"The Fall of the House of Saul"
God will not allow the old thing to fall until He judges that the new thing is ready to take its place.
Download or email this sermon Part 2: When Saul's House Goes Too Far - The Occult
The second thing for which God is waiting is for the house of Saul to go too far. At what point have they gone too far? When they go into the occult. Arguably the most serious form of occult practice seen in the Bible is the sin of necromancy, or communicating with the dead. If a believer goes to be with the Lord, until the Rapture and Resurrection when we meet them in the air, we have one indirect line of communication left to them: We may talk to the same Jesus they may talk to. By the Holy Spirit, He transcends time, space, and eternity. Only He may cross that barrier and be both in time and in eternity simultaneously. The case we just read about with Saul is a special event that God allowed one time only.
When you see religions fooling around with the dead, it is a serious matter. We are not just talking about the spooky movie stuff that kids like; it's something more than Ghostbusters. Mormonism, for example, is big-time into this thing with the dead. The same is true of Roman Catholicism – when you walk into a Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox church, look at how dark it is. Also observe all the statues of dead people they put up before which people light candles and burn incense. Similarly, what do you see in Shintoism, the Japanese practice of ancestor worship? The same things. It is the spirit of death. At Lenin's tomb in Moscow, they've re-embalmed his corpse and made him into a godlike figure. This is the spirit of death. Even the architecture and atmosphere of these places reflects what they are; look at a cathedral and see how startling a resemblance it bears to a haunted house. Little children find these churches spooky when they go in. The literal darkness of these places reflects their spiritual darkness.
Only the Lord can transcend time, space and eternity. When someone else tries to put him or herself in the position to cross over this barrier between the temporal and the eternal, they are putting themselves in Christ's place. This is the spirit of Antichrist – “anti” literally means “in place of”. It is something grossly demonic. It isn't just that they're fooling around with the dead, but that they are attempting to do something that only God may do. All false religions will put man in God's place in some way.
Benny Hinn has stated on national television that the ghosts of Kathryn Kuhlman and Amy Semple-McPherson appeared to him in his room at night. This man communes with the dead, and has proclaimed that fact on so-called Christian television. The Bible calls this demonic – the man is an absolute necromancer. Yet none of this matters – neither that he said it nor that he did it – people still accept it as being from God. The church has proven her willingness to accept the demonic.
This is Page 6 of 17
Scripture taken from the New American Standard Bible Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation.