Book Recommendation | Dealing with Belial: Spirit of Armies and Abuse by Anne Hamilton and Janet Speirs

I’m doing something a bit different for me. I’m sharing a book recommendation and my journey in reading a nonfiction book: Dealing with Belial: Spirit of Armies and Abuse by Anne Hamilton and Janet Speirs.

Here’s the Book Description:

‘What harmony,’ Paul asked, ‘is there between Christ and Belial?’

Where, you might wonder, did he pluck that name from? In most English Bibles, it appears for the first time in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. So it comes as a surprise to realise this army commander of the spirit world is mentioned 27 times in Hebrew, almost always in connection with abuse and violence. Modern translations generally substitute worthless. Yet from the stories where Belial appears, we can draw important principles for dealing with its tactics, agenda and ploys.

This eighth book in the series, Strategies for the Threshold, examines the spiritual dynamics involved in approaching your life’s calling.

Narelle’s Thoughts:

Where do I start? Usually the answer is the beginning, but I’m going to work backwards from a time perspective and start with why I read this book. Interestingly, ‘time’ is a topic that’s touched on in the book. 

Yesterday I was chatting on the phone with a dear author friend of mine and talking about how I’ve been researching spiritual abuse, among other things, for my current writing projects. My friend said “You should read Anne Hamilton’s recent book on this topic.”

I was awake early this morning. At 7am I decided to find the book and check out the Amazon sample on my phone. I was engrossed in the sample chapters and immediately hit ‘buy now’ in the Kindle store to add the ebook to my Kindle App. I’ve no idea how much the ebook cost because I didn’t care. I was invested in reading more, irrespective of the price. Suddenly it was after nine and I was at 42% and I needed to go to the shops and do a few things around the house before lunch. But…I didn’t want to stop reading. From then on I’m reading in every spare minute and pondering what I’ve read in between times. At three this afternoon I reached the end – which means I read a full length nonfiction book within nine hours. 

To put this in context, this is not normal for me. I can’t remember the last time I read a complete book on my phone because I usually read on my Kindle. I don’t read a lot of nonfiction. I read fiction for entertainment and nonfiction when I have a problem to solve and questions to answer. My problems to solve related to my own life and my understanding of why my characters were doing what they were doing in my stories. 

Three years ago I had writers block on the next book I needed to write—which is the book I delayed writing and now need to write next. Grief played a role—an author in the series passed away, followed by my father a few months later—but that was only part of the reason. In hindsight, I can see that my writers block related to wrong timing. God said no. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, which was that I didn’t have the knowledge and lived experience back in 2021 to authentically write this story for His glory. 

I write with God and each book I write is a shared journey that typically challenges me to deal with stuff in my own life including denial, the need for repentance, and unforgiveness. I write contemporary Christian romance short novels and a criticism of books in my genre is they’re shallow, formulaic and written via pumping out similar storylines in the popular romance tropes. 

I’ve always believed that every book I publish should be the best book I can write at that point in time. My goal is to grow as a writer, produce quality books, and hopefully please my readers with stories they’d like to read. Back in 2021 I was praying about this book and I started my journey on researching spiritual abuse. I was particularly interested in the psychological aspects of my characters that would logically explain why my characters wanted to behave in certain ways. 

During the last three years my journey has, in many ways, unpacked the subject matter in Anne’s book. Lightbulbs flashed as I recognised familiar patterns and gained a greater understanding of the emotional pain I’d experienced—and the pain my characters had also experienced—in different ways. The underlying factors and red flags, things that I’d previously been blinded from seeing, were spelled out in a way that I could now process and understand. 

Here are a few quotes that stood out among the many passages I highlighted in multiple colours in my Kindle App. 

“The key element in identifying the presence of the spirit of abuse is inversion or perversion. It has to be there. Yet other factors are also present. The other signature smell when it comes to this spirit is group mind control.”

“A few individuals remain unaffected but the group as a whole is asleep. They fail to notice anything wrong, no matter how blatant it is.”

“A third element—although this is not unique to the spirit of abuse, as inversion and group mind control are—is blame-shifting.”

My mum passed away a few months ago and I’ve been dealing with childhood trauma associated with my mum’s decades-long debilitating mental health issues. Anne’s book was like a big hug from Jesus. Her words reminded me that Jesus is carrying me through this difficult season of grief and loss. 

I usually end my book recommendations with a sentence about who I recommend the book to according to their likes and interests. This book was the right book for me to read at the right time. Two years ago I likely would have passed on reading it because I was blinded to the truth about a whole lot of things. I’ve trusted the wrong people—instead of trusting God and being open to hearing His truth. I’ve been burned during the painful discovery of the true character of people who didn’t have my best interests at heart. Multiple times I’ve worked through the hard process of acceptance, repentance and forgiveness. All that to say, I recommend reading the opening chapters and making an informed decision on whether or not it’s the book for you.