Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

The perversions of the truth among professing Christians are great right now during the 2024 election snare. Fallacies abound everywhere regarding the alleged Christian position of it being necessary to vote. They are not just missing the mark of the truth, but are feeding us the exact opposite of it. Whereas voting for man-kings is decidedly a means (if not the means) of abandoning God, we’re being told by thousands of people that not selecting one of them (or at least believing you are selecting one) is the sin! Whereas we need to repent of our support for the kingdoms of the world, we get articles telling us that “if you have not voted before, you need to repent and vote this time.”

But God says the wickedness in men is precisely in setting up human kings. While I won’t dare to say that statism (ie., the philosophy that the State is legitimate) is the essence of sin, it is no small part of it according to the scriptures, which always point such acts out to be rebellious against God.

Since men somehow miss this, even though it’s more emphasized than almost anything else in the Bible, they are able to continue on in the sin of statism while relegating sin to some other area, like infidelity to your spouse. They are able to limit sin to personal failures and fail to see the adultery and prostitution of whoring yourselves out to human rulers and worshiping their militaries (see Ezekiel 23).

But what about the bad guys? 

One excuse that we keep hearing for voting—for setting up a human ruler who is supposedly on “our” side—is that other political bad guys are coming for us. “We can’t let the democrats take over” is a cry of fear from millions of conservatives. They fear what would happen to them if they simply keep their faith in God and refrain from voting. The prevalence of evil supposedly presents a case for joining in with them and adopting their means of political violence.

Anyone who doesn’t seek king X to supposedly assure that king Y doesn’t get in there is said to be “sitting it out.” This is what abstaining from sin and evil is now called by many Christians today: “sitting on the sidelines.” They tell us we “must” join in on the evils of Egypt and seek to elect man-kings in democratic election shams that they have been duped by for decades on end.  

But this fear that “the bad guys will take over if we do nothing” or “we’ll be ruled by our enemies without a State” is a lack of fear of the Lord. The existence of other enemies does not provide us a reason to adopt their means and become statists ourselves, and doing so is expressly a rejection of God and faith that the Lord is our protector. When men set up man-kings, as they do when they vote, they forget the Lord their King and place their faith in men.

Will you choose God or men?

This is exactly what men do when they see other men (eg., “the democrats” or “the communists”) before them: they forget that God will protect us from our enemies, and turn to man-kings to “protect” them. X politician is said to be needed to keep us safe from Y, and not voting for X is said to be support for Y.

It is at these critical points—when the enemy is at the gates—where men have always failed to believe in God.  

“The LORD delivered you out of the hand of your enemies on every side, and ye dwelled safe. But when ye saw that Nahash the king of the children of Ammon came against you, ye said, Nay; but a king shall reign over us; when the LORD your God was your king” (1 Samuel 12:12). 

Likewise, when our people see “the democrats” coming against them, they say, “Forget God, we need X man to come save us.” It’s no different today than it was then.

The truth is plain here: Men who vote for presidents simply do not believe that God is their king. Statists cannot declare that “the LORD is our Judge, the LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is our King. He will save us” (Isaiah 33:22). They confess the opposite: “The State is our judge, its legislators are our lawmakers, and the head-of-State is our king. They will save us.” The statist position, whether one is a “democrat” or a “conservative,” is that with the right people in power passing the right pieces of legislation, we can “save our country.”

A lack of faith in God

Statists don’t believe in God’s ability to deliver us from our enemies, and nor do they see that the enemies have come precisely because we failed to trust in God alone. They continue in their old sins (voting for human rulers and idolizing them) and keep complaining about the results, which they evidently don’t like. 

The perennial problem of men is not believing that God will save them from their enemies, which ironically—for the fact that fearing the Lord alone remains the only solution—worsens as the evils do. “This is the most important election of our lifetime…we have to make our voice heard.”

And so when enemies arise, men always abandon God even further and turn toward men. Though they may hold to some vague notion of the Lord as their ultimate savior who will watch after their eternal soul, they fail in their faith for God’s protection in all areas. When it comes to Y king coming against them, they forget God and say, “we need X president.”

For the men who lack faith in the Lord for all things, the existence of enemies requires some earthly kings in addition to God, as if God is some sort of non-protecting ruler in the heavens who forgets to watch over His people down below. They confine God to the “spiritual realm” and seek man-rulers in the earthly realm. 

It is precisely at the presentation enemies where faith in the Lord is tested. Who will you choose? God or men? This is no innocent affair that is decided apart from one’s devotion to the Lord, say as a man might choose a brand of car. It is precisely when men set up kings (or new presidents) under the belief that they require men to protect them that God says men abandon Him, because God is a protector.

“You have rejected your God, who saves you from all your troubles and afflictions, and you have said to Him, ‘No, set a king over us’” (1 Samuel 10:19). 

Those who say they are in need of political rulers essentially say that “God fails” in this area. While God may be good at saving souls, they suggest He is terrible in the area of protection from enemies. As one new slogan says that embodies this sentiment that arbitrarily separates God into a sort of spiritual realm, “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president.” They don’t believe Jesus is their King, and that He would likewise protect them; for this they say they need man-kings (eg., Donald Trump). 

Man kings are forsaking the Lord

But if anything, God argues just the opposite of this reasoning that while we should trust in the Lord to take us to heaven when we die, we must trust in men in the meantime to protect us from our enemies. God says that trusting in protection from men is the very thing that is abandoning Him! 

Ar the risk of sounding heretical here, God is not even saying in Samuel that “you trusted in someone else for the salvation of your eternal soul.” He is not complaining merely that the people believed that someone else would get them to heaven for eternity (which would also be a problem). His grievance is that men have trusted in other men to rule over them and protect them here on earth.

While statist Christians (contradiction), under this arbitrary separation of God into a heavenly or spiritual realm where He is of little earthly good to us, believe that they can hold to the Lord their soul-saver and a state military at the same time, God actually says that trusting in kings and state militaries is the very thing that men do to turn their backs on him! It wasn’t that men were just turning from God by saying they were going to trust their eternal soul to someone else’s hands, but that they wanted “a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Samuel 8:20).

Turning back to the Lord

That men continue to keep faith in man-kings to “save” them shows just how far gone they are from the Lord. God says it is these very things—setting up kings into power and voting in their Babylonian elections—that demonstrate man’s lack of faith in God as their king. Man-kings and their statist systems are rival kings and rival kingdoms, not simply just the earthly kings in some two-kingdoms theory that says we should participate in both. You cannot serve God and the State.

And so men never see the way out of Egypt. They say that it is better to stay in Egypt and vote for new Pharaohs than to trust in God’s deliverance. They keep their faith in X politician to save them from Y politician. They say that while Y Pharaoh may be bad, we just need to get X Pharaoh in there. He will “make our country great again.”

If anything, when things get bad men should realize their mistake of setting up human rulers above themselves. They should weep at what they have done and repent. The prophet Hosea mocks these statists who suddenly see all the troubles but aren’t getting any relief.

“Where is your king now to save you in all your cities, and the rulers to whom you said, ‘Give me a king and princes’?” (Hosea 13:10). 

Unfortunately, the elites are always able to feed the slaves someone else—a Donald Trump—who is able to bamboozle them one more time and lead them to forsaking God over and over and trusting in another man to save them and fight their battles for them. They keep believing that X king is coming to save them from Y king. They believe that the way out of Egypt is through voting.

Repenting from man-kings

Will men ever learn? Will they ever stop being hardheaded? Will they ever stop stubbornly refusing to repent? Will they ever stop believing in lies? They haven’t done so yet at large. They are still saying, “Give us a king.” And, by that, they are still saying that God is not good enough.

What’s curious is that if they ever wanted to stop facing the calamities that they acknowledge on the one hand, they must stop seeking human rulers as they do on the other. They must stop putting their hand to evil altogether, as they do when they place their ballots in a box. They must stop thinking that X guy is needed to combat Y guy. For these human rulers, which they see on the one hand, come precisely when men forsake God for human rulers. 

“When Jacob went to Egypt, your fathers cried out to the LORD, and He sent them Moses and Aaron, who brought your fathers out of Egypt and settled them in this place. But they forgot the LORD their God, and He sold them into the hand of Sisera the commander of the army of Hazor, and into the hands of the Philistines and the king of Moab, who fought against them” (1 Samuel 12:8-9).

When one realizes that they are ruled by evil men, the last thing they should do is keep supporting human-rulers to “protect” them from the bad guys, and the first thing they should do is turn back to God, which is accomplished by turning away from men.

Those who think we need X guy to make sure Y guy doesn’t rule over us are still lost sheep, a scattered flock who have gone astray from the Lord, anxiously searching for a “savior” among men. The very frantic attitude of voters to elect a new guy— “we’re all screwed if X doesn’t get in there”—proves them to be man-fearers who are not abiding in the peace that the Lord gives to those who trust in Him. God-fearing men are not anxious or angry during election seasons, and they won’t be excited or depressed no matter what the results are. They know that the purpose of these rituals is to incite emotion and rope men into participating in them.

Voting shows men to be unrepentant worldly fools who keep their faith in men to provide for them. Rather than to see their own complicity in it all and confess their sin of supporting human government and its false god rulers, these men continue to be rebels against the Lord and fight against the system (which is judgment against them) with the very sinful things that got them here: setting up man-kings. Rather than see the situation and say, “oh my, we have sinned,” they say, “our enemies are everywhere, we must sin more.” Rather than to see “the democrats” (and the State in general) as judgment against them, they think they are a force of evil that are acting on their own and that must be defeated by controlling the reigns of political power ourselves.

There is hope

But men are in trouble today not because they failed to put X in power, as voters tell us we are doing if we don’t all rally at the polls. They are in trouble because they approve of human rulers, period. The “great evil” that men commit is asking for a king (1 Sam 12:17). Repentance involves turning away from this ideology and idolatry altogether, whether it’s politician X, Y, or Z.

Our situation is not hopeless today, but it requires repentance. Those who are still voting for X to fight Y are still looking in the wrong direction and longing for king-saviors among men.

Evil has never progressed too far to be turned back, but it does however require the one thing men rarely want to do at its later stages: confess the sin of statism, repent of it, and turn back to the Lord. We are never too far gone, assuming men can embrace a repentant, rather than a continued king-seeking, mindset.

“Even though you have committed all this evil, do not turn aside from following the LORD, but serve the LORD with all your heart. Do not turn aside after worthless things that cannot profit you or deliver you, for they are empty” (1 Samuel 12:20-21).