[This is the part 6 in a series on “fear of the Lord.” See part one, two, three, four, five, seven, eight, nine, ten]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

I have already argued (part 3) that God-fearing is necessary for liberty, and that its opposite—the man-fearing that causes men to think they need human rulers to “protect” them from “bad guys”—is closely related to statism and slavery. But we could probably emphasize even more how failing to fear God and turning to the fear of men instead brings on political bondage. 

When we fear men (either in the case of the men who set up political systems and coerce us into obeying them, or the mythical “bad guys” near and far away who supposedly necessitate that we erect a State for security), we get the opposite of peace, protection, and prosperity. We get a ruling elite of people who claim to keep us safe and free, but are really the very enemies of these things — the very criminals and bad guys themselves who merely claim to keep us safe from “the criminals.”

As the scriptures wisely teach,

“The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe” (Proverbs 29:25). 

There is clearly a dichotomy here: Those who fear men, i.e., those who are so scared of “the bad guys” that they institute police states, are clearly not trusting in God (and clearly don’t even know that the government itself claims no duty to protect). Men who support human rulers, like those who run and enforce the American empire, clearly hate God and demonstrate just how little they know Him (vague chants of “God bless America” notwithstanding). God-fearing men demonstrate something different. Those who fear God cannot believe in the lies of political enslavers, that “the Chinese are coming for us and we’re going to need to fund a huge military.” This is the fear of men bringing a snare — the snare being this new alleged need for standing armies and an expansion of state power, which becomes the very enemy of liberty that it was (supposedly) meant to secure.  

Trusting in God for our salvation is wholly opposite of trusting in men and their systems: Believing that the Lord is not only our soul-savior, but is also who protects us from our enemies. Those who fear “the bad guys” of any type (Chinese, North Koreans, Russians, criminals, warlords, etc), and trust in men (i.e., governments) to protect them, demonstrate a severe lack of fear of the Lord.

The “fear of man” applies both to being afraid of the people who already rule over you, or afraid of their manufactured foreign boogeymen who they use to scare people into accepting their rule. This “fear of man” typically works better on the foreign scene. While domestic “criminals” (e.g., marijuana users) often provide the State a good enough justification to erect a police state that goes kicking in doors (often the wrong ones) and killing people, generating a “fear of men” in regards to overseas “bad guys” works very well. For even if men don’t very much like domestic rule being expanded upon themselves in the name of “fighting crime,” they usually still buy into some nationalistic idea of “national defense,” which they mistakenly believe is an expansion of state power that will remain outside its own borders (as if military equipment built up in overseas adventures wouldn’t be turned over to local police departments). As the libertarian anarchist Murray Rothbard writes,

“The powers of the state apparatus to bamboozle the public work better in foreign affairs than in domestic. In foreign affairs you still have this mystique that the nation-state is protecting you from a bogeyman on the other side of the mountain. There are ‘bad’ guys out there trying to conquer the world and ‘our’ guys are in there trying to protect us.”

In either case, such man-fearing goes against the fear of God, who would take care of all our enemies for us if we would trust in Him instead. 

Do we need a State to prevent slavery?

But statist man-fearers have this backward. They tell us that we would be conquered and ruled without Pharaoh’s police and military to protect us. “Without the U.S military you’d be speaking Chinese.” They tell us, whether they realize it or not, that an essentially “anarchistic” society of liberty under God would mean slavery by all sorts of imagined enemies. This lack of faith in liberty (or fear of liberty), which is what men show when they tell us we can’t do without a State, represents a lack of faith in God. It says, necessarily, that powerful men are needed to keep us safe from other men; God can’t help us (they think) when it comes to fighting off enemies. They presume agents of the State to be “good guys” who “keep us safe” and “free” from the “bad guys.” It represents a total distrust in God. 

This good-guy/bad-guy narrative is often pushed by police officers in their childish imagination that they are the “good guys,” that everyone else is the “bad guys,” and that without them there would be “bad guys” running around everywhere. (This also helps them psychologically when they murder someone and write it off as a “bad guy” and themselves as “just doing my job”).

We’re supposed to ignore that these “good guy” police are the very bad guys who steal more property than all other private criminals combined — and this isn’t even counting their tax-funded incomes or revenue generation through tickets, but their asset seizures alone.

How man-fearing gets us enslaved

And this is what the fear of men is all about. Out of the fear of “bad guys” and even the fear of police officers themselves, men institute a system of professional, legalized bad guys who steal more property than the “bad guys” that they were supposedly instituted to protect against. These agents, which the fear of man helped to institute, steal tens of billions of dollars from us on the job alone — again, not even counting the tax-robbery required to fund them or millions of traffic tickets they generate to bring in money for their local courthouses. 

So much for statists telling us we are in need of police or the State in general to protect private property; they’re the very thieves! And it was the fear of men—this imagined fear of “bad guys” running around everywhere in the absence of a powerful state—that helped institute the police state, which evidently leads to even more robbery than we should expect in a private society. In fact, there seems to be a funny phenomenon where the theft and robbery of the State is so great that men don’t even consider it theft anymore, even though it’s greater theft than any private thieves could carry out. As Rothbard once wrote,

“Taxation is theft, purely and simply, even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects” (Rothbard, Ethics of Liberty).

Statists have thus twisted the truth in the word of God. Whereas God teaches us that it is the fear of men—which necessarily means faith in Pharaohs to “save” you from others—that brings us into State bondage and threatens to bring on the Babylonian invaders, statists tell us that we will be enslaved unless there is a gang of men calling themselves a “government” to “protect” us (which, of course, becomes the very enslavers). Whereas God teaches that taxation and slavery is the result of rebelling against Him and setting up man-kings (1 Samuel 8), statist man-fearers tell us the only way to avoid being robbed is….well, to have them do the robbing.

If men of God were really worried about “the bad guys,” they would fear the Lord and forsake the false “protection” of Pharaoh’s military, because if anything is going to make “terrorists” or foreign states come upon our land, it will be the “blowback” from “our” own statist system having terrorized and ruled over people around the world. If anything is really going to bring mass theft upon the land, it’s going to be raising up tax-funded police forces who roam the land and plunder property and individuals under the name of “the law.”

Of course, most of our people are still worshiping Pharaoh’s military and claiming that we’re only “free” because of him and the sacrifices of young boys he has made overseas. The slavish thinking of our people is exactly what the rulers want and depend upon. Keeping us fearing men is the way the ruling elite get us to submit to…well, men — whether these “bad guys” are “the criminals” said to be everywhere without police, “the terrorists” overseas who would supposedly invade without “the army,” the “warlords” that are said to rise up when there aren’t “states” and “counties” ruling over men, or some other made-up enemy. 

American society is full of men who fear men rather than God, and it’s no coincidence that, as a result, we live in a police state society where men are robbed of billions of dollars in the name of “crime fighting” and “criminal justice.” This was just a ruse by the State to become the very thieves and murderers themselves, knowing that a society of man-fearers who allow them to rise up and “keep us safe.”

Contrary to those men who tell us that raising up plunder states to beat up our “enemies” is the path to security, God teaches that it’s the very thing the brings His wrath against a people. Statist societies invite God’s judgment. Those who think they can stomp on others around the world will eventually get stomped on themselves. People who indulge the evils of statism get everything they deserve turned around on them. As one prophet says,

“The people of the land have practiced extortion and committed robbery. They have oppressed the poor and needy, and have exploited the foreign resident without justice. I searched for a man among them who would repair the wall and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, so that I should not destroy it. But I found no one. Therefore I have poured out My indignation upon them and consumed them with the fire of My wrath. I have brought their ways down upon their own heads, declares the Lord God” (Ezekiel 22:29-31).

Fearing men brings the very dreaded slavery 

The scriptures might well have said, “The fear of man bringeth men.” If you’re scared of men, e.g., the highway robbers hiding out in the bushes, invading armies, and warlords that are alleged to abound in an anarchistic society under God, then, contrary to popular wisdom, you surely want to avoid a State! The State is the institutionalization of highway robbers, called “the highway patrol”; home invaders, called “the SWAT team”; kidnappers, called “correction officers”; thieves, called “tax agents”; warlords, called “the military”; gun confiscators, called the “ATF”; terrorist organizations, called the “FBI,” etc. 

Out of the fear of men, men unwittingly institute every one of their biggest fears: bad guys coming for them. By legalizing and institutionalizing these things, the State makes sure that society abounds in theft, kidnapping, imprisonment, murder, etc. If men didn’t want to be robbed, disarmed, caged, or murdered, they would never—fearing men—institute a State. But they haven’t learned this lesson. They still think these things happen without Pharaoh’s men. 

The solution is to fear God

Any truly God-fearing people do not institutionalize systems of men called “governments” to protect them. They believe that God will be with them in all things. Trusting in liberty is thus a true mark of the God-fearing man; clinging to police, military, and politicians is the mark of a frightened man who doesn’t believe God is standing with him. 

Since these institutions are more or less raised on man-fearing, not to mention the great idolatry that is behind them, the only way to turn things back around is to get back to God-fearing. If we want to avoid men and their tyrannies, we must fear God rather than men. 

When you fear men (e.g., the Chinese), as our people do, all your worst nightmares come true. The thefts and home invasions you were worried about without human rulers turned into a situation where Pharaoh’s police outnumber private criminals in theft of property and home invasions. The statists’ worst nightmare (which they always accuse liberty of bringing), that other statists will come and conquer us without a State of our own, is actually true of their very statism. 

It is the sinful erection of States that brings—however redundant this sounds—statism upon men. Out of the fear that some statists will dominate them without a State, statists institute a State and get dominated. Out of fear that “the Chinese” will come and rule us if we don’t have a state military, we get ruled by a domestic police state that’s even more tyrannical than the imagined threat. Out of fear that “the communists” are going to get us if we don’t build up a powerful state of our own, we institute a domestic socialism worse than the one that men imagined would soon reach our shores without a socialism of our own. 

When men sinfully think they need a State (rather than God) to keep them safe, otherwise imagining some foreign statism will come upon them, they bring upon themselves their biggest fear, because statism is a sin that is met with the judgment of a destruction of one’s society through both the domestic robbery of the system set up in the name of “national defense” and the foreign invasions that such domestic regimes invite upon their people by creating conflicts with other statists. As one prophet says, 

“I will give you into the hand of those who seek your life, and into the hand of those whose face you fear—the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and the hand of the Chaldeans” (Jeremiah 22:25). 

Here’s an irony men can never seem to understand: If men really feared men, they should fear God, for it is only through the fear of God that we are protected from men; when we fear men and thus set up statist systems to supposedly defend ourselves from other men, rather than trusting in God to take care of our enemies, we bring about those very systems of rule upon ourselves.

Our people are man-fearers

We even get an interestingly relevant proverb, that “what the wicked man dreads will overtake him, but the desire of the righteous will be granted” (Proverbs 10:24). But our people haven’t learned these lessons from God and His word. Tell most any man in this country that we ought to abolish Pharaoh’s military, and watch them say, “But, but, but without chariots and horsemen, who would keep us safe?” This is their response. The majority of “men” in America think this. Tell almost anyone in this country that we don’t need Pharaoh or his horsemen for protection, and watch them begin making excuses for the absolute necessity of their false god State. And watch them even claim to be men of God as they thereby forsake God’s protection by trusting in men. Tell almost any man in the country that we don’t need these tax-funded institutions, and watch them cry about how none of our needs will be met and “the bad guys” will take over (as if the bad guys haven’t already taken over, albeit they call themselves “the government”).

This is where things are decided: Do you fear God, or men? To trust in God’s protection means to forget man’s protection. As the scripture says, “It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in men” (Psalm 118:8). Amen. Those who trust in government police and militaries to keep them safe are simply not trusting in the Lord. 

Fearing men means bringing on Egypt

But rather than to be seen as the very enemy of God’s people and their liberty, we’re told today that Egyptian systems are our protectors and saviors. “God bless our police and military” is the common refrain among Americans, not God bless God. They all say, what would we do without men? Not, what would we do without God? God is not even on their minds. They’re statist man-fearers who want badges and boots to stand before them.

Our people have it backward. They tell us the enemy is the Assyrian neighbors, and the solution is Egypt! But our enemy is Egypt, so to speak, and the solution—our salvation—is in God. Men have been corrupted by the false gods of the State into trusting in men and praising them for everything they think they have. They are statists who abandon God for Egypt, and consequently—both as a natural effect of state intervention and the judgment of God for such a grave sin as statism—bring the very destruction upon themselves they thought they would avoid by trusting in Egypt to secure them from Assyrian-like societies, which they got anyway by trusting in Egypt. 

Most men foolishly put their faith in Pharaohs and statism rather than God, not realizing that this plan backfires and brings the slavery they thought they were fighting against by trusting in state rulers. 

“You are trusting in Egypt, that splintered reed of a staff that will pierce the hand of anyone who leans on it. Such is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who trust in him” (Isaiah 36:6).

And yet, these people don’t even realize they have abandoned God by trusting in Egypt, which is precisely the means of leaving behind God according to his word. They think that “God and country” (i.e., God and Pharaoh) can be reconciled. But God is explicit that trusting in men and their “governments” is abandoning Him and hence invited judgment. 

“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).

This is how sinful and evil our people are without seeing it. They tell us, invoking God’s name in vain, things like, “God bless the United States Armed Forces, who gave us our freedom and kept us safe from our enemies.” But God hates these systems! He says they’re false gods that don’t protect! But our people don’t even see that they have substituted the State for God, hence their worship of police, military, and presidents. Most Christians, in fact, think God gave us the State for the upholding of His order, and that the plunder system we have today is supposedly the work of His hands rather than man’s! They think it was God’s perfect will for men to erect statist systems, rather than to see they’re evil deviations from His natural and providential order.

What statists tell us today is that staying behind in Egypt is the means of being safe and secure. They’re liars, false prophets, deceivers, and fools. Statists have perverted the truth of God’s word—that freedom and prosperity come from trusting in God alone to secure your blessings—by telling us that the way to “freedom” is through men and their political plunder systems, which the word of God shows us is the precise way to bondage.

Those men who think that trusting in States to keep us “safe” from our enemies (even other statists) are very confused. God tells us precisely the opposite, that it is mingling with the people of the world and adopting their customs (Psa 106:35-36), ie., associating with statists and being a part of their political systems, that angers God into sending enemies upon us. It is doing these things that “the anger of the Lord burned against His people, and He abhorred His own inheritance. He delivered them into the hands of the nations, and those who hated them ruled over them. Their enemies oppressed them, and subdued them under their hand (Psalm 106:40-42). God sends enemies on us not when we fail to set up “governments” to protect us, but precisely when we set them up, which decidedly is proof that men do not trust in the Lord’s protection.

Knowing the Lord again

It is not possible to be acquainted with the word of God and continue to trust in men—state militaries, state police, politicians, government courts, legislatures, etc—for your freedom, protection, and prosperity. 

Men who support the statist Babylonian system are obviously fools, because they are trusting in that which does not profit and which God destroys. It is the men who avoid these systems who have godly wisdom. As Job said, “The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to turn away from evil is understanding” (Job 28:28). 

Whoever you trust in for your protection is your “god,” and statists have most certainly chosen men and their “governments” as their “gods.” Godly men have chosen differently.

“The LORD is my strength and my song, and He has become my salvation. He is my God…” (Exodus 15:2). 

Amen. When God becomes your salvation, you can’t even think about men, much less ponder where you’d be if it weren’t for the United States Military or the “blue line.” You would never think to vote for rulers anymore to “save” us; we already have a King! Those who wish to fear God must turn away from these systems built on fearing men.