1 Sam. 28-29
The story of Saul and the Medium of En-dor has always intrigued me. Having recently done a study on Heaven, it intrigues me all the more. First, the spirit world, the paranormal…whatever you want to call it, is real. I don’t see any way to take this passage other than quite literally. If it says, “Samuel came up”, then Samuel came up.
Second, our Heaven study talked about a “present Heaven” and a “final Heaven”. “Final Heaven” is the one that Revelation describes, with the new heaven and new earth. “Present Heaven” is what happens to us when we die, which the book talked about a lot. We didn’t read the whole thing (it was super tedious, repetitive, and speculative), so I don’t know if it ever mentioned this passage, but I tend to think of the so-called “present Heaven” as something of another dimension that co-exists with the one we are in but is outside of time. All rather sci-fi mind boggling, I know, but there is definitely something to it. There are several people mentioned in the Bible, including Jesus after his resurrection and Samuel mentioned here, who seem to move between the two dimensions at least once. So that whole aspect intrigues me greatly.
The other thing I wonder about here, after going through that Heaven study, is when Samuel tells Saul in 1 Sam 28:10, “…tomorrow you and your sons shall be with me.” We know that Samuel was a man of God and, though I’m not sure about all of Saul’s sons, it seems reasonable to me to believe that Jonathan was as well. But the Bible is pretty clear that God rejected Saul. What does that mean? If God rejected Saul, why would Saul spend eternity in God’s presence? And if he isn’t to spend eternity in God’s presence, then why would he be with Samuel at his death? Wouldn’t God’s enemies be separated from God at death? I don’t know if there are answers to these questions, but it is interesting to think about.
As for David, I wonder at his loyalty to Aphek, the Philistine leader. On the one hand, it makes sense that David would serve him loyally since he had been living under Aphek’s protection and Aphek was, thus, the authority placed over him. But why would he take this loyalty to the point of going to war against his own people – God’s people? I don’t know what the right answer to that situation is, but it seems to me that God protected David from doing anything against the Hebrews when the other Philistine leaders would not allow David to go to war with them. David seemed upset by the rejection, but I think it was for his own protection somehow. That allowed David to be obedient to his authority without striking his hand against God’s chosen. Just my thoughts.
Luke 23:26-56
We tend to mock what we don’t understand. Certainly the people did when Christ was crucified. What He was doing did not fit their image of The Christ, God’s Messiah. Rather than exploring the possibility that they lacked understanding, they mocked that which did not meet their expectations. There are a lot of things that happen in life that don’t make sense to us, that we don’t understand, and that aren’t what we expected. Instead of mocking, getting angry, and letting our pride flare up, we need to seek understanding or, at the very least, trust that God has a plan in what we see as chaos.
And just as an interesting note…here is another reference of that “other dimension”, aka, “paradise”, where Jesus tells the one criminal that he will be with him today in paradise because that criminal sought the Lord.