult them so that you may not be defiled by them. I am the Lord, your God.’ Leviticus 20: 6: ‘If anyone consults a medium who conjures up the dead or a fortune-teller to practice idolatry with them, I will turn against that person and drive him out from my people.’ Leviticus 20:27: ‘A man or a woman who has within them a spirit conjured up from the dead or a fortune-telling spirit shall surely be put to death; they should be stoned. Blood guilt weighs heavily upon them.’ These passages show that the men and women who conjured up the dead were ‘mediums’ through whom evil spirits spoke. These mediums were themselves responsible for their association with Evil. They could have rejected Evil had they turned confidingly to God and entered into communication with the good spirit world. Their punishment was therefore justified. “Besides the mediums, there were persons engaged in communicating with the evil spirit world through ‘clairvoyance’. Blood guilt’ here does not mean actual bloodshed or physical killing. In the Bible the term ‘blood guilt’ refers to spiritual slaying, or the estrangement of the spirit from God. The conjurers of the dead had indeed incurred blood guilt because they had brought those who came to them into communication with the evil spirits, thus leading them away from God and committing them to spiritual death. • The contamination to which those who associate with conjurers of the dead expose themselves is not of a physical nature, but proceeds from the bad od they absorb from the conjurers. It contaminates their own od, making it a hotbed for the activities of evil spirit beings. There occurs in the Bible at least one detailed account of a case of conjuring, namely King Saul’s inquiry of the witch of Endor. It is very instructive in a number of ways. I Samuel 28: 3-19: ‘Samuel had died. Saul had driven all the conjurers of the dead out of the country, but when the Philistine army invaded his land in great numbers, Saul was afraid and deep in his heart he trembled with terror. So, he consulted the Lord, but the Lord would not answer him, not through clairvoyance, or the breastplate of judgment, or through the good mediums. For by his disobedience Saul had turned away from God. The spirits of God had left him, and an evil spirit had taken control of him.

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