Urim and Thummim

Look at verse 6.

And when Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord answered him, not saying, neither by dreams nor by Urim nor by prophets.

And you remember Urim was the stones on the priest's breastplate that they would use to try and hear from the Lord.

So Saul was asking God for direction and help, but would God answer him? No, God would not answer him.

And so Saul is in a predicament where he wants everything to go well, but Saul is in trouble and God is not talking to Saul.

But the Bible furnishes grounds for a contrary conclusion.

If Samuel was in heaven, he must have been summoned from thence either by God or by Satan.

None can believe for a moment that Satan had power to call a prophet from heaven to honor the incantations of an abandoned woman, nor can we conclude that God summoned him to the witch's cave, for the Lord had already refused to communicate with Saul by dreams, by Urim, or by prophets.

He tried to inquire of the Lord, but the heavens were silent.

God did not respond by dreams as he had to Joseph, or by the Urim and Thummim as he had to the high priest in the past, or by prophetic revelation as he had when Samuel was around.

Now, God had given Saul many opportunities to repent and discover God's will, but he refused to do so.

And this is described in chapter 19.

When he said, bring that ephod here, David was crying out.

The Urim and Thummim, if you ever studied that, that's where the thing would actually come alive, almost that cover, the clothing, the sacrificial blood.

And it would splash on the ephod and not so much on their clothing, but on that ephod.

So he was carrying the sacrifice and type in shadow for us.

It's likely it wasn't just in the ephod, but of the high priest, which is the breastplate of judgment.

Exodus 25, 15 tells us that.

And so this breastplate had in it a pouch of two stones, which is known as the Urim and Thummim, I should say, Exodus 28, 30.

So when David inquired of the Lord, he probably asked Abathar to use that.

Terror filled his heart.

He inquired of the Lord, but the Lord did not answer him by dreams or Urim or prophets.

Saul then said to his attendants, Find me a woman who is a medium so that I may go and inquire of her.

There is one in Endor, they said.

Specifically, forsaken God's word, disobeying God's commands, doing what was right in his own eyes.

And forsaking God's word has consequences.

So you wonder, why is it that Saul can't get an answer from the Urim? Well, the Urim is something priests were supposed to use.

And Saul, we saw in chapter 23, put a town of priests to death.

We've got Revelation 4 and 6 describing a sea of glass clears crystal around God's throne.

And then in Exodus 28 and 30, the high priest used the Urim and Thummim, possibly crystal-based objects, to discern God's will.

And Revelation 21, describing the New Jerusalem decked out in every kind of gemstone you can imagine.

So crystals? Not inherently evil.

That doesn't mean there wasn't an Adam and Eve or even a Garden of Eden.

But it is visionary language that came through Moses' visions on Sinai and Abraham, for example, through the Urim and Thummim.

We should understand that sourcing.

How do you read Lehi's dream? How about the book of Revelation? What if these early chapters of Genesis were written to be performed? Would it make a lot more sense to you that that's why they are in the temple ceremony? Scholars like John Walton and Mark Smith read the early chapters of Genesis as temple liturgy.