Bethel Redding’s Courtship with Belial

Tony Miano of Cross Encounters tackles the unholy alliance between Pope Francis and Bethel Church’s residing senior associate leader Kris Vallotton.  Miano writes:

It is well-documented the unbiblical, blasphemous beliefs and practices of a group I believe is a cult–Bethel Redding. My research and documentation includes information about Bethel’s second-in-command, Kris Vallotton. Today, Vallotton met Pope Francis–head of the apostate Roman Catholic Church and an antichrist. As I write this article, Vallotton’s Facebook photo with the pope has 240 shares, 290 comments, and over 5,700 reactions. Vallotton’s remarks, along with many of the comments attached to the photo, serve as examples of Bethel Redding’s courtship with Belial.

Who is Belial?

The word/name “Belial” appears in only verse in the Bible–2 Corinthians 6:15.

“What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?”

So, who or what is “Belial?”

I found the following explanation in Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers to be rather fascinating:

“The passage is remarkable as being the only occurrence of the name in the New Testament, all the more so because it does not appear in the Greek version of the Old. The Hebrew word signifies ‘vileness, worthlessness;’ and the ‘sons of Belial’ (as in Deuteronomy 13:13; 1 Samuel 2:12; 1 Samuel 25:17) were therefore the worthless and the vile. The English version, following the Vulgate, translates the phrase as though Belial were a proper name, and this has led to the current belief, as shown in Milton’s poems, that it was the name of a demon or fallen angel, the representative of impurity—

‘Belial came last, than whom a spirit more lewd,

Fell not from heaven, or more gross to love

Vice for itself.’—Paradise Lost, i. 490.

‘Belial, the dissolutest spirit that fell,

The sensualest, and, after Asmodai,

The fleshliest incubus.’—Paradise Regained, ii. 204.

St. Paul’s use of the word would seem to imply that some such belief was floating among the Jews in his time. A strange legend, which possibly had a Jewish origin (it is referred to certain necromantici), is found in an obscure and forgotten book (Wierus: Pseudo-Monarchia Dæmonum), to the effect that Solomon was led by a certain woman to bow before the image of Belial, who is represented as worshipped by the Babylonians. Of that worship there is no trace in history; and Milton seems to have recognised this—

‘To him no temple stood

Nor altar smoked.’

“But if the name had gathered these associations round it, we can understand St. Paul’s using it as representing, or, as it were, personifying, the whole system of impure cultus that prevailed in the worship of Aphrodite at Corinth.”

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H/T Churchwatch Central