Bible Studies
The Bible's warning on spiritism is not a threat. It is a Father stepping between grieving people and those who would profit from their pain.
Start Here
If you have ever sat in a quiet house after a funeral and thought about calling somebody who says they can reach the other side, I want you to hear this first: there is nothing shameful about that thought. It comes from love. You are not weak for wanting one more conversation.
So let us talk about this honestly. Not with fear, not with mockery, and not with a lecture. Just clearly.
What is a medium? A medium is a person who claims to pass messages between the living and the dead. Scripture consistently warns against seeking them out, and it turns out those warnings protect exactly the people who are most likely to go looking: the grieving.
Getting The Terms Straight
The words get blurred on purpose in marketing, so it helps to separate them. A psychic claims to sense hidden information, to read people or predict things. A medium claims something more specific, that they can make contact with people who have died. A channeler claims to speak on behalf of some higher being.
They overlap constantly, and plenty of practitioners use all three labels depending on the room. What they share is a claim to knowledge you cannot verify, delivered to someone who badly wants it to be true.
Related territory shows up under other names too. Horoscopes, tarot, spirit boards, all promising the same thing from a different angle: information from somewhere beyond, without having to ask God for it. We work through the closest cousin of this in our study on what the Bible says about astrology.
The Common Thread
Every one of these promises certainty. That is the product being sold. And certainty is the exact thing grief makes us willing to pay almost anything for.
A Story Worth Knowing
Modern spiritualism has a birthday. In March of 1848, in a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York, two sisters named Maggie and Kate Fox told their mother that mysterious rapping sounds in their bedroom were a spirit answering questions. The neighbors came. Then the newspapers. Then the world.
Their older sister took them on tour. Séances filled parlors. Within a few decades millions of people across America and Europe believed the dead could be reached, and a whole industry grew up around it. You can read the full account in this Smithsonian Magazine history of the Fox sisters.
Forty years later, on October 21, 1888, Maggie Fox stood on the stage of the New York Academy of Music in front of about two thousand people and confessed the whole thing was a hoax. She showed them how she did it. She cracked the joints in her toes, and the sound carried across the theater. Doctors came up from the audience and verified it.
Now here is the part most retellings leave out, and honesty demands we include it. Maggie later retracted that confession. She was broke, drinking heavily, and said she had been paid and pressured into it. So the historical record is genuinely tangled. What is not tangled is this: an entire movement grew out of a bedroom in upstate New York, and its founder said, under oath of a sort, in front of a crowd, that she had made it up.
Sit With That
Even a public confession from the founder did not slow it down. Once a belief promises to give people back what they lost, evidence stops being the point.
When It Gets Tested
Researchers have been testing mediums for over a century. The problem with most of those tests was that the medium could see the person they were reading for, which means they could pick up cues from clothing, posture, age, a flicker of reaction. That is not contact with the dead. That is observation, and it has a name: cold reading.
So in 2005, two psychologists designed a study to close those loopholes. Ciarán O'Keeffe and Richard Wiseman had five professional mediums each give hour-long readings for five volunteers. Twenty five readings in all. The mediums and the sitters never met. They were in separate rooms. The sitters never even heard the readings live.
O'Keeffe and Wiseman, British Journal of Psychology, 2005
Sitters later rated the readings without knowing which was meant for them. The results did not support the existence of genuine mediumistic ability. The paper is indexed on PubMed, and the British Psychological Society published a plain-language summary of how it was run.
Take away the ability to watch a person's face, and the accuracy collapses. That is worth knowing, not so you can win an argument with a grieving friend, but so you understand what is actually happening in that room. Someone skilled is reading you, and you, in your pain, are helping them without meaning to.
A Gentle Word
If you have paid for a reading, you were not stupid. Grief lowers everybody's defenses, and these techniques work precisely because they are aimed at people whose hearts are wide open. There is no shame here. Bring it into the light with someone you trust.
Spiritualism Through Time
1848
The Hydesville Rappings
Two girls, one prank, and a movement is born. Grief-stricken families across a country that had buried a great many young people find a way to hope again.
1850s To 1880s
Parlors And Stages
Séances go professional. Dark rooms, floating trumpets, cheesecloth passed off as ectoplasm. Magicians who knew stagecraft began exposing the tricks one by one.
1888
The Confession
Maggie Fox demonstrates the toe-cracking to a packed theater. The movement barely blinks. It had already outgrown the women who started it.
2005
The Lab
Under controlled conditions, with cues removed, professional mediums perform no better than chance.
Today
The Livestream
The parlor became a phone screen. Readings sold by the minute, algorithms serving them to people whose recent searches say they are hurting. The lighting changed. The room did not.
The Bible's Landscape
Israel lived surrounded by nations where consulting the dead was ordinary religion. Every neighbor had a rite for it. And into that world God says, do not do this. Not because a spirit board has power over Him. Because His people were being harvested by professionals in their most desperate hours.
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?
Isaiah 8:19Read Isaiah's tone there. It is not thunder. It is almost bewildered. You have a living God who speaks and loves and stays. Why would you go asking the dead about the living?
The best known scene is Saul at Endor. A king, terrified, cut off, with the enemy massing and God feeling silent, sneaks off in disguise to a woman he had himself outlawed. It ends with him hearing that tomorrow will go badly, and it does. Notice what the account is actually showing. It is not a manual for contacting the dead. It is a portrait of a man who had stopped listening long before that night, and it is the last stop on a long road of not listening. We walk the whole road in our study of King Saul.
We should also be careful about how we talk about what is out there. Scripture speaks of real forces of opposition. Deception is real. Exploitation is real. The way grief can be manipulated is very real. What Scripture does not hand us is a roster of named entities with personalities who might answer if we knock. That distinction matters, and we work through it carefully in this study of what the Bible says about demons.
The Reframe
The warning is not God guarding His territory. It is God guarding His kids from people who sell certainty to the brokenhearted.
The New Covenant Difference
Here is what changes everything. The whole business of mediumship rests on one assumption: that there is a gap between you and the unseen, and you need somebody with special access to bridge it for a fee.
Jesus closed that gap. The curtain in the temple, the one that kept people out of the holiest place, tore top to bottom when He died. The access is free and it is yours and it does not run through anybody's booking calendar. There is one mediator between God and people, and He is not taking payment.
What A Medium Offers
What Jesus Offers
And notice this is not a scarier version of the same fear-based religion. The Kingdom of God is here, now, present and active. Resurrection life has already begun. Your people who died in Christ are held in God's own keeping, safe, not stranded somewhere waiting to be paged. You do not have to reach them. God has them. If you want to sit with what Scripture actually says about that, start with what heaven looks like.
For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.
1 Timothy 2:5Discernment That Is Not Paranoia
You do not need to live scanning the room for danger. You need three honest questions. Tap through them.
The Three Questions
Useful for a reading, a podcast, a teacher, or a voice in your own head.
Why Am I Really Here?
Grief, fear, loneliness, and curiosity are honest human things. Naming the real reason is not a confession of weakness. It is the first step of healing, because you cannot bring a need to God that you refuse to admit you have.
Ask: what am I actually hoping this gives me, and could God give it better?
How Is This Being Done?
Watch for secrecy, theatrics, pressure, and money. Healthy spiritual life happens in the open, with accountability, among people who know your name and are not billing you.
Ask: does this invite scrutiny, or does it need the lights down?
What Is It Producing In Me?
Jesus said you know a tree by its fruit. Not by how impressive it is. Not by whether it got a detail right. By what grows. Truth from God produces love, peace, patience, freedom. Deception produces fear, dependency, and a need to come back and pay again.
Ask: am I freer than I was, or more hooked?
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God.
1 John 4:1If You Are Grieving
Telling somebody not to see a medium without offering them something real is just taking away their last idea. So here is the real thing. None of it is fast. All of it works.
Say It Out Loud To God
Not polished. Not reverent. The Psalms are full of people yelling at God, asking how long, telling Him it is not fair. He can take it. Honest anger prayed is closer to faith than polite silence, and it is where prayer actually begins.
Let The Waiting Be Long
Scripture is honest that hope stretched thin makes a person sick. It does not scold you for that. It names it. Grief is not a problem to solve by next month, and anyone promising a shortcut is selling something. Sit with hope deferred without rushing it.
Get In A Room With People
A grief group. A counselor. A pastor. A friend who will sit on your couch and not try to fix it. Isolation is what makes bad ideas look reasonable at 2 a.m. If you are carrying deep or prolonged grief, please talk with a licensed grief counselor as well. That is wisdom, not weakness.
Come Back Without Shame
If you have already gone to a reading, or five, God is not standing there with folded arms. That is not who He is. Turn around and find Him already walking toward you. That is the whole meaning of God's grace, and there is no version of your story that runs it out.
Where It Lands
Every boundary God draws in Scripture, when you look long enough, turns out to be a Father with his arm out across the front seat.
He is not insecure about a deck of cards. He is not threatened by a woman in Endor or a livestream in 2026. He said do not go there because He watched His people, in the worst week of their lives, hand over their money and their trust to strangers who told them what they wanted to hear. Then He came Himself. He wept at a friend's grave. He touched the coffin of a widow's only son. He did not send a message through a medium. He showed up in a body.
So if you are sitting in a quiet house tonight, missing someone so much it is physical, hear the actual invitation. You are not being told to be quiet and get over it. You are being told that the one person in the universe who has authority over death loves you, is near you, and is already holding the person you miss.
Come talk to Him. No appointment, no fee, no dark room. And if you want people around you while you do it, we would love to have you plan a visit here in Deer Park, or reach out any time through our prayer page.
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Matthew 11:28We Would Love To Pray With You
If you have lost someone, or gone somewhere you regret, you can bring it here without explaining yourself. Our team on Commack Road reads every request, and we will pray over yours by name this week.
Questions People Ask
A medium is someone who claims to carry messages between the living and the dead. Scripture consistently warns against consulting them, most memorably in Isaiah 8:19, which asks why a people with a living God would inquire of the dead on behalf of the living. The warning is protective. It stands between grieving people and those who would profit from their pain.
A psychic claims to sense hidden information or predict outcomes. A medium claims something more specific: contact with people who have died. A channeler claims to speak for a higher being. In practice the labels blur, especially in marketing. What they share is a claim to knowledge you cannot verify, sold to someone who badly wants it to be true.
Yes. In 2005, psychologists Ciarán O'Keeffe and Richard Wiseman published a study in the British Journal of Psychology. Five professional mediums each gave hour-long readings for five volunteers, twenty five readings total, with the mediums and sitters kept in separate rooms so no visual cues could pass. The results did not support the existence of genuine mediumistic ability.
Saul, terrified before a battle and feeling cut off from God, disguised himself and consulted a medium he had himself outlawed. He heard that the next day would go badly, and it did. The account is not a manual for contacting the dead. It is a portrait of a man who had stopped listening to God long before that night, and the medium at Endor was the last stop on a long road, not the beginning of one.
No. God is not standing with folded arms waiting for an apology. Grief lowers everyone's defenses, and these practices are designed to work on open hearts. Turn around and you will find Him already walking toward you. Bring it into the light with a pastor or a trusted friend, and if the grief is deep or prolonged, please speak with a licensed grief counselor too. That is wisdom, not weakness.