Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

It is a common saying among atheists to say that “religion is just a tool for social control.” They’re not wrong in the sense that the devilish doctrines and traditions of men, operating in God’s good name, have been as much. The mainstream churches, especially when they’re part of the state religion, have indeed been used to pacify and mislead the people. There’s no doubting this. 

But once these people are conflating the word of God into this assumption, which the religionists seek to bury with their traditions and rituals, the claim has gone too far. Though the men who represent God have unfortunately (but expectedly if you knew you knew your Bible and its warnings of false prophets) perverted the truth of what God is all about and have used their teachings to pacify and control men, the same cannot be said of the scriptures themselves. We cannot judge the word of God for what men make others believe it must be all about. When this is done, atheists are indeed created by wrongfully assuming that God must be just like those who claim to know Him. In a way, it seems, the established religions seem to be sent precisely to obscure the truth in God’s word. But rather than to do any investigative work and see if the scriptures have something else to say then what men posing as Christians have to say, most atheists simply and lazily write-off the whole deal. The Bible is grouped-in with the men who appear to represent God, and the whole thing is discarded into the “disregard” category. We have millions of men who wrongly ignore the Bible because they rightly despise the men who claim to represent God. If they had looked into the Bible, they would know that God thinks these men—the false pastors of the world who scatter the flock—are frauds, too (eg., Jeremiah 23).

The assumption that the scriptures must be part of this tool of social control, which we may concede the religionists have been, is mistaken then. And it’s often based in ignorance. I commented to a person the other day that the Bible is in fact a freedom manual that is waiting to provide the slaves the tools for breaking out of their political bondage, and they said that “nothing could be further from the truth,” giving me the old drivel that it has been a means of controlling people — only to then admit that they have never even read it!

The scriptures—amazingly in light of all the distortions of men—stand as a testament against the political schemes of men, pointing them out to be false god systems based in idolatry, sin, and violence, rather than righteousness, holiness, or justice. Thus, the prophet Isaiah could say of Jerusalem in his day that “justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us” (59:9). As he went on, “Judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street” (Isaiah 59:14). So scarce was a man of justice (ie., a man who knows of the injustices of state violence that most men praise) in the kingdoms of old that God had challenged His prophets to find just one man who does justice (Jer 5:1). 

While it’s true the religionists—the establishment churches and mainstream lines of religious thinking—are all about pacifying men and even training them to be good statists who support the kingdoms of men, God’s word, on the other hand, is precisely all about liberating humanity from the bondage of men—namely from the ones who call themselves a “government” and organize their slavery through the political means—by getting them to return to God. For it was the sin of believing in these systems that allowed them to come about. As one prophet said, “Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity” (Hosea 14:1). Most of the disasters in our world—famines, world wars, genocides, labor camps—have come because men turned away from God and trusted in the State for their “salvation,” not because the Bible, as some alleged tool of social control, led men there. Indeed, if men read their Bibles and they saw the sin in setting up man-kings alone (1 Samuel 8), they would never even have to endure these evils that God promises will come along with supporting man’s political kingdoms, because they would never set them up in the first place.

Far from enslaving men, the scriptures themselves may liberate men and show them the political plunder systems that men have gotten over on people through the humanistic philosophers of the world. It’s no wonder, then, that the so-called “Slave Bible” of 1807 had removed some 90% of the Old Testament—a book that is assumed by those who don’t read the Bible to be some archaic, outdated book that must just be one big defense of slavery—and some half of the New Testament. If God’s word was all about teaching men how to be good slaves, why wouldn’t they have left it alone? Why not make it compulsory reading?

We see why the scriptures are mostly kept from men though (even though they are living among us at the same time). You can’t have anyone inspired by the Exodus story (as this ministry is) to walk out of Egypt and stop being a part of the evil ways of statism. You can’t have people reading the scathing rebuke of these violent political systems given by the prophets. You can’t have people seeing that the prophets preached that judgment comes upon all those societies (like ours) which abandon God for man-gods who call themselves “governments.” You can’t have people reading that kings were set up in rebellion to God (1 Samuel 8). You can’t have people reading the Psalms, which cry to God to be rescued from the predations of men. You can’t have people reading about the salvation offered by Christ. 

The scriptures are, in fact, the greatest threat to the slavish systems of men to ever exist, even though its great messages have largely been kept from men even today. One recent poll I came across estimated that some 85% of American homes have a Bible (or a few) in them! But around one-third of American have never read the Bible, and around one-third of those who do read it do so only a couple times a year at best. There is a (spiritual) revolution sitting on tens of millions of people’s shelves, but merely collecting dust instead. Tens of millions of men have radicalizing freedom manuals sitting around them that could potentially make them ideologically and theologically motivated in the cause of liberty, and they don’t even know it — or worse, assume it’s the opposite: an enslaving device.

As we can see in this historical case of the “Slave Bible,” there’s a better argument that those who want to enslave men are more apt to prevent men from reading the Bible rather than using it “as a tool for social control” (which, again, is what organized religion may well be doing). To the contrary, the word of God is likely to start an intellectual and spiritual revolution against slavery—chattel or political—if men were to read it. And so it makes sense that vast portions of it were redacted when given to others in ministry work, rather than kept as a whole.

But, one might wonder, if the Bible is truly liberating, as I argue, wouldn’t our captors need to suppress it and ban it? Sadly, such censorship or redactions as noted above aren’t really even needed today since men don’t even read their Bibles; the rulers can operate safely all while hundreds of millions of unread Bibles collect dust on shelves, posing little to no threat to their violent rule or the idolatry that supports it among the people. If anything, a government ban on the Bible might awaken men to the fact that it has something to say about all these evil rulers in our world who pose as gods. Men are always drawn to things that aren’t allowed. It is better, on part of the rulers, to just hope that people avoid this subversive text. While it was suppressed in times past, and men have been punished for translating it and spreading it around, it is too ubiquitous today—though mostly as a dust collector—to do much about it. Better, then, to send false prophets to distort its message than to try and eliminate it altogether. Thus, if men do dare to read it, they’re put into the hands of popular Bible teachers, false pastors who make up the institutional churches, or maybe even pointed toward a handful of verses instead of the front-to-back book. Most people have no idea what the prophets have to say. Many modern Christians have even taught that the Old Testament is irrelevant or obsolete for us today, even though it uniquely expresses God’s will in regard to the systems of men. The vast majority of sermons today seem to come from the New Testament only, even though it makes up only a relatively small portion of the generally accepted canon. Many “Bibles” found for free on bookshelves are only the NT. Showing how the New Testament is understood in light of the Old Testament, and vice versa, is often forgotten.

And this is what is amazing about the captivity we’re living under: Millions of people have a freedom manual and virtual anarchist manifesto in their homes or nearby, and yet men have not awoken to the truths that it contains. They either haven’t read it, didn’t absorb its lessons, or were misled by false pastors about its contents. 

Far from enslaving people, if more men would dust off their Bibles—especially if they were to give attention to the prophetic books in the Old Testament that strongly reveal God’s anti-statist will—we would have a “revolution” on our hands. Men would repent from ever supporting the political gods that they were tricked into idolizing. They would see that God wants us to make Him our only God, and that men—presidents, politicians, and police—are false gods that are here only to rule us. They would read, “Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save” (Psalm 146:3). They would be more inclined to leave Egypt rather than stick around and sing her “national anthems,” delude themselves about their “freedom,” or think that her evils can be fixed if only we all got out and voted “correctly.” They would see just how much we need God, not new politicians, reading, “Give us aid against the enemy, for the help of man is worthless” (Psalm 60:11). They would give up thinking that men like Donald Trump are going to save them (which atheists might incorrectly assume Christianity is all about if they took “Christian” Americans’ word for it), reading instead to “put no more trust in man, who has only the breath in his nostrils. Of what account is he?” (Isaiah 2:22). They would see their enormously destructive error in trusting in presidents and political systems to protect them, reading that “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). Though the religionist frauds might indeed tell men that political systems save us and make our societies great, men who read the scriptures would find instead that “this is what the LORD says: ‘Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind, who makes the flesh his strength and turns his heart from the LORD” (Jeremiah 17:5).

In other words, if men actually took to their Bibles, they would see, contrary to the claims that it is a tool for social control, that it actually teaches us how to not be ruled by men by making the Lord our king. It’s not that the scriptures aren’t liberating, but that men have not yet absorbed its lessons.

Prayer

Lord God, I pray, that You will lead men to Your word and show them what You have been so gracious as to show us. Show men that You hate the Egyptian societies that they have been misled into worshiping, and that You want Your people to come out of Babylon. Get them to crack their Bibles open, which are evidently around them and accessible, and start revealing Your ways to them! Blow their minds, as You have done mine, and surprise them just how radically different Your word is from what they would assume if they had taken man’s word for it. Change men’s hearts and minds. Turn their stony hearts into flesh again and humble them enough to see the truth in Your word. Help them break out of the worldly delusions they have been under that make them believe that the statist philosophers of the world hold all the truths and that Your word was merely invented by men or just some ancient mythology. Expose the lies behind the kingdoms of men and get them working on Your kingdom again, instead of putting their hand to evil and furthering the evil statist systems of the world. Get more people on fire for You, Your word, and Your cause of liberty. Amen.