[This is part 4 in a series on God and justice. See part one, two, three, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

The notion that God desires a just society is not very prevalent among many modern Christians. The idea that we are called to pursue a just society—that we are to seek the Kingdom of God as Christ preached—is almost completely ignored by most Christians whose sights are set on the heavens. For them, “religion” is merely a spiritual or otherworldly concern, leading them to conclude that we have no real earthly responsibilities beyond saving souls and preparing for an afterlife in heaven. The longing to escape this life is a more common sentiment among Christians than the motivation to do anything about the perversions of truth and justice in our world, hence why it’s common to hear the escapist, “I can’t wait to get out of here.” 

Under these heavenly-minded ways of thinking, men come to think that most social-earthly matters are the responsibility of human civil government rather than individual men of faith who must uphold their duties to family, neighbors, and God. They see issues of law, justice, defense, and welfare as secular-statist concerns that are separate from their religious beliefs and practices, which are thought to be the things men do in private or on Sunday morning. Matters of daily ministration of social needs are regarded as being in the domain of human government, rather than Christian men obeying God. Religion is thought of as solely a spiritual matter involving personal beliefs about God and religious rituals, rather than serving one another. They think it is fine for their brothers to get their daily bread from Caesar, since providing for one another is not thought to be part of one’s religious practices. Seemingly the only reason for calling oneself a Christian in their eyes is just to be among a camp of believers who are just awaiting the ship to Heaven. Religion isn’t seen as how you take care of the needy in society, whether (1) through God’s people freely doing it themselves by congregating with others in charitable networks meant to serve each other regularly, or (2) by forming political-legal systems to covet your neighbor’s property and provide “charity” through force. It is thought that saying “Lord, Lord” is good enough. Seeking the Kingdom of God and freeing our people from Egyptian captivity is mostly off their radars and even considered futile.

This abdication of earthly responsibilities has largely come about because Christians today are not doers of the word and think that professions of faith are all that religion and service to God is about. Though Christ taught that serving and providing for one’s neighbors is the essence of one’s Christian duty, many Christians have disregarded these responsibilities. In doing so, they have given way to the statist religion where false benefactors claim to be men of “public service” as they carry out the administration of law, justice, welfare, etc., but operate on the principles of force and violence and provide these things in an authoritarian manner. This lack of pure religion, ie., of men serving each other freely out of love of neighbor and love of God, which results when Christians consider religion to be nothing more than a concern for where their soul is headed, is how we get the religion of socialism, where state rulers “serve” our neighbors for us and bring everyone into tax bondage. If we don’t do these things ourselves, but think of them as someone else’s duty, the Caesars of the world are more than happy to come along and seize upon our irresponsibility and control these goods and services for us in order to gain dependents who apologize for the alleged necessity of human rulers, as well as to rope the people into tax bondage.

Often when people do get around to thinking about God’s love of justice and His disdain for the unjust political systems we live under today, their views on setting things right are thoroughly statist. They believe that this justice should come about by reforming the Babylonian systems of the world and vainly attempting to Christianize them.

Even the so-called “liberation theology” that ostensibly seeks the freedom of oppressed people is typically rooted in a political approach to solving social injustices. They, too, often fail to recognize that these injustices are caused by the very state apparatus that these liberation theologians seem willing to use to “liberate” people and fix “inequalities” through socialist means like welfare, property distribution, and government intervention.

In a statist system as ours, it often becomes impossible for many people to conceive of the ways of God’s kingdom anymore, much to the satisfaction of the plunderers who rely on people not knowing God or seeing alternatives to the political systems of the world that Christ said His kingdom is unlike. With men having lived in an ungodly society where the political means have been used for so long to do everything, it has been difficult for them to see any other way of things being done. This is why most people will ask, “who would provide for the poor without the government?” or “who would protect us without the police?” It never occurs to them that providing for their families and neighbors is their own responsibility, not the government’s — that the answer to “who will protect us without the military?” is you and us. They’re so used to outsourcing these duties to rulers who fund them through tax robbery that they ironically can’t conceive of any other way to avoid robbery than to institute robbery into law.

One telltale sign that law and justice has been perverted in society and that we are living in a backward world of people who hate God is that not only is justice and liberty not sought among these people, but they shout things like “back the blue” and worship our very captors as the people who are supposedly keeping order in society. People end up praising Pharaoh’s “law enforcers” as heroes because they are people who hate God and His ways. “Those who forsake the law praise the wicked, but those who keep the law resist them” (Proverbs 28:4). And they do this even though they should be absolutely appalled that God’s liberty has been perverted with man-made law systems and violent officers to carry out the schemes of men. “Rage has taken hold of me because of the wicked who reject Your law” (Psalm 119:53).

Perverted justice and minds 

When a man’s only lense is the worldly systems around him that he has failed to come out of as instructed by scripture, his whole worldview is formed within this framework. The statist society around them is successful at further corrupting everyone’s perspectives of politics and social order and blinding them to the solutions that exist outside the political box. They defend the political system as a “necessary evil” or even a “necessary good,” even when they sense something is amiss and don’t feel fully confident in their own position. The established statist “social order” (there is nothing social or orderly about it), where everything is upside down and backwards, helps to perpetuate the political plunder system that relies on people’s failure to renew their minds, shed their worldly ideologies, and be reborn. They become all around corrupted in a corrupted world and lose their ability to think and make their own judgments. They forget about God and derive their “truths” from the world.

Not only does the “law” itself hold double-standards in these perverted political societies, but so do the people who believe in these systems. Theft become justified when it is called “taxation” or “monetary policy,” kidnapping becomes justified when it is called a “warrant” for a “failure to appear in court,” murder becomes legitimized when it is called “war” or “the officer fears for his life.”  People who break into homes without badges are labeled as burglars, which most consider justification for using defensive force, while SWAT teams that invade homes for a living are seen as men who are “enforcing the law” or “just doing their jobs,” and defending oneself against them is thought to be unjustifiable. 

With all the corruption that the worldly system of human government brings, even Christian men have largely forgotten about God’s love of justice and His hatred for the injustices that we advance when we seek the kingdoms of men rather than His rulership. They have conflated it with the perversion of justice that is state “law” and disregarded their own responsibility to seek justice. 

Forgetting justice 

As we see, societies turn so backwards under state rule that most people cannot even begin to conceive of what a social order should look like. They know nothing about the Kingdom of God. All their thoughts are animated by the kingdoms of men, which pretend to accomplish the administration of social needs through political violence, but merely plunder men and destroy these societies in the process. Again, this is why men are so hung up on asking “who will build the roads?” or “who will protect us?” upon the first sight of a proposal that human government is not only unnecessary for these things, but precisely contrary to achieving them. They don’t know the word or ways of God anymore.

Thus, most people think that we need States to protect us from “bad guys,” when God tells us that He sends enemies (eg., States) against us precisely for this sin of trusting in human rulers rather than Him (Judges 3:7-8, 4:1-2, 10:6-7, 13:1; Neh 9:26-27; Sam 12:9; Psa 106:40-42; Jer 17:5; Isa 31:1-3, 63:10; Hos 10:13-14). For the evils of practicing statism, God allows people to be destroyed by their very fears of the lawlessness, injustices, and “anarchy” that they imagine would occur without human rulers. “He who sows injustice will reap disaster” (Prov 22:8). They are the people who have come to believe in human saviors—in the political gods of this world promising freedom through government—and “have forgotten the God of your salvation and failed to remember the Rock of your refuge” (Isa 17:10). They have forgotten their Maker (Hos 8:14) and come to believe that human government was at the source of social order, that they needed a military to take care of Egyptians when God has proven He can smash these kings and their armies. In trusting in governments to protect them, “They forgot God their Savior, who did great things in Egypt” (Psalm 106:21). By trusting in man’s political systems in general, “They have perverted their ways and forgotten the LORD their God” (Isa 3:21). When men forget God, they always face the oppressive societies of human government.

“You have forgotten the LORD, your Maker, who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth. You live in terror all day long because of the fury of the oppressor who is bent on destruction” (Isaiah 51:13).

Going further astray from the Lord usually becomes a cycle after the initial abandonment, which comes namely when men begin to seek human kings to provide for them. While such sinful thinking precedes the erection of statist societies and is at the root of putting them into place (Sam 8:6-8, 12:19), the longer that such systems endure, the more lost in such sinful and worldly thinking men become. As Frederic Bastiat wrote in one of his last and major works, The Law,

“The consequences of such a perversion [of law is that] it erases from everyone’s conscience the distinction between justice and injustice.”

This is how we have a world today of statist slaves who tell us to just “obey the law” without any distinction of whether it is moral or not. The State is able to get away with its crimes merely because it calls them law, and most of the people around us are too foolish to ever know the difference. The State is able to continue in its control of law and justice, because few people can see an alternative. 

Bastiat explained how the State is able to exploit an honest sense of justice in the people to get them to approve of immoral acts simply by calling them “law,” which is how our people struggle to make these distinction between political decrees and morality today, approve of anything if its written in the code books of man, and don’t think twice when a “law enforcement” officer uses violence against someone as part of his job, which they assume to be genuine protection of liberty and rights rather than enforcing man-made edicts entirely detached from any protection of people and property (and decidedly involved with invading them). They come to defend their own victimization of these “law” systems in the belief that they are genuine merely because they operate under the good name of “the law.”

“There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are ‘just’ because law makes them so. Thus, in order to make plunder appear just and sacred to many consciences, it is only necessary for the law to decree and sanction it. Slavery, restrictions, and monopoly find defenders not only among those who profit from them but also among those who suffer from them” (Bastiat, The Law). 

Forgetting God’s ways

Since statism and its perversion of law and justice has been pressing on for so long now, few people even know how to go about the business of restoring society anymore. As one prophet says,

“‘For they know not how to do right,’ declares the LORD. ‘They store up violence and destruction in their citadels’” (Amos 3:10).

People can’t see outside the political box anymore; reforming the current system is as far as their eyes can see. The rulers themselves are wicked men who are bent on plunder and violence. Few people even care about this, even though God rails against these evil, unjust, violent plunder systems and the men who operate them throughout His whole word.

“You hate good and love evil. You tear the skin from my people and strip the flesh from their bones. You eat the flesh of my people after stripping off their skin and breaking their bones. You chop them up like flesh for the cooking pot, like meat in a cauldron” (Micah 3:2-3).

Despite God showing us the way and path that was right, which has nothing to do with seeking human rulers, our people have remained ignorant to the ways of the Lord.

“For My people are fools; they have not known Me. They are foolish children, without understanding. They are skilled in doing evil, but they know not how to do good” (Jeremiah 4:22). 

Giving into the political systems and ways of the world, men forget about God entirely and become completely wrapped up in the systems of plunder that exist, thinking they’re the only way societies can be carried out.

“Hear the word of the LORD, O children of Israel, for the LORD has a case against the people of the land: ‘There is no truth, no loving devotion, and no knowledge of God in the land! Cursing and lying, murder and stealing, and adultery are rampant; one act of bloodshed follows another” (Hosea 4:1-2).

Both the plunderers themselves, and the statist fools who support the plunderers in spirit, forget about God and His ways.

“Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge? who eat up my people as they eat bread, and call not upon the LORD” (Psalm 14:4).

The injustices of statism as judgment

We have ended up in an Egyptian police state society because men sinfully believed they needed men to protect them and provide law and justice for them, only for these men to turn around and use their control of these things to plunder us — to “use their power to shed blood” (Ezek 22:6). Few men want to recognize their own complicity in it too by walking away from God’s order, hence why many have thoughts of revolution when they see the evils. They can’t see, “Have you not brought this on yourself by forsaking the LORD your God when He led you in the way?” (Jeremiah 2:17).

This is what men get as judgment from God for believing they needed men to protect and defend and feed them, and failing to do these things for their neighbors on their own. Injustices and evils are what men get for believing that government agents are people who “protect and serve” because they wrote it on their cars, when they’re men “who fill their masters house with violence and deceit” (Zephaniah 1:9), whose jobs are bringing back property for the crown, who are revenue agents in a vast system of extortion, who are men “bent on bloodshed” (Ezek 22:9), who, along with the wicked men whom they take orders and “laws” from, are people who “devour the people, seize the treasures and precious things, and multiply the widows” (Ezekiel 22:25). This is what always happens in political law systems. “Her officials within her are like wolves tearing their prey, shedding blood, and destroying lives for dishonest gain” (Ezekiel 22:27). 

But since men have thought that these were “peace officers” who exists to bring “law and order” to society, such legalized crimes have prevailed for now. Men have thought that aggressive violence against non-violent people has been “justice,” that beating up men who never violated another man’s person or property is “law.” They would sooner side with the agents trepassing on their neighbor’s liberty in the name of the “law,” than their neighbor who is being extorted or kidnapped by them. They have been unable to see what true justice looks like, which would have much more to do with protecting our neighbors from being extorted, eg., by men who would evict them on behalf of demonic county agents who have decided their home is now the property of the State. This is what true justice looks like, contrary to the police worshipers who would tell us that “they should have just paid their taxes and been a law-abiding citizen like me” — another sign of how lost people are when it comes to true law and justice. 

“This is what the LORD says: Administer justice and righteousness. Rescue the victim of robbery from the hand of his oppressor. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless, or the widow. Do not shed innocent blood in this place” (Jeremiah 22:3). 

It is by caring about the injustices in our statist societies, an evil that sadly disturbs very few men, that we begin to care about true justice and liberty. It is not good enough for the follower of God to sit around and do nothing to change the culture around him and agitate men toward a different path than what they have known so far. We are to be helping our brothers escape the dominion of man by preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom of God to them, where Jesus has come to liberate men from the political enslavement that has come upon them for their rebellion against God. We are called to do it. 

“Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; uphold the rights of the afflicted and oppressed. Rescue the weak and needy; save them from the hand of the wicked” (Psalm 82:3-4).