Question: Isn't communication with spirits forbidden?

Question: I recently attended a service in which the speaker taught about “healing family trees” by renouncing generational curses that are supposedly maintained by demons who are assigned to individual families generation after generation down through the years. Afterwards, I watched as several people were “healed” amid great expenditures of noise and emotion, complete with conversations that supposedly took place between them and the spirits of their dead ancestors.

But I have been taught that any such interaction with evil spirits is forbidden. In addition, the whole thing occurred after a communion service, which seemed like a strange juxtaposition, yet I am told that more and more of this kind of thing is going on in churches nowadays. What is your opinion?

Response: You are correct that communicating with the spirits of the dead is actually with demons impersonating the spirits of dead relatives and is forbidden in God’s Word. You also asked about apparent “healings” and “spiritual” experiences, which you characterized as excessive and even frightening.

In my opinion, at least some of the people involved, both in the leadership and in the pews, have come under heavy demonic influence. My reasons are fairly simple. First of all, of course, God does not terrify us or bring confusion. Second, there is no biblical basis for the “healing of the family tree” concept. Jesus never did it; the apostles never did it; and there is no record that anyone else ever did it! There is no biblical basis for the idea that we are bound by either the sins themselves or the demonic involvement of our ancestors.

Moreover, such a belief lays the foundation for new confusion and new bondage. If one has subsequent problems after such a healing, then one immediately imagines that everything in the family tree hasn’t been uncovered and dealt with, so the same ritual must be repeated endlessly.

Finally, the Lord’s Supper, or communion, is for the express purpose of remembering Christ’s death for our sins upon the cross, and of worshiping and praising and thanking Him for what He endured and accomplished. To use it as an occasion for being healed is to pervert it from its intended biblical use and to turn it into a magical ritual. This is as bad as the sacramentalism of Roman Catholicism, wherein the physical act of partaking of the Mass is alleged to have redemptive value.