What I’m Reading – Charity’s Fire

I’ve been a Christian for many years. And as one, there are several scriptures I rally around.

One of my particular is a favs is from Jeremiah 19. “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

Well, one of the first things I learned about spiritual warfare is that if God has a plan for you, it’s a sure bet that the Devil has one to take you down.

And that’s what the book is about. Charity’s Fire takes you onto the front lines of the war between good and evil. And it does something chilling. It tosses our world square into it.

And while a lot of ideas of spiritual warfare and disregarded these days, Craig has taken them and added a bit of a “Star Wars” twist to it. Demons use technology. They have starships and starbases. They have a chain of command. And in modernizing them, he makes them frightening again.

One type of demon caught my attention. They’re called “Leeches”. When you think that, you think of the things that live in swamps. You walk across and through the swamp, and these parasites attach themselves to you.

Well, these things do the same thing. One of the main characters has a leech living inside him. He didn’t walk through a physical swamp to get it, but a virtual swamp of online porn. The thing feeds off this, and before long, he’s using his work computer to view the stuff. Many people consider porn a victimless crime. What Craig wrote shows it’s anything but.

The Leech, like any parasite, starts taking more and more. Here, it’s time. So much time that he’s caught viewing porn at work and fired.

In the physical world, a parasite can lower your immune system. In the spiritual, the same is true. The discovery of what he’s been doing simply causes other leeches to show up, in this case anger and resentment. This, in my terms, is what I call sin and it shows how it operates. Not as a vague concept, but as a parasite that sucks the life out of you.

I would recommend you read the book in as few sittings as possible. Take the phone off the hook. Put the dog outside. There’s a lot going on and lessons that will make you pause.

Don’t believe me. Read the part about the guy condemned to Hell. If that doesn’t cause you to take pause, I don’t know what will.