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TV Program
Ever played with a Ouija board? Gone to a séance? Maybe you’ve wondered exactly how that stuff works. Well, wonder no more because that’s the topic for today’s program.
At first, the committee members thought it was pretty funny. In fact, some of them even laughed out loud when Leah and Maggie claimed they were speaking to the dead. Those poor deluded girls; they’d do just about anything for some attention. But some insisted that at least they should give the girls a chance, so they put them to the test. And, of course, just like everyone expected, when the girls were asked to do their thing under close scrutiny and controlled conditions, absolutely nothing happened.
So, as far as the committee was concerned, the case was closed. The Fox sisters were not speaking to the dead. And that’s when it happened. All of a sudden a table in the room lifted off the ground and flew over their heads, accompanied by a strange series of knocking sounds. And, needless to say, the laughter stopped.
In 1848, two young girls who were living in Hydesville, New York (Margaret and Kate Fox) and their older sister Leah, started hearing strange knocking sounds in the middle of the night in their rundown house.
At first, their parents were convinced that the girls were making the noises themselves. But, for some reason, they were never able to catch them in the act.
Night after night the strange noises returned and, as the family tried to fall asleep, invisible fists beat on the wall, windows rattled in their frames, and heavy footsteps marched down the pantry stairs. Needless to say, the family was terrified. Who or what was in their house?
The answer came on a Friday in March. Mrs. Fox and the two girls went to bed early, hoping to get a good night’s rest. Mr. Fox carefully inspected the house to make sure all the windows were closed and tightly secured so that invisible hands couldn’t rattle them. But just like every other night, the eerie noises woke them up and before long, loud pounding had them all sitting straight up in bed, absolutely terrified.
That’s when one of the girls got an interesting idea. Little Kate called out into the dark: “Here, Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do.” And with that she clapped her hands three times.
There was a brief pause, almost as if someone was considering her request, and then it happened, three heavy distinct raps on the wall. Kate’s little sister Maggie thought she’d try it too, but she didn’t say a word. Instead, she held up five fingers in the dark and waited. And whoever was in the room, knocked on the wall five times.
“Look Mama,” said Kate, “it can see us as well as hear us.” Now, those noises couldn’t be dismissed as mere coincidence. They weren’t dealing with banging water pipes, loose-fitting shutters or creaky floorboards. There was somebody or something in the house that could see them and hear them.
Of course, the family was eager to know what was going on, so they developed a system of communication for their nocturnal guest. They developed special knocks for each letter of the alphabet, as well as for the words “yes” and “no.” Kind of like an audible Ouija board.
Before long, they discovered the identity of their invisible guest. His name was Charles B. Rosma, he said. And he was a 31-year-old salesman who had been peddling sewing supplies in their neighborhood before he was murdered. And the Fox house, he explained, was exactly where he used to live.
In fact, he said it was the very spot where his murder took place. One day, when he was home alone, a previous tenant came to the house to rob him. He gave the thief his life savings, $500, but he was murdered anyway. His body was buried in the basement of the house and it had remained there every since.
Of course, it sounds a little like a campfire story, but this one really happened. The ghost of Charles Rosma continued to visit the family every night, telling them things that nobody could possibly know. And most chilling of all, he was able to tell them everything they had done in that house all day long, making it obvious that he never stopped watching them.
Now, you can’t have something strange like that taking place in your house without word getting out. So, before too long, wide-eyed neighbors gathered at the Fox house each evening to listen to the ghost of Charles Rosma answer their questions thoughtfully and intelligently.
Most of them were convinced. And the thought occurred to them that if the mysterious entity was really telling the truth, then they should be able to find the remains of Charles Rosma in the basement. But, you know, a thorough search of the basement floor only yielded a few pieces of broken pottery, and they had to stop digging when they hit water. But they’d seen enough that they were convinced; even without a body, they still believed the story of the nighttime ghost.
Many years later, in 1904, the wall of the old cottage fell apart, exposing a cache of pots, pans and sewing supplies, and an old skeleton. Apparently the story was true. Someone really had been murdered in the Fox house.
Now, let me push the pause button on this story for just a moment and ask you a question: Why is it that people are so fascinated by the dead? All around the world, children delight in spooky stories, and morbid audiences flock to the theaters for a scary movie. And in some places, such as Mexico, they even have an elaborate festival dedicated to the dead. With all there is to do in this life, why obsess about the dead?
Well, maybe it has something to do with the fact that we know we’re going to die. The writer of the book Ecclesiastes, puts it like this (Ecclesiastes 9:5):
“For the living know that they will die.”
Somewhere in the back of our minds, and especially as we grow out of childhood, the thought that we won’t live forever actually begins to bother us. What in the world is going to happen the day we die?
You can drive down to the local cemetery and you can ask that question of the people who have already died, but you know you’re not going to get an answer. The grave is absolutely silent, just like it says in the book of Palms (Psalm 115:17):
“The dead do not praise the Lord, neither any who go down into silence.”
The grave is absolutely silent. So when we hear that someone might be speaking from the other side, we simply can’t help ourselves. We have a need to know what’s going on.
People desperate for answers about the grave began to flock to the Fox sisters for help. And, as you can imagine, it didn’t take long for little Kate and Maggie, along with older sister Leah, to become famous. In fact, they began to charge people to come and see—or perhaps more accurately, hear—what was going on. And their reason for charging money? They claimed they were so busy answering questions that they had no time to do anything else.
Almost every day the house was packed full of people who wanted to hear a word from the other side of the grave. Some of them were believers who wanted to see the so-called miracle for themselves. Others were skeptics who wanted to catch the girls doing something fraudulent. But, try as they might, they were never able to produce a satisfactory explanation for what was going on.
In fact, to silence the skeptics, the Fox sisters rented the biggest hall in town to conduct a public séance. A special committee was appointed to find out how the girls were generating the strange noises made by the ghost. After three days of demonstrations, the committee came away empty-handed and hundreds more became believers.
By 1850, the story of the Fox sisters reached a man by the name of Horace Greeley, who was editor of the New York Tribune. Mr. Greeley tragically had lost his son and he was looking for someone who could help him reestablish contact beyond the grave. He sent an assistant to the Fox house to check out the claims. When the assistant returned, completely convinced, Mr. Greeley went to see the girls himself.
After meeting them, he became so convinced of their psychic abilities that he used his newspaper to give them his public seal of approval. Almost overnight Maggie, Kate and Leah Fox became a public sensation in New York City. They left their humble cottage, moved to the city, and made a very nice living for themselves as spirit mediums.
It didn’t take long, in the wake of the girls’ celebrity, for séances to become very fashionable. People who had attended the Fox sisters’ meetings discovered that with a little effort, they could also communicate with the spirit world.
By 1854, just six years after the strange phenomenon started, the art of communicating with the dead became so prevalent across the country that Senator James Shields of Illinois presented a 15,000-signature petition to Congress, asking the government to launch an official investigation.
The fad of speaking to the dead also leapt over the Atlantic into Europe where it was popularized by people like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes novels. Before long, Doyle was lecturing to massive crowds of people, and won many of them over to spiritualism—which to this day is still practiced as an official religion in England.
Some people point to the Fox sisters as the birth of modern spiritualism. But history reveals that spiritualism itself is almost as old as the human race. In fact, there’s a startling account of a séance found in the pages of the Bible.
It all happened in a moment of panic. King Saul’s empire was crumbling and he was at war with the Philistines. At one point, to keep his men happy and to keep morale high, he took it upon himself to offer sacrifices that only a priest was supposed to offer. He simply decided he couldn’t wait for a priest to arrive.
When the Prophet Samuel arrived on the scene a little while later and saw what Saul had done—well, he told Saul that his transgression was very displeasing to the Lord. “Saul,” he said, “because of this, you’re going to lose your throne and your descendants will never have it back.”
That was the beginning of the end for Saul. And further acts of spiritual disobedience sealed his family’s fate. When Saul found out that David had been chosen as the next King of Israel, he became insanely jealous and spent most of his time and resources trying to destroy David, instead of dealing with the Philistines.
As a result, his armies grew weaker and the Philistines started to gain the upper hand. So desperate to turn things around, Saul did something he should never have done; he went to a spirit medium for advice. And really, he should have known better. In the past, when he’d been faithful to God, he’d actually driven all the spiritualists out of the country because of God’s instruction.
Now, why in the world would God forbid séances and spiritualism? Is it because it doesn’t work? Well, actually, it’s just the opposite. God forbids contact with the spirits because it does work. Something can really happen when you foolishly try to contact the spirit world.
But God forbids it because He knows full well that the spirits you contact are not the spirits of the dead. Just listen to the words of Job, where we discover that dead people never make contact with the living. Listen to this (Job 7:9, 10):
“As the cloud disappears and vanishes away, so he who goes down to the grave does not come up. He shall never return to his house, nor shall his place know him anymore.”
Now, I hope you caught that. The dead simply don’t come back to speak to us. Nothing could be clearer in the pages of the Bible. So if someone is speaking to you at a spiritualistic séance, it must be someone else.
Let’s take an honest look at what happened the day that Saul went to a séance. He knew that his relationship with God was not what it was supposed to be. He knew that his own life was wreck and that his own spirituality was on the rocks. His last channel of communication with heaven seemed to be gone now that Samuel the prophet was dead.
Instead of Saul humbling himself and turning back to God, he put on a disguise and went to see a spiritualist at night. Here’s what the Bible says happened (1 Samuel 28:8):
“So Saul disguised himself and put on other clothes, and he went, and two men with him; and they came to the woman by night. And he said, ‘Please conduct a séance for me, and bring up for me the one I shall name to you.’”
Now, it’s hard to imagine the king of Israel doing something like this, but then again, when you consider the number of Christians who dabble in spiritualism today, maybe it’s not all that surprising. Sometimes it’s almost irresistible to dabble with forbidden knowledge. The woman knew that it was illegal to practice spiritualism and only when Saul guaranteed her safety did she agree to bring someone back from the dead. Saul asked for Samuel.
Now, after you finish reading this, I want you to go and read the chapter of 1 Samuel 28, and I want you to notice a couple things. First of all, this was not a smoke and mirror show. This was a real séance, and something really happened that night. You can tell because the woman herself was surprised when it happened, and she saw the spirit of Samuel appear.
But I also want you to notice something really interesting. The manifestation was real, but it wasn’t really Samuel. It was a terrible spiritual deception. Take a careful look at the story and you’ll see exactly what I mean (1 Samuel 28:11-12):
“Then the woman said, ‘Whom shall I bring up for you?’ And he said, ‘Bring up Samuel for me.’ When the woman saw Samuel, she cried out with a loud voice.”
Now, did you catch it? It wasn’t Saul who saw Samuel first. It was the woman. It continues (1 Samuel 28:13-14).
“And the king said to her, ‘Do not be afraid. What did you see?’ And the woman said to Saul, ‘I saw a spirit ascending out of the earth.’ So he said to her, ‘What is his form?’ And she said, ‘An old man is coming up, and he is covered with a mantle.’ And Saul perceived that it was Samuel, and he stooped with his face to the ground and bowed down.”
The Bible makes it crystal clear that it was the spirit medium who actually saw the apparition. And only after she described it did Saul perceive that it was Samuel. And only after Saul buys into the lie does the story actually refer to the apparition as Samuel.
But was it really him? Was Samuel really back from the dead? I don’t believe it for a moment. God had always strictly forbidden spiritualistic séances and communication with the dead. And yet some people would have you believe that when a psychic tries to contact the dead, God is somehow obliged to cooperate and make it happen.
And if this is really supposed to be Samuel, that would mean that after death, the prophet who had obeyed God faithfully all his life would actually be disobeying God at that very moment.
When something appears at a séance—at a spiritualistic meeting—you can be dead certain, if you’ll pardon the pun, that it’s not God at work. God doesn’t violate His own principles. And that means at that séance, it’s someone else.
If you look at this story carefully, it becomes obvious who that someone else is. Notice what happens when Saul becomes convinced that the spirit really is Samuel. He bows down to the ground in front of it, and the spirit being just accepts that.
Now think about that for a moment. If it really was Samuel, do you suppose for one moment that he would accept Saul bowing down to him like that? Remember, when an angel appeared to John in the book of Revelation, John bowed down to the angel and twice the angel had to tell John to get back up. When Cornelius bowed to Peter in Acts chapter 10, Peter told him, “Get up!” And the reason is that we should only be bowing before God.
But the spirit in this story never tells the genuflecting Saul to get back up. And while I admit it’s not a perfectly airtight case, it does give a massive hint as to what’s really going on.
Ever since God removed Lucifer from the courts of Heaven, he’s been looking for ways to get the universe to bow down before him. He even tried it with Jesus, offering all the riches of the world if Jesus would just fall to His knees in front of him. And of course, Jesus refused to do it.
But Saul, in his last moments of desperation, bows to the ground in front of the spirit and not a word is said. And that tells me it’s not really Samuel. We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s not one of God’s angels or God Himself, because God would not participate in something He forbids.
So, who does that leave? Take a wild guess. I think it was the same being who banged on the walls of the Fox sisters’ house. It was the same fallen angel who continues to impersonate the dead and prey on people’s fragile emotions without mercy. Still eager to have human beings bow the knee to him, Lucifer does whatever it takes, even if it means taking advantage of you at your weakest moment.
In 1888, Maggie and Kate Fox made a startling confession. They told the world it had all been a hoax. And the knocking sounds were produced by snapping their joints. But it was too late for a confession. People didn’t believe them, and those girls didn’t really believe it either. Eventually, Maggie even retracted the confession because she knew that somebody really had been knocking on her wall.
I sometimes wonder when we’re going to learn our lesson. Hollywood continues to crank out movies about talking to the dead, and major toy companies continue to sell Ouija boards to children.
During the 1960s, spiritualism took on a new face as it was seductively woven into Eastern New Age religions. But the thing they never tell you is how it ends.
As the séance drew to a close, the spirit told Saul that he would die the next day. And that’s exactly what happened. Saul watched in horror as the Philistines sacked his army and killed his sons. Afraid of what the future held, Saul committed suicide.
And I wish today I could say Saul was the only one. But every year countless people start dabbling in the occult and the results are always disastrous: drugs, illicit sex, self-mutilation, and yes, even suicide. Let me assure you, it’s always dangerous to play with the forbidden. And God had a reason for setting these things off limits.
Knock, knock—who’s there? Sometimes the urge to find out what’s on the other side can be overwhelming, but that always ends in disaster. Later in life, Kate Fox admitted that she was sorry she ever got started. She said, “I regard spiritualism as one of the greatest curses the world has ever known.”
You might think that spiritualism is perfectly harmless, but how do you really know that? What makes us think that we have the wisdom to know what’s harmless and what’s not?
Our existence and our experience are a fleeting second compared with the eternity and wisdom of God, and God says, in this department, “Don’t touch!”
Forget the knocking on the wall. Instead, listen to the knocking at your heart’s door (Revelation 3:20):
“Behold,” says Jesus, “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.”
Now, that’s a knocking you can’t afford to ignore. You may have had somebody tell you that once you dabble in the occult, there’s no way out. I’m going to tell you today, based on what the Bible says, that’s just not true. And by coming to Christ, you can be free. Why don’t we pray together?
PRAYER:
Father in Heaven, there are a lot of voices in this world, but today we choose to listen to Yours. We know that there are forces that work in this world that lie to us, that take our life from us, and today we want to walk away from that and place our faith completely in You. Be with that person who is dabbled in places he shouldn’t have gone, and has done things he shouldn’t have done. Today we bring all of that to the foot of the cross and ask Jesus to cover it with His blood, knowing that we can be free in Him. Forgive our sins we ask, and come quickly, Jesus. For we pray it in His Holy name, Amen.
Scriptures Used in “Knock, Knock”
“For the living know that they will die; but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward, for the memory of them is forgotten.”
—Ecclesiastes 9:5
“The dead do not praise the Lord, neither any who go down into silence.”
—Psalm 115:17
“As the cloud disappears and vanishes away, so he who goes down to the grave does not come up. He shall never return to his house, nor shall his place know him anymore.”
—Job 7:9, 10
“So Saul disguised himself and put on other clothes, and he went, and two men with him; and they came to the woman by night. And he said, ‘Please conduct a séance for me, and bring up for me the one I shall name to you.’”
—1 Samuel 28:8
“Then the woman said, ‘Whom shall I bring up for you?’ And he said, ‘Bring up Samuel for me.’ When the woman saw Samuel, she cried out with a loud voice. And the woman spoke to Saul, saying, ‘Why have you deceived me? For you are Saul!’ And the king said to her, ‘Do not be afraid. What did you see?’ And the woman said to Saul, ‘I saw a spirit ascending out of the earth.’ So he said to her, ‘What is his form?’ And she said, ‘An old man is coming up, and he is covered with a mantle.’ And Saul perceived that it was Samuel, and he stooped with his face to the ground and bowed down.
—1 Samuel 28:11-14
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.”
—Revelation 3:20