Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris 

It is common for anyone who’s convicted by the Holy Spirit to share the word of God with others to be scorned and ridiculed when they do so. We are often laughed at and teased for trying to deliver God’s word to men who just simply don’t want to hear it. With the advent of the “laugh react” on a certain social media site, it is even easier for men to express this; the “angry react” is another way that they fight against such truth.

Just the other day, a person in an online philosophy group, where wisdom supposedly resides, asked for people to name a book that impacted their life in a profound way. I said the Holy Bible. The “laugh reacts” lit up. “We said non-fiction books, not your fantasy novel about sky-daddy.”

Biblical anticipation of the mockery

Unfortunately in our world, standing with God often requires some conviction and courage that many people don’t have — especially considering the dangers that come with preaching His word. Most people are more concerned with making friends or appeasing others than saying what is true and right. They will easily back down when the statist hordes (or is it whores?) come out to laugh at them. 

But those who mock our attempts to lead them to God and His word don’t know that we’re prepared for it, that the scriptures have already foreseen their mockery, that our Lord tells us that “you will be hated by everyone because of My name” (Matthew 10:22; cf. Matt 5:11, 24:9). When men laugh at us today when we try to do deliver the same message to our people as the Biblical prophets did to theirs—that statism is a great evil and brings great consequences to a society—they don’t know that we’re already expecting it. Far from pointing out some weakness or blindspot in our faith, as they think they are doing, we already see it coming when the statists of the world come out to mock us. In an effort to save their society from destruction, God sends anti-statists to rebuke the men of the world who support the evils of political rule, but they laugh at us instead of hear us out. 

“Again and again the LORD, the God of their fathers, sent word to His people through His messengers because He had compassion on them and on His dwelling place. But they mocked the messengers of God, despising His words and scoffing at His prophets, until the wrath of the LORD against His people was stirred up beyond remedy” (2 Chronicles 36:15-16). 

After refusing to hear for long enough, God grows weary and gives men over to the political slavery they have begged for. God sends States as judgment for man’s participation in the evils of statism. For not listening, but mocking God’s word instead, 

“So He brought up against them the king of the Chaldeans, who put their young men to the sword in the sanctuary, sparing neither young men nor young women, neither elderly nor infirm. God gave them all into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, who carried off everything to Babylon—all the articles of the house of God, both large and small, and the treasures of the house of the LORD and of the king and his officials. Then the Chaldeans set fire to the house of God and broke down the wall of Jerusalem. They burned down all the palaces and destroyed every article of value. Those who escaped the sword were carried by Nebuchadnezzar into exile in Babylon, and they became servants to him and his sons until the kingdom of Persia came to power” (2 Chronicles 36:17-20). 

Man’s flight from truth

One reason men run from the truth is that they don’t want to be called out for the errors they are engaging in or the lies that they have held on to for so long. Perhaps one of the hardest things for a man to do is admit that he has believed in lies, especially once these lies have gone on for a half-century or more. 

Men who have been told by their captors that they are “free” don’t want to hear that they are living in captivity, so they continue to buy into the lies of the system and its system-makers that they live under. 

As anyone knows who is out there in the real trenches (not the political campaign trail as some have suggested) of trying to minister God’s word to people, it is exceedingly difficult to get anyone to hear us out and listen to what the Lord is saying. Most men are entirely too stubborn, entirely too caught up in their idols, to repent from statism and come back to the Lord. Men are often too proud to hear the things of the Lord. They have eyes, but cannot see; ears, but cannot hear” (Psalm 115:5). 

What we see, as the scriptures document, is that most men simply don’t want to hear the truth, or they believe that whatever they already hold (usually the ideas of some worldly philosopher) is already the truth. As one prophet puts it, they say, “Do not prophesy to us the truth! Speak to us pleasant words; prophesy illusions” (Isaiah 30:10). 

People would rather hear comforting lies, such that all is good and well with our statist society, rather than the uncomfortable truths of our situation, that statism is unsustainable and brings great judgment to the land. They would rather have man-kings feed them lies about coming to “save” the country, than to hear someone tell them it’s time to turn away from statism. As one prophet says, “They hate him who reproves in the gate, and they abhor him who speaks the truth” (Amos 5:11). Most men don’t like to have their views challenged, and so hate those who do it.

It is often hard then to ever get men to change their ways of thinking. Though God warns of the disasters of statism, men just don’t care. 

Fighting against the truth

There is also a sort of psychological element to man’s resistance to the truth, too, although much of it is based in sin and turning to the philosophies of the world rather than the word of the Lord (Col 2:8). When men fight against Biblically supported arguments against statism like those found in this site and others, it’s usually the case that they don’t like being rebuked for things that they themselves are already involved in. They don’t want to be “called out” for their own idolatry. This is embarrassing to them, so better to close your ears than to listen. 

It takes a humble person to be doing something already and then accept that it’s wrong upon someone else pointing it out. 

It is simply unlikely for a man who currently straps on boots for Pharaohs or wears one of his badges to accept that they are doing evil in the service of the kingdoms of men. No one wants to have their whole lives turned upside down at the rebuke of their ways, and so it’s often easier to continue in them than to change. If only men were as good at listening to righteous counsel as they were at remaining in a state of denial and ignorance. 

Since the word of God brings great correction to men, they don’t want to hear it. Better to remain in a state of error than admit you were doing it wrong. 

This, unfortunately, is often even more true when it comes to men who consider themselves Christians. No one who already has a flag hanging off their house or stuck to their bumper wants to be told “God doesn’t approve.” They don’t want to be told that there is a problem with Christians voting for human rulers, and so they fight against anyone who says otherwise. They don’t want to be told that the police whom they worship are not here to protect us, so they refuse to hear anything that says otherwise. They already believe that soldiers “fight for our freedom,” and so they get angry when anyone suggests otherwise. They prefer those who tell them lies, like some “chaplain” who tells them that their military service is doing good in the eyes of the Lord.

God told us all we needed to know to avoid the slavery of human government (eg., that faith in the Lord alone is sufficient for fighting off our enemies), but men couldn’t help but go and idolize men (presidents, police, etc) instead. And so God allowed the people to pursue their idols and be destroyed by them as they are today.

“Hear, O my people, while I admonish you! O Israel, if you would but listen to me! There shall be no strange god among you; you shall not bow down to a foreign god. I am the LORD your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it. But my people did not listen to my voice; Israel would not submit to me. So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts, to follow their own counsels. Oh, that my people would listen to me, that Israel would walk in my ways! I would soon subdue their enemies and turn my hand against their foes” (Psalm 81:8-14).

When men insist on man-saviors like “presidents” to “make our country great again,” eventually God stops fighting with these hardheaded fools and lets them have what they’re asking for: wicked men to rule over them.

The “wisdom” of men

It’s easy to see why men get angry when we try to tell them about the ways—the ethics, economics, and politics—of God. They want to keep on believing what they already believe, or keep pursuing the foolish ideas that God has allowed them to pursue. They want to “eat the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices” (Proverbs 1:31). They are ultimately fools, because they are trusting in their own wisdom rather than the true wisdom of God’s word. As the scriptures say, “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wiseman listens to counsel” (Proverbs 12:15). They are fools because they never listen. “Fools despise wisdom and discipline” (Proverbs 1:7).

It is easy to see why men who deny God lack these truths we are trying to deliver to them, believing it is found in one of the statist “intellectuals” of the world. As the scripture says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). If men do not begin with a fear of the Lord, ie., with great reverence for the Most High as the master teacher, they have no chance at coming to true wisdom. They will remain “foolish people without understanding” (Jeremiah 5:2), foolish people who seek other men to reaffirm the foolish ideas they already hold. 

Most men, then, are not truth-seekers or men who are willing to be set straight at the word of the Lord, but mostly men who seek writers and speakers who are preaching the things they already want to believe in. As the scriptures explain, “with itching ears they gather around themselves teachers to suit their own desires. So they will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths” (2 Timothy 4:3-4). More than a desire to seek divine wisdom, most men seek another man to reaffirm their own biases, a man to validate their economic fallacies and political errors. 

Exploiting man’s sin

As we see, men often gravitate to men who defend the fallacies that they already believe in, rather than to turn to the Most High God to see what their Maker has to say about the “wisdom” they hold. 

The philosophers of the world, then, who are mostly statist humanists, are more so telling men what they already wanted to hear rather than teaching them something new. A thought experiment is sometimes proposed on who one would go back and remove from history if they could, assuming that this alone would change the world. 

But it wasn’t really that Marx led men to be Marxists, though it’s still true he radicalized some people. Men were Marxists before Marx. They already had the violence of statism and revolution in their hearts, and Marx simply intellectualized it and made it seem philosophically defensible. If there were no Karl Marx, there would have been someone else to feed men the lies they were already itching to hear. 

Likewise, it wasn’t Hitler himself that made Nazism possible. He was simply the man who ended up as it the head of it all. If it wasn’t Hitler, it would have been someone else. The German people already had fascism in their hearts, and the Hitlers of the world played upon it. While any group of statist rulers may rile some men up for their cause, they are really only stirring up the wickedness that is already within men. It wasn’t Hitler that made Nazism possible, but the people who stood behind him. The former are nothing without the latter. As one anarchist, Larken Rose, once explained, 

“I’m not scared of the Maos and the Stalins and the Hitlers. I’m scared of the thousands of millions of people that hallucinate them to be ‘authority,’ and so do their bidding, and pay for their empires, and carry out their orders. I don’t care if there’s one looney with a stupid mustache. He’s not a threat if the people do not believe in ‘authority.’”

Has God kept men dumb?

But the lack of wisdom in men and their refusal to hear the word of the Lord may not be their own doing. There is a Biblical case for God hardening men’s hearts so that they continue headlong into the disaster that they have for so long sought after by trusting in these systems of men, so that they can’t turn their societies around from the divine judgment that awaits them, which would be provided if they had the wisdom of the Lord who counsels against trusting in Egypts and Assyrias they have been caught worshiping (Isa 30:3, 31:1-3, 36:6). This was the case with the Pharaoh that Moses was exhorting to free God’s enslaved people that he was keeping in Egypt. God hardened his heart so that he wouldn’t repent and the destruction God had planned for him would come upon him (Exodus 4:21, 9:12, 10:1, 11:10). God has also caused famines of His own word so that people would remain lost who had for so long refused Him (Amos 8:11). 

I would hate for this to be the case today. I pray right here that God will soften men’s hearts and turn them back to the Lord, so that they can avoid the destruction He currently has planned for our unrepentant people. While I do believe many more people are waking up than ever before, it seems that all too many are hardened in their ways and are going to keep clamoring to their political gods to save them, and that it will be too late before anyone wakes up and walks out of Egypt. 

Ultimately, it is on God to change men, to get them to turn away from their state worshiping and regard the Lord as their God and King, rather than the false kings of the world that they have hitherto regarded as their rulers. But we might pray in that light,

“Restore us to Yourself, O Lord, so we may return; renew our days as of old, unless You have utterly rejected us and remain angry with us beyond measure” (Lamentations 5:21-22). 

Let us hope and pray that the evils that men have supported in this country—the “thank the troops” (for blowing up children) and “back the blue” (for murdering us on the side of their highways) slogans we hear all the time—do not lead God to utterly reject us and abandon us into the hands of these wicked statists forever.

Prayer 

Lord God, hear us in this hour, and heal us in this day. For we have gotten ourselves in great trouble and face enormous consequences for having strayed this far from You and from the type of peaceful and voluntaryist order You desire for us. Wake men up to You and Your word like never before. Make Your word as a fire for them, and cause them to renounce the worldly philosophy of statism they have clung to for so long. Cause them to see that engaging in politics is not for Your people and that it is only giving into the man-made systems of the world. Put this evil statism into retreat, and collapse the evil and plunderous political system that it helps to uphold. Soften men’s hearts enough to be led to Your word and Your wisdom, and help us to stay strong and patient in the meantime, given how frustrating it is to try and herd the lost sheep again. Amen.