Are Ghosts for Real?

October 30
As we lay in bed this morning listening to me reading the NAS version of the Psalms on my MP3 player, my beloved wife gave me the topic for this morning’s devotions. She told me one of her students asked her yesterday if she believed in ghosts. It’s one of those loaded questions that can provide a perfect opportunity for a Christian teacher in the public school system to bear testimony to his or her Lord Jesus. I certainly hope and pray everyone who loves our Lord believes in ghosts. Please forgive me the comparison, but a Christian who doesn’t believe in ghosts is like the cowboy who doesn’t believe in riding horses or roping cows. One of the most basic tenets of Christianity is that there is physical world and there is a spiritual world. They co-exist at the same time and in a sense occupy the same space. The problem we have in defining spiritual beings is that they don’t occupy space as we do. They transcend it. There are countless biblical events where we see they can both possess human beings and materialize as humans or even animals. The most famous and obvious is in the account of the Garden of Eden where Satan appeared as a serpent. And in I Samuel 28 Saul goes to a medium (aka a spiritist, aka diviner, aka witch) and has her call Samuel up from the dead because God refused to answer his question about going to war with the Philistines.

The reason this is such a good time to discuss the topic is that tomorrow night is the night the overwhelming majority of people in this country celebrate All Hallows Eve. Or the shortened name we have given it, Halloween. Witches, warlocks, devils, demons, evil beings in the spiritual world have existed since Satan’s fall from God’s grace. The Bible tells us he was cast down from his pre-eminent position before God because he rebelled against the authority of God and declared himself to be equal to God. I wrote a whole study on satanic activity and warfare, so if you’re interested just write me and I’ll get it to you in one form or another. Isaiah 14:5-21, Ezekiel 28:2-19; and Rev. 12:3 give us some very descriptive and poignant information about Lucifer, star of the morning, the fallen angel.

In order to keep from making this devotional several pages, I will simply refer you to my study on the topic if you want to understand our enemy better. For our purposes here, I will only point out a couple of things I believe we must understand if we don’t wish to be promoting evil ourselves. Like Christmas and Easter, Christians have attempted to take a strictly secular holiday and turn it into a holy one. That, in and of itself is not necessarily evil; the problem lies in having children of professing Christian parents wearing witch, warlock, pirate, and demonic garb in a vain attempt to be cute. It isn’t cute; it’s an affront to God. Pirates, for example, have never been good. There’s no such thing as a good pirate; and the thought that there are good witches is idiotic. Witches are those who call upon evil spirits to do their work. That’s the definition of a witch. Under God’s divine law, they were supposed to be stoned to death the moment they were exposed. Pirates robbed, maimed, rapped, and pillaged. That’s the definition of a pirate.

Many churches attempt to protect their children from both the evil sense and the evil intent of people who use this time to do them physical harm (i.e., razors in candy, poison, kidnapping, etc.). They hold parties at their church or some large hall and play a variety of games to keep their children entertained and safe. That can certainly be a good thing as long as they don’t allow their children to put on costumes of witches or devils or anything else that most people know clearly promote evil. Two proverbial statements are good warnings for us to heed in closing this devotional, “Can a man take fire in his bosom and his clothes not be burned? Or can a man walk on hot coals and his feet not be scorched?” They’re rhetorical questions. Israel was the most powerful nation on the planet under King David. God destroyed Israel and scattered them to the four corners of the earth; and until now they have not recovered the glory and splendor they once enjoyed. And He did it because they called evil good. They began practicing witchcraft and divination. In Acts 19:19 we learn those in Ephesus practiced witchcraft. Upon mass conversion of the Ephesian citizens, they brought out all their books of witchcraft and burned them in a public fire.

The value of those books was recorded to be the equivalent of 50,000 days wages for the common man. They took the problem seriously. I would like to humbly suggest one of the main reasons the contemporary church in America is so listless and impotent is that we don’t take such dabbling in evil seriously. If you have made, bought, or rented a costume that glorifies evil, I urge you take it back, burn it, or tear it into shreds as quickly as you can and get on your knees before God and seek his forgiveness for dishonoring Him. He’ll forgive you and make you as white as snow (Is. 1:18). He’ll cast your sins from you as far as the east is from the west (Ps. 103:12). He’ll cleanse you from all unrighteousness (I John 1:9). Amen and amen, praise His holy Name. And that’s our word from God for today.