The conjurer Saul visited at Endor had a familiar spirit. It’s a well established practice from those days that someone would cultivate an alliance with a Nephilim spirit. She was familiar with it; she could recognize it in some fashion. She would call up her familiar spirit in a seance to pretend to be someone who died. Using this false ghost, she would persuade people to pay her for this service, pretending to allow people to contact the dead. It was fraud of a peculiar sort.
There were hucksters who would pretend to call up spirits, but would instead throw their voice; these were utter fakes. The woman at Endor is described in the Bible as a genuine spirit caller. What shocked her was that Samuel showed up and she knew it was not her familiar spirit. This was the real deal.
Samuel spoke with the same authority in this incident that he had during life, to relay a word from God. Why would the woman have been so persistent in her wicked practice? Because the demon was in contact with the Devil and the Watchers, and perhaps indirectly with the rebel elohim from the Divine Council.
Keep in mind: All human governments outside a covenant with God are run by the Devil and his allies. They have an agenda and they confer together on how they can best deceive humans. A primary interest is herding humans into doing things that appear empowering, but actually result in destruction. These spirits are still at it today, suckering humans into self-destructive behavior. They plant their thoughts in human minds that don’t have spiritual covering from the Covenant. The spirits keep offering great things that they cannot possibly deliver, nor would they want to deliver. They want to destroy the entire human race.
That woman’s Nephilim friend was deceiving her, too. A major element in these seances was for the spirit to report things that reflected what the deceased person would say. They knew these people. Sometimes, the Nephilim would pretend to leak the Devil’s plans for the end of one kingdom and the start of another, or perhaps some other political event. It could forecast accurately because it knew the Devil’s strategy.
Of course, the Devil always had to get God’s approval on all of this. No created being can hide anything from God. So, He also knows those plans and could reveal them to His prophets if it mattered. However, prophecy from God is revealed, not to give information, but to declare His character, His agenda and His priorities. In other words, the prophets speak about God and what He wants from His people. In the process, people could also discover things that are in the works. Sometimes God would predict things that He really didn’t want to carry through.
Thus, a lot of His warnings come in the form of, “If you don’t change course, bad things will happen.” The whole point is to get them to change course, not to reveal future events.
A couple of times I’ve gotten a clear word of prophecy. Most of the time, God speaks to me through my convictions. He warns me to accomplish certain things soon, with the clear implication that this reflects His plans or His knowledge of the Devil’s plans.
Last year, I felt led to procure a couple of newish laptops. I would need them for the gospel mission. The picture I got was that the hardware would become difficult to get later on, which is coming true right now. Memory prices have shot up because of the demand for memory chips for use in AI server farms. I could not have expected the AI stuff would take off like it has, but I understood rather clearly that the prices would soar this year, and so they did.
I’m learning to trust my convictions. It’s quite seldom I can extrapolate from a conviction to a concrete expectation, but I can usually make some limited sense from trying. Of course I can get it wrong, but I don’t really need the details. I need to have some idea what sort of challenge I’ll be facing so I can prepare specific measures to be ready to serve His glorious agenda today and in the future.
