Saul and the Medium of Endor

Today's Scripture

1 Samuel 28:6-7 — "And when Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord did not answer him, either by dreams, or by Urim, or by prophets. Then Saul said to his servants, 'Seek out for me a woman who is a medium, that I may go to her and inquire of her.' And his servants said to him, 'Behold, there is a medium at En-dor.'"

1 Chronicles 10:13-14 — "So Saul died for his breach of faith. He broke faith with the Lord in that he did not keep the command of the Lord, and also consulted a medium, seeking guidance. He did not seek guidance from the Lord. Therefore the Lord put him to death and turned the kingdom over to David the son of Jesse."

Isaiah 8:19 — "And when they say to you, 'Inquire of the mediums and the necromancers who chirp and mutter,' should not a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of the dead on behalf of the living?"

The Big Idea

The darkest occult story in the Bible is not about a pagan. It is about the king of Israel. When God went silent, Saul could not bear to wait — so he hired a forbidden voice, and it spoke his ruin. The story is a warning: when heaven seems quiet, there is always a substitute for sale, and the substitute is always worse than the silence.

Reflection

The night God said nothing

Picture the scene. Saul is king of Israel, camped across from a massive Philistine army, on what will turn out to be the last night of his life. He is terrified, and he does the right thing first: he prays. The answer comes back in one of the bleakest verses in Scripture — 1 Samuel 28:6 says the Lord did not answer him, "either by dreams, or by Urim, or by prophets." Every legitimate channel a king of Israel had — dreams, the priestly oracle, the prophets — sits silent.

If you have ever sent a desperate text and watched the read receipt appear with no reply, you know a faint shadow of this feeling. C.S. Lewis described it after his wife died, and he did not soften it:

"But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence." — C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Scripture is not embarrassed by this experience. Psalm 13:1 — "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?" The Bible gives us words for God's silence because God's people actually face it.

But Saul's silence has a history. He has spent his reign breaking faith — disobeying God's commands, hunting David, slaughtering priests. The silence is not God losing Saul's address. It is the long consequence of a relationship Saul abandoned years earlier, and it is still an invitation: the door back was called repentance, and it was never locked.

The séance at Endor

Saul cannot bear the quiet. So the king who had once banished all mediums from Israel — he knew Deuteronomy 18:10-12, which says "there shall not be found among you... a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord" — now asks his servants to find him one. A medium is a person who claims to contact the dead. Saul puts on a disguise and goes by night, which tells you he knows exactly what this is.

The woman performs her ritual, then screams. Something has actually happened — and the figure who rises is identified by the text as Samuel. Christians have long debated whether this was truly the dead prophet, permitted by God to deliver one final word, or a deceiving spirit wearing his shape. Calvin and most interpreters since have noted the simplest reading: the narrator just calls him Samuel, and the message matches everything Samuel said in life. Either way, the verdict on Saul is the same. He is condemned not by who showed up but by the command he broke to summon him.

And here is the part our generation most needs to hear: the forbidden voice told the truth. 1 Samuel 28:15-19 records Saul's complaint — "God has turned away from me and answers me no more" — and Samuel's terrible, accurate answer: the kingdom is torn away, and "tomorrow you and your sons shall be with me." The reading came true. It also saved nothing and helped no one. Accuracy is not the test of whether a spiritual source is safe. Plenty of things in the dark are real.

Saul wanted information about tomorrow because he could not trust God with tomorrow. Corrie ten Boom, who survived a Nazi concentration camp, named the trade-off he refused to make:

"Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength." — Corrie ten Boom, Clippings from My Notebook

The séance did not empty Saul's tomorrow of its sorrow. It only emptied his last night of its strength. He collapses on the medium's floor, and his final meal is served to him by the woman whose trade he once outlawed.

It is worth pausing on how modern this all feels. Strip away the ancient costume and you have a frightened person, facing an uncertain tomorrow, paying a stranger to make the unknown speak. The storefront psychic, the tarot subscription, the "channeled message" account with two million followers — same fear, same transaction, same trade. Endor is not far away. It is open late, in every city, still doing brisk business with people God is waiting to hear from.

Why the verdict is so heavy

Centuries later, when the chronicler sums up Saul's whole life, he reaches past the battles and the jealousy and picks this night. 1 Chronicles 10:13-14 — Saul died "in that he did not keep the command of the Lord, and also consulted a medium, seeking guidance. He did not seek guidance from the Lord." One desperate hour becomes the headline of a life. Why?

Because the séance was not one bad decision among many. It was the summary decision. It declared, in a single act, where Saul's trust had been all along: he would rather buy a voice than wait for his God. Isaiah heard the same logic in his own day and was incredulous. Isaiah 8:19-20 — "should not a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of the dead on behalf of the living? To the teaching and to the testimony!" There is a living God who speaks. Why would his people pay for chirping and muttering?

Here is the uncomfortable answer. The medium is easier. God speaks to people in relationship with him — people willing to repent, wait, and obey. A medium speaks to anyone with the fee. The psychic storefront's neon sign is always on; no repentance required at the door. That convenience is precisely the catastrophe, because it lets you keep the guidance question open while keeping the God question closed.

J.I. Packer puts his finger on what Saul actually lost:

"What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it — the fact that he knows me." — J.I. Packer, Knowing God

Saul wanted data from God. What God had offered him for forty years was being known by God — and that is the thing no medium, no tarot deck, no astrology app can sell, because it cannot be sold. It can only be received.

Waiting in silence with a God who speaks

So what is the right response when God goes quiet? Not manufacturing a voice. Lamentations 3:25-26 — "The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord." Waiting is not doing nothing. It is praying without the felt answer, staying in the Scriptures you already have, staying with God's people, and refusing the substitute. Charles Spurgeon, who knew long stretches of darkness himself, described what such waiting builds:

"It is easy to sing when we can read the notes by daylight; but he is skillful who sings when there is not a ray of light to read by — who sings from his heart." — Charles Spurgeon, "Songs in the Night"

And waiting rests on a promise: silence is a season, not a verdict. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from a Nazi prison, in a silence darker than most of us will ever know:

"I believe that God can and will bring good out of evil, even out of the greatest evil." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Tim Keller turned the same trust into a sentence about unanswered prayer:

"God will either give us what we ask or give us what we would have asked if we knew everything he knows." — Tim Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

But the deepest reason a Christian can wait in silence is the gospel itself. On the cross, Jesus entered a silence more total than Saul's — Matthew 27:46 — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The Son was met with a closed heaven so that everyone who belongs to him never truly will be. The door Lewis heard bolted was, in fact, taken off its hinges at Calvary.

And God has not stayed quiet. Hebrews 1:1-2 — "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son." You do not need a medium to get a word from God. He has already given his final, fullest Word, and his name is Jesus. The silence you feel is real — but it is the quiet between words from a Father who has already said the most important thing, not the empty static of an unoccupied heaven.

Going Deeper

If you are in a season of God's silence, write one honest sentence about it today — "Lord, I have asked about ___ and heard nothing" — and say it to him out loud. Then read Psalm 13 slowly. Notice that the psalmist asks "how long?" four times and still ends, "But I have trusted in your steadfast love." That is the whole skill of waiting: complaint carried to God instead of away from him. That is the road Saul refused — and it is open to you tonight.