Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

It is common in our time to divide God and limit His saving power to an otherworldly, spiritual realm of the eternal soul, where He is not really active down here below and doesn’t much intervene in our earthly affairs. Our only real goal of being saved, this idea implies, is going to heaven when we die. God is good for accepting His children into heaven, but not so much providing for them before that day comes.

In this view of the Lord being relegated to the narrow confines of spirituality, heavenly matters, or private religious devotion and prayer, God has supposedly left us in a curious position to where Egyptians—pharaohs, pharaoh’s “lawmakers,” and his “law enforcers,” chariots, and horsemen—must be brought aboard in the meantime to “save” us from our human enemies on earth. While God is great at soul-saving and securing us a place in heaven, we are (supposedly) in great need of a State down here below to protect us from our enemies.

With this faulty division between the “heavenly” realm (where God sort of passively resides) and an earthly realm (where God does very little for us) that has reduced God’s power to almost nothing, men have made it possible in their minds to claim there is a need for man-kings down here below to “protect” us — even though this king-seeking sin of men specifically involved men seeking protection from men, rather than from the Lord. They wanted man-kings to “judge us and go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Samuel 8:20). Whatever good God does for them personally, He (supposedly) comes up short when it comes to the needs of “national defense” and “public safety,” where suddenly we are (supposedly) in need of booted men carrying out the orders of other men if we are to be safe and free. God prepared us a place in heaven, but His providential work here below was left slacking.

Thus, while many men may claim to put their faith in God the soul-saver, on the other hand—without seeing any contradiction—they put their faith in things like the “U.S. Military” to save them. They see no contradiction in standing behind such slogans as “God and country,” “back the blue,” or “God bless our troops,” assuming that a true reliance on God, which would mean avoiding the statist systems of men, wouldn’t provide in the area of protection from earthly enemies; for that we (supposedly) need man-kings.

Of course, most Christians do not think God is entirely inactive. He hears our prayers, makes a move every now and then, is definitely ready to accept us into heaven, and is ultimately with us. But when it comes down to a full reliance on His protection, these same men in practice abandon God and trust in Pharaohs and their soldiers and police to “protect” them. While God is doing His thing up in the heavens, we (allegedly) have a need to institute man-made systems to take care of business below, where God has apparently come up short.

God the protector

But God and His word do not support this division. God’s word is full of promises and offers to be with us against our enemies: local criminals, foreign tyrants, or anyone that may wish to threaten those who trust in God as their “national defense” or army. (In fact, there is a lot more of this than the heavenly-minded understanding that makes up the popular view of why men need to get right with the Lord: so they can go to heaven when they die). Here we can see that God has not neglected to provide for our safety and defense, and that His promises very much so include these things that political systems are alleged to be needed for. Actually, we see that God’s protection is needed from these very systems that men tell us we need for our safety, security, and liberty. In fact, the only way to be protected from enemies—the Assyrias and Babylons of the world—is to refrain from adopting their statist methods of protection! It is for this very sin, of giving into statism ourselves as supposedly necessary to protection, that God sends the Assyrians (so to speak) after us — that we get enslaved by the very people and systems we sought to avoid by erroneously erecting a State (Isaiah 10:5-7; Leviticus 26:25; Judges 3:12; 2 Samuel 7:14, 2:11; 1 Chronicles 5:26; Jeremiah 9:16, 21:10, 24:10, 25:27, 49:37; Ezekiel 5:17, 14:21; 28:23; Amos 9:4; etc).

At any rate, the scriptures are not lacking promises by God to fight our battles for us, as men tell us require a State.

We are told how God will fight our enemies for us (Deuteronomy 20:4), how God is the only savior from these enemies (Deuteronomy 28:29, how salvation is from state systems (Judges 6:14), that God fights off the statists for us (1 Samuel 4:3), that we ought to cry to the Lord (and not men) to be saved from these statist enemies (1 Samuel 7:8), that God hears our cries for help (1 Samuel 9:16), that God will keep all the statists away (2 Samuel 3:18), that God brings statists down to size (2 Samuel 22:28), that God saves us from kings and other tyrants when we obey Him (2 Kings 16:7), that God topples kings to prove himself (2 Kings 19:19), that the salvation of God is very much linked to protection from men (1 Chronicles 16:35), that we should rely on God to crush our enemies (Psalm 3:7), that we ought to cry to God for deliverance from the snares men who call themselves “governments” (Psalm 6:4), that all of our trust should be in God rather than men to fight our persecutors (Psalm 7:1), that God is our king and savior and that man-kings are precisely who we need saved from (Psalm 20:9), that we should never trust in state militaries to save us but only to enslave us (Psalm 20:7), that all our expectations of defense should be in God alone (Psalm 31:2), that God delivers us from the evil men of the world when we trust in Him (Psalm 37:40), that we should call upon God alone to save us unlike everyone else who calls upon police and militaries and Congresses (Psalm 55:16), that God works His saving power from above (Psalm 57:3), that the violent and murderous statists of the world are not the saviors but precisely who need saved from (Psalm 59:2), that God will take care of these oppressors for us if we would just stop trusting in them as the “saviors” (Psalm 72:4), that God is with those who fear him (Psalm 145:19), that we don’t need to set up vengeful states but should rely on God’s salvation (Proverbs 20:22), that God is to us everything the governments of men claim to be (Isaiah 33:22), that God assures enemy invaders can’t prevail against us (Jeremiah 15:20), that God is to be trusted fully to protect us from all the violent men of the world (2 Samuel 22:3), that people who trust in state militaries don’t know that God rescues us from Egyptian systems (Psalm 106:21), that trusting in the man-made “governments” for protection is to trust in false gods (Hosea 13:4), etc.

The list goes on. But it’s clear that true men of God trust in God also for their protection from other statists and their militaries, not in statist systems of their own. This is what the Psalmists thought. God’s saving power is not limited, nor confined, to some otherworldly place. God provides also in the realm of national defense, and anyone who trusts in the “United States Armed Forces” for their defense doesn’t know God and is actively forsaking Him for a faith in man-gods who don’t save.

Trusting the State is to change faiths

As we see, true faith in God is to rely on Him for protection from earthly enemies just as much as the saving of our souls, and to trust in Egyptian power systems (“country”) is to forsake God and place your faith in man (1 Samuel 8:7-8). Since, as our one and only true King Jesus taught, a man cannot really have two masters lest he forsake the one for the other (Matt 6:24), in practice this means that men wholly abandon God and find a new “god” for themselves in the State — hence the tens of millions of military and police worshipers in this country. No matter how much they say they believe in God, they really don’t if they have also turned to the Salvation State for their protection. The State is not just this benign institution that men turn to in addition to God or in the “earthly realm” where God isn’t really active in our protection; the State is a false god that is decidedly opposed to the Kingdom of God. Statism is not just something men toy around with while we await a time in the future where we finally get to serving God; it is a false religion that demonstrates where a man’s allegiance truly lies. The State doesn’t get its slaves to pledge allegiance to it for nothing, but because a man must choose whether his allegiance is with God or the State. (And don’t be tricked by the false insertion of “under God” in a pledge that is fully against God and serving Him). When men chase after the “gods” of statism, they abandon the True Religion. When men say that state rulers are needed for protection, suggesting that God is lacking in this area, they show themselves to be “atheists.” They do not have faith in God to save us from enemies.

None of this, then, is a light matter or even simply a contradiction. The State is a false god, and so their attempt to substitute themselves for God naturally includes monopolizing the means of protection and defense. The State has to attempt to take the place of God in every way, and the realm of protection is perhaps even most significant of all. When men, seeing all the things States control (health care, schools, protection), say “what would we do without them?,” they show blatant disregard and lack of faith in God. This tired old response repeated by statists—“but who would protect us without police?” or “you’d be speaking Chinese without the U.S. military”—is really one of the best examples of sin in a man, for it is hard to abandon God much more than to seek protection in the kingdoms of men.

On the other hand, when men shun the idea that they are in need of state rulers to “protect” them (by robbing them, monopolizing goods and services, and forcibly providing them to everyone), they show that they truly trust in the Lord to provide for all their needs — not just their understandable desire to have eternal life with the Lord. Godly men simply do not trust in Pharaohs, Egyptian armies, and Egyptian police officers to protect them, but know that God is needed precisely for protection from these men. They know that trusting in men for protection demonstrates a lack of faith in God.