[This is part 9 in a series on the “fear of the Lord” in the scriptures. See part one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, ten]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

There are essentially two options when it comes to where we place our fear: In (1) God alone, where we do not worry about the things that men may do to us; or (2) in men, who use this fear to rule over us. This is a choice that has to be made. One cannot hold to both. God commands our exclusive “fear,” so to speak, as He does exclusive Lordship, and any such fear of men, which may cause us to institute police and military forces funded through state robbery, is a demonstration of the lack of faith in God. 

While this dichotomy is more or less implied in the other articles, to be sure, the point may as well be expressly made that this is an either-or option. You can’t really do both. If you fear men, such as “the Chinese” or the Federal Government, you’re not fearing God. For the “fear of man” is nothing more than to deny God’s saving power. So fearing God is just as exclusive as regarding the Lord as our King. This fear cannot be granted to men. We are to fear God alone. 

When men fear men and thus turn to other men (e.g., governments) to protect them from these men, they are trusting in men for their salvation rather than the Lord. This is wrong for the Christian to do. As we taught in the scriptures, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Men are not our saviors.

God is our “national security”

I have already made this point in a previous article in this series, but it’s worth it to keep expounding on it in another that emphases the choice being between God or men, because man-fearing means necessarily to turn to men (e.g., governments) for your protection. When men don’t fear God, i.e., don’t have faith that only God can make things bad for them if they don’t stick with Him, they are likely gravitate toward man-saviors, i.e., governments that give them false promises of “protection,” peace, prosperity, and security and safety in general. A lack of fear of the Lord leaves men vulnerable to political enslavement by people who coerce and scare them into bowing to their attempted captivity of whole lands, populations, and industries.

But things are different when men have a sufficient fear of the Lord, i.e., when their only worries are wronging God and His will. Fearing God means not trusting men or expecting to find salvation in men or their political systems. Fearing God and trusting in the Lord for our salvation is more than a personal relationship with Him. It has always meant precisely that He will take care of our enemies for us, without the need for men who call themselves “governments.” God is not just a soul-saver who neglected to provide for our protection, too, such that we are in need of “governments” to keep us safe from our enemies. True faith and fear of God means also relying on God for protection in the earthly realm. Such scriptures that mention being “saved” and “delivered” in this sense are rather abundant. 

“The Lord your God you shall fear; and He will deliver you from the hand of all your enemies” (II Kings 17:39).

If you fear God, you expect Him to do what man-fearers say is only possible through government police and government militaries. The truly God-fearing man does not turn to these organizations of man for his protection, who only end up becoming his enemies; he turns to God also for salvation from human enemies (e.g., government tyranny), and so long as we stop sinning by doing such things as worshiping the false gods of the State, God provides it.

Salvation from enemies

As we have also implied above and in another article on trusting in God for our “national security,” many of these references to being “saved” in the Old Testament scriptures were all about God removing us from the hands of our enemies and putting us in a safe place. God “saves” His people out of the hands of Pharaohs, Caesars, and modern-day agents of state plunder. He, for instance, “saved Israel that day out of the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore” (Exodus 14:30),

Fearing God is not just the prospect of owning up to our acts on a day of direct and personal judgment, or even just that we ought to avoid Egyptian systems knowing what God does to them. It is also the faith that God—without a need for state armies—will fight our battles. God’s salvation is not limited to the eternal soul, but pertains also to our physical, earthly reality should we obey His commandments, which forbids us from setting up thieving, murderous governments which are the very things we need protection from. 

Fearing God is the wisdom that we escape Egypt not by fearing men and erecting our own rulers to fight Pharaoh (Moses didn’t lay a finger on Pharaoh) or by allying with Assyrias or forming one of these systems of our own, but by trusting in God to part the waters and bring the plagues upon our Egyptian enemies for us. We were never supposed to see Pharaoh, get scared, and—this is what all statists do—form an Egyptian system of our own to fight him. This is how we get into bondage and forsake God’s protection. We are to recall God’s deliverance out of the hands of our enemies in times of fear, not to fall into the cold embrace of Pharaoh’s arms. 

“You shall not be afraid of them; you shall well remember what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt” (Deuteronomy 7:18).

Fearing God is seeing the danger in being on the Egyptian-side of the sea—which is true for all statists—when God’s judgment comes down, not worrying, as man-fearing men do, that we will not be safe without an Egypt over us. 

But our people are so lost in Egypt still that they have lost sight of God and look to such foolish goals as “we need to vote them out and get better people in office” or “we the people need to take back our government.” But God delivered his people out of Egypt. They didn’t need a “U.S. Armed Forces” to do it for them, and if they would have turned to such systems, God wouldn’t have cared about them. They had to choose to walk out of Egypt and trust in God for everything, something that a state-worshiper is not prepared to do. It wasn’t that they needed to set up an Egyptian military to save themselves, but rather that God was going to save them. 

Who is your god?

What we see is that the instruction to fear the Lord is not just something we are to do in addition to other men who call themselves “lords,” but rather that the fear of God and the fear of men are mutually exclusive. God wants us to fear Him exclusively. We’re in a monogamous relationship with the Lord God and refuse to consider men “lords.” We have to decide who our God is: the One True God, or the “gods” of Egypt?

To be God-fearing thus means fearing God rather than men. It means abandoning the false gods (presidents, police) that one held before. 

“Now, therefore, fear the Lord and serve Him in sincerity and truth; and put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:14). 

Pharaohs and their Egyptian systems—the “commander in chiefs” and the “defense departments” of the world—are to be a thing of the past when we fear God. Amen. 

It is one or the other. God and His liberty? or man-gods that don’t save? It is not a choice of “I fear God…but I also love presidents, police, and military, and trust them to protect me.” We have to choose between one or the other (and as we see, many men have chosen their god, and it is the State). We don’t get to have two gods: God who saves us later on in the heavenly life, and a man-god who sets up a State and protects us in the meantime. Monotheism implies that we’re to trust in God for everything, including our security. 

As Joshua also said, 

“Choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).

Do you serve God, or Egypt? And consequently, do you support liberty or tyranny? Most people trust in Egypt, even if they say they’re Christians and maintain contradictions like “God bless our troops.” Probably one hundred million or more Americans can simultaneously hold to God and the military without seeing the delusion. Probably most professing Christians buy into some variation of the lie that “the military is a government-designed institution that protects us from evil from outside our borders [and] the police protect us from evil from within our borders.”

But the popularity of mistaken ideas doesn’t change the fact that they’re trusting in a political institution rather than God for their salvation, and that doing so has brought on Egyptian bondage. 

Only a fear of the Lord brings liberty, because when we fear God only, we no longer fear men — that is, we no longer find a need to erect systems of man-made (alleged) protection, because we find our protection, prosperity, and life in the Lord. The fear of God essentially shows men how to not fear liberty. The fear of liberty—seen every time the statists tell us “how would we be safe without police officers?”—comes from a lack of fear of God, and not only because His judgment is upon those who trust in States, but because trusting in States is to fear men. Out of the fear of the “tyranny of liberty,” men institute their worst nightmares in a State.

This is not a commandment to have in addition to having a society of Egyptian “protectors.” Rather, our problems are provided for—the Assyrian neighbors, the criminals, or whatever else leads men to defending States—when we fear God alone. 

“O fear the Lord, you His saints; For to those who fear Him there is no want” (Psalm 34:9).

When men regard other men as lords, as they do with presidents, soldiers, and police officers, they are neglecting a duty to be God-fearing and regard the Lord as their God. Fearing men is a forbidden idolatry. 

Serving men

Those who are in Christ are not trying to please men, but the Lord (Gal 1:10). A huge problem with our world, which explains why people become police officers and such, is that they’re trying to look good before other men. As one scripture says of these types of men, “They loved the approval of men rather than the approval of God” (John 12:43). But we are called to fear God, not men. 

Man-fearing is the disposition of statists, who say, “without government we would be invaded by the Chinese or the warlords would take over.” Or even, “If I don’t obey every edict of the government they might imprison me” or “I may lose my job if I don’t take the vaccine.” This statist position and other man-fearing is not for the God-fearing man; we know that fear is a tool used for controlling foolish man-fearers.

The statist’s worry of a thousand things that would supposedly go wrong without government—the criminals, the invaders, the warlords, the schools, the roads, the sewage, the healthcare, and everything else—is a peak example of the sinful thoughts of men who fear men over fearing God who provides everything we need. And, in doing so, they set us up for a failed society where none of those things work after a long while of dragging these tax-funded services into the ground. All the things they cite as “necessary” to be funded by taxes—the schools, the police, the health care—become worse and worse.

Not fearing the persecution of men

Another problem with fearing men is that everyone keeps quiet on the truth to avoid persecution. This is why there’s barely anyone out there even recognizing our Egyptian society, much less preaching against it and showing others the way out. In fear of persecution, then, men often forsake God and keep quiet on their couches hoping their lives will pass before everything goes bad. 

But the man of God has to be ready for whatever the statists may send his way while he serves God and preaches the good word. Jesus warns us that when we go out and preach the word of God, we should expect to be persecuted, kidnapped, imprisoned, etc., by the very people (police, prosecutors, jailers) who “statist Christians” (contradiction) tell us are carrying out God’s holy work. But we are never to fear these agents of the State, these “law enforcement” officers that most of our foolish people think are God’s people. 

“Behold, I am sending you out like sheep among wolves; therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. But beware of men; for they will hand you over to their councils and flog you in their synagogues. On My account, you will be brought before governors and kings as witnesses to them and to the Gentiles. But when they hand you over, do not worry about how to respond or what to say. In that hour you will be given what to say. For it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rise against their parents and have them put to death. You will be hated by everyone because of My name, but the one who perseveres to the end will be saved” (Matthew 10:16-22).

That men will hate us for walking in Christ should not be a deterrent from doing God’s work, even though agents of the State will surely try to come down on God’s people under the name of “law enforcement” who claim in vain that “in God we trust.”

Anyone doing God’s work is going to find themselves criticized and under attack by the world, which hates God and loves the statist enemies of God. But when we find ourselves in these positions, we need to fear abandoning God more than the pressures these men may put us under. “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). Anyone ready to serve God and share his word should be ready to persevere against the inevitable backlash of men that will come their way, because fearing God is against everything the world of man-fearers believe in. 

We can either fear God, or fear men. As for me and my house, we will fear God rather than governments.