Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

If you asked the average person today, who is far-gone from God and His word, if men are in need of governments if they wish to have social order, they will tell you that such organizations are nothing less than civilization-breathing institutions that are absolutely indispensable to law, order, prosperity, and society itself. “Without it,” they say in their sin, “there would be chaos, lawlessness, anarchy, impoverishment, etc.” (It has never occurred to them that we have these things now, under a government, and the system itself is guilty of these charges and largely responsible for them when they appear on a street-level). We are told by most everyone just how much we could never do without a State and the theft (taxation) and violence (law enforcement) that comes along with it, how Pharaoh’s “law enforcement” officers are vital to “public safety.” In fact, realizing that you can’t have a State without theft and violence, men fallaciously and sinfully tell us that human governments are a “necessary evil” or even (for the more adamant socialists) positively a necessary good. Not even denying the inherent violence of human governments (though they will on the other hand), the alleged civilization-breathing that comes along with the inherent coercion and plunder of governments is reasoned-away with the thinking that “the ends justify the means.”

Even worse, many go further and tell us (blasphemously) that human governments are God’s gift to humanity to save us from an otherwise terrible state of existence that would (supposedly) abound without man-gods ruling over us with their so-called “governments.” God supposedly gave us “governments,” which in turn (supposedly) give us social order, so that men would not be living in the wretched state of sin that society would (supposedly) be with us if men were not brought into line by human governments. (This idea that “we need governments because men are sinners,” of course, never accounts for the fact that these governments, whose human agents we have every reason to believe are worse than the average man who doesn’t seek power, will also be comprised of men who are presumably not exempt from the problems that this reasoning attributes to every other man. In other words, if men are in need of government, then who is to govern the human governors? Why don’t they need to be governed too?). 

Men vs. God

But as we know, the ideas of men are usually very at-odds with the word of God. According to God’s word, human kings are not given as the “socially necessary” law- and order-givers to society, which by the way denies God as our only lawgiver (Isaiah 33:22). Rather, they come as a form of God’s judgment, which is carried out by these States committing the definite and inherent evils that come along with them. The kingdoms of men are thus guaranteed to bring about all the very things—robbery, kidnapping, war, taxes, extortion—that statists cite as the reason for their alleged need (1 Samuel 8:12-17), which is meant as a warning to men who are foolish enough to think they need man-kings ruling over them. As such, God promises that those who embark upon the statist path of evil will experience the very things they thought they were avoiding by choosing man-gods to deal with their problems for them. 

Far from being ordained by God to minister His law and kingdom, as most men tell us, States are God’s “servants” in the worst sense of the term: to bring terror to the populations that they rule over (Jeremiah 27:6; Isaiah 7:17, 10:5-6), as a punishment for their sin of idolizing governments. By doing evil, States “serve” God and teach men the lessons that they are evidently lacking as they live under the sinful delusion that governments are “saviors” that are (at least) “necessarily evils” to social order. These “governments” they patriotically worship and trust in prove to be evil and then give men (ideally) the wake up call needed to forsake them in the present and avoid them in the future.

Human government is rebellion against God 

Most men have it backwards to suggest that governments have come as a society- and order-giving gift from God. God did not give us human governments so that our societies could work and function; He permitted them to happen, at the hands of men, so they would come to realize their great and sinful error of believing that social order comes from political violence rather than submission to the Lord and His way.  

Contrary to the average “Christian” who will tell you that governments represent God’s divine plan on earth, according to God’s word these institutions are always raised up in rebellion to God and His ‘libertarian’ idea of law, order, and freedom under the One True Sovereign (1 Samuel 8). States are both raised up in sin and, through tempting men into praising them, lead men into sin. In a story of the Kings of Israel, for instance, we read that “after Rehoboam had established his sovereignty and royal power, he and all Israel with him forsook the Law of the LORD” (2 Chronicles 12:1). 

God sends the evil

Far from being what God gave us for social order, the States of the world are meant to show us the way back to the Lord by doing evil. They don’t come from God as “saviors” but as terrorist plunderers who create a nightmarish world for us. They give us the conditions—violence, impoverishment, slavery—that we justly deserve for trusting in them to “save” us. These kingdoms of men (i.e., the governments of the world which are all fully evil and plunderous), and all their consequent evils, are what we get (or rather what God gives us) when we abandon the Lord as our Sovereign and the path of liberty under God, and seek instead the foolish idea of “freedom under government.”

God has no trouble turning us over as subjects to state rulers when we reject the Lord as our King. 

“This is what the LORD says: ‘You have forsaken Me; therefore, I have forsaken you into the hand of [king] Shishak” (2 Chronicles 12:5).

God brings evil upon His disobedient children who chase after man’s false god system of “government.”

“Therefore this is what the LORD God of Hosts, the God of Israel, says: ‘Behold, I will bring to Judah and to all the residents of Jerusalem all the disaster I have pronounced against them, because I have spoken to them but they have not obeyed, and I have called to them but they have not answered” (Jeremiah 35:17).

God is behind both the good and the evil in our world, with one (respectively) being the blessings given for obedience and the other being the curses that come from deviating from God’s path. As God says, He is “the One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the Lord who does all these” (Isaiah 45:7).

But men have jumped to conclusions here. While it is true that God is sovereign even over evil, we cannot conclude that statism—a society organized by political violence—is God’s system for social order or that we are called to support them. Precisely the opposite: the evils of statism are the punishment for getting behind such systems of men. Again, States are something that God permits men to set up, not something that He wills us to seek after. By reluctantly and sorrowfully allowing men to set up political systems and for them to backfire on us, as they always do, God teaches men a lesson in the providential law that political violence is always a rebellion against God that consequently destroys a society and leaves men desolate. 

The evils of statism are meant to teach men the divine economic and moral law (to use secular terms) that they abandoned once they began to believe that violent political intervention was “necessary” to society and civilization, that social order and economic harmony is achieved only through state power, or all the other things that statists worry would happen without a State: the poor would be getting poorer, the rich would get richer, children would go uneducated, we wouldn’t have any healthcare services, the corporations would take over, etc (again, all the things that are occurring right now and under a government). Albeit the hard way, the utter failure of statist societies, and the destruction they bring, teaches men the cause and effect law that God has put into the social structure from the beginning of time. All the necessary effects of statism—the increase of taxes, prices, poverty, income disparity, homelessness—are meant to show statists and socialists alike the foolishness of their idea that intervention is needed to assure these things don’t happen. The terrorism of statism is, in short, meant to rebuke men for their sins. 

God’s use of the State

Evil governments are meant by God as a corrective tool to get men back to the Lord, not as a lesson in the means they ought to choose for successful social organization. God sends state rulers as a means of correcting those who don’t obey Him, i.e., those who don’t regard the Lord as their Sovereign and only Ruler. 

This is where many go wrong. They assume the State (evil) was given for social order, rather than for judgment, and thus believe they should get behind God’s “ordaining” for these systems and support them, even though we’re only living under them because of our rebellion. Even if States are used by God, they are nevertheless evil and are avoidable only when we give up on the sin of statism. God wills that men reject statism and turn to the Lord. He wills that we give up the false belief that man-gods (i.e., governments) are saviors. “Put not your trust in princes, in mortal man, who cannot save” (Psalm 146:3). 

While God may use the State to serve His ends, that is to carry out the evils that we should always expect to come from human governments (if we were spiritual and truth-seeking enough to know God), it is still not His perfect will. States are still evil and not part of God’s plan for men, except, as a God of justice and consequences (Isaiah 30:18; Colossians 3:25), to make them pay for the deviant path that they have taken.

Evil governments as a means of correction

God knows that human governments are evil. Everytime throughout history, they do the same things we’re finally seeing today (after centuries of people wrongly believing that Americans had an exceptional government that was not like all the other bad ones in the world). Human governments always mean taxation, inflation, prisons, wars, murder, concentration camps, police states, surveillance systems, etc. There is no such thing as a State without theft and violence; they’re founded on, and sustained by, coercion against people and property. After perhaps a humble beginning with a few basic lies about how they have come to rescue everyone from poverty and insecurity, they eventually (though this was always active and present from the start) become the very robbers and plunderers that everyone believed they should fear in the absence (anarchism) of their existence. 

But God has a plan in all this evil. Eventually, God hopes, the evils become too hard to bear and men finally realize that they need to get back to God as the Sovereign, that the sinful idea of men-as-gods just isn’t working out anymore and has brought too much pain. 

These evils of government, which are guaranteed to come anytime men erect one in belief it is needed for their protection, are meant to show us just what happens—we will surely suffer under taxation, inflation, wars, police states, etc—when we abandon the Lord as our God. 

As God continues on the point of sending the statists (foreign kings in this case) after His disobedient children, as judgment for their evils, 

“They will become his servants, so that they may learn the difference between serving Me and serving the kings of other lands” (2 Chronicles 12:8). 

The slavery we’re living under today, i.e., the state rule which many call “freedom,” is judgment by God upon sinners (e.g., idolatrous police worshipers) that is meant to correct them, by way of allowing these evils systems to put their boots down on the throats of the foolish and sinful men who asked for it and called it “law,” “order,” and “freedom.”

In other words, slavery is what you get when you forsake God for the kingdoms of men. A society organized around taxes is the only proof one needs that men do not know the Lord, for by believing that violence was necessary to provide their goods and services, they have demonstrated that they know nothing about the Kingdom of God and have found themselves under a curse instead of the great blessings of the Lord that would abound for those who rejected these political orders. 

Far from being proof that God doesn’t exist, as a degenerate “atheists” might interpret the evils around us, such evils that come with government are proof that God is active in correcting us for our sin, i.e., our idolatry toward men and the evils they bring once we allow them to take power over us. The so-called “problem of evil” is not a problem for those who understand how God works: the evils we live under are man-made — the result of our own rebellion against the Lord and His Kingdom. This statist slavery we’re living under is meant to show us that God exists and to bring men back to the Lord, as statism represents nothing less than a distrust in the Lord as our King and Savior. As one prophet says,  

“You fear the sword, so I will bring the sword against you, declares the Lord GOD. I will bring you out of the city and deliver you into the hands of foreigners, and I will execute judgments against you. You will fall by the sword, and I will judge you even to the borders of Israel. Then you will know that I am the LORD” (Ezekiel 11:8-10).

God intends for men to see the evils that naturally come about from human governments as a grave error that they have made to ever approve of their existence in any way, to show them what a mistake they had made to allow these man-gods to be raised up above them (which, to be sure, only come about when men sinfully approve of them). 

“These curses will be a sign and a wonder upon you and your descendants forever.Because you did not serve the LORD your God with joy and gladness of heart in all your abundance, you will serve your enemies the LORD will send against you in famine, thirst, nakedness, and destitution. He will place an iron yoke on your neck until He has destroyed you” (Deuteronomy 28:46-48).

And by eventually destroying the States themselves that God uses for His judgment against statist sinners, and freeing them from their captivity, God further aims to show these state-worshipers His active work. 

“The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I stretch out My hand on Egypt and bring out the sons of Israel from their midst” (Exodus 7:5). (cf. Exodus 14:4, 14:18). 

God crushes statists to wake them up to their own evils. 

“This is what the Lord GOD says: ‘Behold, I will stretch out My hand against the Philistines, and I will cut off the Cherethites and destroy the remnant along the coast. I will execute great vengeance against them with furious reproof. Then they will know that I am the LORD, when I lay My vengeance upon them'” (Ezekiel 25:16-17). (cf. Ezekiel 5:15, 6:7, 25:11).

Getting back to God

In summary, the evils of statism ought to cause men to wise-up and get off the sinful and evil path we’re on today of seeking political solutions to every facet of our lives. The evils of statism, which are increasingly materializing today, ought to cause men to see that they shouldn’t want anything to do with so-called governments ever again, whether simply believing in their legitimacy, voting for their actors, or (even worse) taking up employment in Pharaoh’s plunder system as one of his thugs in a badge.

If men knew God, they would know the systems of men are enemies of God’s kingdom, that God’s people do not trust in government militaries and police forces to save them, that men who trust in government-provided military and police prove that they do not trust in God. They would see that these things show, rather, that they fear governments over God, when they should—since God gives us the evils of government for our sin of denying Him—just fear God to avoid all the things they tell us would happen without governments but, in fact, happen with them (lawlessness, chaos, disorder war, robbery, etc). 

If men are serious about serving God, they would be asking for light correction now, and they would heed the calls of the Spirit to stop doing evil and give up their idolatries, turn in their badges, burn their flags, and beg God to not to allow this evil State we’re living under to utterly destroy us. They would ask for God to start showing them the straight path now, so that they might avoid the treacherous path of great trials that lies ahead for those who refuse correction. 

Because if we fail to learn from our evils, if we fail to see that everything that is going on today is the result of our own sin and requires that we change course and return to the Lord, then God will allow this evil empire to run its course and destroy us. As one prophet knew, it’s better to start changing now than to wait and let God do what he must do to state-worshiping sinners. “O LORD, correct me, but with judgment; not in thine anger, lest thou bring me to nothing” (Jeremiah 10:24). 

It remains to be been if men are going to learn from the evils that continue to spread in our world today, if the next big stunt pulled by those who hit us with Operation Covid-19 at the beginning of this decade will wake men up and bring them back to the Lord in time for us to start turning away from the great disasters that await those who believe in salvation through the State. All we can try and do is sound the alarms and try to bring the lost sheep back to the Lord. And as the prophet says, 

“Perhaps they will listen and everyone will turn from his evil way, that I may relent of the calamity which I am planning to do to them because of the evil of their deeds” (Jeremiah 26:3).