[This is part 5 in a series on God and justice. See part one, two, three, four, six, seven, eight, nine, ten]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

As more people begin to recognize that we are living in captivity to human rulers, they may start questioning how this came to be. How is it that men have gotten themselves into bondage to human rulers? How is it that we have become captives to wicked men who plunder us? How has it come to be that we’re producing the bricks and a gang of non-producing who call themselves the “government” live parasitically off us?

While it’s rare for men to even sense the political bondage, often chalking taxation up to be “the price we pay for civilization,” they often struggle to pinpoint where things went wrong. Was it because we elected the wrong Pharaohs who mismanaged an otherwise exceptional system of constitutional government? Many people take this shortsighted view. Was it that we passed the wrong “laws” somewhere down the line? Many people seem to think the system of human government only recently turned evil. Was it simply a lack of proper oversight over government spending that led to the current state of plunder, waste, fraud, and abuse? Those seeking to make government “efficient” operate under this assumption that government has a people-problem, not a violence and sin problem.

The political rebellion against God

Until we see how we have abandoned our faith in the Lord by submitting to human rulers to go into bondage, we will not make much progress in understanding how to both get out of Egypt and do things differently this time. The political problem we suffer under is not one of type or degree, such that “constitutional republics” are good and only when they stay “limited,” but a matter of principle and divine command. God never instructs His people to form a State. Men set up human civil governments in their rebellion to God, when they fail to regard the Lord as their King.

It is this statism, which is not mysteriously ignored as a sin among the patriotic “America” lovers who don’t want to be rebuked for their flag-waving, voting, and idolatry toward human rulers, that is at the center of man’s rebellion to God. It is the act of seeking man-kings to rule over us that God explicitly says is sinful (Sam 12:19) and a rejection of His kingship (Sam 8:6-8). It is acts like seeking the “protection” of “defense departments” and the “benefits” of public welfare schemes that leads men into the snares and traps of human government — that leads them away from the pure religion of personal responsibility toward the weightier matters and toward the public religion of legal charity based in violence and theft and coveting your neighbor’s property.  

Going under human civil government is sin because it makes you an idolater, adulterer, thief, murderer, and whatever else breaking the six other commandments would make you. It is this sin that brings great evils upon us. The vast injustices we reap from man’s political systems are the price we pay for this sin of statism. The civil governments that men set up in their sin are necessary in order to be the Hell to punish the evildoers that go under them.

Our contribution to our bondage 

Our political enslavement cannot be understood without referencing our relationship to God. For it was by abandoning the Lord as our King that we opened the door to being occupied by human rulers who take us for a plunder and rip the flesh off our bones. Until people recognize this truth, they will be searching in vain for a way out of Egypt — assuming their sights are even on the other side and they aren’t just relishing in Babylon. Those who fail to see how statism is a rejection of God, or rather that our rejection of God is highly centered around our quest for political systems of power, will fruitlessly seek to escape from their captivity. Worse, failing to acknowledge our own complicity in this bondage—our willingness to have other gods, legitimize human rulers, and morally approve of tax-theft and murder—may lead some to believe they can shoot their way out of Egypt, when in reality this path will only cement their subjugation under Pharaoh’s army and police, who stand over them more so due to their spiritual and mental enslavement than their lack of weapons. 

To truly escape the bondage of Egypt, men must first confess their sin of statism — the worldly ideology that has long deceived them and enslaved them into believing that human civil government is legitimate and should even be worshiped and praised as the apotheosis of civilization and order. They must repent of these sins, regenerate their hearts, turn away from the worldly doctrine of statism, and seek the Kingdom of God as the sole alternative to the failed systems of man. Only by recognizing that our Egyptian captivity today is the direct result of our own actions—sowing the wicked seeds of setting up civil governments and praising them as our saviors—can men hope to avoid the disastrous consequences that a people must inevitably reap from this wide road of destruction.

Men have to turn from their sin—their support for theft, murder, and idolatry that is inherent in human government—if they wish to turn back the captivity. Sin is the breaking of God’s Law. Each of the ten commandments are necessary to preserve liberty through the Dominion Mandate. Breaking any of them is a return to subject citizenship of civil bondage.

Reaping what you sow 

It is perhaps in the political sphere where the providential law of God, whereby men do good or evil and reap the same, is most starkly evident. When men do such evil things as erect or support governments, they naturally harvest the evils that inevitably arise from these systems, all which God promises will come to pass for this rejection of His rulership (1 Sam 8:10-18). For abandoning God as our ruler, we get taxation, inflation, conscription, enslavement, prisons, labor camps, mass surveillance, police states, and all the other grave injustices and genocides—tens of millions of people murdered by “their own” governments—that were not coincidentally pervasive throughout the 20th century and beyond as the modern state solidified its power.

It is this law of cause and effect, or reaping what we sow, that helps to explain the political bondage and widespread injustices plaguing society today. Those who sow the evil seeds of human government reap the resulting enslavement. Those who defy God’s commands against political organization must bear the consequences of this rebellion. When people reject God as their ruler and seek earthly rulers, they inevitably fall under the dominion of human authorities who subjugate them through their own contrived legal systems.

How men go into slavery

Many fail to recognize this divine principle that sin leads to bondage, that disobeying God leads to a loss of liberty. They mistakenly believe they can trifle with human civil government without consequence, when, in truth, those who reject God’s sovereignty and instead place their trust in earthly rulers for “freedom” and “law and order” end up surrendering their freedom in the process. Likewise, when they neglect to love and serve their neighbors on their own, they cede the responsibilities of (self) governance to men who operate by exercising authority and lording it over them.

Ultimately, sin is the root cause of physical captivity and how we explain the political situation we’ve arrived at today. 

“All this happened because the people of Israel had sinned against the LORD their God, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They had worshiped other gods and walked in the customs of the nations that the LORD had driven out before the Israelites, as well as in the practices introduced by the kings of Israel” (2 Kings 17:7-8).

It is a people’s failure to serve God alone and “have no other gods before Me” that has led them to live in captivity to men, which serves as divine judgment for their evil ways and political ideas which they learned from the world in their refusal to seek counsel from the Lord. When people turn their backs on God, He turns His back on them, allowing them to be dominated by the men they choose to rule over them as punishment for these very evils.

“And the nations shall know that the house of Israel went into captivity for their iniquity, because they dealt so treacherously with me that I hid my face from them and gave them into the hand of their adversaries, and they all fell by the sword” (Ezekiel 39:23). 

When men trust in man-gods (ie., political rulers) to stand over them, they forsake the Lord and His protection and are handed over to these tyrants who they have (unwittingly or not) begged for. Statist tyrannies are what men get who turn away from God as their ruler. 

“On that day My anger will burn against them, and I will abandon them and hide My face from them, so that they will be consumed, and many troubles and afflictions will befall them. On that day they will say, ‘Have not these disasters come upon us because our God is no longer with us?’ And on that day I will surely hide My face because of all the evil they have done by turning to other gods” (Deuteronomy 31:17-18).

The Biblical explanation for bondage to human rulers is always that men have sinned by turning away from the Lord their God to trust instead in other “gods” (eg., presidents and politicians) as their new rulers, who God himself sends as the punishment for this sin. As the prophet devastatingly puts it, 

“When the people ask, ‘For what offense has the LORD our God done all these things to us?’ You are to tell them, ‘Just as you have forsaken Me and served foreign gods in your land, so will you serve foreigners in a land that is not your own'” (Jeremiah 5:19). 

The political captivity we’re living under today is easily explained by men having turned away from God by asking for men to rule over them instead. 

“When you tell these people all these things, they will ask you, ‘Why has the LORD pronounced all this great disaster against us? What is our iniquity? What is the sin that we have committed against the LORD our God?’ Then you are to answer them: ‘It is because your fathers have forsaken Me, declares the LORD, and followed other gods, and served and worshiped them. They abandoned Me and did not keep My instructions. And you have done more evil than your fathers. See how each of you follows the stubbornness of his evil heart instead of obeying Me” (Jeremiah 16:10-13). 

God always warns men exactly what happens when they seek human kings to rule over them, as He did with the rebellious Israelites who wanted a human king to fight their battles for them (Sam 8:10-18), but they never listen. For this great sin of trusting in human rulers, as our people are still doing today, God allows all the evils that always materialize in a statist society to act as a judgment and curse upon these reprobates who wouldn’t hear His word. 

“I will pursue them with sword and famine and plague. I will make them a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth—a curse, a desolation, and an object of scorn and reproach among all the nations to which I banish them. I will do this because they have not listened to My words, declares the LORD, which I sent to them again and again through My servants the prophets. And neither have you exiles listened, declares the LORD” (Jeremiah 29:18-19). 

Getting free

If men want to leave behind the bondage of Egypt today, they must repent for their sin (ie., their rebellion against God as characterized in their quest for political power), forsake the kingdoms of men they trusted in rather than the Lord, and seek the Kingdom of God that they formerly lacked faith in. Salvation from human civil government is a gift from God for those who repent and turn away from these systems, just as statism has been a curse upon men who have turned toward them for their salvation. The Israelites in Biblical Egypt were given freedom by God because they repented from trusting in men to provide for them, eg., in believing that political systems are necessary to welfare or that chariots and horsemen are necessary to “national security.” They turned away from the sins held by most Americans today that lead them to worship police and military as their saviors, and the Lord delivered them from bondage.

Men have to repent from statism and turn back to the Lord their King if they wish to be free. In order to repent, we must do the opposite of all the things that brought us into bondage. No more faith in the systems of man. No more military and police worship. No more calling upon ruling men to provide our justice, law, order, protection, welfare, education, or anything else for us. No more covetous sloth. No more socialist benefits. No more apathy towards seeking God’s Kingdom model and its Godly government.