There’s a significant difference between Belial and the other threshold spirits, a difference involving its tactical approach to the threshold. Python doesn’t want us to cross over into our calling, neither does Rachab. If we choose to sacrifice to them and they give us entry to our calling, it’s only so that Leviathan can smash us backwards and pulverise us so severely that we’ll never want to approach the threshold again. As for Ziz, she’s intent on making sure we’re so distracted we forget we even have a calling, while Lilith is likely to stake us down near the threshold so we’re stuck and can’t move. All of them want to deny us access to our calling in one way or another.

But Belial, the spirit of abuse, is different. Belial wants us to pass over into our calling, but to do so with cruelty, violence and aggression. He wants us to be callous and brutal and to transgress God’s set boundaries. He urges us to take out our frustrations and impatience by smashing any obstacles aside, when God asks us to wait for the door to open at the appointed time.  

Belial is the only one of the threshold guardians who is described in Scripture as having sons and daughters within the human race. The phrase ‘sons of Belial’ is repeatedly used to describe perverted, corrupt and abusive men. Belial apparently wants to build a human family in his own image. He wants to mimic God and to make us over into his image-bearers, not God’s.

And he wants us to do that by doing as he did. He wants us to cross a forbidden frontier just as he did when he chose to descend from heaven in order to seek a human mate. In trespassing across the boundary God had put in place between humanity and angels, Belial mixed ‘kinds’ or species God had intended to be separate. In doing so, Belial became the father of some of the nephilim, those angel-human hybrids who were titanically tall and who ravaged the earth before they were destroyed in the Great Flood.

In the ancient Greek translation of Genesis, the word ‘titan’ was used to translate the Hebrew ‘nephilim’. We usually think of ‘titan’ as meaning giant but it actually means the one who oversteps boundaries. These giants of Greek mythology are actually alluded to in 2 Peter 2:4. There Peter writes of the angels who sinned—the Watchers who mated with human women—being imprisoned in Tartarus. This is the same place as the Greeks said the Titans were imprisoned.

While Belial is locked up there, his agents on earth still cause untold grief and damage. Belial hates us so much that he doesn’t just want us destroyed, he wants us to be the cause of our own ruination. He wants us to pay for the privilege of annihilating ourselves. Unfortunately, all too often, we fall for this plan.

This is Grace Drops and I’m Anne Hamilton. May holy angels under Jesus guard your boundaries.

Thank you to Lorna Skinner of www.riversofmusic.co.uk for the background music.

More on the spirit of Belial can be found in the new paperback, Dealing with Belial: Spirit of Armies and Abuse, Strategies for the Threshold #8.