Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

In a previous article, I wrote that of all the great secular arguments we may make that statism (ie., the introduction of political violence into society) must fail, the strongest one is thus saith the Lord — that statism must fail per God and His word. 

The prophetic books of scripture relentlessly repeat this truth: that man’s statist kingdoms are bound to fail, that every society built on tax-theft and political violence will go up as did Sodom and Gomorrah. Every statist system must fail, because States are erected against the will of God. In the scriptures, God’s judgment is more or less always coming down upon these very systems of men. 

The false prophets

But there are men out there in the world who attempt to thwart the Biblical narrative that stands against the kingdoms of men by becoming apologists for the existence of the State and its alleged necessity and permanence, whether they have something to gain as beneficiaries of this plunder system, or whether they have nothing to gain and foolishly defend their own slavery. 

The job of these false prophets of the statist gospel is to make everyone believe that God is a liar: that statism is actually good, socially beneficial, saves societies from collapsing (rather than destroying them), and will last forever. 

A false prophet—whether the pastors in the churches training their congregants to wave Caesar’s flag and pledge allegiance to him or the secular intellectuals who provide cover for the statist ideology—is one who teaches the opposite of what God teaches: that statism is bound to bring salvation and is an “essential” and “necessary” institution that we should expect to endure forever. They tell us that, without the government of men, we would not be secure from enemies, crime would abound, and we’d all be impoverished. 

And this is what the statist intellectuals teach: that statism is good, necessary, inevitable, and permanent. As the libertarian anarchist Murray Rothbard once wrote, always seeing through the lies, 

“It is also important for the State to make its rule seem inevitable; even if its reign is disliked, it will then be met with passive resignation, as witness the familiar coupling of ‘death and taxes’” (Rothbard, Anatomy of the State, p. 26).

This notion that the State is inevitable and permanent is seen when men tell us that we must get out and vote, because “this is just the way it is and it’s our responsibility to try and influence the government in a different direction because it’s not going away.” Failing to fall back on God’s word, voters essentially believe that God is inactive and that they must get out there and make vain, even sinful attempts—such an act is to walk down the path of evil and yoke yourself with unbelievers—to steer Babylonian systems in a different direction. 

But it’s hard to blame them, as those who are caught up in the system of statism have been tricked by the lies of the world. Against the word of God, States and their crony intellectuals seek to teach men that their reign is permanent and that everyone ought to get with the program and bow to the State already. You “may as well” start voting and forsaking God, because the system isn’t going anywhere, and it’s best you try to influence it in a good direction or attempt to “Christianize Babylon.” 

In our world then we are made to be believe that the State is here to stay, that this method of organizing society is the “best” because it has survived this long to plague humanity. The State, being an ancient evil that has been with us forever, is able to play on the “appeal to tradition” or “argument from antiquity” to make a case that it is good and permanent because it has always been around. The elites work to make people believe that things had to turn out this way, that statism is God’s perfect will for men. As Rothbard continued, 

“One method [of subduing the people] is to induce historiographical determinism, as opposed to individual freedom of will. If the X Dynasty rules us, this is because the Inexorable Laws of History…have so decreed and nothing any puny individuals may do can change this inevitable decree” (Rothbard, Anatomy of the State, p. 26)

We are made to believe that it is some “natural law” that statism is inevitable and permanent. Men are likely to believe these things only when they depart from God’s word and indulge in the “wisdom” of the world. For the word of God says otherwise: statism will always mean the ruin of a people, and cannot ultimately triumph over God’s kingdom.

God’s everlasting kingdom

In the scriptures we are told that God’s kingdom, as opposed to the kingdoms of men, is everlasting. The prophets tell us that “His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and His kingdom is one that will never be destroyed” (Daniel 7:14). We read also that “[God’s] kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and [His] dominion endures through all generations” (Psalm 145:13). 

When God’s kingdom is said to never end, it is a direct attack on the “governments” of men that are thought (in error) to be permanent (Luke 1:33, Hebrews 12:28, Isaiah 9:6, Daniel 4:3). The reason that we are told that the kingdom of God is everlasting, is that the kingdoms of men are not. 

The kingdom of God and the kingdoms of men cannot co-exist. They are mutually exclusive, and the expansion and widening of God’s kingdom must always necessarily mean that man’s kingdom (the States of the world) are being driven back and replaced. The kingdom of God comes to abolish the kingdoms of men. The expansion of God’s kingdom means that the kingdoms of men are to be done away with. 

Thus the prophets tell us, 

“The God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will shatter all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, but will itself stand forever” (Daniel 2:44). 

As opposed to the idea that States can embody the kingdom of God, we’re told in the scriptures, to the contrary, that the latter replaces the former, that God’s kingdom “will shatter all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, but will itself stand forever” (Daniel 2:44). God’s eternal kingdom will ultimately replace the temporal kingdoms of the world (Rev 11:15). 

Man’s withering kingdoms and political action

As we see, it is the hope of Christians that God will eventually and fully destroy the false, man-made kingdoms of the world (1 Cor 15:24), for these god-kings merely pretend to be authorities, sovereigns, and equal to God in other ways. God destroys these men and their systems for pridefully setting themselves up as rulers. God promises to bring an end to all of the earthly regimes that oppress us, and already has destroyed many of them throughout history, until one day when they no longer exist whatsoever. Such evil men cannot prevail forever, even though they have succeeded for some time at plundering humanity. God promises that “the tent of the wicked will be no more” (Job 8:22). We are told that “the rulers of this age are coming to nothing” (1 Corinthians 2:6).

Though men may attempt to destroy God’s kingdom, namely by setting up systems of human government that act as enemies to His kingdom, it cannot be destroyed (Dan 2:44). Rather, it is man’s kingdom that is slated for destruction.

It is curious for this reason that anyone places their faith in the kingdoms of men “in the meantime,” and tells us, eg., that we need to be voting. Not only because such a mindset is the very thinking that empowers the systems of the world, but because God has marked these systems for destruction. Rather than attempt to reform Babylon or have anything to do with these systems, God’s word is arguably calling upon His people to come back home, to stop walking in the statist ways of the world, and to live a godly and righteous life that shuns the idolatry of the world. 

The coming of the kingdom

The whole of scripture more or less pronounces man’s kingdoms dead. Whether or not one sees these things as happening in an instant or occurring gradually over time, Biblical eschatology at any rate shows the demise of the statist society, which was born and set-out against God, and a replacement of it by God’s kingdom. 

James Redford saw this in his essay on the politics of Jesus. Far from this earthly statism having the moral stamp of approval from God, he says,

“Jesus Christ will come to abolish and utterly annihilate all the governments of the world: including all the rulers of those governments along with them!” (Redford, “Jesus is an Anarchist”).

Far from the statist society being sustainable, “everlasting,” “inevitable,” or “necessary” to social, political, and economic order, the State is a failed scheme of plunder against people, which God has and will put an end to when He has seen enough. God’s Kingdom comes as a replacement of the statist “kingdoms” and “lordships” of men. The Lord’s judgment comes, namely, upon the institutions of statism, in its applied or practiced form and even its theoretical form, when men’s hearts are turned back to God. As Redford said, God’s final judgment “consists of the punishment of all the Earthly rulers and the abolition of all mortal rulerships!” (Ibid). 

Any sort of “end times” theory in the scriptures point to God literally smashing state rulers and substituting His kingdom for this plunderous rule by false gods. The Apostle Paul writes,

“Then the end will come, when He hands over the kingdom to God the Father after He has destroyed all dominion, authority, and power. For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet” (1 Corinthians 15:24-25). 

The prophets against the kingdoms of men

This theme of man’s false kingdoms coming to and end, and God’s kingdom being raised up, runs all throughout scripture. Anyone who reads the prophets with just the slightest bit of attention can’t help but to see that they offer a scathing rebuke of statism and the people of those societies who have sinfully supported them.

The prophets are virtually always preaching to statist societies, and the kings and princes themselves, the destruction at the hand of God that is to come upon them for their evils. It would be severely downplaying God’s word to treat it as if most of its characters were delivering their message to some generic, vaguely-conceived “sinners” who needed to repent from their ways. The message is often “political,” ie., intended to go out to men who practice the sin of statism. While God’s word is for all of us, a general theme is that men need to repent for their willful participation in “the world” and its schemes. It is largely a rebuke of the system of statism. 

Thus we see everywhere in the scriptures that statism is going down, not just children who lied to their grandmothers (or something like that). It is the worldly rulers, who have exalted themselves as lords and gods and who drape their human bodies with “royal” clothing to falsely assert their authority, who will one day be torn down.

“All the princes of the sea shall come down from their thrones, and lay away their robes, and put off their embroidered garments: they shall clothe themselves with trembling; they shall sit upon the ground, and shall tremble at every moment, and be astonished at thee” (Ezekiel 26:16).

We see these events play out in history in the scriptures, with God smashing state rulers and their armies.

“Pharaoh’s chariots and his host hath he cast into the sea: his chosen captains also are drowned in the Red sea” (Exodus 15:4). 

But these things will come to pass again and again, until God finally removes the scourge of statism entirely from its false dominion over men. Over and over, the prophets speak of the statist societies of men, and the idolatry that accompanies it, being “utterly abolished” (Zechariah 13:2; Isaiah 2:18).

There can be no doubt that God is a state-smasher and that the kingdom of God abolishes human rule on earth.

“And I will overthrow the throne of kingdoms, and I will destroy the strength of the kingdoms of the heathen; and I will overthrow the chariots, and those that ride in them; and the horses and their riders shall come down, every one by the sword of his brother” (Haggai 2:22). 

God puts an end to the state violence that those who bear the sword use against us. “He breaks the bow and shatters the spear” (Psalm 46:9). 

The false prophets of the statist society (academics, authors, politicians, pastors, etc) tell us that the path to order and law in society is through submission to their violent political organization. But God’s prophets tell us, to the contrary, that it is only His kingdom that is sustainable and everlasting. The statist kingdoms of the world are to be replaced by God, at their expense. “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever” (Revelation 11:15). 

God the State-smasher

This thesis is inescapable. Nearly the whole Bible is “political.” It talks about the kingdoms of men, the alternative kingdom of God, the political theory one should hold, etc. And it covers the kingdoms of men, ie., the States of the world (that means even “constitutional republics”), raising themselves up against God and being destroyed for this great rebellion and sin. Most men would not like to hear this, because they have placed their saving-faith in the very institutions that God says are false gods and destroys for that reason. 

While we may not called to destroy these systems ourselves, as evil as they are, this doesn’t mean that God is not allowed to get His hands dirty or that He won’t. Indeed, we’re told to leave this very vengeance—judgment upon the evil kingdoms of men—to God (Deut 32:35). 

Most people don’t realize how radically State-smashing God truly is, and they would even be offended because they are idolaters of the kingdoms of men and their figureheads. Trump-worshipers, many who even claim to know God, won’t like hearing that these are the men God destroys, that “He shall execute kings in the day of His wrath. He shall judge among the nations, He shall fill the places with dead bodies, He shall execute the heads of many countries” (Psalm 110:5-6). 

God destroys all these proud men who raise themselves up into positions of political power and pretend to be gods from their earthly thrones. 

“It shall come to pass in that day, That the Lord will punish on high the host of exalted ones, And on the earth the kings of the earth. They will be gathered together, As prisoners are gathered in the pit, And will be shut up in the prison; After many days they will be punished” (Isaiah 24:21-22). 

The kingdoms of men are temporary, despite the claims of the rulers and their followers that, eg., “we have the most powerful military in the world and could never be destroyed.” God wrecks human rulers, because they have substituted their false, worldly authority for the kingship of the Lord. 

“He brings the princes to nothing and makes the rulers of the earth meaningless. No sooner are they planted, no sooner are they sown, no sooner have their stems taken root in the ground, than He blows on them and they wither, and a whirlwind sweeps them away like stubble” (Isaiah 40:23-24).

Though these men may be prominent in our statist world for the time being, and though they have hitherto been rather successful at enslaving men, the prophets tell us that the “princes will come to nothing” (Isaiah 34:12). 

Statist societies are, quite literally, going to become a fiery hell. 

“Therefore her plagues will come in one day—death and grief and famine—and she will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her.’ Then the kings of the earth who committed sexual immorality and lived in luxury with her will weep and wail at the sight of the smoke rising from the fire that consumes her. In fear of her torment, they will stand at a distance and cry out: ‘Woe, woe to the great city, the mighty city of Babylon! For in a single hour your judgment has come’” (Revelation 18:9). 

One day, again, when God judges all the wickedness on earth, all the statist systems of the world will be turned into ashes, recalling the scene of Sodom and Gomorrah early on in the scriptures. “He looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and all the land of the plain, and he saw the smoke rising from the land like smoke from a furnace” (Genesis 19:28). 

The evils of statism will one day be an ash heap, to the great disappointment of all those who told us that state power was the only way to have society. No matter how much idolaters told themselves that “that’s such a beautiful flag we have waving in the wind” or “our soldiers are just the most brave and handsome men in the world,” these proud and evil systems will come to an end. The States of the world are not marked to last forever, but it is written that they must fail. 

“Babylon, the jewel of the kingdoms, the glory of the pride of the Chaldeans, will be overthrown by God like Sodom and Gomorrah” (Isaiah 13:19). 

Man’s fight against the word of God

Men who are not in their Bibles are going to struggle to see that the kingdoms of the world are not permanent, but are all bound to come under judgment. Since most men form their ideas from the world, they are most likely to arrive at the false idea that human government is indispensable to civilization, without which we wouldn’t even be alive. And it’s no wonder they avoid God while remaining in their statism. The reason that men fight against the word of God is because it rebukes them for their statolatry (idolatry of the State), which they stubbornly wish to cling on to, even acting as if the States of our world are different from the Biblical systems. “This is a constitutional republic and not a kingdom, learn the difference! You can’t apply Samuel 8 to our day where we have a democratic right to vote.”

It is thus easy to see why men fight against the scriptures. Most of them have been caught worshiping the very systems that God destroys. The word of God is more or less a king-killing spree, where He works…

“…to make them a ruin, an object of horror and contempt and cursing, as they are to this day—Jerusalem and the cities of Judah, its kings and officials; Pharaoh king of Egypt, his officials, his leaders, and all his people; all the mixed tribes; all the kings of Uz; all the kings of the Philistines: Ashkelon, Gaza, Ekron, and the remnant of Ashdod; Edom, Moab, and the Ammonites; all the kings of Tyre and Sidon; the kings of the coastlands across the sea; Dedan, Tema, Buz, and all who cut the corners of their hair; all the kings of Arabia, and all the kings of the mixed tribes who dwell in the desert; all the kings of Zimri, Elam, and Media; all the kings of the north, both near and far, one after another—all the kingdoms on the face of the earth” (Jeremiah 25:18-26).

Men and the world of ideas

Those who are caught up in the kingdoms of the world are simply not going to like to find out that God’s plan is to remove them from the earth and erase them from history. And so they allow the secular intellectuals to keep lying to them, telling them that statism is “progressive” and the future of humanity, when God says the opposite.

Most men would vehemently disagree with this Biblical promise that the kingdoms of men will be ended, not only because the State is their “god” who they defend, but also because this is the way they have been trained to think. 

Though ninety-nine times out of one hundred a man is going to run into a statist if he searches the world for knowledge, it isn’t strictly true that every thinker who hasn’t cited God is completely off the rails — though most of them will be. 

While the general “wisdom” of the world of secular thinking is most likely to lead one to statism, this idea that States are not permanent or inevitable does have some secular existence. It is however the exception, and not the rule, for secular theorists to preach against the kingdoms of men. Most secular philosophers, not having taken their wisdom from the scriptures, are statists and socialists (same thing) who defend these false kingdoms and the false religion (the ideological statism) behind them. Without God on their side, they naturally gravitate to false gods and worldly ideas.

One of these exceptions is libertarian anarchism (a la Murray Rothbard), which holds that the State is not needed for social order but that voluntary interaction and markets are sufficient to the maintenance of society, prosperity, and order. The idea of liberty how he knew it was right in line with the voluntaristic kingdom of God as we should be doing it. As he explained the secular stance,

“The libertarian approach to the welfare problem…is to abolish all coercive, public welfare, and to substitute for it private charity based on the principle of encouraging self-help, bolstered also by inculcating the virtues of self-reliance and independence throughout society.”

While we might add that such a private charity program is based on God and love of our neighbors, he was nevertheless describing the type of order that the kingdom of God looks like, where men are no longer trusting in the State to provide for them. Much of what he had to say (though not all) can be lined up with scripture.

Like the Biblical prophets, though, Rothbard defended the inevitable failure of statism, not its triumph (as the statist false prophets preach). He was always rather optimistic that statism, and the secularism that helps to support it, couldn’t go on forever. His economic predecessor, Ludwig von Mises, also taught that socialist experiments (which is what all governments are) are doomed to failure every time. 

Of all the secular theory to parse through in the world, it was seemingly only the free market anarchists who jive with scripture; everyone else is a statist, or property- and person-invader of some sort, that proposes ideas that are antagonistic to the social order of God. Of particular relevance in this case, Rothbard saw that there is nothing inevitable or permanent about the State.

God’s judgment upon the kingdoms of men

We should likewise preach the end of statism, and should live like it’s the truth. The Biblical prophets were preaching directly to kings the inevitable failure of their societies, which, for having adopted statism and surely other accompanying moral depravities, had gone astray from God and were to come under judgment.

“Hear the word of the LORD, O kings of Judah and residents of Jerusalem. This is what the LORD of Hosts, the God of Israel, says: I am going to bring such disaster on this place that the ears of all who hear of it will ring, because they have abandoned Me and made this a foreign place” (Jeremiah 19:3-4; cf. Jer 13:18, 17:20

Most men, being statists, would not like to hear that God destroys their beloved rulers, that He vows, “‘I will cut off the ruler of Moab and kill all the officials with him,’ says the LORD” (Amos 2:3). “Not our wonderful ‘public servants’ and ‘public safety’ officers,” most people might say upon seeing what God does to the kingdoms of men. 

But God’s judgment always falls precisely on the proud men (ie., the political rulers) of our world.

“The LORD of hosts hath purposed it, to stain the pride of all glory, and to bring into contempt all the honorable of the earth” (Isaiah 23:9). 

God’s law of liberty

But there is another point to be made here, which hearkens back somewhat to the secular argument made by market economists that statism and socialism bring societal ruin. While God may destroy a pagan society directly, He mostly allows them to destroy themselves while still receiving the glory for it. It is built into the providential law that statism, which is based in idolatry, theft, violence, and sin in general, must breed destruction of society. The Law of Cause and Effect, established by God, necessitates that every pagan kingdom sows its own destruction after germinating the seed by which it was planted. Men idolatrously establish a central bank (eg., Federal Reserve) for a pagan society and structure it with socialist institutions, and this invariably leads to the weeping and gnashing of teeth of moral and fiscal bankruptcy, through inflation and currency-collapse, as well as self-destructive policies like martial law, organized crime, and disenfranchised communities. This paganism/statism is unsustainable, and the disaster that such idolatry brings is its own punishment and recompense.

At any rate, those who have placed their faith in the State to save society might want to reconsider their position considering that God promises that all these plunder systems must come to end, whether at His hand or their own. They are neither permanent nor inevitable, but are guaranteed to be destroyed. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken it.