Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

That so many men are having a grand ole time out in the world drinking, partying, consuming its distractions and entertainment, watching sports games, gambling on them, screaming at their televisions, etc, rather than preparing themselves and their people for disaster, is more or less all the evidence one needs that most of them have no idea what’s going on. If you knew how bad it was, if you had any idea of our captivity by political systems and the deep spiritual and physical bondage that our people are in, you would probably struggle to see much joy in the things that the average man carries on about. Indeed, you’re probably a target of these people’s ridicule. “Why don’t you just lighten up and touch grass sometime?”

As I have argued already, anyone who knew the evils that have come upon us would have a much more somber and repentant approach to dealing with them. A mournful demeanor to seeing the evils around us, and recognizing our people’s complicity in allowing it to happen, is much more appropriate to the child of God than the other options that men often arrive at, such as the idea that we should forsake our Christ and participate in politics (the whole problem in the first place) to fix things, or that we should launch of violent revolution against our captors (when men haven’t even repented of the political views that have landed them here).

Most of these people don’t want to hear the prophetic word of the Lord about what happens when men rebel against the natural order and set up political systems as we have today. Most of them refuse to listen and don’t have time for a single scripture, which in part may be due to the fact that God’s word will refute the statist ideologies the world has fed them. They don’t want to hear anyone tell them what these men who they call their “leaders” and “heroes” have planned for them (and that they are far from the “heroic” society-savers that they think they are). They would rather yell at a television, chug a beer, stay at a bar all night, wave a flag, or shout something as stupid “Trump 2024.” Indeed, it’s common for these revelers to say “I bet you’re fun at parties” the first time someone brings up an unpleasant truth about our world — that is that we’re enslaved by human rulers who have every intention to tear us to pieces. They would rather continue in their (for a while longer) blissful ignorance rather than confront the problems we’re facing. 

Few men know or care that we’re living in captivity. In fact, they’re praising the captors for providing us a “freedom” that doesn’t exist. They have happily led themselves into bondage by choosing to follow man-gods (i.e., “governments”) instead of the Lord. And when they do realize that things have gone wrong, they often can’t make sense of the suffering or don’t believe we deserve it. 

Now, I’m not suggesting that one shouldn’t have fun whatsoever. I make time to relax myself, though I try to stay focused on the Kingdom of God even in those periods. I believe that God also wants us to be happy and prosper. But it’s difficult to justify partying in the middle of our captivity, and it’s not what any of the prophets in the Bible were doing even as the statists of the day stood over people. The captors—the State, its manipulators, propagandists, law enforcement officers, etc—have tricked us into settling down in our slavery and being content with it, attempting to pacify us with a whole host of different things. “It’s just the way things are.” We must not grow complacent toward their agenda against us. They have a whole lot more in store for us than what they’ve dosed us with so far. Operation “Covid 19” was just a test-run, and not even the first of test-runs, that would see how men would react to their schemes.

We have to get serious at some point. What we’re facing is not a joke. Those who are still asking “which team you rooting for tonight?” are going to be severely caught off-guard when they hit us with the next scheme. If they don’t care about the slavery now, they aren’t prepared for the tightening of the chains.

To get too excited about the world around us is difficult to reconcile with the backwards society—with the political slave system— we’re living under today. At the very least, because “the fun” is not going to last forever. But at any rate, because we are in dire need of getting God back into our lives and communities if we wish to have any sort of sustainable future and if we wish to ever throw the shackles of men off of our lives. We can’t forget that time spent with family and neighbors is what the Kingdom of God is all about. But we also need to get more serious about how we should be training up our family and neighbors for what is to come. We need to move past idle words and small talk and living in ignorance to our situation. We need to set our sights much higher than the worldly places where most men’s thoughts reside. Those who are set on earthly things (eg., the entertainment fed to us by our captors to pacify us) are candidates for being considered enemies of the cross of Christ (Phil 3:18-19).

The lamentations of Jeremiah 

I wanted to share with you here the first chapter of the Bible that sent me into tears, absolutely balling over the political situation we have gotten ourselves in due to having forsaken God and His instruction of the path to liberty.

The tears came, in one sense, because of the guilt I felt for our people as a whole having betrayed the Lord and finding ourselves living under the boot of men; and in another sense, because of the consequences that we now must face to having done so, and how unnecessary the present debacle is and how it could have been avoided. What a depressing scene to see our people living on a plantation, coerced by men into following their every order, hauled off to prisons when they don’t obey, or shot if they resist Pharaoh’s agents (or even when they don’t). We are reaping the iniquities we have sown today by living under the bondage of taxation and human government. We have found ourselves living under a police state as a curse from the evil seeds we have planted in allowing for these men to be raised up. 

This section of scripture comes from the prophet Jeremiah, who has been dubbed the “weeping prophet.” A main part of his weeping is the same reason we feel pain when men refuse to hear the word of the Lord: God has sent us, like He did His biblical prophets, to preach the inevitable collapse of all statist societies, and yet men never want to listen, never want to heed the call. We warn that indulging in the sin of statism, all its idolatry, and the evils of man-kings, will bring upon our captivity, but men never care to hear. Indeed they laugh at us instead. Jeremiah called men to repentance, but stubbornness toward the word of the Lord brought captivity instead. 

Thus, we weep at men’s refusal to leave behind the worldly ideology of statism and all the violence and evil that comes with it. We hate to see our people enslaved to statists when they easily could have known better if they would have ever been humble enough to hear the voice of the Lord. It hurts us to see people waving the flags of their captors, displaying their patriotic support for the enslavers, and seeing nothing wrong with anything they do.  As Jeremiah wept,

“But if you do not listen, I will weep in secret because of your pride. My eyes will overflow with tears, because the LORD’s flock has been taken captive” (Jeremiah 13:17).

We hate to see people chase after the “law” systems of men and laud their “law enforcement” agents as heroes. “My eyes shed streams of tears because Your law is not obeyed” (Psalm 119:136). It hurts us to look upon our people and see a bunch of statist cowards who love political violence and cannot see the ways of the Lord. As Jeremiah says in another account of his weeping, 

“Oh, that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears! I would weep day and night over the slain daughter of my people. If only I had a traveler’s lodge in the wilderness, I would abandon my people and depart from them, for they are all adulterers, a crowd of faithless people. ‘They bend their tongues like bows; lies prevail over truth in the land. For they proceed from evil to evil, and they do not take Me into account,’ declares the LORD” (Jeremiah 9:1-3). 

The tear-jerking scripture

There are many moments of holy laughter for me in the scriptures, times when the truths that the word of God is passing on to us are just hilariously true, whether in and of themselves or by the wording and way in which they were delivered to us. God has a great way of adding humor into the words He has left us. But there are others that call for weeping, for holy tears if you will. The final written words of Jeremiah (as far as I know) are cause for the latter. 

I don’t want to suggest that if this fails make you cry too that you don’t really know what’s going on or how much we have abandoned God. But if you had any idea, you would understand. If you read this numbly and disinterestedly, however, you might be lost in the world and might want to read it again. I might even caution the reader here to prepare their heart. If men would just soften their hearts just a little and set their pride aside for one moment, they might be able to hear the Lord speak to them through His word. If you know how bad it is out there, prepare yourself for watery eyes.

Here it is. These passages are known as the “Prayer of Jeremiah.” The modern division of the scriptures has it recorded as Lamentations 5, a book that follows the longer prophetic book bearing the prophet’s name. I want to share the whole chapter. I still can’t read it without crying; reading it aloud to others is even harder. I get choked-up every time. It is proof of the spirit living inside of us that we can be so touched by these things.

The discerning reader will realize that we are in the same situation today — that we have turned our heritage over to human rulers and have found ourselves yoked into a system of human bondage. Let’s see if we are ready to say the same prayer as Jeremiah given our similar situation today, where men ruler over us.

“Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us: consider, and behold our reproach. Our inheritance is turned to the strangers, our houses to the aliens. We are fatherless, even without a father, and our mothers are as widows. We have drunk our water for money, and our wood is sold unto us. Our necks are under persecution: we are weary, and have no rest. We have given our hands to the Egyptians, and to Assyria, to be satisfied with bread. Our fathers have sinned, and are not, and we have borne their iniquities. Servants have ruled over us, none would deliver us out of their hands. We got our bread with the peril of our lives, because of the sword of the wilderness. Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine. They defiled the women in Zion, and the maids in the cities of Judah. The princes are hanged up by their hand: the faces of the Elders were not had in honor. They took the young men to grind, and the children fell under the wood. The Elders have ceased from the gate and the young men from their songs. The joy of our heart is gone, our dance is turned into mourning. The crown of our head is fallen: woe now unto us, that we have sinned. Therefore our heart is heavy for these things, our eyes are dim, Because of the mountain of Zion, which is desolate: the foxes run upon it. But thou, O Lord, remainest forever: thy throne is from generation to generation. Wherefore dost thou forget us forever, and forsake us so long time? Turn thou us unto thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned: renew our days as of old.But thou hast utterly rejected us: thou art exceedingly angry against us” (Lamentations 5:1-22). 

How many people are acknowledging the captivity today? Most of them are ignoring the judgment we face, and the false pastors of our world lead men into these idolatrous systems. They fell for the lies of state propagandists that all is well in Babylon.

How many people are calling upon the Lord to be with us against the evil statists? Very few. Most people (professing “Christians” among them) are calling upon a new set of men to fix our problems. They believe things will be fixed at Pharaoh’s polling stations. They don’t even see the slavery. They think “this is a free country.”

How many people see that our lives—our individual selves, our properties, our wages, our homes, our businesses, our families, communities, etc—have been handed over to “strangers?” That men who call themselves the “government” tax us, control us, “regulate” us, steal from us, coerce us, kidnap us, incarcerate us, and kill us? That we have sold out—or as Jeremiah said, “given our hand to the Egyptians”—to these people in exchange for a false prosperity and false security? Our people have trusted in the kingdoms of men to provide for them rather than the Lord. Or as God said through the prophet Isaiah,

“They set out to go down to Egypt without asking My advice, to seek shelter under Pharaoh’s protection and take refuge in Egypt’s shade” (Isaiah 30:2).

They have not cared that God pronounces judgment on those who are so foolish to trust in Egyptian systems as ours today, and how doing so is clearly ungodly.

“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). 

How many people are lamenting the captivity today? As I said, most people are praising the plunderers for the “heroic” work they do keeping “law and order” on the plantation! How many people are repenting from their association with these systems? Most people are still happy to identify as “American citizens” rather than citizen’s of God’s kingdom. They have proudly supported these systems without thinking they embodied pride and idolatry. They have even chosen to serve this enemy of God’s kingdom, and they have refused to repent of these evils. They have said that we can’t do without them, and they have thought that God wouldn’t protect us. They have not seen that fearing the Lord only is precisely the way to keep the statist slavery away. They have said that we need man-kings because others around the world are ungodly too. They have told us that evil is “necessary” because other people engage in these same evils. They have been scared into accepting the rule by men. 

But it’s time for us to turn away from the worldly ideology of statism today and turn back to the Lord. It’s time that people ask the Lord to convert them to His ways (Jer 31:18), for God to start working on bringing hitherto rebellious men back into His arms — His mighty, outstretched arms, which bring down Pharaohs for us. 

Prayer

Lord I pray as Your prophet Jeremiah did that You will show some men Your word and allow their hearts of stone to soften enough to hear this message. We have indeed turned our inheritance over to strangers and most men still find the conditions good enough to be shouting and celebrating a false liberty that they don’t have. Please, Lord, will You wake men up from their sleep? The longer the sheep have gone astray, the much more dangerous our situation remains. Get men to realize that their statism has not just led to economic and social ruin, but that statism is downright satanic, evil, sinful, and idolatrous, and has been the plague upon humanity forever. Get Your people walking away from these deceptive, plunderous systems of men and fired up about walking back into Your arms and working on Your kingdom again. And until then, Lord, save us. Be with us against these evil statists who will accept nothing less than destroying other men and whole societies to get what they want. Wreck these unrepentant statists if need be. But keep us safe. Keep us fed as these men inevitably bring destruction, war, shortages, and famine upon us. Hide us under Your wing, Lord, you’re the Rock of Ages. Keep the tyrants away from our door steps. Cause them to stumble as they approach and turn away. Put confusion into their plans. Guide us in how we ought to treat them when they come for us. Lead the servants of Pharaoh to repentance, or destroy them if they refuse. We trust that You will be watching over us as these men who are considered “saviors” of civilization bring hell upon us. We trust that You will show men how foolish and evil they are to have adopted slogans like “back the blue” in the middle of a police state. Praise You, God! You’re the Lord. Amen.