The prophet's dictionary guide to the supernatural

Divination as practiced in the Bible was censured by Yahweh when His people sought to use the same manipulating means of accessing supernatural knowledge that the heathen did to hear from Him. They sacrificed the wrong animals, petitioned lesser spirits, and forged ungodly alliances with unclean spirits or their national rulers to court supernatural favors. The only tolerable forms of divination, merely because Israel had yet to find out that her God was the only God and the God of gods, were by lot or by Urim and Thummim. Both these methods fall short of prophecy in that their answers were obtained under rigid guidelines. Yes and no inquiries, and short, closed-end responses from querants were typically the limit. The lot, the most rigid form of Bible divination of all, was a single chance response. It fell where it fell, and the result was presumed to be the unchangeable will of the god sought. See Lot Casting. The idea behind divination is that fates and futures could be learned from the spirits occupying or circulating the vicinity of their expected occurrence or that of the querant. Thus, diviners could forewarn, protect, or punish those in the path of the events. The god’s destiny on a life was another reason for divinatory inquiry. The divining damsel in the book of Acts was an itinerant oracle that traveled from place to place, telling people’s fortunes for money. Presumably, she had the inherent power to turn the fortunes she told and doubled as a paid supernatural mercenary. Paul’s problem with her exceeded her source of information and the lying spirit that supplied her knowledge. He was extremely agitated by the damsel’s intrusion into the work of the gospel. As a counterattack against apostolic ministry and its powerful evangelism, the young woman’s demon sought to defend himself with a perversion of the gospel through the girl’s mouth. The spirit took to heralding the good news of salvation by appearing to affirm Paul’s and the others’ ministries. See the brief account in Acts 16:16–17: “These men are the servants of the most high God which show unto us the way of salvation.” The account said she did this for many days. How could one know that the girl was divining? The words she spoke were not the gospel, and no self respecting Jew or newly saved Christian would have spread the gospel with a tactic like that since all religions had some knowledge of God. (See James 2:19.) It was Jesus Christ that was the stumbling stone and the rock of offense. Paul knew that it was by the name of Jesus that all men must be saved and so understood the insidious attack on his calling and halted it. Prophets should know regarding divination that many things can have truth in them but only in the gospel is there truth in its entirety. See Mancy and Divinatory Arts.