Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

Though more people than ever in recent years have begun to realize that something is wrong and that problems lie ahead for this country, Americans have for a long time been deceived by slogans that made them believe the State was their lord and savior, when it is a great enslaver and destroyer of liberty. These lies are repeated daily, even as they become more evidently untrue. “This is a free country” — “We wouldn’t have anything without our military” — “Our veterans fought for freedom” — “Our police officers are heroes who stop crime.”

To tell others that we’re living in political captivity—that this country is one big tax farm that whips its cattle into line for its own gain—thus greatly offends their sensibilities. They believe the false god State is their “protector,” rather than to trust in God for protection. They believe that our statist society has God in it when it’s an enemy of God. To tell people that this is a socialist society that is already based on centralized decision-making, corporate monopolies, central bank manipulation, or economic intervention in general, greatly offends their false notion that this is freedom and that we live in some “free market” paradise or that everyone who’s rich got that way from working hard. One of their favorite Pharaohs has told them that it will “never be a socialist country,” making it impossible for them to realize it’s already happened.

This is a lot to swallow for people who are under the delusion that Pharaoh’s soldiers “fight for freedom” and that his plantation officers exist for “public safety,” rather than to uphold a statist system of slavery. They have not only been fed propaganda their whole lives that keeps them from seeing this, but their sin, manifesting greatly in the idolatry for politicians and the false god system of statism in general, keeps them from breaking out of these slavish ways of thinking. Indeed, we’re living in bondage because of these ways of thinking.

God’s assessment of society vs. man’s

The word of God, however, teaches us something entirely different than what the average person—the American idiot no less than anyone else—would tell you is going on. Whereas men believe in countless myths regarding the State, the prophets of God, who uniquely express His will, give us another picture of our society. Whereas the masses disagree that we’re being robbed by people calling themselves “the government,” that taxation is theft, that America is one big prison society bent on trafficking humans in and out of courtrooms and cages, God’s word gives us the opposite assessment of our political situation. 

As one prophet saw in a society of his day, which is equally applicable to ours, 

“This is a people robbed and plundered; All of them are snared in holes, And they are hidden in prison houses; They are for prey, and no one delivers; For plunder, and no one says, ‘Restore!'” (Isaiah 42:22). 

How easily Isaiah could have said the same thing if he walked into the modern-day United States and reported what he saw, with the federal government robbing us of trillions of dollars a year on income tax alone, state governments extorting us for hundreds of billions of dollars, local governments taking us for billions more, and Pharaoh’s police officers raking in tens of billions of dollars on so-called “civil asset forfeiture” and stealing more property than all the burglaries of private criminals combined.

Or the two million people directly incarcerated in the “land of the free,” over half of which (some 60% in a 201o study) are non-violent offenders. (And these numbers might be even greater since many non-violent things are classified as violent crimes). 

This prison population in our incarceration nation has been steadily increasing in the past 40 years, even though—contrary to statist wisdom which would assume otherwise—the rate of violent crimes has not. (As one study shows, “The total number of violent crimes was only about three percent higher in 2008 than it was in 1980, while the total number of property crimes was about 20 percent lower. Over the same period, the U.S. population increased about 33 percent and the prison and jail population increased by more than 350 percent”). 

And these are just the people directly enslaved by the system. There are, in this country alone, some 330+ million of us all living in one giant, open-air prison camp where political rulers who are bent on robbing, controlling, and enslaving people keep open a constant threat to fine, beat, detain, incarcerate, or kill, anyone who should “break” one of their thousands of laws (most of which have nothing to do with not violating another person’s body or property and only to do with not satisfying some edict of the “lawmakers” or “law enforcers”). 

Isaiah was right: we’re indeed robbed and plundered. We’re all living under tens of thousands of different man-made “laws,” statutes, codes, regulations, tax extortion, police preying on us as we move about, SWAT teams that break into our homes tens of thousands of times a year, fines, fees, and threats of jails and prisons, or even death, if we don’t comply with these tyrants. This was more or less the indictment of all the prophets as they witnessed the mess that had come upon numerous peoples and lands. These people were all found supporting violent, idolatrous political plunder systems that had left their societies destroyed. This is what the prophets always pronounced would be the judgment for the sins of state worshiping and taking part in this violence: “Your cities will be reduced to ruins and lie uninhabited” (Jeremiah 4:7). 

Our blinded people

One of the great errors of American thinking has always been the belief that we are not already a people living in captivity, and that the threat of occupation was one where an external force would suddenly descend upon us, breach the until-then impenetrable walls built by the fine men and women of our armed forces, and subsequently subjugate the masses with their bayonets and slanted-eyes. The American fear was never of internal domination, but that some foreigners would pierce through the great defenses of “our military” and begin marching through our streets with their brown-shirt uniforms or hammer-and-sickle flags after making landfall. It was never that Americans were paying trillions of dollars in taxes to fund their own enslavement at the hands of “our government,” as they have affectionately called it, but that some conjectural enemy would one day be air-dropped from the skies and assemble against us in military formation. On that day, but not before then, they have fantasized all the heroic actions they would take against this enemy, perched atop their deer stands and hiding behind ever blade of grass, giving it all they’ve got to repel these occupiers.

Of course, Americans are a highly slavish bunch of fools who are already living in an Egyptian-statist society and have placed the yoke around their necks long ago in believing in human government at all. Out of their unfounded fear of some “foreign” enemies — their state rulers are likewise foreign to social order — they have placed their faith in local tyrants to secure their “freedom” for them, only to find themselves living as captives to men who milk them for trillions of dollars a year in taxes, evict them from their land and homes if they don’t pay, throw them in cages if the installments aren’t made, and shoot them if they resist or if they decide to murder that day.

The fear of some “foreign” occupation thus ironically led men to embrace their own domestic bondage, all while kidding themselves that they are free men because “the Chinese” are not marching down their streets. This fixation on a future, foreign invasion led Americans to place their trust in the very people who keep them in bondage, and to regard them as the people who “protect and serve” them and “fight for our freedom.” By thinking their only real enemies and potential occupiers were men plotting overseas and preparing to cross oceans and land boots on the ground in some grand feat of military logistics, the American people were trained to look away from the captivity that had long been taking shape at home, at the hands of the very men — the beloved “troops” and “boys in blue” — they were taught to call their “heroes.”

If men knew their Bibles, they would know that the very means of getting themselves in bondage or inviting God’s judgment in the form of Babylonian invaders would be precisely to practice these statist ways yourself, and that the only way to avoid them is— this is entirely foreign to the statist mind — is to trust in God alone and abandon the practices of statism. Yet they did things backward. They assumed, against God’s counsel, that they must, like the Israelites asked of Samuel, seek kings of their own to avoid getting dominated by men, and for this grave error and sin they have found themselves occupied domestically by “their” government, which exists as a judgment against them.

The American mind has been plagued by many delusions of liberty and protection for many generations. They not only fail to see that they are enslaved, but they consider their captors to be their liberators. None of the Biblical prophets would agree with most Americans today that “this is a free country” if they arrived today to write their accounts of the situation again. They would say exactly the opposite, just as they did back then when men practiced the same evils as they still do today. If Jeremiah arrived in America, he wouldn’t say, “Wow, what a free society we have, where all our properties and bodies are secured by this lovely government of the people.” He would say, once again, “Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers” (Lamentations 5:2). What God sees in statist societies like ours is that the rulers are bent on “nothing except your own dishonest gain, on shedding innocent blood, on practicing extortion and oppression” (Jeremiah 22:17). He sees a land that is “full of crimes of bloodshed” and a “city [that] is full of violence” (Ezekiel 7:23).

The worst part is that we cannot even blame the plunderers themselves. As tempted as we are to hate them for carrying out their evils, they get away with it only because of the wickedness in our neighbors’ hearts and their blind approval of these systems. It is their ignorance of the captivity, and even their foolish patriotic support of the captors (‘Back the Blue!’), that allows for these systems to happen.

So we’re not only slaves in this statist society, but most men don’t even see it. To make things even more depressing, few men — save a remnant that God left — call for God’s liberation from bondage and restoration of liberty from the perversion of it that has occurred under this statist society. “No one says, ‘Restore!'” The Egyptians have been rather successful at tricking men into thinking Egypt can be “made great again,” that we just need to vote new Pharaohs into office, or that ‘things will get better with the next election.’

Our people are still mostly living in the dark to the schemes that are before them, because they have not sought the wisdom and word of the Lord. “They eat the fruit of their own way, and are filled with their own devices” (Proverbs 1:31). Most all of the thoughts that permeate men’s minds today, e.g., that “the government is here to keep us safe and help the poor,” are the exact opposite of what God tells us is going on: that we’re being absolutely plundered by men who call themselves “the government,” who we gave away our inheritance to. Whereas most men tell us that we couldn’t do without the State, its politicians, judges, police officers, soldiers, etc., and that they’re all here to prevent us from being robbed (if you’re a conservative) rather than to rob us themselves, or that they’re here to help the poor (if you’re a democrat) rather than hurt the poor, God tells us what the real situation is:

“Your rulers are rebels, friends of thieves. They all love bribes and chasing after rewards. They do not defend the fatherless, and the plea of the widow never comes before them.” (Isaiah 1:23).

Many people, deluded by the deceptions of the democratic age, still believe in the lies of a “benevolent” and “selfless” government of “public servants” who are “we the people.” They don’t see that claims of existing for the “public good” are merely a ruse to rule over people, because they don’t care to learn from the Lord Jesus, who taught that “the kings of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those in authority over them call themselves benefactors” (Luke 22:25). They don’t see that the rulers don’t care about the masses but, in fact, live at their expense. The nineteenth-century French economist, Frédéric Bastiat, was always hyper-aware of this truth. As he saw in his effort to explain and define government,

“[Government is] composed…of men…who, like all other men, desire in their hearts, and always seize every opportunity with eagerness, to increase their wealth and influence. Government is not slow to perceive the advantages it may derive from the part which is entrusted to it by the public. It is glad to be the judge and the master of the destinies of all; it will take much, for then a large share will remain for itself; it will multiply the number of its agents; it will enlarge the circle of its privileges; it will end by appropriating a ruinous proportion.”

Government agents are not “public servants,” but legalized robbers. They’re not here for poor aid, as socialists think, but to impoverish the people. As God charges the princes and rulers, “Ye have eaten up the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses” (Isaiah 3:14). Oppression of the poor is a common theme of the scripture (Psalm 12:5, 35:10, 82:4; Isaiah 3:14; Ezekiel 18:12; Jeremiah 2:34). The state rulers are not here to assure that society works and keeps running or the “general welfare”; these are but a guise for their efforts to rob us and make us think that such robbery is “necessary” to social order. Bastiat was only giving the same assessment as the scriptures to witness such plunder.

“Her officials within her are like wolves tearing their prey, shedding blood, and destroying lives for dishonest gain” (Ezekiel 22:27).

Most men are entirely fooled by statist intellectuals into thinking that the system of political plunder exists to serve them, or just entirely deceived through the sin in their own hardened hearts. But God’s word stands as a testament against the lies of statists and the foolish imaginations of men. Whereas most men tell us that all is well in Babylon, that this a “free country,” that “government” keeps us safe, feeds us, promotes equality, etc., God’s word tells us that societies under political rule are being absolutely plundered.

“Your land is desolate; your cities are burned with fire. Foreigners devour your fields before you—a desolation demolished by strangers” (Isaiah 1:7).

We’re occupied by strangers — men who, for subsisting on theft (taxes) and coercion (obey us or else) rather than voluntary trade and contract, are external and foreign to the social order of free and peaceful interaction. They rob us and rule us in our presence, and very few men see it or care. Indeed, most men apologize for it as a “necessary evil” or even apositive good. They think the police are here to fight off “the bad guys” and uphold “law and order,” when really they’re here to rob the people as they travel around, enforce the thousands of edicts of the government, and help kidnap men to fill up the jails and prisons in their network of human trafficking. This is what Pharaoh’s police officers do. “He lies in wait like a lion in a thicket; he lurks to seize the oppressed; he catches the lowly in his net” (Psalm 10:9). We live, not in a “free society,” but in an Egyptian world where agents of Pharaoh conspire against the public daily. Far from existing for “law and order” or “justice,” the prophets pointed out that “among my people are found wicked men: they lay wait, as he that setteth snares; they set a trap, they catch men” (Jeremiah 5:26). 

This ministry

God’s word was one big effort to get people to see the political plunder society they had brought on themselves and to turn from their ways. And, all praise to God, this ministry was formed to wake people up to these truths. We were sent “to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house” (Isaiah 42:7). Amen. All of God’s people need to keep working to show their neighbors the way and bring them to the Lord. The scriptures teach that “through knowledge the righteous are rescued” (Proverbs 11:9).

We risk our necks to expose these lies that form the foundation of the slave society, but God forbid we should forsake the Lord and remain quiet. 

“The Spirit of the Lord GOD is on Me, because the LORD has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and freedom to the prisoners” (Isaiah 61:1). 

God will not forget about us, so why should we forsake Him and keep from waking up His lost children? God can heal people from their sin of statism, where they thought that the only hope for society was in men with badges and boots. They do not have to keep believing in these lies. 

“I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known: I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight. These things will I do unto them, and not forsake them” (Isaiah 42:16). 

Are you ready to be done with the lie? Are you ready to change your ways? Are you ready to know the Lord? Are you ready to “wash and cleanse yourselves, remove your evil deeds from My sight, stop doing evil!” (Isaiah 1: 16)?

“Who among you will pay attention to this? Who will listen and obey hereafter? (Isaiah 42:23). 

Prayer

Lord God be with us in this captivity. Our people have set up a dangerous society all around us with their worship of men as their protectors, who have only become predators of Your children. We know that we are nothing without You, and that we are very alone and outnumbered. We turn to You for our salvation and trust in You only to save us from our enemies. You’re all we have, Lord. The hope of man is worthless. We need Your protection and guidance every day. We’re nothing on our own. Be a shield for us everywhere we go, for our land is overcome by strangers who mark our steps. Keep leading our people to repent of their idolatry for false gods like the State and show them how foolish they are for having forsaken You for so long. Humble them enough to admit their faults. Turn their hearts of stone into hearts of flesh again. Make them see and to hear Your word. Get them reading Your prophets. Turn back our enemies from us and fight our battles for us. Be with us through these hard times ahead, because we surely aren’t going to rely on men to protect us ever. But we know Your judgment is coming. Keep Your hand on the remnant and don’t let them tear us to pieces, and don’t let us slip up in this fight and be turned away backwards ourselves. Keep us strong too, that we may persevere in the evils these men have planned for us and scheme against us daily. You’re the only God, and in You only do we trust. Lord, restore us like the days of old. Amen.