[This is part 6 in a series on God and justice. See part one, two, three, four, five, seven, eight, nine, ten]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

Those who have God’s law pressed upon their hearts should readily understand the principle that we reap what we sow and should then avoid supporting such inherently destructive political systems immediately — physically, spiritually, and emotionally. Even those without faith should easily recognize that man’s political systems inevitably breed more corruption, injustices, lawlessness, disorder, and all the things we are led to believe they are needed for fighting against. As the flaws of worldly political institutions continue to manifest in our backward political society, the Biblical truth that “evil trees bear evil fruit should be more evident than ever to everyone.

It is clearer than ever that establishing and sustaining human civil governments inevitably leads to the very conditions we experience today, which should be no surprise to the student of God’s word. It had to be this way, given the evils of statism at its origins and given its violations of God’s laws against theft and murder. As Jesus taught, “a bad tree cannot bear good fruit” (Matt 7:18) — and we have planted many such bad trees by instituting systems of human government and naively expecting tax-funded systems to be anything other than tyrannical. We have erected many such three letter agencies against God and His intended social order of liberty.

We have sown evil at every turn and are reaping the same. The solution is not simply returning to the constitution, removing corrupt officials from office, voting in better Pharaohs, or making government spending “wiser” or more “efficient.” We must uproot the wicked tree altogether knowing that it cannot ever bear good fruit and that we are only reaping the destructive seeds we planted originally. All of these grave injustices of human government—non-violent men being thrown in prisons run by evil people to be beaten, stabbed, and raped for not satisfying some edict of Pharaoh—are the expected result of setting them up and supporting them, not an anomaly that could have gone differently with the right people in power or by “sticking to the constitution.” 

That men seem surprised today that their beloved “constitutional republic” has turned into a tyrannical police state just shows how little they understand their wicked sowing and the inevitable wicked reaping that must come from it. This is the God-guaranteed outcome of establishing centralized power structures in the first place, which the Lord never instructed His people to do and never gave us when He created this Earth. Human government is always an evil system of plunder set up to extort and cage men. Its very purpose is to rob and murder. This is what these systems always produce, and it should surprise no one that it came to this — that our people are under the threat of government violence at any given time.

Following the wicked path 

The essence of the problem is that men walked away from the Lord as their King the day they set up human kings to rule over them. God sees men who seek human kings as people who have “cast Me away, that I should not reign over them” (1 Samuel 8:7). He sees a people who “have forsaken Me, and served other gods” (1 Samuel 8:8). They sought the benefits and dainties of rulers, who could rob their neighbors in order to hand out stolen property to them, which the rulers themselves used to entice men into accepting their bondage, depending on their hand outs, apologizing for the existence of the regime, and in general becoming human property of the State.

We have mistakenly believed we could get by without God, that having human rulers was good enough to have society. Men have believed they could stray from Christ’s kingship and still succeed with false rulers, such as George Washington, in His place, despite Jesus’ teaching that success is impossible without abiding in Him.

“Remain in Me, and I will remain in you. Just as no branch can bear fruit by itself unless it remains in the vine, neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in Me. I am the vine and you are the branches. The one who remains in Me, and I in him, will bear much fruit. For apart from Me you can do nothing” (John 15:4-5). 

The only way to bear good fruit is to follow the ways of the Lord, which necessarily means to turn away from the wicked ways of the world’s systems that are predictably producing the moral, cultural, and social decline we see all around us today. As scripture warns, “Cursed is the man who trusts in man” (Jeremiah 17:5). 

Those who trust in States and their armies and police forces to save them are only getting everything they deserve for sowing this wicked fruit. There is nothing but evil and sorrow to reap from planting and watering human civil governments and sinfully cheering on their militaries and lawmakers. 

“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). 

We are only getting everything we deserve today under the increasingly apparent evils of human government for this very sin of setting them up and nurturing them, as opposed to being a self-governing people who live freely under God and uphold all our responsibilities to our families and neighbors, unlike those who slothfully spin them off into Caesar’s government school system or free bread programs. The backward, upside down, corrupt legal system we have today is but the price men must pay for the sin of handing their responsibilities over to human government, who they believed were the saviors of civilization. 

“You have plowed wickedness and reaped injustice; you have eaten the fruit of lies. Because you have trusted in your own way and in the multitude of your mighty men” (Hosea 10:13). 

Though statists believe that faith in human government will lead them to the promised land, such wicked sowing as supporting the kingdoms of this world always result in the opposite of what men believed would come from them. These are people who have handed their God-given inheritance over to strangers to control it for them. As God sees it, they are people who have “turned My pleasant field into a desolate wasteland” (Jeremiah 12:10). 

True fruitfulness comes from seeking God’s kingdom above all else, and refusing to advance the evil kingdoms of man.

“Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, or set foot on the path of sinners, or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the Law of the LORD, and on His law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, yielding its fruit in season, whose leaf does not wither, and who prospers in all he does” (Psalm 1:1-3).

God’s causal laws

The corruption in our society today, which is primarily a result of the political systems that we have erected in our sin, is the effect we get for sowing the evil seeds of government in the first place. We get a backwards law-order when we turn away from God and entrust the duties of justice to human civil government. We get what men in the Bible could observe,

“There is a futility that is done on the earth: There are righteous men who get what the actions of the wicked deserve, and there are wicked men who get what the actions of the righteous deserve” (Ecclesiastes 8:14).

If there’s any simple enough Biblical truth, it’s that men reap what they sow — that what good or evil you give in is what good or evil you get back. Men cannot get away with doing evils, eg., raising up human rulers and allowing them to feed and educate their people, without receiving the consequential destruction of their social orders. “Those who plow iniquity and those who sow trouble reap the same” (Job 4:8). 

Men who do evil will only only get evils in return. As the old saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for.” Men who pray to human government to “save” them from numerous social ills (poverty, insecurity, ailments) get exactly what they deserve for trusting in false gods: the opposite of what they hoped it would bring. For believing that “law enforcement” agents would bring them “public safety,” they get robbed for billions of dollars on the side of the road. For believe they need police to protect them from theft, they get a police force that steals more property from them than all private criminals combined. For believing that militaries would keep them safe from enemies, they create enemies all around the world and find themselves paying hundreds of billions of dollars a year to transfer their property to the hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries of this system. For believing that government schools were necessary for the education of their children, they pay tens of thousands of dollars in property taxes to fund what only ends up being a decline in intellectual and moral standards. For believing a State and legislators are needed to protect them from criminals and uphold law, justice, and order, they get thousands of bogus “laws” that invade their property and liberty and are used against them. The price to pay for failing to obey God’s Ten Commandments is to live as slaves under man’s ten-thousand commandments.

God’s liberty

The only way to live safely in the land is to seek to live according to God’s commands and trust in His providential protection (Lev 25:18-19). The error men have made is that they believed they needed police to sleep safely at night when God’s people are to trust in Him for safe sleeping (Psa 4:8), and so have received a police state for their sins. Now they have to worry about a SWAT team kicking in their door in the middle of the night, burning down their home with a flashbang grenade, and shooting everyone inside if they move too quickly while being terrorized. They believed we needed robed false gods who call themselves judges in order to have justice against crime, and so they found themselves victims of man-made edicts, such as going to jail for “driving without a license” or losing your home because you didn’t pay your “property taxes.” They believed they needed “defense departments” to be secure from enemies, and found themselves paying over one-trillion dollars’ worth of their property annually to fund wars and other regimes around the world. 

Those who pray to false gods (eg., governments) for all their social needs have their false prayers met, but not in the way they expected — hence why people are upset with how human civil government has turned out today and say “we didn’t want our taxes used on that thing over there,” as if a people who are robbed get to choose how the thieves spend their money. Under the sinful belief that government agents were needed to keep men safe from “criminals” wandering around our neighborhoods, now men must worry that some tyrant and his thin blue line thugs will kick in their door in the middle of the night. Under the sinful belief that governments were needed to keep us safe from “terrorists,” now men are paying for a surveillance apparatus that is used to spy out their liberty. Under the sinful belief that government is “necessary” to society, men pay for their own bondage. They fund their own subjection. They are looted by government agents, and the loot is used to keep them subjected to the looters. As the 19th-century American anarchist, Lysander Spooner wrote,

“If any man’s money can be taken by a so-called government, without his own personal consent, all his other rights are taken with it; for with his money the government can, and will, hire soldiers to stand over him, compel him to submit to its arbitrary will, and kill him if he resists.”

Statism is a rejection of God, and its evil effects are what a people who reject God get and deserve. Statism is a sinful, demonic plunder system that attempts (unsuccessfully) to substitute human gods for the Lord as our administrators of “public goods,” only to find out that these systems are always under judgment from God and cannot last forever. Statism is a sowing of evil that expectedly reaps an evil harvest. 

Seeking the Kingdom of God

The good news—the Gospel of the Kingdom of God—is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Statism is a result of people who failed to practice the pure religion of loving and serving their neighbors freely and instead turned to the public religion of having human rulers do it for them, which has brought them into the bondage of Egypt. If people heeded Christ’s command to serve one another, instead of relying on a welfare state that wields power and coercion, they could return to the way of Jesus Christ. If we began to sow the non-evil seeds of serving our neighbors and loving them and laboring in the causes of the Lord, we may begin to likewise reap a non-evil harvest and the great blessings that come from obeying God’s ways. We might turn back the curse of statism and abolish that institution that has sprung up in our rebellion against the Lord. If we continue to sow the seeds of God’s Kingdom and raise others up on the Word, we may begin to build up groups of people who see the necessity in seeking the Kingdom and doing things differently.

The statist captivity we’re living under today is a result of failing to seek the Kingdom of God, of failing to serve our neighbors ourselves and handing it over to human rulers in our own sloth and unwillingness to be responsible to one another. Should we seek God’s kingdom earnestly, take it very seriously as men who are living in captivity for our sins, and begin to put in the great work required to advance a godly society, we will surely be blessed. We will receive only what effort we put in toward this cause of liberty under God. “Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously” (2 Corinthians 9:6). 

Liberty comes from God. It is granted by the King of kings. But He gives it only to His faithful and humble servants who earnestly seek it. Let us then repent from the false kingdoms of this world and become servants of Christ’s Kingdom. 

God’s Mercy 

Though God hates our wicked ways, such as the worship and praise of human civil government that many professing Christians do not see as antagonistic to their faith, and though He promises to judge these evils by handing statists over to their enemies to rule over them and place them in the bondage they deserve, He is more inclined toward mercy than judgment. God always wishes that people would repent for these grievous sins and return to Him. 

“But if they will confess their iniquity and that of their fathers in the unfaithfulness that they practiced against Me, by which they have also walked in hostility toward Me—and I acted with hostility toward them and brought them into the land of their enemies—and if their uncircumcised hearts will be humbled and they will make amends for their iniquity, then I will remember My covenant with Jacob and My covenant with Isaac and My covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land” (Leviticus 26:40-42). 

Will you repent for the sin of patriotism, which has led us into bondage? Will you stop sending your children to Caesar’s school system? Will you stop registering them with the State? Will you reject the benefits of rulers? Will you refuse to accept Social Security payments? Will you send back and cancel your military pension? Will you start loving your neighbors and protecting them yourself? Will you turn away from the kingdoms of this world which have been a snare for all those who trusted in them? Will you seek the Kingdom of God as an alternative to the lies and slave systems of this world? God bless those who see the truth and turn away from these systems and walk away from the bondage of Egypt. We can be sure of it. “Labor for the Lord is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58).