Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

[This is part three of a series on the Book of Jonah. See part 1 and part 2 here].

There are a lot of lessons packed into the short book by the prophet Jonah, beyond the more well-known gist of Jonah winding up in the belly of a whale (which happened because he was fleeing from his duty, and ours, to preach repentance to evil statist societies, however dangerous it may be to do so). One of those lessons applies to those who are all too anxious to see their enemies—the political tyrants who indeed plunder, oppress, and enslave us—smashed and ended, which is indeed what God has done to these people and their systems (Psalm 37:38, 92:7, 94:23; Proverbs 10:29, 14:11; Hosea 7:13).

The scriptures are full of both disobedient (i.e., statist) societies that erected kings and pagan deities that they worshiped, and were consequently destroyed (Jeremiah 46:25, Ezekiel 30:13); and men who, on the other hand, followed God and avoided the destruction that necessarily comes from those statist/political societies that worship false gods and plunder everyone (1 Samuel 7:3-4).

Some men have a tendency to take joy in the former: watching God’s wrath come down upon Pharaohs and Caesars, rather than to hope for the latter: repentant men who change their ways, give up their idolatries, and stop their plundering, which is much needed in the American Empire today that is full of blind state-worshipers and servants. Jonah was one of those people. And God’s mercy (for the time being) for a repentant Nineveh, the subject city of the prophetic mission that God sent Jonah on, is one of these lessons. While they would have surely been worthy of being destroyed, God spared a city of 120,000 people, women, children, and others included, many who didn’t even know of their evils and the reason for their fall until the prophet Jonah showed up preaching it endlessly in the streets. (Though, as the prophet Nahum predicted, it eventually fell anyway).

As God described Nineveh in His mercy,

“[There are] more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left” (Jonah 4:11).

The confusion today

How true is this today? Men truly don’t know their left hand from their right. They don’t know that “taxation” is theft, that such tax-robbery comes along with all statist systems (1 Sam. 8:10-17), that taxation is what you get when you abandon God’s ways, that tax collectors are chief among sinners (Matt. 9:10-12), that “war” is murder, that Pharaoh’s “law enforcement” officers are here to extort and kidnap us, that “pledging allegiance” to a State is forsaking God for a false god, and that statism in general is idolatry and evil and an enemy of God’s Kingdom.

The 120,000 Ninevites pales in comparison to the one-hundred and twenty million Americans who generally hold some absurd fallacies of statism and misconceptions about liberty.

Our world is full of people “who call evil good and good evil, who turn darkness to light and light to darkness, who replace bitter with sweet and sweet with bitter” (Isaiah 5:20). Most people side with Pharaoh’s agents when they rob us, than with the victims of their robbery. They are sooner to support the exoneration of a murderous police officer than the self defense of some innocent man who was attacked by these thugs in badges. They will “back the blue” even as they murder innocent people in a pre-dawn home raid. Our world is full of people who “justify the wicked and condemn the just” (Proverbs 17:15). They think that badges make someone incapable of being a criminal, and that everyone who they oppress was just someone who was “breaking the law.”

Our people have a backward, perverted sense of justice, law, economics, ethics, freedom, and order, where all these things for them are embodied in the man-made system where political agents use violence against us in the enforcement of their arbitrary decrees, and where genuine liberty—a stateless society where God is our only archist (ruler), judge, and lawmaker—is regarded by them (pejoratively) as “anarchy” and “chaos.” Pretending to have found “law and order” in a State, our people have instead thrown their support behind the very enemy of peace and freedom. Notwithstanding their claims that statism and civilization are connected, our people are unwittingly embarking upon paths that leave their (anti)social orders desolate.

As the prophet Isaiah put it, regarding the backwardness of the people of his day,

“Their deeds are sinful deeds, and acts of violence are in their hands. Their feet run to evil; they are swift to shed innocent blood. Their thoughts are sinful thoughts; ruin and destruction lie in their wake. The way of peace they have not known, and there is no justice in their tracks. They have turned them into crooked paths; no one who treads on them will know peace. Therefore justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us. We hope for light, but there is darkness; for brightness, but we walk in gloom. Like the blind, we feel our way along the wall, groping like those without eyes. We stumble at midday as in the twilight; among the vigorous we are like the dead. We all growl like bears and moan like doves. We hope for justice, but find none, for salvation, but it is far from us” (Isaiah 59:6-11).

The ignorance of our people

In the Book of Jonah, the people of Nineveh were involved in great evils, such as the support of state plunder and violence — but many of them didn’t even know it. This is the same as in our world today, where men are just as much of idolatrous sinners who hang flags of their enemies on their houses, “thin blue lines” to show their support for the police state, etc., and are entirely ignorant of their evils. Indeed, they think they’re the only “good” people or “true patriots” left and that everyone else is a communist (but not them, the flag-wavers who call for powerful militaries and police!). Even worse, they invoke the holy name of the Lord alongside these great evils. These conservative Americans, who are just as socialist as the “lefties” they denounce, are fully immersed in the same sins as in the scriptures: worshiping the rulers, showing support for their enforcers, praising the system, holding days of remembrance for their false heroes, singing its songs, begging for masters, etc.

So we have a difficult situation: Our people are largely unrepentant sinners with evil in their hearts, and yet they’re too foolish to even know. To wish ill upon them would be like beating a toddler for touching a hot burner on the stove. They just don’t know any better. As Jesus famously said as he was being crucified, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). We have a world of thugs in badges who mindlessly carry out the decrees of politicians who are presumed to be legitimate “lawmakers,” carrying men off to cages for not properly satisfying their masters, and barely thinking a thing of it. Indeed, running with the praise and idolatry they receive from much of the public, many of them, though also aware of their role as members of a fraternal gang, are at the same time able to convince themselves that they actually exist for “public safety” and “law and order.” They are able to go home at night believing that they play an essential, indispensable role in upholding civilization and society itself, without which they tell themselves it would be “lawlessness” and “anarchy.”

And yet, at the same time, they are deserving of judgment for their evils — deserving of the complete collapse of their societies, at the hand of God, for sinfully believing that political violence and man-made laws was suitable foundation for social order.

But since men are fools and aren’t even fully aware of their evils, we are in the tough Christian position of upholding the lesson from Christ to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). Many police are just robotized tyrants who go through the motions for a paycheck. They are foolish order-followers who never question anything they’re told. They don’t even think whether it is just or moral to kidnap a man and place him in a cage for some bogus “law” of men (e.g., caging a man for six months for “driving without a license”); they are just blind order-followers who listen to the order-givers (e.g., the judges who give the orders to kidnap a man and bring him before Pharaoh’s court). Police are agents of evil who have come to rob God’s children, and yet many of them don’t even realize they themselves have been manipulated by spiritual evil into plundering men and property; they even lie to themselves that they’re “godly” men who are carrying out the righteous business of God on earth as part of a (supposedly) God-ordained, benevolent government. But what they need is to come to Christ and stop walking in the wicked path. They are “sick,” as Jesus said of them (Matt. 9:12). And they are in need of the doctor, who is the Lord.

As we have seen in our attempts at ministering to men, it is very hard to wake them up to the evils they have found themselves supporting. Perhaps the majority of people buy into some form of the statist lie, making it hard for us to steer them away from the love and veneration of Egypt. The statist ideology is all-pervasive throughout our society. As Isaiah said, “truth has stumbled in the public square” (Isaiah 59:14).

Adopting God’s mercy

While there is a ruling elite above us who know full-well their evils and relish in them daily, including many of the “thin blue line” thugs who are well-aware of their gang membership and desire this type of authority and control, there are millions of slavish men below, among both the poor victims who support the plunder society and those who partake in the plundering, who know not their evils. Many have convinced themselves that they “fighting for freedom” or “national security,” that they are “serving our country” and work for the cause of “public safety,” and they go on living these lies, avoiding confronting their sin, and try to suppress their inner-torment as their dead spirit subconsciously gnaws at them to confess to their injustice.

But in the story of Jonah, God meant for us to learn a thing or two about mercy and grace ourselves, despite us being surrounded by evil men who would not hesitate to murder us or put us in cages for not satisfying the decrees of their godvernment, and despite us having very good emotional reasons to want to hate them and believe they are lost causes who are permanently sold out to the evils.

We too must grant mercy and acceptance to the truly repentant, as much as we may despise them for their past evils. And we must go easy on those who are living in the dark, while not compromising on the position that they must repent (hence, Jesus eating with the tax-collectors). If we follow the lessons from Jonah, we must hope for the lost sheep of the world to return to the Lord (Luke 15), more than we hope for them to be destroyed, even though we may at the same time warn them that they better repent or be destroyed.

Jonah ends with a profound point that must always be kept in mind when we are ministering to the poor slaves in our society: They don’t know we’re slaves living in captivity under political rulers. They think we’re living in a free society. 

Our people are lost. They don’t even know they’re in Babylon, much less how to get out of it. Indeed, they think Babylon can be made “great again” with enough political will. They don’t even know they have committed their hands and feet to bloodshed and evil; they think their “service to country” (i.e., bombing children in the middle east) was for the cause of “liberty” rather than the advancement of statism and plunder. They have not yet been moved by God’s calls to “keep to the paths of the righteous” (Proverbs 2:20). They have not listened to the Lord, “Do not swerve to the right or to the left; turn your feet away from evil” (Proverbs 4:27). They have not sought to avoid the evil path, such as those systems that are built on plunder (Deuteronomy 5:32, 28:14; Proverbs 1:15). They have not obeyed the Lord, who tells us, “Wash and cleanse yourselves. Remove your evil deeds from My sight. Stop doing evil!” (Isaiah 1:16). They have not made an attempt to “Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good” (Romans 12:9). Our people contribute to evil. But they have not even known it. 

Waking men up

This is why Jesus ate with the tax collectors, who are unequivocally called sinners (Matt. 9:11-13; Luke 19:10). It was going to take more than one lunch to show them that they are thieves who put men in cages for not complying with them. If Jesus would have told the tax agents that they need to hear the full message now and repent, or else He was not sitting down with them for dinner, He would have gotten nowhere with them. They would have ignored him outright if He showed up saying taxation is theft and “you’re all a bunch of thieves” and insisting they repent up front. Politicians, police, and tax agents are blind men, living in darkness, walking the sinful path, and are not going to realize their evils overnight, especially when carrying out their roles as administers of political robbery pays their bills and supports their families (though ruining others). They have been tempted by Pharaoh’s deep pocketbook (his money printer and tax machine) to serve evil over serving God. They have been tricked into believing that we should trust in men rather than God.

As much as we are tempted to hate them and slap them in the face to wake them out of their spiritual sleep, we have to be merciful to these men too, even as they remain thieves and murderers and strap on boots and badges for the State.

For those who have never had eyes to see, it is a lot to accept that we live in an Egyptian society of plunder of people and property, and that they’re on Pharaoh’s payroll rather than God’s team. It’s a lot to accept that we are not in need of state militaries for our protection and that we should trust in God for all things, rather than human governments. It is hard for them to see that their beloved country and its political system is a curse rather than a blessing. Men were brought up in a world of state propaganda that trained them to think otherwise.

If men get themselves into Egyptian slave societies because of sin and ignorance that they are not even aware of, it stands to reason that we must be as therapeutic and forgiving as possible in showing them way out through Christ the Lord, and accepting them when they are ready to come or have been made ready through the spirit softening their hardened hearts. 

Calling men to repentance

But, this mercy isn’t a call to let evil run amok without our rebuke, as many Christians seem to have done by softening their message to the world. Jesus wasn’t schmoozing with the tax collectors when he ate with them; He was still calling them to repentance and to seek the Kingdom of God. We must not mistake mercy and grace for compromise. Being merciful toward some lost sheep does not mean we must approve of their ways and tell them they’re walking upright, just as calling on them to change their ways does not mean we are “judging” or being “hateful” toward them. If anything, telling men of their errors and sin means we truly love them. It was a great mistake that we have ever considered it to be “loving” to fail to reprove men for walking in the dark path under the assumption that we wouldn’t be being “nice” to do so.

But we have mostly the opposite in our world: Men who cozy up with agents of the State, fly their “thin blue line” flags on the front of their homes, seek to be accepted by the gang and offered jobs as “law enforcers,” and never think that they are doing anything wrong, much less call them to repentance. Churches everywhere see no problem having Caesar’s agents sit in for their Sunday services, never telling them that they are plunderers who serve Rome instead of Christ and need to return to the Lord if they would like to keep coming to their church. Many churches see no problem with celebrating “Memorial Day,” “Veteran’s Day,” “Flag Day,” or some other idolatrous holiday of the State.

There is no reason not to tell these men that they must change their ways, while loving them at the same time and seeing the child of God within them. It is not good enough that men remain servants of Pharaoh while professing a devotion to the Lord. True repentance must be followed by one changing their lifestyle and their actions. Anyone who still serves the State is frankly not repentant and doesn’t know the Lord. The Lord may still be dealing with them mercifully, but they are not abiding by His commandments. 

And it is never too late for God to change His mind about how He will deal with our people, who, as largely unrepentant state-worshipers and state-servants, are surely deserving of judgment. As the prophet says,

“Now therefore amend your ways and your deeds and obey the voice of the Lord your God; and the Lord will change His mind about the misfortune which He has pronounced against you” (Jeremiah 26:13).

While we must be merciful, we must also not forget that men are in need of repentance for their evils and in need of being born again and walking away from the old sinful paths in which they used to walk when they were still living in darkness. And there is hope in being merciful, too. The story in Jonah (as well as Paul the apostle) shows that no one is beyond redemption, even though they may be currently deeply lost in the evils and carrying a sword rather than a cross, and even if they may never give up their wickedness in the end anyway. And the story shows that God is merciful to those who repent. If a city like Nineveh—another Babylonian statist society much like ours today—could repent and be spared, and someone like the Paul can go from a great persecutor of Christians carrying out home-invasions to an Apostle of Christ, then so can the lost soul down the road who straps on boots of Pharaoh and kicks in doors for the “SWAT” team for a living to find some “criminal” who is growing a plant.

We preach the gospel so that the Spirit will overcome men and they will be changed from their ways and become new men. As the apostle Paul said of his old ways, 

“I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, that He considered me faithful and appointed me to service. I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a violent man; yet because I had acted in ignorance and unbelief, I was shown mercy. And the grace of our Lord overflowed to me, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. This is a trustworthy saying, worthy of full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst. But for this very reason I was shown mercy, so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display His perfect patience as an example to those who would believe in Him for eternal life. Now to the King eternal, immortal, and invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen” (1 Timothy 1:12-17).

Jesus “came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10), i.e., those who do not even realize that they are statist robbers and serve the demonic system of human “government.”

So, rather than be like Jonah in the sense that we wish for death upon our enemies, we should rather wish that the Lord heals them of their evils. We should wish that God will heal our whole world. We should wish for change in our world, not to see our enemies burn. We should, seeing the political slave society, call for God to restore us as the days of old, as opposed to men who have sat silent on this issue before (Isaiah 42:22).

We should wish to avoid the pitfalls of Jonah, i.e., seeking destruction over repetance, while still following through with his at-first-evaded job of prophesying to people the destruction that comes to sinful social orders as ours. 

As one commentator explains, 

“There appeared in Jonah remains of a proud, uncharitable spirit; and that he neither expected nor desired the welfare of the Ninevites, but had only come to declare and witness their destruction. He was not duly humbled for his own sins, and was not willing to trust the Lord with his credit and safety. In this frame of mind, he overlooked the good of which he had been an instrument, and the glory of the Divine mercy. We should often ask ourselves, Is it well to say thus, to do thus? Can I justify it? Do I well to be so soon angry, so often angry, so long angry, and to give others ill language in my anger? Do I well to be angry at the mercy of God to repenting sinners? That was Jonah’s crime. Do we do well to be angry at that which is for the glory of God, and the advancement of his kingdom? Let the conversion of sinners, which is the joy of heaven, be our joy, and never our grief” (Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary, Jonah 4:1-4).

The example of our King, Jesus Christ

Sometimes it takes our long-suffering and endurance against evils to set the example for the conversion for others, and this is Jesus Christ’s teaching of loving your enemies and blessing those who curse you, whereby men see how God’s children persevere in the face of evils and change their ways as a result. We are told after the crucifixion of Christ, who showed great meekness through his trials and eventually hanging on a Roman cross, that “when the centurion saw what was done, he glorified God, saying, certainly this was a righteous man” (Luke 23:47-48). The injustice of such an act was evidenced in His display of humility, humbleness, and lowliness.

Through the example of Paul and Silas praying and singing hymns in jail, the jailer—wicked men who kidnap and enslave humans to be sure—was changed and wanted to know what it would take for him to be saved (Acts 16:25-34). Jesus likewise didn’t ignore Matthew as he was still walking in sin as a tax collector, but instead called him to follow, and he did (Matthew 9:9).

We have to show people their errors and expose their sins, so they can correct them and our world can be healed from the evils that men hold in them. And we have to show them the way to Jesus Christ, the true King. None of this should be to embarrass anyone, or to act like we are better than them, but to teach them where they’ve gone wrong. As Jesus said, “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother” (Matthew 18:15). We should correct others, and be willing ourselves to be corrected. As Jesus says, “If your brother sins, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him” (Luke 17:3). 

But this is what Jonah didn’t quite understand. His position was something more like, ‘If your brother sins, rebuke him (or run away at first), but hope that he stays unrepentant so you can watch him burn!’ To not tell people what’s going on when you know better is to run from God, but to hope that they remain unrepentant is of the devil. 

If we tell men of their evils and they don’t change, that’s on them. But if we don’t tell men of their evils, then we share in the guilt to some degree. Those who know the Lord must not keep silent when it comes to preaching repentance, for such blame—considering again how lost they are—may fall on us too for knowing of these evils and their consequences, but not telling them. We need to keep our conscience and responsibilities clean by preaching the evils that we know—the rampant statism in our world—to men who have not yet seen it. As one prophet put it,

“When I say to the wicked, ‘You shall surely die,’ and you give him no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life, that same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at your hand. Yet, if you warn the wicked, and he does not turn from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but you shall have delivered your soul” (Ezekiel 3:18-19).

Preaching truth and mercy

In short, we need to find the balance between preaching the truth and being merciful to the lost. Being merciful should never require that we abandon the truth, and telling the truth should never require that we forget how merciful God is too. 

Those who see what’s going on in the scriptures ought to be ought telling people how the world works: That God’s judgment—coming in the form of famine, war, destruction, invasion, economic collapse, moral depravity, total social degeneracy, which is often carried-out by a State—comes upon those people who have disobediently and sinfully worshiped false god states. 

Evidently, men have not figured this out yet. They keep hoping that Pharaoh (albeit a new one every few years) is going to be their “savior, “and they fail to see that the monster they have created is eventually going to wreck everything they thought was glorious and wonderful. We have to show them their “great” nations, their “best country ever,” is bound to fall no matter how lovely and everlasting they think it is. As Isaiah said,

“Babylon, the jewel of the kingdoms, the glory of the pride of the Chaldeans, will be overthrown by God like Sodom and Gomorrah” (Isaiah 13:19).

We can’t be quiet when it comes to God’s law, which puts to shame Egyptian societies. “Ye that make mention of the Lord, keep not silence” (Isaiah 62:6). We are called to preach the Kingdom of God and its advancement.

But when we are approaching the average man, we have to realize that they are almost completely unaware that they’re living in an Egyptian society. In fact, they have mostly believed the lies of the enemy that it’s everything but this: that we’re living in “the best country in the world” and that the empire will never come to an end.

In the end, the best Christian advice we can get for waking people up is to “let all that you do be done in love” (1 Corinthians 16:14). This is often easier said than done, because it’s just so frustrating how much our neighbors, family, friends, and strangers prefer entertaining evils over getting serious about serving the Lord. But it’s still our only hope for providing an example to others by being a light unto the world.

A light unto the world

We realize the importance of being more like the “later Jonah,” who in the end preached the word, when we see that Jesus’s testimonies, ministry, miracles, and sacrifice on the cross also came to show men their evils and push them toward repentance. In the gospels we are told, “For just as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so will the Son of Man also be [a sign] to this generation” (Luke 11:30). 

We are told to be a light unto the world so that others may see it and come home to the Lord (Matt. 5:13-15). We are to show others just how forgiving and merciful we can be even when they are walking in darkness and pose a threat to us, so that they may realize their crooked path and get off it.

Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, who conquered evil forces in Your earthly ministry, I pray that, in due time, our prayers will be answered and You will bring men back to You and begin restoring our sick and evil statist societies. I pray that you will make men throw down their badges, take off their boots, stop operating tanks and SWAT vehicles and police cars and tax systems, burn their flags, walk away from putting their foot to evil, repent of their idolatry, and get to working on Your Kingdom. I pray that You will make us gentle, tactful, loving, and courageous enough to tell them what they need to be told. I confess, I struggle to be so kind when the great idolatries for men are rubbed in my face by my neighbors who proudly put signs in their yards of their favorite man-gods. Give me a way to go more easy on them, and put words in my mouth that they can hear. Amen.