Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

One scripture weighing on me lately is one among many calls to continue loudly proclaiming the word of God as an antidote to the evils of our world, namely the dangerous, sinful religio-ideological philosophy of statism (i.e., support for political violence) among our people that has worked to bring us into Egyptian bondage. 

“Ye that make mention of the LORD, keep not silence” (Isaiah 62:6). 

It is only God who is going to save us from this statist nightmare, which is the result of the idolatries and evil ideas of our neighbors, and thus we can’t cease to teach men the way of the Lord—obeying His commandments for liberty—and seek it for ourselves. 

The evils

Those who know God’s law of liberty cannot be sitting around on the sidelines while men plot wickedness against God and His people. There is a vast political conspiracy against us that men still need to awaken to.

“The wicked scheme against the righteous and gnash their teeth at them” (Psalm 37:12).

We are being preyed upon by “our” Babylonian occupiers.

“The wicked watcheth the righteous, and seeketh to slay him” (Psalm 37:32).

And we can’t stay silent while political schemes are being hatched against us. Our Egyptian captors want to enslave the world. 

Those invested in God’s word need to be taking it to anyone they can find who might have ears that are ready to hear it, and even those who will most surely turn their ears off to the word. God is our only way out and we need to show men that salvation is of the Lord and that Jesus Christ is the only name that we recognize as being our Lord and King and Savior, never the name of some man or group of men calling themselves a “government.”

“Arise, O LORD! Save me, O my God! Strike all my enemies on the jaw; break the teeth of the wicked. Salvation belongs to the LORD” (Psalm 3:7-8). 

How many men are still so lost that they’re calling upon Pharaohs to “save” them? How many people still think “our” Egyptian system keeps us “safe” from the “bad guys”? How many people still think this (the Babylonian captivity) is “freedom” and that this illusion was won by amassing tanks, fighter jets, and soldiers?

We can’t keep silent when men are still this fooled. There’s an ongoing spiritual and intellectual battle for God, truth, and liberty, against the evils of statism and its selling point of salvation through men, i.e., through so-called “governments” and their “protection.”  (Hence most people’s response to the first time ever even considering a society without Pharaohs being, “Well without Egypt, how would we have X?”).

Seeking God

We have a part to play in fighting the evils of the world by seeking God and His kingdom, and understanding it for ourselves so that we may relay it to others.

“Show me Your ways, O LORD; teach me Your paths. Guide me in Your truth and teach me, for You are the God of my salvation; all day long I wait for You” (Psalm 25:4-5). 

This is undoubtedly not an inquiry of those who are still believing in Egypt and trusting in men to guide them to freedom and prosperity, rather than camps and famines. They are seeking the ways of men.

The men who lay traps for us want to try and get us off-course and to walk in their ways, i.e., the “laws” of men, which gives us even more reason to seek God. 

“Teach me Your way, O LORD, and lead me on a level path, because of my oppressors” (Psalm 27:11).

The systems of men are built on lies and we are going to need to know God to get out of Egypt. 

“Teach me Your way, O LORD, that I may walk in Your truth. Give me an undivided heart, that I may fear Your name” (Psalm 86:11). 

It is God’s Law that we need to be walking in if we ever want to leave Egypt; the “law” systems of men are nothing more than legalized plunder with the facade of “freedom” and “public good,” backed up with robes and crowns and flags and badges and boots and swords and other subjects of man’s idolatries.

“I will meditate on Your precepts and regard Your ways” (Psalm 119:15). 

Agents of Egypt cannot say these things. Pharaoh’s “law enforcement” officers, his judges, etc., are far from the psalmists’ focus on truth through God. They are seeking rather after the “laws” of men. They don’t ask to know the way of God, but only what the State “authorizes” them to do against their fellow human beings. Their “truth” is whatever some human “lawmaker” declares is “law.”

We can’t keep silent and have nothing to say about the laws of social order when men have raised political systems up against the kingdom of God, and we do not escape the results of violating the commandments of God, which we do namely through erecting the Egyptian “law” systems of men, by pretending they don’t exist. We reject God only at our own peril, and we remain ignorant only to our own destruction. We pay the price for doing it whether we accept it or not. 

Not backing down

The schemes of Egypt that have been hatched against us have real-world economic, moral, and social effects that force us—just as the word of God is always telling us to do—to join in the intellectual and spiritual battle of combatting the errors and deceptions of men if we hope to avoid digging ourselves deeper into the pit of statist bondage and captivity.

As the prophet said, 

“My people are gone into captivity because they have no knowledge” (Isaiah 5:13). 

We find ourselves in the middle of a great fight that we can’t turn away from. We have a responsibility to our people, our neighbors, our brothers, and strangers, to work to ensure that a peaceful and free society is not fully co-opted and destroyed by statists, who get their plunder system over on people by deceiving them into thinking it is for the “common good.”  (As they say, tempting men into the socialism of state control of resources, “Throw in your lot with us; let us all share one purse,” Proverbs 1:14).

We must stand and proclaim the kingdom of God and the inevitable failures of man’s socialist systems. It is our duty to ensure society is not destroyed by these evil men. 

As even the secular economist, Ludwig Mises, once said, 

“Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping toward destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interest of everyone hangs on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us” (Mises, Planning for Freedom).

Only when men obey God and order their society according to His law of liberty (and not the “laws” of men) can we have a peaceful, prosperous, and just social order. The kingdoms of men are artificial orders that leave men with violence, poverty, and great injustices. 

The effects of statism and God’s judgment 

The essential role of the Biblical prophets was, with the word of God on their side, to go out to the people and tell them of the coming destruction of their societies for having based them on the sins and idolatries of political violence and king-worshiping.

This is the word of God. If anyone asks how we have found ourselves in Egypt and under Pharaohs, we are to tell them because they have worshiped these false gods. When people ask us,

“‘Why has the LORD pronounced all this great disaster against us? What is our guilt? What is the sin that we have committed against the LORD our God?’ Then you are to answer them: ‘It is because your fathers have forsaken Me, declares the LORD, and followed other gods, and served and worshiped them. They abandoned Me and did not keep My instruction'” (Jeremiah 16:10-11).

We are to tell them that disaster has come upon us because we followed man-gods instead of God.

“‘It is because they abandoned the covenant of the LORD, the God of their fathers, which He made with them when He brought them out of the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 29:25).

Police states, wars, labor camps, prisons, shortages, famines, executions, etc., are both the natural result of, and divine judgment against, the evils of statism.

“‘Because they have forsaken the LORD their God who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and have embraced other gods, worshiping and serving them–because of this, the LORD has brought all this disaster upon them” (1 Kings 9:9).

And we have today the same duty as the prophets of old. We need to be showing our people that the Babylonian systems they have foolishly praised and trusted in for their “freedom” and “prosperity” end up destroying everything and coming under God’s judgment. For their sins, God makes statist societies as ours “utterly desolate” (Isaiah 6:11), “ruinous heaps” (Isaiah 37:26), a “habitation forsaken” (Isaiah 27:10). 

We need to tell our people the effects of violating God’s natural order with statist intervention into society: It brings wars, poverty, famine, prisons, labor camps, genocide, mass vaccination schemes, etc. It brings all the things they said would happen if we didn’t have Pharaohs. 

It’s the Law of God. It happens every time. It has happened repeatedly throughout history, and we’ve brought it upon ourselves again today. Statism and socialism do not work. 

Though it’s finally becoming more obvious to people, after all our years of noise-making and being mocked, that Babylon is in trouble and her whoredoms have the empire in over its head, there are still millions who haven’t seen it yet. 

Most people thought it was safe to rest in Babylon forever. 

“They set out to go down to Egypt without asking My advice, to seek shelter under Pharaoh’s protection and take refuge in Egypt’s shade” (Isaiah 30:2). 

They thought they could count on Egypt’s retirements, savings, banks, currency, food, houses, horses, chariots, footmen, etc. They thought that state tyranny could work forever, because they don’t believe in God’s judgment and justice against such plunder systems. They thought Pharaoh’s footmen were for “public safety,” and his horsemen for “national defense.”

They don’t believe the word of God:

“Pharaoh’s protection will become your shame, and the refuge of Egypt’s shade your disgrace” (Isaiah 30:3). 

They think the Pharaohs are going to “Make America Great Again” or “Build Back Better.” They think Pharaohs know how to run economies, balance budgets, protect people, feed them, etc. They do not believe in God for their provisions, their protection, their food, their life, or their salvation. 

The duty to tell people what sinful state-worshiping brings to society (per the word of God) is thus far from over in our slave-minded land of fools. The old ideas of Egypt are still popular. 

They believed they could have whatever they wanted as long as they brought enough violence and control down on their captives. In their pride and sin and evil acts and thoughts, they never considered that God was going to put a stop to it, that attempting to violate the laws of God brings negative sanctions upon societies in terms of violence, crimes, conflicts, injustices, imprisonments, slavery, famines, inflation, moral decay, degeneracy, moral relativism, labor camps, Gulags, secret police, and you name it. 

But they are condemned from the start. 

“Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, who rely on horses, who trust in their abundance of chariots and in their multitude of horsemen. They do not look to the Holy One of Israel; they do not seek the LORD” (Isaiah 31:1). 

God’s judgment is upon all the evil States of our world, and we ought to tell all those who are still trusting in Babylon of their misplaced faiths — who are “trusting in Egypt, that splintered reed of a staff that will pierce the hand of anyone who leans on it” (II Kings 18:21). 

We have to let them know that the evils they built up will be turned around on them. God does not intend to hold back. 

“Behold, it is written before Me: I will not keep silent, but I will repay; I will pay it back into their laps” (Isaiah 65:6). 

Ministering to our people

We need to let everyone know that statism came upon us because we disobeyed God. 

“They entered the land of Egypt because they did not obey the voice of the LORD” (Jeremiah 43:7). 

It was the sinful hearts of men that brought this slavery upon us. As one prophet bluntly puts it,

“The heathen shall know that the house of Israel went into captivity for their iniquity: because they trespassed against me, therefore hid I my face from them, and gave them into the hand of their enemies: so fell they all by the sword” (Ezekiel 39:23).

We have turned away from God and vice versa: He has left us to foolishly and sinfully chase Egyptian fantasies of powerful militaries and police forces and great social welfare programs, amongst a million other political imaginations and made-up philosophies of men.

“Your iniquities have built barriers between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He does not hear” (Isaiah 59:2).

It is our job to put the word of God to use in combating the destructive intervention of the evil statist plunderers. That’s what prophets of God do. They teach everyone that liberty comes from obeying God and that trusting in men leads to Babylonian captivity. This is what we are to tell to the millions of men around us who have placed their faith in the false salvation of Babylon, thinking that she feeds people when she feeds on them. 

And there is an urgency considering both the heightened threat of the Egyptian rulers as of late (remember 2020-present?) and the fact that God himself gets to a point where He has seen enough evil and has to bring His fist down on these wicked statist societies of ours.

As the Lord says,  

“I have kept silent from ages past; I have remained quiet and restrained. But now I will groan like a woman in labor; I will at once gasp and pant. I will lay waste to the mountains and hills and dry up all their vegetation. I will turn the rivers into dry land and drain the marshes” (Isaiah 42:14). 

We have a duty to not be silent to the evils before us, and to not just watch our people fall.

Stubborn statists

It is true that men who are wrapped up in evil—those who join the State and put its boots on as well as those who believe in this system—are notoriously hard-headed and refuse to listen when they hear the horn blowing (not to mention the mocking, caging, and killing of the prophets when they come).

“I appointed watchmen over you and said, ‘Listen for the sound of the ram’s horn.’ But they answered, ‘We will not listen!'” (Jeremiah 6:17). 

In another instance when the prophet Jeremiah went to preach the coming judgment on the people of Judah who had set their sights on Egyptian systems and living, they flat-out rejected him even knowing it was the word of God.

“As for the word that thou hast spoken unto us in the name of the Lord, we will not hearken unto thee” (Jeremiah 44:16).

But we still have a duty to warn people, to blow the trumpet, to sound the alarm, to ring the bells, because we love God. Every Christian whose eyes are on the kingdom of God should effectively be on a “mission.”

We are called to prophesy the word of God (such as to express God’s will, as told through the prophets, that there are blessings for all who obey the Lord and curses for those who trust in men). 

As Moses said, 

“I wish that all the LORD’s people were prophets and that the LORD would put his Spirit on them!” (Numbers 11:29). 

If we wanted to look up to the Biblical prophets, who preached the coming of God’s judgment to the wicked statist societies of their days, we can’t stop telling men about the Babylonian captivity of our own.

“For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not keep quiet, until her righteousness goes forth like brightness, and her salvation like a torch that is burning” (Isaiah 62:1).

Indeed, it’s the word and power of God that can bring down Babylons! Amen. 

Babylon is falling. Tell your neighbor.