Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

Those who have read the scriptures and realized just how much God hates statism, and are now trying to tell others about this chief form of idolatry, have the frustrating, unpaid, and thankless job—the same job as that of the prophets—of trying to lead the masses of stubborn, unrepentant statist sinners back to the Lord, who don’t want to give up the lies of their false gods.

One thing that makes preaching the ideas of liberty so difficult is that statism/socialism is not merely based in economic illiteracy or some gaps in philosophical reasoning, as secular libertarians tend to think, but is deeply rooted in sin for the false god State. As the abolitionist Christian anarchist Michael Plaisted said, “[The] failure to be aware of these subjects is not an ignorance issue, but rather a sin issue.” This is why it has always been so hard to persuade men out of their statism through mere appeals to logic or calls for ethical consistency (if you or I may not rob someone, why may men who call themselves “the government” do so?). It is deeper than mere fallacies that lead men to the ideology of statism, though confused ethical and economic ideas are abundant among these men. Statism is, for its adherents, a religion — and accordingly is aggressively defended. Given that men are religiously devoted to statism, we have to rely on the word of God even more than simple philosophical ways of thinking in our attempts to sway men. As Michael Plaisted writes,

“Most people value a concept of liberty on some moral grounds, but they lack a consistent worldview full of ultimate answers by which to presuppose liberty as valuable, or morality as definitive. Abolitionists recognize that only an evangelical approach to a lost and self-righteous generation is one that might free them from the bondage of their own making. Men must be converted if they want to be free.”

We have to do more than simply tell men to “read an economics” book if we want to demonstrate the futility of state intervention. Men are deeply invested in the lies they have bought into and they hate the truth. They hate to hear the words of the prophets, who show their “beautiful” and wondrous statist societies in flames one day. They can’t imagine that their “most powerful military in the world” will one day become nothing, that the welfare schemes they believe are necessary for the poor actually impoverish them.

Men hate to hear that their statism is idolatrous ultimately because they hate God. Now, they won’t admit this. Of course, tens of millions of Americans find their statism to be compatible with their professed Christianity. But that they fight against the rebuke of their idols, going so far as to make threatening statements like “I dare you to burn a flag in front of me,” only proves how committed they are to the gods of this world, embodied more in the kingdoms of men than anywhere else. 

But we have to bring the message of God’s liberty to people anyway, even as they inevitably fight against it. God commands it. We’re sent to share the will of God, known especially through the prophets, with all the people who can’t see what’s going on. It’s just what we have to do. “To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house” (Isaiah 42:7). That men often won’t hear it shouldn’t stop us from giving the good word. As Michael Plaisted says,

“[Even though] those whom God has given over to a reprobate mind to belong to false gods in their idolatry will suppress the truth in unrighteousness [and] deceive themselves and react out of their conviction when exposed in their sin, God compels us to preach the Gospel anyway: Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand (Matt 3:2). You cannot serve two masters (Matt 6:24). You must obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29).

The Word vs. the World

All we can do is keep trying to show our brothers that this is a prison society and that their minds are snared with the phony philosophies of men, which is always the result when men get their “wisdom” from the world rather than the Word. The masses of people are largely statists because they have gotten their philosophies from men, hence why the Apostle Paul tells us to guard ourselves against these worldly philosophies (Colossians 2:8).

We have to rely on the word of God in ministering to men, because the “wisdom” of most men around us is foolish and evil, and because the word of God is our main weapon in this battle (2 Cor 10:3-5; Eph 6:17; Heb 4:12; Matt 4:1-11).

Of course, what the average man—almost always in great error—thinks is usually completely out of line with the will of God. The average man sees no problem with regarding the State as “necessary” to society. And professing Christians generally see no need to reconcile their love of State with their faith in God. The two are seen as completely compatible. Actually, it would seem strange to most people if you didn’t believe in both. “God bless our troops” is a stock phrase among our people. They see no problem with Christians joining the military, and think we should be praying for “the troops” as they go out and murder for Pharaoh. The rare man who sees the contradiction—that God hates when men serve Pharaohs, become his horsemen, and operate his chariots—is regarded as the “confused” one. We’re told that we missed the part of the Bible where Jesus said “render unto Caesar,” which to them is a permission slip to actively and positively support all things statism: taxes, government jobs, patriotism, statist holidays, waving flags, and holding on to the statist ideology in general. (What a convenient excuse they have to refuse to repent from their support for evils).

How the State gets its power

It would be one thing if our only problem was wondering what to do about the captivity, about being occupied right now. But our problem is even worse. Our people don’t even know they have gone into captivity. They think they’re “free.” So it isn’t as if we are all collectively strategizing our escape from Egypt; most men don’t even know they’re living in it and most of them positively love it. “This is the best country in the world and if you don’t like it you can leave.” (Only, this isn’t true either, because you can’t secede from their statist system without being attacked or robbed on the way out, as we saw in the so-called Civil War. Statists suppose that secession is “illegal”).

It makes our preaching, and our efforts to thwart these tyrants with the word of God, all the much harder that our people have given into the lies of the rulers, which is really the very thing that empowers the system. The political rulers gain their strength from the fact that they have successfully manufactured apologists among the lowly people whom they oppress and rule over, although these men have nothing to gain from their apologia of the system that extorts them for the benefit of others. In short, men oppress themselves by believing in these false gods and granting them intellectual respectability and spiritual lordship. 

The State does not truly rule by wielding force alone, which would never serve to gain it the respect it has today. It requires that men do as they have and support its heads of state, praise its officers, sing its secular anthems, take oaths to serve it, and pledge allegiance to its “sacred” objects. The “United States” empire would have never been possible without the “patriotism” that went along with it. It’s impossible to imagine that we could have ever got to this point—a global, hegemonic power with a domestic police state—without men partaking in its religious rites. Without a statist people to buy into the ideology of political violence, no State is possible. The State doesn’t rule over men merely because it has the physical might to do so. The State is a product of people saying “give us a king” (1 Sam 8:5). 

Men avoid the truth

Unfortunately most men love being lied to. It makes them feel good about the contradictions that they already believe in, and it allows them to avoid intellectual responsibility to themselves, which is already what caused them to arrive where they are. They hate it when a man of the scriptures comes around and shows the evils and errors of their statism, which they hold to be the only way of organizing society (even though they have never even considered alternatives and simply bought into the ways of the world). And it has always been this way. “They mocked the messengers of God, despising His words and scoffing at His prophets” (2 Chronicles 36:16). 

Believing that Egypt will save you

Americans simply aren’t ready for the truth anymore because they are so caught up in the idolatries of statism that the truth offends the lies they’ve been taught and have held onto their whole lives. Admittedly, it must be hard to decide to look at a flag in a different way when it’s been hanging off your house for decades, or even worse, when one of your relatives has died in vain for it, or when you yourself have had your leg blown off for it in one of Pharaoh’s wars. It’s simply easier for most men to keep lying to themselves. “That flag is a symbol of freedom and I fought for it.” Only real men are able to look back on their former idolatry, or down at their missing leg from their “service” to the military, and admit that they mistakenly served the enemy and ought to repent before the Lord. Most “veterans” wear the hat of their military branch or their specific war campaign that Pharaoh sent them in to the day they die.

But if men ever want to confront the truth and face the word of God head-on, they better be ready to confront their idols and abandon them. For God’s word is a direct attack on all the things that worldly men hold dear. Chasing after state militaries, for one, is explicitly ungodly and only leads to destruction of society. 

As the prophet taught, 

“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). 

American society is full of horse and chariot lovers, though. They think it’s awesome being a part of big and powerful plunder gangs. “Our military would run them over in ten days flat.” They think it gives them a sense of purpose, belonging, or brotherhood. The tanks and planes and police cruisers were just too “cool” for them to resist not wanting to operate. Who wants to drive a Ford Mustang in exchange for shaking down travelers on the highway system? Many of these chariot-lovers are even capable of citing a few Bible verses, like some military acts from the book of Joshua, who killed kings and was not part of a statist army, as the supposed proof that God supports military service to the evil empires of the world. 

A false freedom

Most men do not realize how their statism has brought their enslavement, because they believe that what we have is “freedom” and that without a State there is “chaos,” “anarchy,” “lawlessness,” and “disorder. They tell us that if we don’t trust in men to rule over us, that we would be ruled, and don’t see that they establish the very thing they believe they are avoiding by seeking the protection of men who call themselves “the government.”

Men feared men instead of God, and instituted state armies out of their fears, and so they got Egypt. Most people are so confused and lost that they think living in Egypt is “freedom.” But trusting in political protection has led to the opposite of freedom, despite what most men see when they squint to understand the social order around them. Far from being free, the prophet Jeremiah sees that people who should be free have instead “become plunder” (Jer 2:14). 

If you ask most men in our world, they would quickly tell you that it’s without an Egyptian society that we would all be ruled by Pharaohs (even though this can’t explain why we’re ruled by men now for having chosen this system). The vast majority of people think that the only way men are fed, clothed, safe, healthy, intelligent, etc., is because of the State. They don’t believe that God provides for His obedient people if they walk away from these false protectors. “Without the police and military,” they tell us, “there would be criminals everywhere and you’d be speaking Arabic.” To them, liberty is slavery and slavery is liberty. 

Most men get mad when you tell them that their false gods aren’t going to keep providing for them (or that they never did). They don’t like men of God coming around to tell them their “god” of “government” is a false one. They think that by showing them the Kingdom of God, which is the alternative to the statist systems of the world, that we are presenting them a worse option than what they have now. And so they tell us, “Let us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians” (Exodus 14:12). 

People fight and resist any attempts to bring them out of their beloved slave societies, and they fail to remember our Lord as one that delivers us from Egyptian systems. As one psalmist recalls of the scene at the Red Sea when Moses was trying to lead his stubborn, slavish people out of Egypt,

“Our fathers in Egypt did not grasp Your wonders or remember Your abundant kindness; but they rebelled by the sea, there at the Red Sea” (Psalm 106:7). 

Again, the general beliefs of the masses (statism) are highly at odds with the word of God on the nature of this system. They are two separate beliefs, despite these peoples’ own claim to godliness and religion. They believe that Egypt will save them, that the way to “stay free” is to institute Pharaohs into power and form powerful armies for him to command. This statism cannot be reconciled with scripture and God’s will. As the prophets knew, “Assyria will not save us” (Hosea 14:3). Americans say, “Yes it does! Without Assyria, we’d all be speaking German…and the Chinese would come to occupy us.” (I guess it’s alright to them to be presently occupied by a domestic terrorist state, so long as they speak English and claim to be “we the people” or here to “protect and serve”).

And so most men don’t want to hear that their statist societies are going to come crumbling down and fail to serve them forever. 

Hardheaded men

A great portion of scripture is all about this very narrative of people not obeying God’s law (i.e., not choosing liberty over statism), chasing after false god “governments” instead, and getting ruined for it. 

“These evil people, who refuse to listen to My words, who follow the stubbornness of their own hearts, and who go after other gods to serve and worship them, they will be like this loincloth—of no use at all” (Jeremiah 13:10). 

Even after getting destroyed by statism over and over, men still never want to learn God’s law: that statism doesn’t work. God can utterly destroy a society, leave people broken and starving, and they will still say that it’s nothing another government program can’t cure. That’s how hardheaded our people are. They refuse to see the destruction of their societies as a punishment by God for their sin of statism. As the Lord said,

“How long will these people treat Me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in Me, despite all the signs I have performed among them?” (Numbers 14:11).

From the prophets, to the psalmists, to the wisdom literature, we are taught that all these systems are vain and futile because they are based in the sinful pride and arrogance that men can violate the laws of God. 

God always sent prophets to try and wake people up to the fact that statism was going to be the end of them.

“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” (2 Chronicles 36:15). 

But no one wants to listen to such attacks on their false gods. They don’t want to hear that their statist societies represent Babylon and not the kingdom of God, that they are slavish societies and not free ones. They are too foolish to listen to and obey God, and so they march right into captivity instead of listen to those who warned them.

“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 36:16). 

As always in the narrative of the scriptures, men slip away from God and back into slavery without even noticing it, even praising their captors as their “saviors” and setting aside state holidays to honor them on. This is how you have men who profess a devotion to God and yet serve men and their systems at the same time. 

Despite the “God and country” image of many men, our people have chased after the Egyptian model and only vaguely associated it with God (mostly as means to cover for their own sinful love of the false gods that they haven’t been ready to repent from). They mistakenly believed that stumping for the state plunder system was somehow “godly” and “righteous” and represents everything God wants us to be doing on this earth. 

Men are not seeking God when they are seeking rulers. Far from going for God and liberty (as many think they have done), “they have followed the stubbornness of their hearts and gone after the Baals, as their fathers taught them” (Jeremiah 9:14). Men who tell us that state militaries and police are necessary to liberty from “other states” and “criminals” never trusted in God, who tells us, “I will rescue you from foreign subjugation. I will deliver you from captivity” (Jeremiah 30:8). 

Men didn’t want to abandon the old fallacies they inherited from birth, e.g., that “America is the best, most-free country in the world and I’m going to stand behind it.” They didn’t want to put an end to the generational sins of statism that have gone on forever. They didn’t want to hear the prophets say,

“Be ye not as your fathers, unto whom the former prophets have cried, saying, Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Turn ye now from your evil ways, and from your evil doings: but they did not hear, nor hearken unto me, saith the LORD” (Zechariah 1:4-5). 

God has always tried to warn people that their idolatry for the rulers of the world and their systems will lead a people into bondage, that those who refuse to follow God’s Law and commands will find themselves ruled by false gods, but they always chase after worldly kingdoms against His counsel.

“Yet through all His prophets and seers, the LORD warned Israel and Judah, saying, ‘Turn from your wicked ways and keep My commandments and statutes, according to the entire Law that I commanded your fathers and delivered to you through My servants the prophets.’ But they would not listen, and they stiffened their necks like their fathers, who did not believe the LORD their God. They rejected His statutes and the covenant He had made with their fathers, as well as the decrees He had given them. They pursued worthless idols and became worthless themselves, going after the surrounding nations that the LORD had commanded them not to imitate” (2 Kings 17:13-15).

The statist’s fight against the truth

Our people haven’t wanted to see the truth because it hurts. For Americans to open their eyes would require that they confess that their own flag-waving played a part in everything that is going wrong today. So they either blame someone else (eg., “the democrats”), or simply refuse to see the statist slave system at all. “They hated knowledge and chose not to fear the LORD” (Proverbs 1:29). They don’t like it when anyone comes along to correct them and tell them their statism is not just a grave intellectual error, but based in sin and being estranged from God. They have said, “How have I hated instruction, and my heart despised reproof” (Proverbs 5:12). They are not humble enough to hear a brother out, and would rather attack him than open their ears for once.

As much as we have all done in the history of the world to wake men up, the perennial problem of men—from Biblical times to ours—is that they’re statist whores, that they pimp themselves out to human rulers to be their proud tax cattle and lust for political power themselves. And so most men hate the word of God, hate His prophets, and hate His kingdom, because it goes against all their evil desires to be “as gods” and control societies through political power, or be controlled by them. They don’t care to hear the word of the Lord, because it doesn’t fit their worldly ideology that they aren’t ready to abandon. When it comes down to choosing between God or the State, most men say, “we have no king but Caesar!”