[This is part 5 in a series on the “fear of the Lord.” See part one, two, three, four, six, seven, eight, nine, ten]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

I have written how the judgment that God brings upon statist societies—in the form of wars, famines, or mass vaccination programs (e.g., Operation Covid 19), all of which are a result of sinfully setting up these systems—is meant to correct their behavior. The judgment that God brings upon the evil statist systems of the world, all of which deserve such judgment, is supposed to wake men up to these evils and to the work of God. When God disrupts the works of evil men, He hopes that people will come to know Him. 

“And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes” (Ezekiel 36:23).

But I wanted to make it more clear that we were never supposed to be chasing after these systems of men, called “governments,” and that coming to fear the Lord has to be coupled with serious repentance. God never wanted us to walk like Egyptians, to copy the statists of the world and adopt their ways, which is political force against the innocent to run a system based on perpetual violence, theft, and murder. 

As we read early in the books of Moses, God says, 

“I am the Lord your God. You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes. You shall follow my rules and keep my statutes and walk in them. I am the Lord your God. You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules; if a person does them, he shall live by them: I am the Lord” (Leviticus 18:2-5).

People around the world have always been statists. They have loved the “laws” of men and worship at the feet of these “law enforcers” as if they are the gods who uphold society. But God calls His people to avoid these evils.

“You must not follow the statutes of the nations I am driving out before you. Because they did all these things, I abhorred them” (Leviticus 20:23).

A godly society cannot have men posting flags on their houses, saying “back the blue,” pointing to “the troops” as their saviors, and singing the praises of the State and worshiping all their false idols. We’re called to avoid these things.

“‘Each of you must throw away the abominations before his eyes, and you must not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt. I am the LORD your God” (Ezekiel 20:7).

So this is our problem today. As in the days when God’s people first forsook him and sought after kings so that they could be “like all the other nations” (1 Samuel 8:5), we became just like everyone else and bought into the statist/socialist systems of the world. We have “mingled among the heathen, and learned their works” (Psalm 106:35).

Fearing God and repenting

Perhaps a primary aspect of fearing the Lord is fearing His judgments, i.e., knowing what God brings to people who follow the violent ways of Egyptians (Americans have done). But this must be met with a repentance and serious effort to follow the order that God commanded us to obey, not the “laws” of men enforced by Pharaoh’s “law enforcement” officers. 

“If you will diligently listen to the voice of the Lord your God, and do that which is right in his eyes, and give ear to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you that I put on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord, your healer” (Exodus 15:26). 

Of course, men rarely ever learn, and are more prone to say the problem is “we don’t have enough police officers” than to see that it was a police state that brought their society down. As God brought judgment down on the evil Egyptians, Moses could say, even amidst disaster, that “I know that ye will not yet fear the Lord” (Exodus 9:30). 

Statists are hard-headed and refuse to accept the truth and repent. But the point is that God’s judgment, coming upon a people deservedly for their worship of the State, is at least intended to wake people up to their errors in constructing evil social orders. 

Such destruction of society brought about by the sins that led to statism that led to destruction, were meant to wake men up to their great intellectual and spiritual errors of trusting in statism. 

God was bringing punishments upon Egypt precisely so that they would see their evils and repent — so that they would come to fear the Lord and give up on their statist control of people, property, and society. 

The fear of God—the prospect of losing his favor and being destroyed with the rest of the Egyptian statists and worshipers—was always meant to keep us from embarking on such evil paths and to change our ways when we realized that we had gone down the road to Egypt. 

As Moses said to the people, 

“Don’t be afraid…For God has come to test you, so that the fear of Him may be before you, to keep you from sinning” (Exodus 20:20).

In other words, God’s works on Egypt—plagues, famines, utter destruction, all which are also the natural effects of such state intervention—ought to scare us out of Egyptian systems ourselves and cause us to remain in the fear of God. 

We know God when we fear Him and trust in Him for our salvation rather than men. We must trust God to free us from statism, not in statism to “free” us from men (which, as we should see if we looked around us, only leads to slavery by government).

“I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians” (Exodus 6:7). 

And here we see just how bound-up “God-fearing” and liberty really are — or conversely, the connection between a lack of God-fearing and statism. Fearing God is about fearing His judgment and repenting, which is done by avoiding the sinful Egyptian systems that His wrath comes down upon and admitting that they have been bound-up with sin. 

We are warned over and over that judgment comes to people who walk like Egyptians, i.e., who build up powerful militaries, police states, worship of the rulers, and general systems of tax plunder — and how much these are to forsake the Lord. We were not to copy the ways of the statists around the world, because it never works out good. 

“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). 

Men have hitherto not repented of their state-worshiping. They still trust in police cars, SWAT vehicles, fighter jets, tanks, and infantrymen, to save them from their enemies. They love chariots and horsemen still. 

God has not abandoned us, but we have to get right with Him again. We can start by giving up our fears of men and placing it within God. What men can do to us is hardly as fearful as what God can do to these men. But this all must be met with repentance, too. For the sins of Babylon, which most men have unwittingly worshiped, are great.