Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

As we see with God and His word, any God (there is only one, though many fall for false ones) offers the gamut of social needs to their people — whether truly, as in the case of the One True God, or falsely, as in the case of man’s political systems.

It was not politically insignificant that God promises to feed, clothe, and protect his people. This was meant to keep us away from the false provisions of man’s “governments.” Hence the men who, in the exodus from Egypt, complained of Moses leading them to their hunger (Ex 16:3) and death (Ex 17:3), and desiring to return back to Egypt, in the arms of Pharaoh’s “loving” care, rather than walk with God and trust Him to provide (Ex 16:4). When men don’t believe God will take care of us, they inevitably come to believe that men who call themselves the “government” can do it. This is why “governments” either need to pervert the nature of God (as they have successfully done in America by mixing state worship into Christianity), or turn men away from the Lord and His word altogether.

For as we see in His word, God promises to provide us with all the things that States pretend to provide men (most of whom believe they are needed for it). 

We will not even thirst if we trust in the Lord to take care of us.

“The LORD will guide you continually and satisfy your desire in scorched places and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.” (Isaiah 58:11).

Nor will we starve. Both spiritually and physically, God “satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things” (Psalm 107:9). We needn’t worry how we will eat without the “Department of Agriculture,” in other words. “The Lord does not let the righteous go hungry” (Proverbs 10:3). To go one further, in fact, we need only to worry how we will eat when we do trust in such agencies to supply us with our needs. Famines are the result of trusting in men instead of God to feed people. Famines and socialism go hand in hand. Indeed, for such evils as seeking man-gods (i.e., States) to rule over us, God guarantees starvation and famine. He will turn “a fruitful land into a salty waste, because of the evil of its inhabitants” (Psalm 107:34).

In hopes that such a harsh judgment as starvation—also to be conceived of as a natural effect of statism—will correct us and turn us away from men and back to the Lord, God allows States to destroy us as a punishment for our statism, as a way of giving us just what we deserve for trusting in man-gods. He allows us to go into captivity to men when we trust in them for liberty. He allows men to enslave us when this is what we sinfully beg for. He sends the famine (Ezekiel 5:16-17), that men might repent of their wicked ways.

“‘I gave you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and lack of bread in all your places, yet you did not return to me,’ declares the Lord. ‘I also withheld the rain from you when there were yet three months to the harvest; I would send rain on one city, and send no rain on another city; one field would have rain, and the field on which it did not rain would wither; so two or three cities would wander to another city to drink water, and would not be satisfied; yet you did not return to me,’ declares the Lord. ‘I struck you with blight and mildew; your many gardens and your vineyards, your fig trees and your olive trees the locust devoured; yet you did not return to me,’ declares the Lord” (Amos 4:6-9).

Of course, men are usually too hardheaded to learn. They get destroyed by statism and still beg for more. “We just need more police and more laws!” It still remains to be seen whether men in this land called “America” will wake up to God’s rebuke, coming against us today, via governments, in the form of rising prices, taxes, more “laws,” and an economy that is failing to provide for everyone anymore. We are only reaping what we have sown today, and ought to be shaking our heads at what we have done to ourselves.

But when we trust in God, which necessarily means when we refuse to put our faith in men, we needn’t worry about anything. We are told that we will have “sufficiency in all things at all times” (2 Corinthians 9:8). We are told that “those who seek the LORD lack no good thing” (Psalm 34:10). God will meet all our needs (Philippians 4:19).

When we seek the Kingdom of God, i.e., when we order our communities freely and voluntary as opposed to the coercive and controlled methods of political rule, we need not worry what we will eat, drink, or wear (Matt 6:31-33). We trust that God will provide for us. Should we follow the Good Shepherd, we trust that we “shall not want” (Psalm 23:1).

Godly men have no need whatsoever for so-called “governments” of men (e.g., the so-called “United States”) or anything of the things they claim to provide. We don’t need soldiers, lawmakers, police, as statists say they are in need of having, when we have turned to the Lord. Rather, we say to the Lord, “You are my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust” (Psalm 91:2).

We don’t have to worry about “bad guys” coming after us (the “Russians”) or “pandemics” when we have God on our side and have sought His kingdom over that of men. 

“Because you have made the LORD your dwelling—my refuge, the Most High—no evil will befall you, no plague will approach your tent” (Psalm 91:9-10).

Indeed, contrary to what statists tell us, we need only worry about these things—highway robbers (rebranded as “state patrol”) and scamdemics—only when we do trust in men.

As opposed to those who believe men are needed for “public safety,” our safety and refuge is in the Lord (Exodus 14:14; Proverbs 18:10, 30:5; Isa 41:10; Psalm 3:3, 5:11, 16:1, 18:30, 32:7, 57:1, 91:4, 119:114, 138:7, 121:7-8; Nahum 1:7; Romans 8:31; Hebrews 13:6; etc). 

Men of God have no need for “police officers” who carry out the plunderous edicts of men under the guise of “public safety.” We trust in the Most High God, not men, to save us from our enemies (2 Samuel 22:3-4). 

In fact, far from trusting in “law enforcement” to save us from “bad guys,” godly men know they need the Lord to save them from man’s “law enforcers.” We know these men provide only a false safety and security and could never be true protectors. For “who is a rock, except our God?” (2 Samuel 22:32).

There is no one to fear—the “bad guy” bogey used to justify the State as one’s shield—when we trust in God. “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” (Psalm 27:1).

When it comes to choosing between God to provide for us, or the so-called “governments” of the world, our choice is simple: “It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man” (Psalm 118:8). 

The false god State

Likewise, statists trust that their god—the State and its appendages—will provide for them. (Albeit, they trust mistakenly and in great error, for their faith is not in the Lord, but in men). 

The very false god nature of the State is that such a system of men is an attempted substitute for the things God promises to provide to His obedient people: protection, peace, prosperity, justice, or “stable value” for the money, etc. It is no coincidence that the State even names its agencies the “Department of Defense” or “Department of Health.” The State is a pretend-god.

This is why trusting in these things, as all statists necessarily do by placing their faith in the State (which it is claimed is necessary for “public good”), is a betrayal of God, who promises to provide these things, not through a political system, but when men merely follow the Lord and obey His commands. 

Statism is inherently ungodly for this reason, for the State is nothing more than the claim that men are needed for law, order, peace, prosperity, protection, etc. 

Once one realizes that most all of the rebellion in the scriptures is men seeking after human kings rather than the Lord their God, we can see that there is really nothing more sinful than the claim that all statists must necessarily make so long as they remain in support of such a system: That “without government, who would provide X?”

We have heard this millions of times among the ungodly statist masses. “Who would protect us without police?” “Who would educate our children without public schools?” 

Not only is it to abandon ones godly responsibility to family, friends, and neighbors to pass of such duties to others, but such a claim that a State is needed for X is clearly demonstrative of ones lack of faith in God. 

Only ungodly men are in need of Egyptian systems, pharaohs, and the enforcement officers of these man-made organizations. God’s people trust that they will be provided for without these men. (We might be tempted to say we will be provided for only without these men, if it weren’t that God will provide for us through famines, too. For such men as who call themselves “governments” do nothing but destroy). We trust that if God sends us out into the desert, that He has a plan for us. Only statists say, as the men complaining to Moses did, that things would be better back in Egypt. 

Central banking

Now, all of these things are true regarding the nefarious system of central banking, too. The central bank is a false god hiding behind a false wisdom that falsely makes promises of economic stability and prosperity. Like the rest of the political system, it pretends that its alleged God-like abilities are needed to run the economy.

Yet as a recent Wall Street Journal ad by the Mises Institute (which I will cover here) notes, “the Federal Reserve faces so little scrutiny.” Who knows what percentage of Americans know of central banking, its alleged economic role or “mandates” as they call them, or could even name the central bank or one of its chairmen. The results are probably not that good.

But this dark, shadowy institution is behind much of the destruction of our society and economy today. (Much to the disappointment of simple-minded Trump worshipers, we don’t get to blame the B-word and the last four years alone. Such price inflation is inherent in the existence of a central bank).  

For the men who are aware of this system, most of them (financiers, bankers, crony economists, academics) defend it as necessary to economic wellbeing — that is, “the Fed,” as they affectionately call it, is another one of their false gods. They support it because, as the advertisement states, they have bought into the “myths about how the Fed provides stability and prosperity.” They have bought into the lies of the alleged expertise of the central planners. They have said that without the Fed, there would be inflation, recessions, unemployment, unstable rates of interest, etc. In other words, they have said that if we trusted in God instead, things would go bad!

Like any good false god, the article points out how “the Fed claims—always without evidence—that everything ‘would have been worse’ without the Fed.”

But has this been the case? Has the Fed “saved” us? Have its “mandates” been fulfilled?

From the article,

“A closer look at the reality of the Fed reveals that the Fed does not benefit ordinary people nor does it make the economy more stable. Instead, the Fed was the primary source of the forty-year highs in inflation consisting of sharp spikes in food, housing, healthcare, and transportation prices. In many cases, rising prices outpaced wage growth, meaning that millions of American households—mostly those with lower incomes and fixed incomes—have experienced negative real income growth in recent years. Meanwhile, Fed policy has also driven inflation in real estate and equity prices, which has padded the portfolios of wealthy households, banks, and governments.”

Such truths as these, which use to require long economic treatises to try and convince anyone, are now becoming more evident to average men on the ground level — making the ad quite timely to any non-beneficiary of monetary inflation who might cross it, and perhaps even a wake up call to the fools who have defended it.

The conspiracy of central banking

There is no good argument that we couldn’t have done without such people, as statists want us to believe, and every good argument that such institutions only prevent peace and prosperity from flourishing. The government, after all, couldn’t fund its wars, surveillance apparatus, and other domestic and foreign schemes, without such cheap money flowing in from the central bank.

As the Mises ad points out,

“As the Fed forces down interest rates to fuel more monetary inflation, governments are able to borrow more money at lower interest rates. Fed policy allows elected officials to expand government budgets and spending while minimizing the cost of maintaining huge federal deficits. Without the Fed, the runaway profligacy of the covid years would have never been possible—nor would we have had the surge in price inflation that followed. The government itself is the primary beneficiary here. The organizations that are on the receiving end of Washington’s financial favors—bailed-out banks and government contractors, for example—share in the windfall brought by spending newly created inflationary money…The same cannot be said of ordinary people further down the economic food chain, who experience rising prices without the easy largesse of the government class and its allies.”

The answer to “who needs the Fed?” is: only the people who need transfer resources from the private economy of individual producers to themselves and their economic allies, only the people who need to try and mitigate the economic disasters they create while still failing in the end to control their destructive schemes against the people.

There is never any need of the common man for a “central bank.” Such systems are the tools of proud, pretend-god plunderers who want to control men and their lives.

Even if we try to look at things from a purely economic point of view and ignore the conspiratorial nature of such systems, there is no historical basis for saying that a central bank is needed for economic growth. 

As the article goes on,

“History has shown that economic growth and a rising standard of living hardly depend on the existence of the Fed. Indeed, in the second half of the nineteenth century—when the nation had no central bank at all—America experienced an incredibly dynamic period of rising standards of living. Notably, this period was also characterized by deflation—something the Fed hates—which helped drive down the prices of goods and services, thus increasing real wages.”

Why then even treat it as a purely economic matter, which wrongly acts as if we are ruled by dispassionate public benefactors (i.e., men that aren’t human and have no self-interests), when history doesn’t even defend it? There’s no reason we should.

“Contrary to the many myths propping it up, the Federal Reserve has never been anything more than a tool of wealth redistribution that fuels economic inequality and government profligacy. The Fed’s mission has never been founded on sound economics.”

The “economics” of statism—the ideas provided in defense of political intervention into the natural market order—are nothing more than pseudo-intellectual justifications for what is, on part of the rulers, an express attempt to plunder and rule over men.

This inevitable failure of man-gods to provide for us is the essence of the false god nature of the State. It is not just a false idol that has become the subject of idolatry for millions of men who have been duped by its lies; it is a false provider that eventually fails to deliver on its promises. 

Naturally, then, the Fed and its so-called “mandates” (which creates an assumption that we couldn’t do without their socio-economic engineering) have failed to achieve their stated goals — though these policy aims are more so a guise for its efforts in financing governments and transferring wealth to the privileged elites. As economist Murray Rothbard once said of such false economic the theories that give a pseudoscientific veneer to central banking,

“Keynesianism is a smoke screen for the State to seize control of the economy and to inflate, spend, and regulate at will.”

As the recent Mises Institute ad puts it,

“Fed economists employ a variety of poorly devised economic theories to justify the Fed’s inflationary agenda.” 

The false theories of statism, whether political or economic in nature, whether regarding the State itself or the central bank, are never anything more than covers for plunder. As Murray Rothbard once said,

“When the bad guys form a State…their primary motivation is economic: to increase their plunder at the expense of the subject and taxpayer. The ideology that they profess and that is formulated and spread through society by the Court Intellectuals is merely an elaborate rationalization for their venal economic interests. The ideology is the smokescreen for their loot, the fictitious clothes spun by the intellectuals to hide the naked plunder of the Emperor” (Rothbard, The Libertarian Forum, vol. 1, p. 521).

The system of central banking is not really about “economic stability,” an idea that is possible only under the economically illiterate idea that markets are chaotic and unstable without a public “gods” (central planners, “experts”) ruling over them (thanks to the false theories of men like Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes seeping into the public mind). The real purpose of central banks is to help perpetuate plunder. As the ad goes on to say,

“Politics, not economics, is the real driving force here. The incessant call for more monetary inflation and ultra-low interest rates serves to benefit certain influential and powerful interest groups at the expense of the beleaguered middle and working classes.”

Under a charitable assumption that the Fed actually works for the economic good of everyone (the idea that it just needs to be in the hands of the government, which is supposedly “we the people,” is no better), we could still see that none of the things it is supposed to do have been achieved.

They haven’t tamed prices or prevented recessions, which we supposed to believe—again the nature of the false god State is to scare us out of seeking Gods provisions—would abound without them.

As the ad notes, the central bank of the “United States” has done nothing but “create more economic instability with seemingly endless crises such as we saw in 1953, 1957, 1960, 1969, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1990, 2001, 2008, and 2020.”

But it’s not good enough to just say that these institutions of men are “not doing their job.” They’re worse than that. In fact, they’re doing just what we should expect of such institutions that are raised up in rebellion to God: They’re working to bring disaster upon a rebellious people who approve of such methods of social organization.

As the ad harshly puts it,

“The best we can say about the Fed is that it failed to prevent the Great Depression, the 1970s stagflation, and the Great Recession. But the Fed didn’t merely fail to prevent all this. The Fed created these economic disasters.”

Losing God

God’s word is a caution against forsaking Him and following the ways of men—their institutions, their legislative systems, their “public goods”—into civil bondage and artificial impoverishment and inequality.

The blessings that God promises are material as much as they are spiritual. We will be fed when we trust the Lord to provide for us, rather than men.

“You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country. The fruit of your womb will be blessed, as well as the produce of your land and the offspring of your livestock— the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks. Your basket and kneading bowl will be blessed” (Deuteronomy 28:3-5).

It is no surprise to the student of God’s word to witness what we are today as far as rising prices, economic stability, vast wealth disparity, and enormously wealthy and powerful men ruling over us. We are guaranteed rising prices of goods such as food and shelter (as we’re experiencing today), and even famines, if we trust in men, i.e., in central banks and governments, rather than God (Deut. 28:17-18).

While God promises blessings to the obedient, if we fail however to trust in God for these things, i.e., if we seek them through men and their political systems, then we surely won’t be provided for, as will become increasingly apparent to our people in this age, who have decidedly forsaken God to worship human rulers instead.