[This book is part of a series of an anti-statist commentary on the Holy Bible, by Obadiah D. Morris]

Table of contents

The prophet Hosea

Ministering to statists

God’s mercy upon the repentant

What brings enemies upon us?

Getting ruled for trusting in men over God

The sin of statism

The adultery of statism

Turning back to God for mercy

Liberty through God

Getting back liberty by getting back to God

The ungodliness of statism

The foolishness of statism

God against kings and kings against God

Repenting from statism

The nature of the statist society

State evils as a means of correction

Allying with States as denying God

The State’s vain use of the Lord’s name

Prophesying the destruction of statism

We reap what we sow

God’s salvation and man’s rejection of the Lord

Turning away from statism to avoid judgment

The pride of statism

The end of statism

The Prophet Hosea

Though Biblical canon places him as one of the first of the so-called “minor” prophets (who are giants when compared to the lies and false ideas of men), the 8th-century BC prophet Hosea was one of the earliest writing prophets of God, whose ministry took place in approximately the years 750-725 BC. This “minor” distinction should not diminish the importance of the prophets who didn’t leave as much text as the other writing prophets, like Jeremiah, whom Hosea had apparently influenced. They all offer no minor expression of God’s ethical nature, will, and promise of destruction upon the disobedient people of the world who build up and chase after the false political systems of men that bring them and their people into bondage. The “minor” prophets provide further accounts of the general message that all the other prophets delivered, which serves to reaffirm the overall narrative of God against the kingdoms of men and their systems of government that men trust for their salvation. We can pull all the regular political theology from their own accounts of the political evils of their time, and sometimes the lessons are even more condensed, such as in the case of Amos, Habakkuk, or Micah, who all lay it out straight away that God’s main problem with the social orders that men have organized is that they have been statist, i.e., based around political violence and the tax-theft inherent to these systems. The prophet Hosea then is just as good as any other for teaching the people of their great political errors, where they foolishly and sinfully chased after the kingdoms of this world and are now paying the price for it by living in bondage to these rulers, who tax them, plunder them, prey upon them, kidnap them, cage them, and kill them, just as God said would be the case for any people who reject the Lord as their King and trust in men to save them instead.

Ministering to statists

Like all the prophets who came to rebuke the people for their evil and sinful affiliation with the worldly political systems around them, Hosea was sent by God to tell the people—in his case the men of the northern kingdom of Israel—that their societies would be destroyed for their idolatry and faith in these systems of human government and the men who operate them (Hos 1:1-2). 

  “The LORD said to Hosea…soon I will bring the bloodshed of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu, and I will put an end to the kingdom of Israel. And on that day I will break the bow of Israel in the Valley of Jezreel” (Hosea 1:4).

  God always puts an end to the kingdoms of men, as He did in the days of the Great Flood when “the earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence” (Genesis 6:11). Destroying the man-made kingdoms of the world is an old pastime for God (Ex 14:17, 15:4; Deut 3: 21-22; Josh 11:10; Psa 46:9; Isa 13:19, 23:11; Ezek 26:16; Dan 7:27; Haggai 2:22; Rev 6:16-17). He brings down those men who have set up their societies with the sword of the State, who “build up Zion with blood and Jerusalem with iniquity” (Micah 3:10). While the world’s rulers may wield the sword to attempt to force social order, this violent political means of social organization is not God’s way. Rather, it is an enemy to His kingdom and to the peace and freedom of mankind. Though earthly kings exalt themselves as gods and pridefully believe they are indestructible and beyond divine judgment, God humbles them by tearing down their systems, as He has all earthly empires of men throughout the history of man’s ongoing political rebellion against God. Despite their delusions of invincibility and the belief that their plunderous ways go unnoticed by God, the rulers of this world do not actually fly under the radar of God as they believe. And despite their expensive militaries that only impoverish the masses to fund, nor are their supposedly great armies and police forces any match for His power. As one commentator writes, “Neither the pomp of kings nor the power of kingdoms can secure them from God’s destroying judgments” (Matthew Henry, Hosea 1:2-7). 

  When a people abandon God and turn to human rulers for their protection and security, which is but another theory of salvation that men accept whenever they support human government and defend its existence, God always assures that there are consequences to follow. A statist people will be punished by God one way or another, either by allowing those worldly systems to oppress the people who set them up and be a judgment against the wicked works of statism itself, or by sending an even more tyrannical state to conquer a people who were flirting with statism at home and thus deserved further judgment at the hands of the very Babylonians who they hoped to keep away by organizing a statist system themselves. Some way or another, God assures that a people who sinfully beg for human rulers and the people who take these positions of power will receive all of the evils of statism that they beg for in their sin. Thus, God says, “I will bring the most wicked of nations to take possession of their houses. I will end the pride of the mighty, and their holy places will be profaned. Anguish is coming! They will seek peace, but find none” (Ezekiel 7:24-25).

  Despite men’s belief that their evil political systems, like the “United States Government,” represent the “best countries ever” with the “most powerful military” that no nation could ever take down or remove, God aims to humble their prideful arrogance by either allowing these systems to self-destruct and be a judgment to themselves or by employing other statist regimes to punish them and tear them down. If God does the latter, sending Babylonians to invade and terrorize a people who practice their own brand of Babylonian statism at home, it is not because He condones the wickedness of these other statist powers that He may work through, but rather because the evils of statism serve as a fitting punishment for those who participate in such plunder systems. “Behold, I will bring foreigners against you, the most ruthless of nations. They will draw their swords against the beauty of your wisdom and will defile your splendor” (Ezekiel 28:7). When men act like Egyptians themselves and practice the worldly method of social organization of political violence, believing that this is the only method of securing their “freedom,” they deserve to be both dominated by these systems and even conquered by other statists around the world for their political sins. 

  Yet far too few men have been able to see these things in our time. In their political paradigm, which has been formed by the world rather than by the Lord, the existence of human government isn’t to be questioned. It is accepted without thought that men need a State for their security, and that anyone who challenges this notion is a utopian anarchist who desires disorder, chaos, and lawlessness. The only question for them, in their many false dichotomies, is what brand of statism we are to have, e.g., a “democratic government,” a “socialist government,” or something else. It isn’t even possible for the average person to imagine life without human government, because it is all they have ever known. For them, the problems we face today are merely issues of having deviated from what things like the “constitution” were “supposed to be.” It is not seen that these are problems that are inherent to all systems of human government and that all these things we are experiencing today, which almost go without saying anymore, are intrinsic features to statism and that this is the way things turn out every time men go down the statist route, which is but a departure from the godly-anarchist society that is the model God has given us, where men live freely under God and do not set up human rulers as their means of supplying protection, welfare, or any other numerous goods and services that are often said to require taxation and “public” provision. In the mind of the average person, who has never really sought the wisdom of the Lord or to have their eyes opened to His Kingdom model, statism is a given in society. Life would not be possible without it. It is a foreign concept to them to say that all statism (i.e., the political organization of society) brings about God’s judgment upon a people, because their whole worldview and ideology rests on the opposite vision: that salvation can only come through man’s systems of authoritarian rule that control the supply of law, justice, protection, defense, welfare, and a myriad of other things, in the alleged belief that the people would supposedly have to go without these things if it were not for presidents, prime ministers, princes, kings, lawmakers, soldiers, police, bureaucrats, and a million other government employees who are assumed to be benevolent “public servants” who came to the rescue to assure that society could function and that “the people” have all their social needs provided for them. 

  The prophets of God, including those of us who see the truth today, must deliver warnings of divine judgment to the people still lost in the world of statist societies and can’t see their way out of these systems to the alternative path that the Lord provides for those who repent and seek His Kingdom, which is not of this world and its violent systems of human rule but is based rather on a decentralized network of men who love God and serve their neighbors freely as actual servants rather than lords. As much as the masses will fight against it, we must call upon the hardheaded statists of the world to repent, leave behind the Egyptian plunder systems they have worshiped and praised in their foolishness, and begin to seek the Kingdom of God with us. Knowing that disaster and divine judgment await the earthly kingdoms our neighbors have placed their faith in, we must begin to call them out of these false kingdoms of man and press them to build the Kingdom of God with us. As much as they will be kicking and screaming to stay behind in Egypt, as the Israelites were in the exodus who groaned in the desert, complained to Moses, and remembered all the vegetables and luxuries they had when they were in bondage to Egyptian-statist systems, we must tell men that the fate of these systems is complete destruction and that they will be going down with them too if they refuse to begin seeking God’s Kingdom with us as another alternative method of social organization altogether, not based on political violence but rather the freewill offerings of a people who gather together to look after their neighbors in a free society.  

  While many currently see great patriotic pride in flying “old glory” from their homes, government buildings, and so-called churches, and in having their soldiers march through invaded countries and the aisles of their “Sunday services,” such idolatrous displays as there will eventually come to an end, for they represent the very sins condemned in scripture. God assures it. “I will make the land a desolate waste, and the pride of her strength will come to an end. The mountains of Israel will become desolate, so that no one will pass through” (Ezekiel 33: 28). For engaging in the same evils as the tyrants that God sends against men, i.e., for adopting the ways of foreign statists (e.g., the Chinese) under the excuse that have to be like them if we want to keep them away, God gives statist societies what they deserve. “I will pour out My indignation upon thee, I will blow against thee in the fire of my wrath, and deliver thee into the hand of brutish men, and skillful to destroy” (Ezekiel 21:31). To be ruled and occupied by men, whether by “your own” government at home or foreigners who have invaded, is only proof that a people are under divine judgment for the sins of having ever sought the statist ways of the world.

  For the evil acts of setting up statist systems, which men knowingly or not thought were the method of protecting themselves from “bad guys,” God hands men over to the very fears—bad guys ruling them—that they sinfully sought to avoid in a State. This would be an almost humorous case of man’s failure to understand their causal reality if it didn’t result in such tyranny. In their misguided and sinful attempt to protect themselves from “bad guys” by establishing statist systems, men invite the very fears they sought to avoid and find themselves ruled by the “bad guys” who now call themselves “the government.” This is an irony that men have not been able to grasp, but which is apparent in God’s word. For the evil act of forming a tax-funded government system, God hands men over to the very tyrannies that they believe they are preventing through their support of a State. Domination by men is the price men pay for the sinful belief that they need human rulers. “And he gave them into the hand of the heathen; and they that hated them ruled over them” (Psalm 106:41). 

  If ever men recognize they are conquered by statists and realize their participation in it, which they are still blind to today, they must never attribute it to a lack of statism that left them vulnerable to attack. Rather, they must see that it has been their own statism, and God’s judgment of this sin, that led to their subjugation under the rule of other men, whether the domestic tyrants whom they think are “their” government or foreign invaders and agents who are more obviously not “them.” As the prophet Jeremiah observed of his situation, “Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens” (Lamentations 5:2). Such is the case anytime men allow men to rule over them in the false belief that they are protectors: they turn their bodies and properties over to strangers, i.e., to statists who seek to control and rule them.

  Yet our people today believe that they are free men living in “the free world.” They have bought into all the American lies since childhood of living in a “free country,” hardly ever pausing to realize that their bondage is worse than the Israelites’ in Egypt and that they pay far more taxes and live under far more rules and regulations than the Israelites of old. For men to ever even begin to think about leaving Egypt and seeking another Kingdom that is not of this world, they will first have to see that they are in bondage, and then begin to approach the realization that it was their sin that led to their bondage. For the time being, men are only, at best, slowly coming to realize that something isn’t right with their society. Yet they are mostly in the position of whining and complaining about the problems without seeing that it was their own evil works—their voting, cheering for presidents, and general apologia of human government—that led to their lamentable situation. Men have a long way to go before seeing their own complicity in the problems that they are only recently beginning to identify. It should not be thought that men are waking up merely because they are starting to feel some of the effects of their own sin, which they do not even realize are effects of their sin. The much more difficult step for men to take, which is a rather wide gap from merely pointing out that the grocery bill is going up, is to address the causes of these things and see that their sin lies at the heart of the problem. They must begin to see not only that they are living in an Egyptian society, which most men can’t even see today, but that all the wicked fruit that it is bearing is but the harvest of a wicked root that they have supported and that they are only reaping what they have sown today. 

God’s mercy upon the repentant

In the minds of most men today, particularly conservatives who are in a state of refusing to acknowledge their sin of statism, the only problem with “our country” today is that some group of people messed it up a few years or decades back. If only democrats or socialists had never come into power, things would have been perfectly fine, and the great Republic would have never been on the decline. If only, say, we could have paused things in the Reagan 1980s, then everything would still be going well today. Rather than witness the mess we’re in today and see that perhaps it is all due to turning away from God and toward human government, these men—they number in the tens of millions in America—fully fail to see that they are ruled by democrats and socialists as a divine consequence of their sin and that things always have to go this way, every time men set up systems of human government in their sin. In their minds, things did not have to go this way but were only the result of, say, “good” men not voting enough “godly men” into power. It is completely lost on them that this is the fate of all systems of human government, which are always contrary to God’s design for men. 

  The failures of statist societies are inevitable, as all States are raised in violation of God’s Law. But their failure does not come without warning or even suddenly. It is a long and slow death that slowly drags everyone down with it. But long before these systems completely fall apart and the masses are at risk of outright famines and utter devastation of their societies and life on earth itself, the people are always given plenty of opportunities to realize their evils, repent from them, and return to the ways of the Lord. For one, God’s word provides divine wisdom that tells people not to seek the kingdoms of this world, and secondly, God has always sent prophets to warn of the disastrous results of statism and even the impending doom once things get closer to that point.

  When societies that have organized themselves under systems of human rule begin to make life on earth harder, the slothful attitudes that originally worked to build these systems often only grow stronger. The people reason that “there’s nothing we can do about it” or that “it’s just the way things are” — the same reasoning that they used to assume that “death and taxes” and the existence of human civil government was “necessary” and “inevitable.” Yet Jesus came calling men to repent and seek the Kingdom of God, without any need to sit around complacently and assume there’s nothing we can do about the perverse effects of statism that were, after all, a judgment upon sins that men didn’t have to practice. Though most men only recognize the dreadful curse of statism after significant events like government-imposed lockdowns, vaccination mandates, world wars, or labor camps, it’s never too late to renounce the sin of statism and hopefully avoid the further consequences of walking down this road — assuming that men turn away from it and seek a Kingdom that is not like the political systems of this world. We shouldn’t think God is inactive or unresponsive, especially when it comes to human repentance. As even momentarily repentant people have said before, “Let each one turn from his evil ways and from the violence in his hands. Who knows? God may turn and relent. He may turn from His fierce anger, so that we will not perish” (Jonah 3:8-9). God responded to this effort by men to change their ways, specifically the violent political ways that they had adopted. “When God saw their actions—that they had turned from their evil ways—He relented from the disaster He had threatened to bring upon them” (Jonah 3:10).

  We always see in scripture that God is willing to change his mind and withhold the destruction He had planned for an unrepentant people who placed their faith in rulers and their armies to save them from their enemies, upon their repentance from relying upon these systems that only become a terror to them (Jer 26:19). Though there are some places in scripture where things have reached a point of no return, where God says that His justice is going forth against a people no matter what for their repeated refusals to repent and that He doesn’t care to hear anymore pleas from a persistently backward people anymore who must now feel the weight of their sin (Jer 14-15; Amos 8-9), for the most God is always waiting on a people to turn from their evils, i.e., to repent from raising up false gods to rule over them and trust in the Lord alone for their salvation. God’s mercy upon a repentant people far outweighs His unrelenting anger against a people like Americans today, who have given God every reason to destroy them for their idolatry for presidents, soldiers, police, and the system of government as a whole. God always says, “If you return to me and trust me, you will be saved” (Isaiah 30:15). He always tells us, “If you turn back, I will take you back, and you shall stand before me” (Jeremiah 15:19). God is just as merciful as He is a God of justice, who must dish out punishment to those who pervert His natural order with the phony law systems of men.

  “Seek the LORD while He may be found; call on Him while He is near. Let the wicked man forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the LORD, that He may have compassion, and to our God, for He will freely pardon” (Isaiah 55:6-7).

  God always wishes that people would turn back from such evils as trusting in human civil government and turn their whole faith back to Him, where He would forgive us for these past evils. 

  “If My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, forgive their sin, and heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14).

  Even after allowing for the evils of statism to come upon a people at His hand, God is willing to turn back from the punishment that He has justly dealt out (the police beatings, the home invasions by SWAT teams, the sacrificing of men to wars, the taxation and inflation) upon those men who sinfully believed these systems were necessary to their liberty, if they are willing to acknowledge that they are under judgment for their sins and that the same God who has allowed their sins to destroy them would also save them from these consequences. As Hosea affirms, 

  “Come, let us return to the LORD. For He has torn us to pieces, but He will heal us; He has wounded us, but He will bind up our wounds. After two days He will revive us; on the third day He will raise us up, that we may live in His presence” (Hosea 6:1-2).

  Those who imagine God as some tyrant for justly punishing the sinful statist systems that men have set up in their rebellion against Him do not know the Lord, who, of course, prefers that men seek His ways rather than the statist ways of the world. “I will judge you, each according to his ways, declares the Lord GOD. Repent and turn from all your transgressions, so that your iniquity will not become your downfall. Cast away from yourselves all the transgressions you have committed, and fashion for yourselves a new heart and a new spirit. Why should you die, O house of Israel? For I take no pleasure in anyone’s death, declares the Lord GOD. So repent and live!’” (Ezekiel 18:30-32). But God wants to see men seek Him through their own will, which requires that they confess their complicity with the systems of men and repent from ever having believed in them, served them, or supported them in any way. “Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn, and weep. Turn your laughter to mourning, and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you” (James 4:8-10). Men need to tell the Lord they regret joining Pharaoh’s army or police force, or even so much as believing in these institutions, and weep over having lived in such darkness and foolishness. God is not one to hold a grudge. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). God is waiting on His children to come back home, to walk away from the world systems where they were lost and living in captivity to men, both spiritually, ideologically, and physically as men who gave both their minds and bodies over to the false gods and false kingdoms of the world. God reciprocates such repentance. “‘Return to Me,’ declares the LORD of Hosts, ‘and I will return to you’” (Zechariah 1:3). God is waiting for a people today who are willing and ready to abandon their statism (i.e., their ideological and physical support for human government and begin to seek His Kingdom, which, contrary to the authoritarian kingdoms of government that we have known today, is one where men actually begin to provide for each other’s needs on their own in a free and decentralized society, without human rulers and taxation as their means of serving one another. God is waiting to bless a generation of Kingdom-seekers, who will repent from their support for human government and begin agitating other men toward another Way and building a Kingdom-network of mutual assistance for them to come into as they begin to withdraw their sinful support for the kingdoms of the world that they had bought into before they knew the better path provided by King Jesus. God is waiting for a people who will stop apologizing for the authoritarian political systems of men, all of which are raised up against His Kingdom order and exist as its primary enemy. God is waiting for people to take up personal responsibility again to their neighbors, rather than passing it off to human rulers in a system of compulsory taxation that makes everyone a slave to a debt-ridden system that, in the end, fails to serve everyone anyway and brings whole societies crashing to the ground with their downfall. God is waiting for men who have finally had enough of all the evil effects of statism that have come upon them precisely as a means of correcting them and showing them that it is not possible to violate God’s Law without paying the price for it, such as being ruled by men who send you a tax bill for your property every year and threaten to seize it if you don’t send them money. God is waiting for a movement of Christian abolitionists to arise who see that the existence of statism is not only the work of idolatrous men but also the effect of a slothful and apathetic people who did not want to carry out the positive obligations they have to support each other and keep them from seeking protection and welfare from human rulers, who only exist because they have filled a vacuum left by people who didn’t want to do these things themselves in a free society. 

Warning men of the sin and judgment of statism

The prophet Hosea’s ministry (Hos 1:4) came at a time when society had turned away from God and toward the false gods (human rulers) of the world, in a spiritual harlotry with the kingdoms of men. This is typical of prophets, who are not merely “seers of the future” as most men like to think of the word, but messengers of God’s will who come to teach men the ways of God and call them to repent from the erroneous path of divine judgment that they are currently on. The role of the prophets then is almost always to demonstrate just how much the Lord hates the political systems of the world that men set up in their sin and ignorance of God’s commands and ways. Prophets aim to “save” the people by guiding them back to God and away from the unjust political systems they have fatally embraced. In His mercy, God sends prophets to warn people of the coming judgment against their violent, statist societies, which they have wrongly believed to be essential for freedom, prosperity, law and order, and life itself — the very claims the Lord offers to those who trust in Him rather than in human kings. 

  It is the great sin of political violence that angers God and invites divine judgment. It is crucial to recognize, from a theological perspective, that God’s wrath is not merely a response to some sort of unbelief, as things tend to be watered down in today’s understanding of God, where He just sends people to hell who don’t believe in Him. The sin that God judges is more specifically a certain type of unfaithfulness, where men place their faith in human rulers to save them, which is the main way that men cheat on God and turn away from Him. It is when men forsake the Lord and serve other gods—whether they be Pharaohs, ruling elites, politicians, soldiers, police, lawmakers, judges, tax collectors—that represents a primary way they betray their allegiance to the one true God. It is largely this betrayal, where men regard other men as their lords and saviors, that incurs God’s judgment upon a people. When God says, “you have forsaken Me and served other gods” (Jud. 10:13) or that men have served the “gods of Egypt” (Ex 12:12), we are not merely speaking of some betrayal for pagan deities, but an allegiance to Pharaohs, Caesars, Prime Ministers, and Presidents, who are the gods and saviors of men who believe they should exist, accept their gospel-promises of salvation under their rule, and vote for them to “make America great again.” It is this political rejection of the Lord in favor of human kings that represents mankind’s abandonment of the Lord as their God and provokes divine retribution upon a people. 

  The message that such statist societies were to fail due to the idolatries of the people within them is almost always the message of the prophets. 

  “Blow the ram’s horn in Gibeah, the trumpet in Ramah; raise the battle cry in Beth-aven: Lead on, O Benjamin! Ephraim will be laid waste on the day of rebuke. Among the tribes of Israel I proclaim what is certain. The princes of Judah are like those who move boundary stones; I will pour out My fury upon them like water. Ephraim is oppressed, crushed in judgment, for he is determined to follow worthless idols. So I am like a moth to Ephraim, and like decay to the house of Judah” (Hosea 5:8-12).

  When people look to the political gods of the world as their “saviors,” they get the opposite of what they expect when they place their faith in them to heal their societies or keep their enemies away: they receive judgment from those rulers, rather than salvation. Though God may use governments as instruments of His judgment, who are paradoxically His “servants,” men must never seek them out on their own, for such political rulers are not part of God’s perfect will. Indeed, such political evils only come upon men precisely for this reason of setting them up and trusting in them; they are absent from a society of godly men who make the Lord their only King. The surest way to keep statists away is to trust in God alone, contrary to the claims of those who argue we must have a government of “our own” to keep the “bad guys” away, who only bring these evils upon their own heads by thinking and acting like this. State rule is not an inevitable feature of human life or social order, but a curse sent by God upon those who adopt the wicked ideology and practices of statism. Godly men who seek His Kingdom only would avoid it.

What brings enemies upon us?

Though most men get things backward in their worldly thinking and lack of seeking divine counsel from God and His word, which leads them to believe that human government is needed to keep them safe and free, God teaches us that the sinful quest for government rulers is the very thing that invites enemies. Men who lack the fear of the Lord and grow fearful of other men come to believe that governments and their military and police forces are needed to keep us safe from numerous “bad guys” and “criminals,” and those who desire to rule over other men even manufacture such crises, wholly fabricate enemies, or even genuinely create them, so that men will flock to “their” government as the alleged protector from the other governments, all which are bad. When a people are not God-fearing enough, which any man who reads the endless judgments upon a backward people in the prophets should become, they inevitable grow weak in the face of real or conjectural “bad guys” around the world and seek safety in government rather than the Lord, just as the Israelites did in the sight of their enemies, which God says was a rejection of His kingship (1 Samuel 8). They are made to fear either local criminals or some “terrorists” in a desert or cave somewhere in a land they couldn’t point out on a map, and come to support “Wars on Terror” that only bring great domestic tyrannies upon themselves, such as surveillance systems, police armed with military hardware after the wars are over, and trillions of dollars in taxes each year to fund it all. The episode in 1 Samuel 8 shows us that God does not just want to be our King in some soul-saver or spiritual sense, as many might imagine Him, leading them to believe that human government must make up for His earthly or social shortcomings; He wants to be our King in the very sense that ungodly statists imagine their human kings are needed for: to provide physical protection from others who would harm them. God wants to be the King who fights our battles for us, who protects us from our enemies, who serves as our “national defense” in the place of “Defense Departments.” God is to be our God in a total sense, not just a partial sense, where He is some inactive God of heaven or has merely come to save our souls and bring us into heaven when we die. The type of salvation expected by men throughout the Bible, seen particularly prominently in the repeated cries of the psalmists for God to physically rescue and deliver them from their enemies, was a rather earthly and present one where God would come and actually free a people from being ruled by other men once they cried out to God as their King again. 

  These days, more men than ever realize that the greatest threat to our liberty comes from within and not some far-away “enemy.” They see that the domestic political system, which claims to exist for the sake of liberty, prosperity, and law and order, is the very enemy of those things and that every government department only achieves the opposite of its name or stated purpose. They see that we are an occupied people living in captivity to very the “protectors” who claim to serve us, that the greatest threat to our freedom and property is the people who say they exist for the “public good” of our society, that the only people robbing them for hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes is “their” own government, or that we’re indefinitely more likely to be robed, caged, or killed by a deputy sheriff miles away from our homes than a member of “Al Qaeda” or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard thousands of miles away — all which have been used to justify the upbuilding of a domestic government. 

  The younger generations born after the so-called “Cold War” came to a close are more likely than their elders who lived through that psychological operation to see that the foreign communist threat—the “Red Scare” of the latter half of the twentieth century—was merely a pretext to justify building up a socialist military-police state at home, while those who grew up in the post-WWII era were largely successfully indoctrinated into believing the American system was keeping them safe and free and still give into this belief in the alleged necessity of state power for liberty. The old fallacies and abandonment of God persist, however, as the post-WWII generation continues to believe the lies and fears they were raised with. Millions in the United States still foolishly claim that the only way to avoid getting conquered by other statists is to establish a state of “our” own, where “the people” are the government. In their lack of faith in the Lord, they ask, “Who will keep us safe without the military?” They cling to the socialist lie that the State is “us,” that “we the people” are the government, that congressmen are “our representatives,” and that “the police work for us.”

  These are people who have learned the ways and ideologies of the world, rather than the Word of God — men who make up their own ideas rather than seek divine counsel. If they sought God, they would know to “trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5-6). But they believed they had it all figured out, that the common wisdom of the world that prevailed around them, which said that human government is necessary, was the truth. 

  Those who rely on human government for protection have not known or understood God’s teachings. God’s message contradicts the common American belief that States and their police forces and militaries are necessary to “freedom” and “public safety” from various “bad guys” and “criminals.” In fact, the very statist control or general subjugation by men that statists fear will happen if they trust in God and liberty alone in an anarchist society is exactly what God imposes on statist societies. Those who believe that Egyptian political systems are necessary to their freedom only end up in Egyptian bondage as a judgment for their sin, which was the very thing they thought they would avoid by seeking it. This was the case for the people whom Hosea’s ministry had targeted. Israel had played the harlot with “many lovers,” trusting in Assyrias and Egypts to save them. They were a people who were whoring after archists rather than trusting in God to save them, never realizing that the real means of finding protection would be to trust in the anarchistic society of God, where God rules His people alone, without the need for any human mediators or man-made kingdoms to stand in between Him and His people. Much to the surprise of the conventional wisdom of statists who believe security and defense are found in a State, those who trust in political gods to “save” them from their enemies end up serving their enemies as slaves. As the prophet Jeremiah devastatingly puts it, “Like as ye have forsaken me, and served strange gods in your land, so shall ye serve strangers in a land that is not yours” (Jeremiah 5:19). When people forsake God as their King and believe that human rulers are required to “protect” them from their enemies, God brings those very enemies upon them. God is a jealous God that does not permit men to have other ruler-gods without paying the price for it. Contrary to the claims of statists that we would be like sitting ducks without a State, once we see that invading Babylonians are but a judgment from God upon a statist people, the typical narrative of statists falls apart. Why would God allow a people who trust in His kingship alone, which is done in an anarchist society, to be ruled by men? Obviously, He wouldn’t. Being ruled by men is a punishment for sin, not something that merely comes upon a people for no reason. God says that invaders, tyrants, rulers, and their accompanying tyrannies arise only when people trust in men instead of trusting in Him. In fact, God Himself sends the evils. One can more or less pick a prophet for the proof that God sends evils upon a people for these very sins (Jer 4:6, 6:19, 9:16, 11:11, 18:11, 19:3, 21:10, 23:12, 24:10, 25:27-29, 29:17, 32:42, 36:3, 42:17, 44:27, 49:37). 

  God always warned that statist slavery was the result of walking away from the Lord, not walking away from building up statist systems for your “protection,” as the people of the world think, which is the very thing God punishes. You get the statist slave society when you trust in men, not when you trust in God and avoid man’s systems. It is not the absence of a State that invites enemies to come destroy us, but the erection of a State that in itself embodies the enemy. The State is the very enemy that men think would exist without having one, and still men don’t realize what they have done after it becomes evident that the fears of “anarchy” and “disorder” in a theoretical free society are best represented in a State — that it is “their” government that acts as the lawless, unjust criminals they thought would exist without these man-made systems of law. Perhaps it is just too ironic for those who have idolized human rulers for so long to accept that everything they tell us would happen in a stateless society is actually true of their beloved statist society. Yet this is just how far gone men are today from the teachings of the Lord and the Lord himself. 

  This statist society we have, which man cannot even see isn’t the “freedom” their masters told them it would be, is precisely what happens when we ignore God and seek other man-gods who do not save: “You will serve your enemies the LORD will send against you in famine, thirst, nakedness, and destitution. He will place an iron yoke on your neck until He has destroyed you” (Deuteronomy 28:48). God brings the statist curse upon men for their disobedience, namely for their faith and trust in the Egyptian “law” systems of men. As expressed throughout the Bible,

  “Because they have forsaken the LORD their God who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and have embraced other gods, worshiping and serving them — because of this, the LORD has brought all this disaster upon them” (1 Kings 9:9). 

  It is seeking human kings and their man-made law systems, rather than the Lord and His commandments, that gets men into trouble with God and brings judgment down upon themselves.

  “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 guilt? 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 instruction. 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. So I will cast you out of this land into a land that neither you nor your fathers have known. There you will serve other gods day and night, for I will show you no favor'” (Jeremiah 16:10-13). 

  God will forget those who forget Him (Hos 1:6). He will leave men to fall to their own evil devices if they are foolish enough to institute these systems upon their own heads, both the rulers themselves and the people who trusted in them. As one psalmist said, “Declare them guilty, O God; let them fall by their own devices. Drive them out for their many transgressions, for they have rebelled against You” (Psalm 5:10). Though God may let it happen and allow men to throw away their own liberty, it is ultimately men who destroy their own societies by following the ways of men and their pagan-statist orders and neglecting to seek God’s kingdom as the only viable alternative to the kingdoms of men. This is why societies go down: “Because they rebelled against the words of God and despised the counsel of the Most High” (Psalm 107:11). 

  Men cannot follow man-made legal systems if they wish to follow God and avoid the judgment inherent to statism, and which eventually falls upon the system itself after God is through with using it to terrorize those people who believed it was necessary to protect them from terrorists. As one commentator said, “To believe in Christ is to have him for our Head, and willingly to commit ourselves to His guidance and government” (Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary, Hos 1:8-11). As always, though, men have raised up other men as their gods and thereby brought divine judgment upon their societies. Instead of governing themselves and caring for their families, neighbors, and communities directly and freely because they love their brothers and neighbors and want to see them free, they have instead abdicated their personal responsibilities to human rulers and outsourced their duties to the violent governments of man, who eagerly accepted this role, knowing they can use the guise of providing benefits and “essential public services” to people as a means of subjugating them into tax bondage on their political plantations. Human rulers made their way in through filling the void left by slothful people who didn’t want to do what it takes to be free on their own and provide for their neighbors themselves, whether because they are unashamed socialists who believe that it is the role of human government to feed and house people, or whether they are conservative-style socialists who think that justice, law, and defense must be monopolized by a State. 

Getting ruled for trusting in men over God

As men who see the truth in God’s word, it is our duty today to warn people that the statist path is the wicked path of sin — the wide, socialist road to destruction that leads to the demise of all who walk it. We must warn them that the Egyptian societies that men establish in their sin always bring death, that political tyrannies and disaster are upon a people who refuse to be ruled by God.

  Hosea prophesied that unless the people turn back to God and end their political prostitution with the rulers of the world, they will be conquered by the Assyrians, who were among the most evil and powerful statists of the time. Knowing what we know from the lost sheep in our time who refuse to listen to us and who mock us for saying we are ruled by satanic plunderers, surely the people the prophets in the Bible preached to were filled with the same statist fallacies we hear today. These people likely objected to their God-given words in the same way men do today, claiming the only way to be protected is through a military-police state. Just as Americans do now with “the Russians” or “the Chinese,” they must have argued that “without a statist system of our own or an alliance with another, we would be conquered by the Assyrians!” But if they truly knew and trusted in God’s word, they would never reason that they need the State because of real or imagined enemies. Rather, they would know to “be strong and courageous! Do not be afraid or discouraged before the king of Assyria and the vast army with him, for there is a greater One with us than with him. With him is only the arm of flesh, but with us is the LORD our God to help us and to fight our battles” (2 Chronicles 32:7-8). 

  The problem with so many of our people today is their idolatrous and unwavering reliance on violent political systems and armies rather than on God for protection from their enemies. Contrary to God’s word, they mistakenly believe that building up a powerful State is the path to freedom and safety, when doing so is only to (ironically) bring down upon themselves the very oppression and bondage they sought to avoid. The people of the world have not yet learned to trust in God for all things, or found that all the ends they seek to obtain through the means of human government have never been reached because they seek them through men rather than through God. Few men who claim to trust the Lord today have extended that trust to the places where it really matters: for God to feed, protect, and provide for those who seek to live under His exclusive kingship, which means an anarchist or Godarchist society where the Lord alone is King and no other human kings can be found, except for in places where men who still haven’t learned the anarchist politics of God are being judged for their statist sins. Probably most professing Christians confine God to a passive existence in the heavens where they believe His earthly shortcomings must be aided with presidents, lawmakers, police, or human judges, even though the Lord tells us He is our Judge, King, and Lawmaker (Isa 33:22). 

  We do not need men to save us, and they cannot do it anyway. When God comes to deliver His people, as in the Biblical episode of the exodus from Egypt, He does it through the power of His own arm and not by requiring them to raise a military. Moses didn’t have to throw one stone at the Egyptians to escape their enslavement. They were divinely delivered from their slavery by God — something He would do again today for us, if men ever repented of the sins that have wound them up in Egypt once again, against God’s warning to never go back that way again. As the Lord says in Hosea, “I will save them — not by bow or sword or war, not by horses and cavalry, but by the LORD their God” (Hosea 1:7). It is backward for statists to think they must cling to the State for protection when God says we must abandon the State and seek shelter under His arms, not by “bow nor sword.” As one commentator thus says, “They shall be saved by the Lord when they are brought off from trusting to their own strength and their weapons of war” (Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, Hos 1:2-7).

  Far from receiving protection, those who trust in human rulers to protect them are a cursed people, eg., people who are looted for trillions of dollars a year to fund a military that does nothing but kill people across the world who aren’t even their enemies. All statists and socialists who believe in state-operated goods and services, from welfare to defense, are people who trust in men rather than God and have foregone the blessings of the Lord. God promises that all these people will be ruined for their lack of faith. “Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind, who makes mere flesh his strength and turns his heart from the LORD” (Jeremiah 17:5). Statists, who soon find out that they will have their societies, economies, and culture ruined for trusting in a State to save them, will eventually see that “it is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in man. It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in princes” (Psalm 118:8-9). God promises the demise of all people and societies that trust in human governments and their police and military to save them. “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).  

  It is often after it’s too late that men realize what they have done: they have trusted in men instead of the Lord, thus bringing these evils upon themselves. The destruction is imminent, the invading armies are coming, the food shortages have arrived, the prices of goods are skyrocketing, they’re taking a train ride to Siberia, or men are already deeply in captivity to political rulers or living under the failed and fallen systems that they had once trusted in for their security. As the people had said in Hosea, “We have no king, for we do not revere the LORD. What can a king do for us?” (Hosea 10:3). How foolish it is to have trusted in human kings once your whole society is falling apart and those whom you placed your faith in for salvation have failed you. God thus mocks a people who had trusted in other gods (kings) than the Lord (Hos 13:10). How foolish it is to have trusted in men to save you when only the Lord can save a people and brings judgment precisely upon the statist societies of the world that have turned away from Him. It is often only after seeing the imminent judgment or outright captivity that has come upon them that a people can ever remark upon how senseless and sinful it was to have trusted in human rulers to save them, how utterly imprudent and unwise it has been to claim that men are needed for “protection” and “freedom” all while it has become evident for everyone to see that no such thing is the case. Unfortunately for most statist societies, who often cling to their fallacies and sins all the way to the grave, it is only after it is far too late that men see the folly in their former king-seeking, where they sought a king to “go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Samuel 8:20). The silver-lining of statist evils is that it is in these times of tyranny that men may find the Lord, who has always meant for the evils inherent to man-made political systems to be a behavior-correcting rebuke upon them. Though God has used the State as divine judgment upon a people who trust in men to be their kings and lawmakers, the divine purpose of its failure to serve men is to correct them in their evil ways and lead them back to the truths of God and His word. As one commentary puts it, “In the day of their destruction Israel would be brought to see and even feel that the king appointed through their own self-will and fancied plenitude of power was unable to protect or help them, and that because they had rejected Jehovah and cast aside his fear” (Pulpit Commentary, Hos. 10:3).

  As we see in the Bible and among the general public and professing Christians today, men are often notoriously hardheaded, stubborn, and refuse to accept the truths and warnings of God’s word, even as it becomes seemingly more impossible to claim that government is necessary to freedom, security, and prosperity. Even total annihilation often fails to wake men up to God. Men may find themselves in prison or a labor camp for not falling into line with the official opinions and accepted political ideology of the ruling elite, and yet still not realize they’re ruled by evil psychopaths who have set up these systems in opposition to God, and that they’d better start repenting for this sin and praying for divine intervention against these tyrants. Americans today are so brainwashed in the statist ideology of the world that is spun by the rulers and their intellectual bodyguards that when society falls apart due to the very statism they supported, they are likely to blame the lack of statism as the reason for their downfall. They will point to things such as a lack of funding for police, military, or other government programs, which they don’t realize were entirely unsustainable, wasteful, and fraudulent in the first place and could never have saved them, as being the only reason they failed to work. Much to the delight of the rulers who created the problems and used the chaos as a means of driving men back into their arms, many will call for more statism as the supposed “solution” to their problems, all while it has been the very cause, as anyone who reads the Bible should know. This is how lost most people are today, which almost becomes even deeper as the problems in our society become more indisputable than they were in the late twentieth century, when everyone was still living the “American Dream.” Even as the evil effects of statism and the tyranny and plunder of having gone down this political road—of having “gone up to Assyria” for our protection—become even more apparent, men have still not realized that they are in urgent need of repenting and turning back to the Lord as their savior from this mess. Indeed, they still place their hope in the next president, the next congressman, the next election cycle to produce the changes they desire in the world, when the real change they need is to regenerate their hearts and return to the Lord as their only God. Though the active effects of statism are a judgment upon a people, eventually these societies completely fail to “work” or even exist anymore, and when they do come to this point, such a fate can only be interpreted as the judgment of God against a people who refused to repent from their evil ways. At some people, God is left with no other choice: “I will destroy my people, since they return not from their ways” (Jeremiah 15:7) 

The sin of statism

God is not impressed by those who trust in the sword for their protection, as all statists do. Other prophets report this same message. “This is what the LORD of Hosts says: ‘Behold, I will shatter Elam’s bow, the mainstay of their might'” (Jeremiah 49:35). “I will strike the bow from your left hand and dash down the arrows from your right hand” (Ezekiel 39:3). God comes to destroy these weapons of war wielded by state rulers against His people. “He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire” (Psalm 46:9). Those who venerate the military as their “heroes” would not like to imagine the thought of God destroying them, their tanks, or their armored vehicles. But this is the nature of our Lord, who drowns Pharaohs and their armies in the sea — a theme we are reminded of throughout scripture (Ex 14:27-28, 15:4-10; Deut 11:4; Josh 24:6-7; Psa 78:53; 106:11, 136:15; Isa 43:16-17; Acts 7:36; Heb 11:29; Rev 15:3). They would rather think of Pharaohs and state militaries as their protectors, rather than see God’s protection is precisely to protect His people from Pharaohs and their order-following militaries and police officers who prey upon His people and take them for a plunder (Neh 9:11).

  Though it’s typical for Christians today to hold a narrow definition of sin that focuses only on personal shortcomings or vices while overlooking their idolatrous praise of human government, we cannot remove the worldly political ambitions of men—whether simply believers, voters, or men who actually run for office—from our understanding of man’s rebellion against God, which Scripture explicitly states is rooted in sin and a turning away from the Lord as our King of kings (1 Sam 8:7-8). If we are to gather from the prophets and the first of the Ten Commandments, one of the primary sins of humanity is the pursuit of “gods” other than the Lord, which is precisely what occurs when people chase after kings and their political plunder systems. It is the statist society, built on theft, coercion, and murder, that best represents man’s disobedience to God and his own lack of ethics and morality. Statism is the great whoredom and evil of men, where they turn to gods other than the Lord. As the prophet says up front, “This land is flagrantly prostituting itself by departing from the LORD” (Hosea 1:2), by which he meant trusting in human kings and their armies as their “saviors,” as men do to this day. This prostitution the prophet was addressing is the same prostitution we see today among all statists, who whore themselves out to the Egyptians—to the human rulers and their socialistic systems—for their defense, law, welfare, and one thousand other so-called “public goods” that they deem necessary to fund by robbing their neighbors and calling it “taxation,” rather than loving them and serving them directly. The prophet was preaching upon a political-statist scene that is just like ours today, where a people had failed to make God their only King, and whose sin was characterized by this political rebellion. This was more or less always the setting in which the prophets preached and the type of people to whom they preached the direct word of God: a society that had traded out divine anarchism for the ungodly statist systems of the world. The sin the prophets had come to rebuke was the adultery of statism, where men sought human governors as their saviors and forgot the God who brought them out of Egypt, as if such deliverance from the hands of the Egyptians wasn’t a good enough sign and wonder to keep them from ever going back that way again. Israel was to be a stateless, covenant-people under God’s sole kingship, but had rejected Him in the great whoredom of mankind that is statism, where men set up Babylonian systems of government in the belief that such methods are the only way to organize their societies and even to create society and civilization itself. Every State is but the evidence of a people who have abandoned God’s direct rule to whore themselves out to Egyptians instead, without even anything to show for it but having gone into bondage to these men. There is no such thing as a “godly statist,” because only ungodly men set up States, and all men of God trust the Lord alone as their Lord, King, and Savior, all of which are political terms that are to be sharply contrasted against the like claims of kingship and lordship made by men in their intentional substitution of themselves as gods.

  Much of God’s disappointment with His people and creation is that we have sought to make men into ruler-gods and institute a political system where men have dominion over other men. When God looks down on statist orders as ours and sees our people praising and worshiping the rulers and their officers as their gods and heroes, He sees people who have rejected Him as King and set him aside for the vain political ambitions of the world. It is precisely a statist people who cause God to say, “You are not My people, and I am not your God” (Hosea 1:9). Those who seek “presidents” to run their lives for them and rule over the state apparatus are men who reject God as their ruler. They assume that God is not in control or effective at serving those who serve Him, and that we, therefore, need men to arrange our society for us and must actively engage in the politics of the world to get them elected. This statism is all the proof needed that such people as this are worldly whores who relegate God to nothing more than a back-burner issue in their lives. Those who say that they have secured a ticket into heaven, but must engage in politics while they are on this earth, do not know the Lord Jesus Christ, who calls men to repent and seek His Kingdom. It is for these very acts of statism that men turn God away from themselves, that men forsake a God that is willing to take us in and protect us from all enemies. As one commentator notes, “Our being taken into covenant with God is owing purely to him and to his grace, for then it begins on his side: I will be to them a God, and then they shall be to me a people; we love him because he first loved us. But our being cast out of covenant is owing purely to ourselves and our own folly. The breach is on man’s side” (Matthew Henry Commentary, Hos 1:8-11). God is willing to let men abandon Him as their King if they are so idolatrous for the kingdoms of men that they will not hear His voice, so that they will find out the hard way what is to come of a people who pursue the wide road of destruction. God is willing to let men walk into their own political enslavement if they desire it so much that no rebuke will ever cause them to turn away from it. As another prophet says, 

  “The LORD said to me: ‘Even if Moses and Samuel should stand before Me, My heart would not go out to this people. Send them from My presence, and let them go. If they ask you, ‘Where shall we go?’ you are to tell them that this is what the LORD says: ‘Those destined for death, to death; those destined for the sword, to the sword; those destined for famine, to famine; and those destined for captivity, to captivity'” (Jeremiah 15:1-2). 

  Men who turn their back on the Lord, such as those who turn their idolatrous eyes to the violence of statism, are destined for destruction at the hand of God (Jer 15:6). God eventually gets fed up with those who are so caught up in idolatry and state worship that they no longer have eyes to see or ears to hear His word, or that of any of His prophets and shepherds. As God has seen before, “I look at these people—oh! What stubborn hard-headed people! Let me alone now, give my anger free reign to burst into flames and incinerate them” (Exodus 32:9-1). When God sees people who have trusted in political rulers to save them, He sees a bunch of fools who have failed to listen to His word and follow His guidance. As Hosea says, “The Israelites are stubborn, like a stubborn heifer. How then can the Lord pasture them like lambs in a meadow?” (Hosea 4:16). Though God’s mercy is great, there comes a point when a people who are bent on being ruled by men must be turned over to all the evils they deserve, and where God (for the time being) abandons a people to all their lusts and lets them reap the fruit of their own wicked ways to experience first-hand the weight of their own sin. 

  It is important to note that, for all the evils in a State, such systems are but the reflection of the religion and morality of men, whose sins bring these systems upon themselves. It is never that a statist people are innocent men who never deserved to be ruled by men, which would make God’s justice into an injustice. As much as this victim mentality is the type of thinking that we see arising in a statist society once men begin to see that things have gone wrong, where they blame the government itself for all the evils in society rather than to confess their own complicity in it, the real case is that statist societies are only possible with statist sinners to make them happen. It is never that a people are just up and dominated by a State because they are outgunned by a gang of evil men, but always that a people beg for their own enslavement and that God gives it to them good and hard. The sixteenth-century French philosopher, Étienne de La Boétie, was ahead of his time in pointing out that our system is one of “voluntary servitude” whereby men bring about their own bondage by believing that rulers are either necessary, inevitable, or cannot be abolished. As much as we would like to blame the State as such for all its tyrannical activities, such a system “works” because the people approve of it in the wickedness of their own hearts. It isn’t just that a State has come to beat up and subjugate a bunch of people who didn’t want it or don’t deserve it, but that their own acceptance of man-gods and the sin in their hearts has allowed for these systems to work. As one prophet says,

  “The heathen shall know that the house of Israel went into captivity for their iniquity: because they trespassed against me, therefore hid I my face from them, and gave them into the hand of their enemies: so fell they all by the sword” (Ezekiel 39:23).

  And another,

  “Your iniquities have built barriers between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He does not hear” (Isaiah 59:2).

  Statism is ultimately the fault of the people who allowed it to happen and supposed that human rulers were needed to secure their liberty, and the devastating effects of these systems upon a people and their social order, which God more than sufficiently warned us would come, are only the divine judgment for this sin of statism. Men are never just dominated by other men under systems of human government without having contributed the sin necessary for these systems to work, and all people who are ruled by men have either apologized for systems of human rule or failed to seek the alternative to human rule that is found in the rule by God, which is the only way to keep men from being ruled by false gods. State rule never just randomly comes upon a people who didn’t deserve it or never asked for it, but can only come against ungodly men who seek these systems as their means of protection. State rule never just randomly comes upon a people at all, but it is always God seeing to it that such sinful people who erect these governments against His Law are punished for their sins and become the slaves of these men whom they believed would be their saviors. There are never statist societies without statists, i.e., without men who contribute the ideology and practices needed for these systems to exist and to continue in their evil operations. Everywhere there is a system of human government, there are people who have played a part in its erection, whether directly, through idolizing the rulers and enthusiastically apologizing for their existence, or indirectly, by failing to seek God’s Kingdom in its place and passively allowing themselves to be ruled. Everywhere there are human rulers who stand above the people as powerful men who are allegedly necessary to secure society and keep people safe and free, there are people who have played the harlot with the kingdoms of the world and are only reaping what they have sown. There has never been a statist society without statist sinners in it. Statism cannot work without patriotism and praise for the ruler gods, and it is no coincidence that there is an endless abundance of these sinful men under the American empire today, because it is impossible to imagine such a political system as the “United States” or any Rome or Egypt before it without sinful men to contribute to it. It is never possible to further statist systems through force alone, and it has always required that men believe in these systems for them to exist. It is impossible to have a State without sinners to make it happen, and all men who want to rule others depend on ungodly men to make their rule possible. It has always been necessary, for any would-be rulers, to keep men from saying that “there is another king, one named Jesus,” and to get them to profess instead that they have “no king but Caesar.” For the Roman systems of the world could not go on if men made God their King, as they have only persisted because men have refused to do so. 

The adultery of statism

Since many Christians are prone to ignoring unpleasant truths if they aren’t delivered in a nice and tactful tone, they would likely screech at the blunt rebukes and harsh language of the biblical prophets, who condemned such statism and nationalism as spiritual adultery and prostitution. They would ignore this rebuke against themselves as being based on a non-Christlike hatred that should take a nicer approach, and that they’re going to keep waving Caesar’s flag on their house and saying “God bless the troops” until your argument becomes more gentle and loving. Even though telling people the truth is one way to really love them, they will write off these calls for them to amend their ways as wrong because they come off as being too harsh. As the saying goes, “the truth sounds like hate to those who hate the truth.” Delivering unwelcome truths is always challenging in a Babylonian society like ours that has been built on its denial, and it is made even harder by people’s religious devotion to their own ideological and political idols. Not only are men often too prideful to admit their error, but they are too consumed in this false worship to even recognize their own idolatry.

  The prevalence of statism in our society is proof of our people’s whoredom, where they have turned away from the Lord and willingly submitted themselves as slaves to political systems and their false gods. Our people have left behind God for false gods to rule over them. In the symbolism between Hosea and his wife, who has unfaithfully gone off with others, men have “cheated” on God with the false gods of the world. Like whores, they have traded out the Lord for faith in the State, where they have placed their saving faith. As the prophet puts it, “They are the children of adultery” (Hosea 2:4). To be a statist and lust after men to “protect and serve” you is to be what the prophets called a whore, which would be a highly unwelcome truth in most professing Christian circles, where men have been trained by their false pastors to believe that the job of a soldier or police officer is fine work for a “Christian” man to take up himself, as if blowing up children and shooting men on the side of the road who backtalked you is being one of the “peacemakers” Jesus was talking about. 

  Though many Christians, who lack any political insight into God’s word, will often confine adultery to the relationship between a man and his wife, scripture often speaks more to this political concept of adultery, where men abandon God as their King for the false kings and presidents of this world. In Hosea 2, man’s turning away from God is likened to the unfaithful wife. The adulteress, in this case Hosea’s wife Gomer, is used to explain the going-away from the Lord, which began in Eden and quickly progressed into men building up kingdoms for themselves that were clearly men abandoning God for their systems of human rule (Gen 3:5, 4:16-17, 11:4-5). Anyone who reads the metaphor of Hosea’s adulterous wife to mean that spousal adultery alone is the only sin being explained is missing the point, which is rather to point out the whoredoms of the people in the eyes of God as they pursue the false god systems of men. While there’s no reason to doubt that sexual sins abounded in such exceptionally backward societies as statist ones, such adultery in the scriptures often serves as an analogy to the idolatry that men have for ruling elites and their violent societies — to a people who wave flags, sing national anthems, and pledge their allegiance to the State. We see, at the very least, that it is bound up with these other things. “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders” (Matthew 15:19). Probably as a way of subconsciously defending their own sin of statism, men have reduced adultery to something that happens in their personal life, not their political life — where they have arbitrarily made exceptions for worshiping and praising politicians as their president-gods. So long as they remain faithful to their wife, the infidelity of seeking human kings to rule over them is not seen as sin and adultery.

  This is by no means to downplay a man’s need to get his house in order, only to point out that men often fail to get their political life in order and regard the Lord as their only King. The fact that such sexual sins are used as an analogy to explain the whoredom of statism, ie., man’s lust and idolatry for human rulers, shows that each is bad. But it shows us something more for those who never consider the political element to adultery — that the “whoredom” in a land is not necessarily or solely sexual, but refers also to the general idolatries (eg., politician-praising and flag-waving) of a statist society. American society, with all the patriotic propaganda that exists within it today, is polluted with it. As we learn of the era before the Israelites asked for themselves a king (1 Sam 8),

  “They did not listen to their judges, for they played the harlot after other gods and bowed themselves down to them. They turned aside quickly from the way in which their fathers had walked in obeying the commandments of the Lord; they did not do as their fathers” (Judges 2:17). 

  Such sexual immorality is frequently used to explain the evils in men’s hearts when they seek lords and gods other than God. As one book recounts, “They acted treacherously against the God of their fathers and played the harlot after the gods of the peoples of the land, whom God had destroyed before them” (Chronicles 5:25). As another prophet said, 

  “Then those of you who escape will remember Me among the nations to which they will be carried captive, how I have been hurt by their adulterous hearts which turned away from Me, and by their eyes which played the harlot after their idols; and they will loathe themselves in their own sight for the evils which they have committed, for all their abominations” (Ezekiel 6:9). 

  Hosea confirms the same thing. “They have played the harlot against their God” (Hosea 4:12). In God’s eyes, to pursue man-made kingdoms is to be likened to a great whoredom, where men run around on God with the false gods of the world, thinking they will save them instead. Men are to see that the adultery of seeking human kingdoms, which the average false pastor will never tell you about, is high on God’s list of sins that represent a people’s turning away from the Lord. Men who have chalked up adultery, prostitution, and whoredom to mean nothing more than the man or woman who heads down to the town square to cheat on their spouse with someone have not seen the full picture that the word of God is always giving to men, which very often emphasizes the political infidelities that men engage in when they seek human rulers to order, protect, and liberate their societies for them. We may go as far as to submit that statism is even the essence of sin — that the very thing that characterizes a people who have turned away from God as their King is their turning toward men as their kings and rulers. Notwithstanding the dilutions and distortions of Biblical truths in modern Christianity, the primary way to cheat on God is to turn toward human government as your means of finding protection, law, justice, welfare, which is to say, salvation. The main way that men betray the Lord our God and set Him aside as their King is, of course, to make men into their kings and presidents. All the other things that men may do, such as steal a candy bar from the store, are relatively benign and insignificant compared to the great whoredom of statism, where men go behind God’s back to have a love affair with the authoritarian figures of the world who claim to be indispensable to a “free” and “lawful” society, without which there would be “anarchy.” God was never just looking down at human society and lamenting that the people had become too enthusiastic in their pursuit of women, but that they had become idolaters for the kingdoms of men who couldn’t get their fill of whoring themselves out to them. God was never just sending out prophets to condemn people who winked at girls on the sidewalk, but to tell them that they were people who winked at the sin of setting up systems of political violence that corrupted everything about their societies. God’s great displeasure with mankind has always been that men have turned away from Him in a political sense, to reason that they couldn’t find law and justice in a free society under His rule, but that they needed human rulers to achieve it for them, who only ended up perverting everything true about God’s Law. “See how the faithful city has become a harlot! She once was full of justice; righteousness resided within her, but now only murderers!” (Isaiah 1:21).

Turning back to God for mercy

Lest we treat God as nothing but a vengeful and relentless state-smasher by pointing out that judgment and curses are upon the disobedient, the other side of the coin is God’s relentless mercy upon those who turn from their old evil ways. If men return to God and give up their old idolatries for the human rulers of the world, our merciful Lord will dwell in us again, too. But men, including those who currently wear boots and badges for the State as its armed plunderers, must repent. As one prophet said, “If the wicked restore the pledge, give again that he had robbed, walk in the statutes of life, without committing iniquity; he shall surely live, he shall not die” (Ezekiel 33:15). Christ has come to save us from our sin that has led us into bondage and reconcile man to God, but men still need to repent and turn away from the world and its institutions, where they have been in bondage, and seek the Kingdom of God. It is not good enough to simply claim “Jesus died for our sins” but see no need to turn away from them. Men need to say, with the psalmists, that “I considered my ways and turned my steps to Your testimonies” (Psalm 119:59). 

  While statists, who have broken God’s Law by seeking to be ruled by men, have already brought great evils upon themselves, they have not irredeemably destroyed themselves and must still repent and seek the Kingdom of God. Though the problems we have accumulated from walking down the statist path of sin will not simply vanish without a day of reckoning, there is still no hope in continuing down this destructive political path, even though we have walked in it so far and are overdue for our “day of the Lord.” There is still no hope in walking down the wicked path of statism if we ever hope to avoid the judgment that God has planned for all men who believe in human archism. God is willing to forgive men for their sins and accept their pleas for mercy and prayers for restoration. However, men must earnestly repent and return to God, who changes His mind upon seeing a repentant people turn from their wickedness, which necessarily means that they must abandon their statism. Then God will no longer turn His back upon an evil people who turned their backs on Him in their adultery with the kingdoms of the world, but will turn His face to us once again. As the prophet says, “It will happen that in the very place where it was said to them, ‘You are not My people,’ they will be called ‘sons of the living God'” (Hosea 1:10). How truly great is God that men can praise presidents, police officers, and soldiers, which is the main harlotry of mankind today that is abhorrent in God’s eyes, and our Lord will still see them as His children? How wonderful is our Lord that men who fully deserve to be totally wrecked for bringing human rulers upon themselves may avoid complete disaster and utter desolation if they turn back to the Lord?

  As scriptural analogies often go, this great story of God’s mercy upon His children is seen through the analogy of Hosea and his relationship with his prostitute wife. As God tells the prophet, “Go show love to your wife again, though she is loved by another and is an adulteress. Love her as the LORD loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and offer raisin cakes to idols” (Hosea 3:1). Though men cheat on God with human rulers, He is always ready to accept them back, even when they don’t deserve it and would justly be left at the mercy of their false gods if He had fully and permanently abandoned them. But the cheating needs to end for the relationship with God to remain. Men cannot simply claim to follow the Lord and be His kingdom-seekers while they are enamored by the systems of men and still choose to serve them, vote for them, or intellectually or spiritually support them. Men must pledge allegiance to God alone and abandon their love affair with the State. As Hosea says to his wife, as God would to His people, “You must live with me for many days; you must not be promiscuous or belong to another, and I will do the same for you” (Hosea 3:3). And we’re given the political explanation to this, which explains God’s use of Hosea and his wife to demonstrate what he wants from us. As the whorish wife must return to the bridegroom, “the Israelites must live many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred pillar, and without ephod or idol” (Hosea 3:4). God wants a stateless society for us where the Lord, and not man, is our King. He wants to see His people walk away from the kingdoms of this world—to leave Egypt—and break out of their captivity by turning back to Him. 

  Though the easy-believeism of modern Christianity has reduced things to vague and irresponsible ideas like “accepting Jesus into your heart” or just saying you “believe in Him” or merely calling yourself a Christian, simple professions of faith are not good enough in the eyes of God, who knows that men can say whatever with their lips all while their hearts are far from Him. God needs to see changed men — people who are born again and have repented of any shred of faith they may have in the systems of men. Coming back to God means abandoning the false gods of the kingdoms of men. Men have played the whore with the kings of the earth, and God calls us to come back. As another prophet put it, “Get up, O Zion! Escape, you who dwell with the Daughter of Babylon!” (Zechariah 2:7). If we go with God, He will help us to forget the old statist gods (Hos 2:17). It is God who brings us to safety from them (Hos 2:18). But things work both ways. God would be our God if we would have Him be so, but if not, He reluctantly—after sending many prophets, signs, and wonders to a people as warnings for their evils—allows men to fall to statism. This does not please the Lord to hand men over to their enemies, but neither does it when they beg to have these human rulers stand over them. The latter, we can safely submit, outweighs God’s reluctance to abandon a people, and the statolatry must be punished. 

  This cause-and-effect reality of our world, whereby sin (disobeying God’s commandments) brings about political bondage, is also one explanation for so-called “the problem of evil,” where it is assumed that the existence of evil “obviously” disproves God and His ability to remove it. Self-called “atheists” like to blame all the evils in the world on God, most of which are man-made, and refuse to see their own part in allowing them to happen. And most often, they are statists who contribute to these evils and act like God is to blame for them. Why should God use His omnipotence to stop men from lusting after idols and reaping the evils they have sown? Why should we say that God is to blame for the prevalence of evils that He told us were avoidable if we had walked down the path that He has pointed us to? The statist evils of the world are not God’s fault; they are the inevitable result of turning to men for safety and freedom. God tells us in His word that there’s a way to avoid the evils: Trust in the Lord instead of men. How can men blame God for evils (prisons, police states, labor camps, genocide, famines, taxes, inflation, etc) that abound in a statist society when He told us exactly what would happen if we trusted in Egypt for our protection? “Look now, you are trusting in Egypt, that splintered reed of a staff that will pierce the hand of anyone who leans on it. Such is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who trust in him” (2 Kings 18:21). When men trust in systems of human government to save them, which they always do when they claim that they are needed for “law and order,” “national defense,” or “poor aid” to the less fortunate, they find that these systems and their system-makers backfire on them and that what they mistakenly thought would be for their protection and welfare became the very means of their enslavement.

  None of the evils that result from statist societies are accidents, anomalies, or things that could have been avoided “if only we stuck to the constitution,” “kept the socialists from taking over,” or “voted more Christian men into power.” The evils we see today, which are becoming harder for anyone to deny, are exactly what happens every time a people seek human civil government, rather than God’s Kingdom order, as their method of social organization. God has assured this would be the result of the evil-doing that is inherent to statism and its foundation on violence and theft, lest He not be a God of His word who has ordered the universe a certain way, such that curses befall all those who walk down the evil path of statism and that blessings await only those men who refuse this path and seek an anarchist society that has no other gods than the Lord. 

Liberty through God

When people chase after the kingdoms of men, it’s not just their idolatrous hearts that lead them there. They’ve also chosen to believe the lies of those in power: that their political agendas, military might, welfare programs, and housing departments are what truly protect, feed, and shelter us. To trust in the State is to fail to trust in God to provide for us, and such a lack of faith comes with great costs. The failure to trust in the Lord for all our needs leads us into the very nightmare scenario of war, poverty, homelessness, and crime, that everyone wrongly feared would come about if we didn’t have Pharaohs and their Egyptian political systems to look after us. 

  God gives us everything we could ever need, all the security and liberty and abundance of bread and barns full of hay and feed, and still men turn His inheritance into a wasteland by building up political systems of human slavery that oppress men, impoverish their societies, and leave them in a mess that is precisely the opposite of the “law and order” they wrongly thought could be attained by setting up a system of human government. As the prophet said, “They exchanged their Glory for a thing of disgrace” (Hosea 4:7). They pervert their societies and trust in false gods (e.g., kings) to feed them, when men were to trust that all their sustenance and provisions will come from the Lord, should they walk in His liberty and reject the false security of human government. This has been the problem of men under our statist societies today, who believe that everything they have (or at least the things they think they have) has come through the government itself: that “the troops fought for our freedom,” “the police work the night shift so we can sleep at night,” and that without human rulers there would be no one to do all these things for us. This is the type of thinking God laments against a people who have turned their faith over to human rulers as the source of their liberty and prosperity, which is, of course, only a false one when it comes to a statist society. As the prophet says,

  “She does not acknowledge that it was I who gave her grain, new wine, and oil, who lavished on her silver and gold— which they crafted for Baal” (Hosea 2:8). 

  Though God wishes to give us freedom and prosperity if we obey Him and walk in His ways, which is living as freemen in an anarchist society that has no gods before the Lord, He is also willing to revoke the blessings and turn them into a curse when we walk away from His law and trust in the legal plunder of men as our means of obtaining bread and protection, which in the end only results in poverty, famine, insecurity, and genocide. Since men are disobedient, the prophet reports, 

  “Therefore I will take back My grain in its time and My new wine in its season; I will take away My wool and linen, which were given to cover her nakedness. And then I will expose her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one will deliver her out of My hands. I will put an end to all her exultation: her feasts, New Moons, and Sabbaths— all her appointed feasts. I will destroy her vines and fig trees, which she thinks are the wages paid by her lovers. So I will make them into a thicket, and the beasts of the field will devour them. I will punish her for the days of the Baals when she burned incense to them, when she decked herself with rings and jewelry, and went after her lovers. But Me she forgot, declares the LORD” (Hosea 2:9-13). 

Getting back liberty by getting back to God

Throughout history, there have always been men who have recognized the importance of remaining steadfast in their faith in God, recalling the Israelites’ bondage in Egypt (Hos 2:15). There have always been men who have understood that slavery arises from trusting in human rulers as one’s gods and protectors. Yet, men have invariably forgotten these lessons, returning to the false belief that slavery and lawlessness stem from failing to establish Pharaohs as “protectors” — rather than the truth of the matter that they result from neglecting to make God our King and living in a free society without human rulers. 

  To build a society free from the tyranny of men, we must stop disobeying God by participating in and supporting the human kingdoms of the world, which are rebellious creations of men that exist only because men set them up in their sin and only because God permits them to act as a judgment upon a people who would not be ruled by Him alone.

  “On that day I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the creatures that crawl on the ground. And I will abolish the bow and sword and weapons of war in the land, and will make them lie down in safety. So I will betroth you to Me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in loving devotion and compassion. And I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will know the LORD” (Hosea 2:18-20). 

  Men who trust in “commander in chiefs,” generals, tanks and fighter jets, or what the Bible refers to as chariots and horsemen, to secure their liberty are sorely mistaken. These weapons of the State are the enemy of God’s Kingdom, which He comes to break. They are alternative methods of salvation to the one promised by the Lord for those who trust in His security. 

  What we need more than anything today is to return to God as our true Lord and Savior, forsaking the false gods of the world that have led us astray and taken us as their captives to plunder for all we’re worth. Our people are an idolatrous people who have built up these false gods in our land and are lost children in need of restoration to our Maker, whom they have forgotten in their lust for the plunder systems of men. If we cry out to God in sincere repentance and turn away from the false systems of this world, He is ready to hear us and deliver us from the oppression we now face. God eagerly awaits our return, even though we have denied Him as our rightful King by setting up man-kings as our gods. God is always ready to be our God again if we seek Him through heartfelt prayer, repent from the sinful support of the kingdoms of this world that have been raised up against Him, and plead for a divine restoration of our backward societies and deliverance from the hands of men. Amen. 

  “‘On that day I will respond,’ declares the LORD,  ‘I will respond to the heavens, and they will respond to the earth. And the earth will respond to the grain, to the new wine and oil, and they will respond to Jezreel. And I will sow her as My own in the land, and I will have compassion on ‘No Compassion.’ I will say to those called ‘Not My People,’ ‘You are My people,’ and they will say, ‘You are my God.’ ” (Hosea 2:21-23). 

  Many men struggle to reconnect with God today because their societies are almost fully based around statolatry, as seen in the American scene with its endless patriotic delusions, flags, national anthems, police praise, military holidays, elections, inauguration rituals, or any other number of statist sacraments and rituals where men practice the ungodly religion of statism. In political societies, people often become so entrenched in the statist ideology of the world, which is all they have ever known from cradle to grave, that they lose sight of their path back to God, who rejects the very systems they have been praising. Their worldviews have become so intertwined with these corrupt systems and the underlying statist ideology that it infects all their thinking, rendering them unable to break free and see the other path that God points us to. As the prophet says, “Their deeds do not permit them to return to their God, for a spirit of prostitution is within them, and they do not know the LORD” (Hosea 5:4). When men are so lost in the statist ways of the world, they don’t even know how to return to the Lord anymore, which is why they violently fight against men like us who sharply contrast the Kingdom of God with the kingdoms of the world that they have supported in their idolatry. They don’t want to believe that they are wholly out of line with the Lord, and so invent every excuse in the book to deny the blatant contradiction of their “God and country” worldview. Americans today, like other statists around the world, are the very type of people whom the prophets rebuked for having been utterly lost in sin, so much so that they fight against any rebuke that comes against them and seek to correct their ideas and actions. They are the people who the prophets had said “have stubborn and rebellious hearts” and “have turned aside and gone away” (Jeremiah 5:23). They are just like the very men rebuked by the prophets in the Bible, who, of course, claimed to know God but do not even recognize His words and message when it is preached to them. They are the people who wouldn’t listen to anything the prophets came to tell them, even though they did it because they wanted to save the people from the bondage they had found themselves in for their own wicked ideas of human rule. “To whom can I give this warning? Who will listen to me? Look, their ears are closed, so they cannot hear. See, the word of the LORD has become offensive to them; they find no pleasure in it” (Jeremiah 6:10). They are a people who call themselves Christians, but do not do a word that the Lord says, clinging to worldly systems of government as their saviors. American society has more or less always been a perfect example of the very people the prophets rebuked, especially in the twentieth century: a land where the political systems of men were expanding in a land of men who claimed to be men of God. Far from actually knowing the Lord, their statism is all the proof needed that they have walked away from Him. The condemnation of the people thousands of years ago given by the prophets is a perfect and relevant rebuke for Americans today: “Alas, O sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a brood of evildoers, children who act corruptly! They have forsaken the LORD; they have despised the Holy One of Israel and turned their backs on Him” (Isaiah 1:4). 

  Men have to give up their statism if they ever want to show that they are godly men, for statism—both the ideological belief that human government should exist as well as the physical practice of implementing and furthering these systems—is one of the best pieces of evidence that men have gone away backward from the Lord and chased after false gods as their rulers. Though professing Christians today see no contradiction or antagonism between the kingdoms of man and the Kingdom of God, the very origins of a State—never mind the widespread evils that come to manifest as it grows over time—are proof that a people have turned from God. Far from the thinking of all the sinful slogans of these societies, like “God bless America,” the mere existence of a State is all the proof needed that a people are under divine judgment, both actively, in the sense that the kingdoms of man are always bringing evils upon a people while they exist, and in the future, where these systems eventually cause the downfall of entire societies and invite all sorts of enemies to devour them. The mere existence of a State, much less the obvious evils that come about the longer they are allowed to grow, is all the proof needed that men have not made the Lord their God, because a people whose God is the Lord are a people who live freely in an anarchist society that has not raised men up as their ruler-gods. Those who wish to avoid the utter collapse of their societies—this is the inevitable fate of all people who choose the violent political means as their method of social organization—must walk away from man’s deliberately perverted law orders and return to the Lord their Lawmaker, Judge, and King (Isa 33:22), because all they will ever receive is lawless, injustice, and disorder under man-made governments.

The ungodliness of statism 

Although the trajectory of American society today has seemingly caught off-guard all those men who were raised in the peak days of the empire (1950-2000) to believe that it could go on that way forever and that no evils could ever come upon their society because they had built massive and expensive armies to “keep us free” and combat all social ills, it comes as no surprise to the student of God’s word that trusting in man’s violent political systems brings destruction to society, because this was always the very things the prophets were warning would be the case of a statist people who trusted in men rather than God. It is more profound than merely thinking that “socialism never works,” although we can agree that this is the case. Such destruction of society is not just the “economic” or “ethical” effects of state intervention, which is a little too shallow for holy thinking. It is the divine judgment of God against a people who have turned from God and toward the law-systems of men. While the Lord is the Author of the “natural law” that prevents statist and socialist schemes from being workable, He also actively sees to it that these systems cannot work because they are raised up against Him. However, this law of God that prevents statism from working, or assures that it “works” to bring nothing but terror and disaster to a people who seek it, may also be conceived of as the means by which God brings about His judgment. While God may destroy these societies with His hand directly, as He had done in a handful of Biblical episodes like the Plagues of Egypt or His judgment upon Sodom and Gomorrah, He also just simply allows them to destroy themselves — to allow the plunder system of statism to loot whole societies until they can’t work anymore, to allow taxation and legislative decrees to strangle the productive efforts of the people and keep them impoverished, to allow the statist mechanism of doling out political privileges to corporations that make it possible for them to squeeze-out all the small-time farmers and producers who have to then sell their land to these legally-enforced monopolists, to allow the monetary inflationists to transfer wealth to themselves at the expense of private producers and to distort all the prices and economic signals in a society to their own benefit, and to allow such theft-based systems to squander all their stolen property on wars, political beneficiaries, and who knows what else. 

  All these intrinsic features of a statist society—all of the coercion, violence, theft, murder, prison camps, central bankers—are precisely why God has a gripe with such people and had sent prophets to rebuke them before. God’s charges against His people are almost always of this political nature, where the people have adopted the violent practices of statism in the place of His Kingdom order. 

  “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. Therefore the land mourns, and all who dwell in it will waste away with the beasts of the field and the birds of the air; even the fish of the sea disappear” (Hosea 4:1-3). 

  These are the same types of charges raised by God in all the books of the prophets. “For the wealthy of the city are full of violence, and its residents speak lies; their tongues are deceitful in their mouths” (Micah 6:12). The people had become a bunch of statists who were only interested in robbing each other, rather than building a free society according to the principles and commands laid out by God. Far from a society of free men who love their neighbors and serve them directly because they love God and want to see their people free, mankind has always been dealing with a statist people who set up human rulers as their gods, who form a system of human government that allows men to plunder each other. As another prophet points out in the opening of his ministry, “Your rulers are rebels, friends of thieves. They all love bribes and chasing after rewards. They do not defend the fatherless, and the plea of the widow never comes before them” (Isaiah 1:23). The prophets’ rebuke against a people was necessarily always because they were statists who had turned from God’s Law — both the rulers themselves and the religious establishment that had always worked to prop it up and falsely give it God’s sanction. “Her princes are roaring lions; her judges are evening wolves, leaving nothing for the morning. Her prophets are reckless, faithless men. Her priests profane the sanctuary; they do violence to the law” (Zephaniah 3:324). 

  Men need to see that the truly abhorrent practices that they are engaged in today are the political evils they have supported, which are part and parcel of every system of human civil government around the world, for all human government is instituted against God’s Law and could never, in any case, be a system of social organization that was compatible with it. If you asked the average church-going Christian what the sins of men are, though, you would at best find them mentioning some personal moral failings like spousal adultery, dishonesty, or maybe thinking about smoking marijuana or something of the like. The notion of political sins, i.e., the idea that patriotism and serving the State is a sin, escapes their radar entirely and even seems to them to be a “political idea” that has nothing to do with what they have deemed to just be a “religion” that has nothing to do with another way of organizing society and concerns only such matters as one’s beliefs about God or the obligation to perform rituals in a so-called church building every Sunday morning that have been entirely separated from actually looking after and serving your neighbors as a Kingdom-people who live separately from the world, as citizens of Heaven. The pervasive rejection of the idea that statism is sin, despite the condemnation of this idolatry being basically all the prophets are ever even talking about, comes in part because these men still participate in such idolatry themselves and don’t want to admit this. To accept that statism is sin would require some major repentance that they don’t believe they require, so it is easier to dismiss the assertion that statism is antithetical to the anarchist politics of the Lord. In many cases, it is simply because they haven’t seen it and have overlooked the political aspects of God’s word, which calls us into a different kingdom than those of this world. Perhaps some seminary hack of a false pastor led them to believe that one’s religion is a “separate realm” from one’s politics, which leads men to compartmentalize these things in a way that allows them to believe they can vote for men as if they don’t have a King already in the Lord.

  At any rate, most Christians have failed to make all their thoughts, including their political ones, captive to Christ, thinking that it is still acceptable to draw one’s beliefs and ideologies from the world rather than the Word, as if God only gave us a “religion” (ie., churchian rituals to take part in) rather than another way to live, which is entirely contrary to the authoritarian methods adopted by the people of the world, whose characteristic “worldliness” is their statism: their belief in human rulers and their faith in these men to save them and right their societies for them. They believe they can embrace the philosophy of statism without negating their devotion to the Lord, because Jesus to them is nothing more than the savior of our souls when we go to heaven and not the King of freemen on earth who liberates those who seek His Kingdom from the tyranny of the kingdoms of man. They haven’t seen that sin not only includes fornication with worldly kingdoms, but that this is really what sin is all about: seeking other (human) kings than the Lord our God to rule over us. Though many people might give us some understanding of sin as their own personal failings or vices or their lust for women or something along these lines, very few have seen that the theft, murder, bloodshed, and lust for the State is at the heart of the matter. The prophets did not come just to say that a people in a given society were whores, but that they were statist whores who have prostituted themselves out to the kingdoms of the world for their salvation, which is the very way that they have turned away from God. 

  Indeed, many Christians are under the delusion that the State has been God’s provision for law and order, forgetting both that God’s Law forbids men from having other gods and that this Law, written on the hearts of men, is itself the only thing men need to follow to have a free society. They struggle to have a clear picture of proper political theology where Christ is King and there are no other gods than God, because they have been deceived by false pastors or even by their own sinful ideology or man-made doctrines into thinking that the Bible is not really political at all, but focused only on matters of salvation of the soul. They have not thought of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, which the God-man Jesus Christ preached in His earthly ministry, as something that has come to deliver them from the hands of our human captors, to free men from the bondage of Egypt. In this thinking, they have been able to believe they can get their politics from the world, and that there is no issue mixing their worldly political philosophy, which is always some variation of statism, into their religion, which they believe is confined to a “spiritual” matter. Therefore, “Christian statist” is not seen as a contradiction to them, even though it is the greatest contradiction possible. They don’t see Christ or Caesar as a choice that needs to be made, but believe they can serve both.

  But in truth, there is only really Christian anarchism or ungodly statism. All statism is ungodly, no matter how much it professes the Lord’s name, and the only possible way to have an anarchist society is to make the Lord your only. There is no such thing as a godless-stateless society nor a Christian-statist one. All those who refuse to be ruled by God will be ruled by men, and all those who adopt the statist philosophy have rejected God as their ruler and decided to be ruled by false gods in their sin, who will only end up being a judgment against them. Men choose not between fundamentally different forms of statism, but only aesthetic or stylistic differences at best, which are different from each other only in kind but never in principle. For all statist systems, whether they use stars and stripes or hammers and sickles for their branding, are founded and furthered on theft and violence, against God’s commands to not rob or murder other men. All man-made political systems are socialist in nature, whether their socialism is supposedly “limited” and concealed or whether it is blatantly and unashamedly a “communist state.” Men choose not between what type of State they should have, where one is supposedly “secular” and the other “Christian,” but between the only godly society possible, which is an anarchist one, and statism in general, which is always an ungodly system of man-gods who rule in the place of the Lord as a people’s King. As much as men imagine that the real struggle is based around what type of way they should reform or rebrand the Babylonian systems of the world, whether they should be systems commanded by “atheists” or ones that are operated by supposedly “godly” men, the true dichotomy we face is the Kingdom of God vs. the kingdoms of men, where the two never overlap. All statist societies are of the latter, and the former in practice is an anarchist society where God alone is King. Notwithstanding the false distinctions men have made in their worldly politics, in an attempt to differentiate each other’s brand of socialism from the other, all statists are in the same ideological camp of ungodly men who seek a system that is opposed to the Lord. The truth is much more simple than the convolution we have been given today of an assortment of supposedly different statist ideas to choose from. The political-theological is really quite simple: There is only godly anarchism, where men live freely under God as their only archist or ruler; and ungodly archism, where men have chosen the State as their religion and its rulers as their gods. There is no such thing as a godly people who set up systems of human civil government, which is always the work of ungodly men. And there is no such thing as a people who manage to get free from human government without God on their side. When men walk away from God, they will certainly walk into the arms of Pharaohs, or their own delusions and egos otherwise, which still prevent them from finding liberty. And as the prophets make clear, to walk into the arms of Egypt is the very thing that God considers to be abandoning Him. All rejections of God lead to statism, and all statism is a rejection of God. The politics of godly men and of God Himself is an anarchist politics that rejects the kingdoms of the world and seeks only the Kingdom of God, to the exclusion of all other kingdoms of the world. All worldly politics, i.e., the work of furthering the Egyptian systems of human government, is of the devil and works against the advancement of God’s Kingdom order, which is furthered wholly outside of these statist societies and does not rely on participating in them whatsoever to be advanced. The only “politics” the godly man can put his hand to is the work of administering God’s Kingdom order, which is carried out without exercising authority over other men, which is the way the rulers of the world operate (Mark 10:42-45). Those who engage in the politics of the world, i.e., voting for politicians or running for office themselves, are ungodly men who are working to advance the government of the devil. In short, there are only non-statist Christians and non-Christian statists. There are no other choices for men. All true Christians are anarchists, and all statists are non-Christians.

The foolishness and evils of statism 

It has been man’s refusal to learn from God—to read His word and understand His will—that they have so easily fallen for the false gods and ideologies of the world, which have led them to embrace these evil statist systems. If men had ever known the ways of the Lord, which He expressed in a great way through His prophets thousands of years ago, they would never fall for the statist ways of the world that mankind has hitherto been deceived by. We have gotten ourselves into this mess precisely because of this type of ignorance and foolishness, which has trusted in the worldly wisdom of men that says human government is necessary to “law and order,” rather than seeking to know the ways of the Lord and live by them. As the prophet says, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6). In other words, men don’t want to wise up and see that statism is ungodly, but wish to remain infatuated with their false gods and the false religious order of statism. They have either never learned the ways of the Lord because they were so lost in the world’s systems that they have never walked away from them, or they have forgotten them because the false prosperity and power of the world were too tempting to avoid. In their sinful ways of thinking, they believe that God and State can be reconciled, that Jerusalem and Athens are compatible social systems. They think that a statist society can be a godly one and that God approves of these evils that we engage in. It has always been man’s rejection of the knowledge and wisdom of the Lord, which is only in fearing Him, that men go into bondage to the kingdoms of the world. As God has taught through other prophets, “Therefore My people will go into exile for their lack of understanding” (Isaiah 5:13). When men don’t know the ways of the Lord who calls them to seek another Kingdom that is not of this world, they are bound to become statists who can’t see another other socio-political path for themselves but to organize along the lines of political violence, which is always the means of ungodly men. 

  Far from being in favor with God by looking to the “law” systems of men to keep them safe and free, God looks down on such systems as ours and says, “You have forgotten the law of your God” (Hosea 4:6). When God looks down upon a statist people, He sees a world of men who do not know Him. Statism is an abandonment of God’s law order for the law systems of men and is high on the list of things that men need to repent from. God names it as one of the explicit things that represent a rejection of His Kingship (Sam 8:6-8). Since men set up systems of human government in their lack of knowledge of the Lord, whether because they have never known Him, falsely claim to know Him, or are unashamedly fighting against Him, we cannot fail to instruct our people in righteousness and get them away from the grips of human government that have been able to prey on them because of their unrepentant sin that does not patently and unquestionably reject these systems as ungodly. It is the false hope in the systems of the world, which ends up being the only hope of men who don’t know the Lord, that gets a people destroyed. For as the prophet says, “A people without understanding will come to ruin” (Hosea 4:14). 

  The statist rebellion of mankind has been a problem ever since God created men, in the early days of Cain and Nimrod, who sought to live apart from God by setting up political systems and believing they could create their own order through the violence of human rule. It was always God’s lament that the men He created have forgotten their Maker and become even dumber than animals. “Listen, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the LORD has spoken: ‘I have raised children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against Me. The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master’s manger, but Israel does not know; My people do not understand'” (Isaiah 1:2-3). God made men to live freely under His divine care, but they demanded that there be human rulers to order their societies for them, thereby demonstrating their lack of belief in God to order things. God pointed men toward the anarchist ways of His Kingdom, which is the only means possible by which men can avoid being ruled by men and the judgment that results from these systems, but “they did not listen or incline their ear [and] followed the stubborn inclinations of their own evil hearts. They went backward and not forward” (Jeremiah 7:24). Since the days that God created men, instructing them to busy themselves about the Dominion Mandate and organize their free societies around the family, men have been involved in a political rebellion against God, rarely if ever deciding to follow His ways and repent of the infatuation they have with human government and all the idolatrous displays that come along with these systems. When God looks down upon our statist people today, He sees the same thing as He did when He spoke through the prophets of old: “These are rebellious people, deceitful children, children unwilling to obey the LORD’s instruction” (Isaiah 30:9). For man’s great political sin against God, where they went whoring after the Egyptian-statist systems of the world to save them, God had eventually abandoned His people in the past to become the slaves of the systems of the world that they apparently desired more than Him. God had always shown His people the right way, even physically rescuing them from the bondage of Egypt as a great sign of remembrance for what He can do for a people who seek His ways and refuse to join in with the plunderous political practices of the kingdoms of the world, yet “they rebelled and grieved His Holy Spirit [and] so He turned and became their enemy, and He Himself fought against them” (Isaiah 63:10).

  For thousands of years and counting, mankind has been too hardheaded and hardhearted to see the truths that God has laid out before them in His word and through the many prophets He has sent out to be against the world for the world, and have fought against as these truths every time it has been presented to them. They have even failed to learn from the harsh judgment that God has repeatedly brought upon men and their societies, setting up systems of human government again and again, even as God tears them down before their eyes. They have been foolish people who refused to repent upon hearing the rebukes of the prophets of God, who they would rather stone to death than listen to. “Israel is as obstinate as a stubborn heifer” (Hosea 4:16). They have thought that selling their souls to systems of human government, waving their flags, giving up their children to die in its wars, or rooting for their favorite politicians would profit them in the end. They never cared to hear that “their sacrifices will bring them shame” (Hosea 4:19). Surely in vain do men give up their property, liberty, and lives to the false gods of Egyptian systems. For, in the end, these systems just leave them desolate and always fail to achieve their stated aims, which, if men knew the word and ways of the Lord, would be recognized as the false claims of false gods anyway. For the great things men believe they can achieve if only they sacrifice a little liberty, for all the compromise with the kingdoms of the world men make to believe that freedom can be found in them, for all the pragmatic reasoning that the ends justify the means and that “Christians” must engage in the politics of the world, it turns out that men sold out on God for nothing. There were no positive trade-offs whatsoever that made it worth it to betray God for the systems of man, since whatever fleeting prosperity may have existed in the peak days of the empire, when it was able to plunder the rest of the world, will eventually come to an end and leave them high and dry. They achieve none of the ends they thought could be obtained through compromise with the world, and forgo all the things they could have actually had if they had sought the Kingdom of God the first time and repented of their statist delusions. All men receive in the end for forsaking God and going the statist ways of the world is to find themselves as a people destroyed for their sin. 

God against kings and kings against God

Since men aren’t very minded in the idea of God as our exclusive and only King, which implies an anarchist political theology that they aren’t ready to embrace, it is common for people to think that they may have a “heavenly king” and an “earthly king” and that they are “citizens of two kingdoms” who may be loyal to both. In recent times, this thinking that men can share their allegiance to the Lord with the ruling men of the world without abandoning the former is seen in a recently popular phrase among American conservatives that “Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my president.” It is thought that the Lord, the King of kings, as scripture calls Him, doesn’t actually wish to be our total King in all our affairs; an earthly king is assumed to be needed to fill in the void of God’s earthly shortcomings, where He is thought to be inactive. This thinking has not been helped by the idea that Jesus’s kingship is only of the future and that there is very little we can do down here besides wait to be raptured into the sky. Under the popular teachings of modern Christianity that present our life on earth as a more or less hopeless one until the return of Jesus, as well as the idea that Christianity is merely a “religion” that is practiced through church sacraments rather than the politics of another Kingdom that is not of this word, men have reasoned that it is perfectly fine to be loyal to the man-made kingdoms of the world, too. Since Jesus is but the savior of their soul, rather than a conquering King who came to point us to another literal Kingdom that we are to seek on earth today, they have thought there is no trouble with seeking man-kings on earth to take care of the socio-political problems that they suppose to exist apart from God and what they have deemed to be merely “religious.”

  This thinking is wrong. God does not want us to seek worldly kings at all and does not tell us that He doesn’t provide protection or defense, such that we would need them. The common idea of salvation today, which is nothing more than the saving of one’s soul upon announcing that they “believe in Jesus,” is rather different from the Biblical cases of salvation where God (as with the Israelites in Egypt) physically delivers a people from the bondage of human rule and sets them free in a place where there is no tyrants to rule over them. Far from not instructing us to seek human kings, indeed God tells us explicitly that such king-seeking is abandoning Him as our King — not only that, but specifically over the militaristic cause of men seeking protection from enemies (Sam 8:20), which leaves the statist who professes to follow the Lord with no excuse for why they should need a human king. The idea that God is a good soul-saver, but fails to be our “Defense Department,” falls flat on its face with scriptures like 1 Samuel 8, which demonstrate that seeking state armies is exactly the nature of man’s rebellion against God and that physical protection is the very type of service and salvation that God provides for a people who seek His Kingdom. 

  Some will say that the existence of States is proof that God wants us to have them. So where do human kings come from then? Aren’t they proof that God wills them to exist? Far from it. All of the systems of human government the world has ever known were instituted by men who were fighting against God’s Kingship and seeking to establish other kings and kingdoms than the Lord and His Kingdom, which has nothing to do with theirs. The kingdoms of the world exist only because God allows them to serve as a judgment against a people who have rejected His anarchistic Kingdom order. It was never that “God gave us human government,” but that God grudgingly “gives” men the kings that they sinfully beg to have over them, and does so precisely and only to bring evils upon a people to rebuke them for this grave sin, so that they may cry out to Him and realize their need to hold God as their only King again (Sam 8:18). Knowing that human rulers inevitably terrorize a people whose wicked works set them up, by taxing them and conscripting them in their armies and robbing them of their properties, God allows the kingdoms of man to exist so that men might learn how to regret forsaking His kingship and kingdom. Though most men in this world tell us that we can’t do without a State for protection, just as the overt sinners in the scriptures thought, we see that God doesn’t desire for us to have human kings but gives them to us only reluctantly after we (sinfully) beg for them. As God says through the prophet, in one of the most excellent Biblical defenses of this thesis, “In My anger I gave you a king” (Hosea 13:11). At best, God “gives” men kings only in His anger — not in His desire and perfect will. God’s will for men was always that He would be their King and that they would actually listen to His words that teach that a man cannot serve two masters, must not have any other gods before the God, are to call no man on earth their (civil) fathers, that they are to have one lawgiver and judge. After being so fed up with the rebellious men who wanted men as their kings rather than the Lord their King, God gives these statist whores over to the human rulers they have been lusting after, doing so only because He knows full well what it will mean for them and doing so precisely as a means of judgment against them. 

  One sees in the scriptures that God is our only real ally against the kings of the earth, not only because He is the only way out, but also because so few of our brothers even stand with us in agreement on the word of God. Most of our people have bought into all the lies of the statist regimes of the world and the ideology and regime intellectuals that feed into their power, as well as drawing them from their own wicked hearts that hardly require propaganda to aid them in such thinking. Tens of millions of our neighbors would just say “he shouldn’t have broken the law” upon seeing one of Pharaoh’s law enforcement agents dragging someone out of a vehicle for not using their turn signal or having a sticker in their window. They would never act as Moses did in his first recorded act (Ex 2:11-12). 

  How greatly we need God, seeing that the evil systems of the world are even controlled by His hand against the people who have turned away from Him and wickedly set them up and advanced their cause. The state rulers have done nothing but prey upon us, as we have become ensnared in their schemes by failing ourselves to carry-out the work of seeking God’s Kingdom. As one psalmist says, “The wicked scheme against the righteous and gnash their teeth at them” (Psalm 37:12). Human government is a system of predation and plunder that has for its only skill the exceptional ability to destroy the lives and livelihoods of a people who find themselves living under one. The nature of the State is nothing less than to destroy men and bring them to nothing. “The wicked lie in wait for the righteous, and seek to slay them” (Psalm 37:32). And God preaches against them through His prophets for this reason. “Hear this, O priests! Take heed, O house of Israel! Give ear, O royal house! For this judgment is against you because you have been a snare at Mizpah, a net spread out on Tabor. The rebels are deep in slaughter” (Hosea 5:1-2).

  While God uses the evils of statism to bring judgment upon the wicked people who supported these evils (Isa 10:5), these evil acts and actors are also themselves punished for their own evils (Isa 10:12). It should never be thought that because God may use States to bring judgment upon people that He morally approves of these political plunder systems. No State can self-consciously serve God, as they are all built on theft, murder, and violations of His Law. Even if state rulers wanted to, it would not be possible for them to escape their nature of statism as born in theft and violence and subsisting on it as long as these systems exist, and any genuine effort to serve God would mean abdicating their authority and becoming a true servant-minister in His Kingdom. The State “serves” God by sinning, and only in their pride believe they are carrying out these acts autonomously from God (Isa 10:13-14), who is actually using them for His purposes of judging a people who wouldn’t make Him their King. Though we may say that God may work through States to bring evil upon sinners who trust in these false kingdoms or even to stop another kingdom around the world, He never wills that we set them up or support them. Indeed, the only reason they exist and are wielded against a people is precisely for this sin of statism. If men didn’t choose a State to protect them, but decided that God was their King in the first place, they would never have Caesars and Pharaohs standing over them demanding their property or their life. 

  The problem with our societies has always been that men have turned to Egyptians (to presidents, princes, kings, politicians, soldiers, and police officers) to “save” them from their troubles, rather than to seek salvation in the Lord who brings His people out of Egypts. In short, the problem with men has always been their pursuit of human government and their kings and militaries, who they believe will protect them. As the scriptures put it, “They set out to go down to Egypt without asking My advice, to seek shelter under Pharaoh’s protection and take refuge in Egypt’s shade” (Isaiah 30:2). They failed to see that these men are not actually the “saviors” they implicitly believed they were. (The typical objection by Christians who must meet this charge is that they don’t call them their saviors, so therefore, that isn’t what they expect of them.) If they had sought the wisdom of the Lord, rather than their own “wisdom” in their foolish pride, they would have known better. “Put not your trust in princes, in mortal man, who cannot save” (Psalm 146:3). But they lived in error and outside of God’s counsel instead. Men believed that we need massive militaries and police states to be “protected” from “the bad guys,” whether the foreign statists who will allegedly conquer us without a state of our own, or the militarized police who are said to keep us “safe” from “the criminals.” Men have always sought human rulers instead of God. As another prophet put it, 

  “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). 

  Hosea gives us the same story of men seeking god-kings over God, hence the tens of millions of Americans who tell us that we have veterans and active-duty military to thank for the “freedom” that they can’t even see we don’t have.  

  “When Ephraim saw his sickness and Judah his wound, then Ephraim turned to Assyria and sent to the great king. But he cannot cure you or heal your wound. For I am like a lion to Ephraim and like a young lion to the house of Judah. I, even I, will tear them to pieces and then go away. I will carry them off where no one can rescue them. Then I will return to My place until they admit their guilt and seek My face; in their affliction they will earnestly seek Me” (Hosea 5:13-15). 

  Unfortunately, it is often the case that when things go bad for a people, that is when statist societies start to destroy everything, men only double down on their errors and say that the only problem has been that there weren’t enough police, enough soldiers, enough monetary inflation, enough taxes, enough government programs, or enough laws. They never give up on their god-State and turn to the Lord, but keep putting their trust in human kings who are in direct competition with God as the false lords, false saviors, and false lawgivers. The rulers of the world are aware of the fear that men have of other men and of the unknown wilderness that men of God must walk on, and they play on this fear to rule over them. They propagandize them with false enemies around the world, make them think that criminals would abound on every corner without their police, that there would be lawlessness and chaos without legislators to give order to society. They even launch wars or global pandemic scares to get the people in a panic and cause them to cower to government orders and lockdowns. And this is why God’s judgment comes down upon them, in the form of letting those statist societies wreck themselves, or as the psalmists have said, to let their own plunderous tables, snares, and nets be a trap to those who set them. God’s anger is toward the state rulers, and the people forsook God to follow men (Hos 5:10), and He does not forget about the sins of statist societies. “I know all about Ephraim, and Israel is not hidden from Me” (Hosea 5:3). God is watching all the evils of these political societies today, despite the men who, in their pride, believe that God is not watching them as they plunder His people (Psa 10:11, 73:11, 94:7; Isa 29:15, 47:10; Job 22:13-14). 

  Men have, in short, always put Pharaohs over God and Egyptian-statist systems over His Kingdom. They have trusted in the systems of false god-kings that pretend to be a source of liberty and prosperity, but which only bring men into bondage. And they are always getting comfortable in Egypt, thinking these systems will last forever and that God doesn’t always bring them down just as fast as they were formed against Him. They mistake these systems for the land of milk and honey when they are but lands scheduled for eventual brimstone and fire, which become ash heaps of history where it is literally impossible for men to live anymore. The statist societies that men thought were essential for society itself eventually become nearly or entirely uninhabitable, and precisely due to the political method of social organization, which has only proven to be a judgment on them for thinking that it was anarchism under God that would be chaos and lawlessness. They simply never care enough to get back on the right path, and most have fallen for the tricks and distractions of Pharaohs that are made to placate them. Men want to drink, party, sit around and watch sports, feed on the entertainment provided for them, etc., all while their societies crumble around them (Hos 4:11). The Romans feed them just enough games and pleasures to keep them from repenting of their Roman citizenship and becoming citizens of the Kingdom of God, who renounce their allegiance to the kings and kingdoms of the world and dedicate their lives to serving the Lord Jesus Christ as their only King. But this is what is needed today. Men need to realize that it wasn’t God who gave us kings, but men who set them up in their rebellion against God. All the human rulers and human governments of the world are the work of ungodly men who turned away from God and His Kingdom and went chasing after their own foolishness, and all human rulers are necessarily antichrists who could never be “servants” of God, except in the sense that they can function as a tool of divine judgment against a people who believed they should exist. The existence of human rulers is merely a reluctant and sorrowful concession from God upon a people who have depressingly turned away from Him, who He has used to bring evils against an evil people whose very evil was believing that human rulers were “necessary” to their welfare and security. None of the systems of human government found on earth today—notwithstanding the American exceptionalism that exempts “their” government—were set up by God, and all the tyranny that men experience today under them is the divine consequence of having forsaken the Lord to be ruled by men instead. The evil inherent to human government are not just an arbitrary punishment from God either, but are intended by God to cause men to return to the Lord as their King and to realize that all their fallacious ideas about the “chaos” and “disorder” of an anarchist society—which is to say a society where God is the sole archist—are actually true of the statist society, and that it has come time for them to get their heads on straight and seek the Kingdom of God or be destroyed.

Repenting from statism

God brings judgment on those societies that forsake Him by their act of setting up human kings and “lawmakers” and “law enforcement” officers that carry out the decrees of men. He agrees to man’s sinful request for human kings, knowing that these kings and their princes will bring nothing but evils upon these people, which will act as a harsh rebuke against them (Sam 8:10-18). But He is just as merciful for those who want to repent from their old ways and make God, rather than the false god systems of man, their God again. It is never too late for men to realize what they have done and to stop walking down this wicked path of sin, because repenting from the sin which has led to bondage is always the only way out, no matter how much of a political mess a people have found themselves in. But men must first realize that destruction has come upon them because they trusted in men. They must realize they are captives in Egypt before they can even begin to think about leaving and doing things right. They must realize that they are delusional men to think that they are living in “the land of the free” and that everything is going well for them in their corrupt statist societies, which can barely be called a “society.” Unfortunately, though, it often takes great destruction for men to realize what they have done to themselves, and even being hauled off to a labor camp or lined up against the wall by a firing squad might not be a good enough wake-up call to bring them to realize that things had come so far because their whole society had turned away from God and rejected His rule for the rule by men in His place. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had realized of the Soviet Union, speaking like a Biblical prophet, “A great disaster has befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

  The way out of the statist slave society is to return to the Lord as our only legitimate archist, as the way into it—back into the Egypt from which God rescues His people—was abandoning God for men who claim to be gods. This is what men have to see if they want out. Men will need to repent for the sins of statism and actually live up to their repentance, knowing what a disaster these ungodly political systems mean for their society and knowing the part they played in allowing it to come about. 

  “Come, let us return to the LORD. For He has torn us to pieces, but He will heal us; He has wounded us, but He will bind up our wounds. After two days He will revive us; on the third day He will raise us up, that we may live in His presence. So let us know — let us press on to know the LORD. As surely as the sun rises, He will appear; He will come to us like the rain, like the spring showers that water the earth” (Hosea 6:1-3). 

  The problem is that any devotion to the Lord in men is always fleeting at best. They may be outwardly religious, “going to church” or taking part in ceremonies and rituals that are good enough to get them seen as “godly men,” but they aren’t obedient to the word of God and don’t actually seek His kingdom, His justice, or His law. They don’t care to be changed men who renounce their worldly citizenship and stop pledging allegiance to these worldly systems of government, and most often they can’t see any problem with maintaining an allegiance to “God and country” — one of the most contradictory ideas in the whole world.

  The level of corruption and evil required to wake men up is often enormous. God can absolutely wreck people, with His means usually being the wicked statist systems that men bring upon themselves, and still, men will not see their desperate need to seek the Kingdom of God.  

  “What shall I do with you, O Ephraima? What shall I do with you, O Judah? For your loyalty is like a morning mist, like the early dew that vanishes. Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets; I have slain them by the words of My mouth, and My judgments go forth like lightning. For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:4-6). 

  One of the most important things to God is evidently His ethical commandments, i.e.,to avoid serving other false gods and supporting their murderous plunder systems. And yet, this is entirely off the radar for pretty much every establishment “religious” organization, whether Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox, which all tend to emphasize the “spiritual,” “mystical,” heavenly, and soul-saving facets of God’s word over the ethical and political commandments regarding how we are to order our societies. For them, “religious” matters like church attendance and the so-called “worship service” or “liturgy” of singing songs, sitting in pews, and listening to sermons, are more important than understanding the politics of God and actually seeking His Kingdom, a claim they would surely consider to be “heretical.” Amazingly, very few people who consider themselves “religious” ever even talk about the evils of statism, while they continue in their so-called “worship services” that actually have nothing to do with serving their neighbors and seeking the Kingdom of God, which God always says impresses Him less than following through with His commandments and social laws (1 Sam 15:22; Prov 21:3; Isa 1:10-17; 58:5-7; Jer 7:22; Micah 6:8; Matt 23:23). God is always looking for people to turn away from the violent kingdoms of men, not kiss an icon and pretend they are holy for wearing a robe into a building that goes by the name of a “church.”

  “But they, like Adam, have transgressed the covenant; there they were unfaithful to Me. Gilead is a city of evildoers, tracked with footprints of blood. Like raiders who lie in ambush, so does a band of priests; they murder on the way to Shechem; surely they have committed atrocities” (Hosea 6:7-9).

  God is much more concerned with the injustices and political evils in our world than He is with the failure of someone to attend some building that calls itself a “church” and considers sing-alongs to be what religion and service to God and neighbor are all about. The whole lament of God in His word is that people have chased after false gods and kings and failed to love their neighbor as themselves, not that they didn’t engage in practices that are mistaken for “worship” today. God wants to see men right the wrongs of the political evils they have taken part in and actually seek His kingdom and serve one another, not have a bunch of people crowded in pews for a Sunday sermon and walk out feeling like they have done their duties toward God and neighbor. God wants to see pastors who are literally feeding the sheep and assuring that they do not need to turn to the Egyptians for their bread, rather than filling them with sermons and passing around an offering plate as payment for their alleged services. God wants to see people gathering for the express purpose of serving one another and looking after each other’s needs, living like a Kingdom people who are on this earth but not citizens of its worldly kingdoms.

The nature of the statist society

While some Christians may believe God’s great disappointment with men is declining church attendance or youth smoking or something relatively insignificant, even the most basic reading of the prophets shows that God’s great concern is almost always for the idolatry and injustices of statism that men advocate in their sin. He hates to see that we have turned the earth that He gave us to dress and keep into a society of bloodshed, violence, predation, prisons, and praise for soldiers, police, and presidents, and all the evils and iniquities inherent to political domination systems, which is the primary way that men rebel against God. What God sees when he looks down on our political societies, which were formed in rebellion to the Lord (1 Sam 8), is nothing less than violence and political evils. As Hosea says of the cities in his day, “Gilead is a city of evildoers, tracked with footprints of blood. Like raiders who lie in ambush, so does a band of priests; they murder on the way to Shechem; surely they have committed atrocities” (Hosea 6:8-9). 

  It’s amazing that people have stripped the political element from God’s word, throughout which He laments the vast injustices of political regimes that men have supported in their sin, and turned it into merely some “religious” document in their minds that is more about securing our ticket into heaven than liberating our people from bondage. For it is the evils of statism that God is most always concerned with. It is the violence that is inherent to political systems that God sees as a violation of His moral law. Political societies are based on theft, extortion, beatings, kidnappings, incarceration, and bloodshed. They are funded through the theft of taxation, backed by threats of violence, and subsist on the continuation of such coercion against the people, with the political class growing ever hungrier for revenues and inmates over time. (This inherent violence of political systems, by the way, is why we should expect that these societies degenerate into crime. Statists, of course, tell us that such would be rampant without the “law and order” of the State. But this is contradicted by their simultaneous complaints of crime having risen alongside the increasing statization of society. Shouldn’t it have vanished by now? Why are there way more street thugs and criminals today than there were one hundred years ago? Evidently, statist societies have produced moral decay and crime even among the private citizenry, not to mention the increasing crime and violations of liberty of the State itself). 

  This is what the prophets were witnessing to all the statist societies that they prophesied to. “They practice deceit and thieves break in; bandits raid in the streets” (Hosea 7:1). Whereas God wants us to live free, men set up police states where legalized criminals who call themselves “law enforcement” officers break into people’s homes in the name of “the law,” even killing them and then getting off the hook when their allies who run the courts grant them immunity.

  Statist societies not only breed genuine criminals, as well as wrongly criminalize nonviolent people who run afoul of their edicts, but they also expand legal criminal activity among the “public” sector of government agents who have legitimized their crimes in the eyes of “the people.” The criminal activity of robbing people on the side of the road, kidnapping men, stealing their vehicles and property, and holding them in jails is called “law enforcement.” Non-crimes, like “driving without a license,” become “crimes” while genuine crimes, like extorting someone who doesn’t have a license, are exempt from being called a crime at all. The perverted law and justice of political systems thus bring a vast expansion in crime, where men who call themselves “government” or “the law” can rob billions and even trillions of dollars worth of property from people that private criminals could never hope to match. Supporting the man-made kingdoms of this world has meant a vast expansion of criminal activity, agencies, laws, police forces, SWAT teams, theft, home invasions, murder, war, etc, much to the dismay of the Lord who looks down upon us to see that His flock has become captive.

  Statism is not only based on the sin of pride and idolatry among the people at the bottom who find themselves praising these institutions, i.e., the foolish “patriots” who have conflated their love of the homeland with their love of the State. This pride also afflicts those who operate these political systems, leading them to believe they are exempt from God’s law and judgment as they pursue violent and conspiratorial schemes to subvert the natural order with their violence. State rulers and agents are so full of pride that they honestly believe they can get away with all their evils. As Hosea accounts for this idea, “They fail to consider in their hearts that I remember all their evil. Now their deeds are all around them; they are before My face” (Hosea 7:2). The pursuit of statism is always undertaken by men who do not know the Lord whatsoever, so much that they cannot see that nothing but judgment awaits those who go this way, and in many cases are blinded to this foresight by God himself, who wants to assure that a people who perpetually reject His ways will meet the fate they now deserve.  

  The pride that is always a part of statist societies is not only the enthusiastic idolatry for human rulers that will necessarily always be found in them, but also the arrogance that keeps a people from seeing the evil ends they are headed toward. The pride afflicts not only the rulers themselves, who carry out their schemes believing that no one is watching them, but also people themselves, who falsely believe their societies are immune from judgment. The State’s propagandists (the regime intellectuals, socialist professors, the media, statist authors, seminary professors, priests, and false pastors) reinforce this delusion, telling the people that statism is God’s great gift to humanity that keeps us from falling into the dreadful state of “anarchy” (ie., a chaotic, lawless, and disorderly society that is ironically the fate of all statist systems). These men spin the lies that judgment will never come upon these systems for their evils. They teach the people that “America is the greatest country ever,” “these things could never happen here,” and “our troops fought for freedom.” These false prophets, the Biblical prophets say, “have lied about the LORD and said: ‘He will not do anything; harm will not come to us; we will not see sword or famine'” (Jeremiah 5:12; cf. Jer 4:10, 14:13, 23:17; Psa 10:6). These men come to falsely report that Babylonian systems bring prosperity and peace when God’s people know they bring famine and the sword.

  The world has strayed so far from God’s truth that those who try to share it are often seen as lunatics. One can quote the prophets verbatim today and hear in response that they should check into a mental institution. This is how far we have gone from the knowledge of God and the cause-and-effect of the world He created. When we warn that statism is doomed to fail and bring down a lot of lives with it, we’re mocked as “conspiracy theorists,” people who “aren’t fun at parties,” or told to “touch grass” because we’re supposedly not living in the real world. As the scriptures have said elsewhere, “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). The real case is that they don’t want to face the truth, knowing subconsciously that they have indeed sinned by seeking the systems of the world, and that there is truly no hope in these systems whatsoever. It is always psychologically easier for a man to continue going on in the lies he has always held, even if they bring him to ruin, than it is for him to confront the truth, which would lead him to safety. This is how great and wide the disconnect is sometimes between a man’s mind and his physical reality, that he would find it preferable to keep lying to himself into disaster than to admit that he was wrong and thereby get himself out of trouble. Men are so prideful that they would rather fall than admit their errors. They would rather be marched into a labor camp than to have to face the fact that they have been fools for a half-century. They would rather keep lying to their families and allow them to be killed by tyrants, than to stand up and admit that they—the father of a household who should have been leading his family as the central unit of a free society—have been wrong all their lives and that it’s time for the family to turn around a new way and begin congregating with other families who have likewise repented and are ready to join together for each other’s mutual aid and protection, as a people who are not of this world and its systems.

State evils as a means of correction 

It is not for nothing that statism ends up being the ruin of a people. God is never just punishing a people purely because it’s what they deserve, though He would be just to do that, too. He is never just allowing statists to meet their expected fate without hoping to gain anything from punishing them. Though God, of course, does not approve of the violence and murder that comes along with all systems of human government and wishes that men never strayed from Him in the first place, these acts ideally serve the purpose of reproving men and bringing them back to God. By letting the evil of human government run its course upon a people, God hopes that the schemes these evil men will always launch against the population of men they rule over, like flying planes into buildings and killing a few thousand people one morning, running global pandemic psyops on the people, attempting to mass-vaccinate billions of people, or even the rising burdens of taxes and price inflation, will lead men back to knowing their Creator and realizing that the enemy State is not just a bunch of bad guys, but a downright demonic and evil system possessed and empowered by evil spirits that works to plunder God’s earth and destroy the men who walk on it. In the scriptures, the evils that inevitably come from statism, which we must see are but the judgments of God, are intended by God to turn people back from their wicked ways. Among many examples, we have this one:

  “I will make the land a desolate waste, and the pride of her strength will come to an end. The mountains of Israel will become desolate, so that no one will pass through. Then they will know that I am the LORD, when I have made the land a desolate waste because of all the abominations they have committed” (Ezekiel 33:28-29; cf. Ezek 11:12; Ex 7:5, 7:17, 10:12, 14:4). 

  Conversely, God’s ability to save us from statism is also a way that men are to know and remember the Lord. “Then they shall know that I am the Lord their God, because I sent them into exile among the nations and then assembled them into their own land. I will leave none of them remaining among the nations anymore” (Ezekiel 39:28; cf. Ezek 26:23, 34:30; Ex 6:7, 29:46). On the negative side of judgment, though, the evils that come upon a people who have erroneously decided that the violent, political means of social organization were a suitable method for attaining their ends of law and order serve as evidence of God working upon a people and using the terrorism of statism as a means of leading people back to the Lord. For all the people who ask for God to “show Himself,” the political evils that prevail in our world are one way that His existence is manifest. The evils of human government are proofs of God, proven by the fact that His word warns exactly what will happen every time men engage in such rebellion. These evils and injustices, which are only the “natural” effect of violating His Law, lead men back to the divine law and away from the foolishness of man’s law-systems, which only bring destruction. The downfall of these societies serves as obvious proof that men have erred and are in desperate need of a godly alternative to the wicked political systems of the present day. The evils that come upon a people who turn from God by turning toward human government are meant to teach them a lesson in the consequences of sin. As the prophet says, “Israel’s arrogance testifies against them” (Hosea 7:10). 

  However, men are endlessly hardheaded, and when things inevitably go wrong in these statist societies, they often resort to even more of the very cause, claiming that all that’s needed is even more laws, more police, or more taxes to solve their problems. If their social situation is getting worse, they reason  it’s because “Congress needs to get to work.” If crime keeps rising, they reason that “we haven’t allocated enough money to the police.” If children keep getting dumber under Caesar’s school system, they reason that “our teachers aren’t paid well enough.” If they get invaded by foreigners, which could only be interpreted as a judgment on their sin, they reason that it is because the last president “gutted the military.” They ask for even more socialism—the very origins of their problems—and get even more backwardness, injustice, and evil. Even though it should be obvious to anyone by now that the backwardness of our society is but the divine effect of the sin of statism, men still do not discover the urgent need to repent of this sin and make God their only King again. As Hosea finished out the verse, “Yet they do not return to the LORD their God; despite all this, they do not seek Him” (Hosea 7:10; cf. Neh 9:16-17, 26, 28). Even when statism is already what has ruined everything in their society, which is to say that sin has already brought about a people’s destruction, men most always choose to remain in this sin and call upon States, rather than the Lord whom they so desperately need, to come to their aid. The unrelenting dedication men have to statism and the endless idolatry associated with these systems is because sin is at the root. Men don’t abandon their advocacy for human rule because this is their religion. They staunchly defend human rulers just as much as we zealously defend God’s anarchist Kingdom, because these men are their gods. It has always worked in favor of the human rulers of the world that when everything goes wrong in the societies they rule over, which is always the result of the wicked schemes these men carried out, the people always come running back to them for help rather than abandoning them as the men who caused the ruin. Whenever danger arises, which is often only a “threat” deliberately generated by the rulers themselves to scare people into running back into their arms, men start crying out to men to save them from the very evils they have brought upon themselves by doing this already. As the prophet says, “So Ephraim has become like a silly, senseless dove—calling out to Egypt, then turning to Assyria” (Hosea 7:11). Men can watch their whole economies turn around backwards and still call out to governments and central banks—the very people who gave them Great Depressions—to “stimulate” and save them. They can watch their families’ and neighbors’ properties being stolen by tax authorities and still think that “taxation is the price we pay for a civilized society.” Men can watch their brothers get stomped on by a “law enforcement” officer and chalk it up to being “bad apples” who “just needed more training,” rather than seeing that aggressive violence in the enforcement of arbitrary “laws” is the very nature of these systems.

Allying with States as denying God 

Though God intends for political tyranny or life’s struggles to drive people to call out to Him, it is more common for people to cry out to the governments of men rather than to God when they feel they need protection, prosperity, health, education, retirement, or other provisions. These government systems inevitably fail to deliver, since it is not actually possible to abandon God to trust in the man-gods without suffering consequences. As punishment for turning away from God and towards man-made Egyptian systems of the world, God allows the curse of statism to overcome these sinful, state-worshiping societies, resulting in political slavery, captivity, foreign invasions, poverty, and disorder (Deut 28:15, Ezek 12:13, Job 19:6, Jer 16:16). 

  Relying on political protection, whether seeking it from domestic rulers or in foreign alliances, invites God’s curses upon a society. Though many believe that episodes of trusting in the State and global alliances for salvation (such as the case of WWII) brought liberty and kept America free from socialism, the post-war American empire turned around and established an expensive, burdensome, and entirely corrupt system of state robbery, corporate contracts to manufacturers of military hardware, and endless wars that have drained the economy and transferred enormous amounts of wealth to those connected to these “defense” deals, military benefits, and the politicians who brokered them. 

  Just as men trust in “their” government for local or domestic protection and praise these system makers as their saviors, they also extend this excitement to foreign alliances that they enthusiastically support (eg., NATO or the State of Israel). Men are always caught seeking States to protect them in their abandonment of God. As the prophet puts it, “They have gone up to Assyria” (Hosea 8:9). As on the domestic front, such foreign alliances are yet another way of forsaking God for a falsely sought protection in the global kingdoms of men (Isa 36:6). Likewise, God punishes these international alliances too — these “League of Nations,” “United Nations,” or whatever other groups of governments that men turn to for protection from perceived enemies. 

  If God hates statism in general and thinks it’s a sin for men to set up a domestic government, it’s easy to see how much more He hates States conspiring together to form a confederacy of plunderers, who are still no match for the Lord. The prophet affirms this is the case. “Though they hire allies among the nations, I will now round them up, and they will begin to diminish under the oppression of the king of princes” (Hosea 8:10). 

  Such alliances—the belief that Egyptian or Assyrian-style systems are going to protect you—are to distrust God and put your faith in the saving power of men and their systems. God sees the evils of these alliances just as much as He does man’s trust in the domestic statists with whom He has allied. As God says, “I will spread My net over them; I will bring them down like birds of the air. I will chastise them when I hear them flocking together” (Hosea 7:12). And none of these self-exalted god-States, who were to be sure the result of men chasing false gods rather than God’s intended law order (1 Sam 8), are too high for the Most High God to bring down. As another prophet said, “Though thou exalt thyself as the eagle, and though thou set thy nest among the stars, thence will I bring thee down, saith the Lord” (Obadiah 1:4). Men can build their castles as high as they want, but they are made of sand and will be unoccupied by the Lord our King, who brings down human rulers from their high places. 

  Men still haven’t learned the great lessons of the scriptures today, such that the only way to keep States and rulers away is to trust in God alone. Whereas in the scriptures men were trying to defend themselves from Egypts by turning toward Assyrias for aid or setting up kings of their own, our people today are likewise trusting in presidents, soldiers, and foreign alliances to protect them from enemies, real and imagined. This has always been a tactic by those desiring to rule men to bring them to heel. By making men fear alleged foreign invaders, domestic states can trick people into supporting them for protection and trick them out of any faith in God. God punishes such betrayal with captivity, as we are living under today by “our” own government. For their fears of being dominated by some other men around the world and not trusting in God to save them, God makes a people occupied by human rulers, who would never have come about if they had trusted in God. 

  When men turn toward human rulers for their aid and safety, God sees men who are turning away from Him and rejecting His kingship (1 Sam 8:6-8). And the Lord pronounces judgment upon such people and their beloved countries, which they believe to be so “safe” and “free” for having the power of the State and other States on their side. 

  “Woe to them, for they have strayed from Me! Destruction to them, for they have rebelled against Me! Though I would redeem them, they speak lies against Me. They do not cry out to Me from their hearts when they wail upon their beds. They slash themselves for grain and new wine, but turn away from Me. Although I trained and strengthened their arms, they plot evil against Me. They turn, but not to the Most High; they are like a faulty bow. Their leaders will fall by the sword for the cursing of their tongue; for this they will be ridiculed in the land of Egypt” (Hosea 7:13-16). 

  The fundamental rebellion against God in our world has been that men have trusted in political rulers over God. They have begged soldiers, police, and politicians to “save” them when God gives us the same offer and tells us to trust in Him, even showing us what He has done to the Egyptians and their armies before. Not seeing that God would smash our enemies for us, or failing to remember, men place their trust in Egyptian systems and thus find themselves living in political slavery rather than freedom (though, of course, they have imagined that they have freedom and free markets). If men trusted in God rather than men, they would never see any need for a State that the people of the world claim is absolutely indispensable to their liberty — nor would they have to see a State come upon them, as they only come as judgment upon a people who turn from God as their ruler. Men of God know that they won’t be saved by seeking the alleged aid of a “U.S. Military” or “North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” but that these things always backfire on a people and eventually are destroyed themselves. They know that God commands us to trust in Him as our military aid, rather than the false and sinful alliances with the kingdoms of this world. 

  “‘Woe to the rebellious children,’ declares the LORD, ‘to those who carry out a plan that is not Mine, who form an alliance, but against My will, heaping up sin upon sin. They set out to go down to Egypt without asking My advice, to seek shelter under Pharaoh’s protection and take refuge in Egypt’s shade. But Pharaoh’s protection will become your shame, and the refuge of Egypt’s shade your disgrace” (Isaiah 30:1-3).

  All people who trust in human government are people who set out to make a plan that is not of the Lord, because God never commands men to set up these systems and only warns of the evils they will bring upon a people. All people who seek to set up, join, or otherwise support systems of human government, whether ideologically or physically, are men who are part of an active conspiracy against the Kingdom of God, in a vain attempt to thwart its advancement by erecting and perpetuating these man-made systems of political violence that work against God’s anarchist order. Anywhere a State is set up in the Bible, from Cain to Nimrod to the Israelites under Samuel, God says it is rebellion against Him and speaks of all the violence that will come about under them. The very way that men rebel against God is by pledging allegiance to the kingdoms of man, all of which are raised up against Him. The philosophy and practice of statism, i.e., of instituting systems of human government to be the providers of a people’s needs, is what sin is all about. It is by believing in and furthering the work of man-made kingdoms that men reject the Lord as their King, and bring themselves into bondage to the ways of the world.

The State’s vain use of the Lord’s name

In our modern Christian world, where faith has been reduced to mere verbal professions and Christians don’t think they need to seek the Kingdom of God and be doers of the word, many things can pass for being Christian simply because they claim to be so. We are almost pressured into accepting anyone’s word for it without any evidence of a changed man, lest we be considered people who are “judging” others. Many, for instance, are fooled into thinking that the extortion racket of a political system called the “United States” is a “Christian country” because they have made ostensible claims to trusting in God or placed their hands on Bibles when they were sworn into office. They have plastered “In God We Trust” on their inflationary paper currency, plunderous police vehicles, and extortionist courthouses, so these must be men of God, right? 

  Nowhere in scripture, however, are we told to just take anyone’s word for it, and everywhere are we told to be skeptical of those who merely say they’re with the Lord. After all, not taking the Lord’s name in vain is one of the Ten Commandments, which alone implies that there are people who profess God but don’t mean it or do actions that are contrary to his moral precepts. Indeed, professing God has always been a way for evil to masquerade as holy. We are told that even Satan can appear as an angel of light (2 Cor 11:24). It can even be strategic, as it is in the case of the American plunder state, to pretend to be godly. What we see in the Biblical case is that evil men don’t always outright claim to be against God. Why would they do that if they wanted to win the favor of Christians? It is better to pretend to be a Christian while turning around and dropping bombs on children in another country. These are people who “profess to know God, but by their actions they deny Him” (Titus 1:16). They write “In God We Trust” on their police cars but beat people up on the side of the road who haven’t given Caesar money for a “license” or “registration.” They chisel it into their Roman-style courts that hustle hundreds of small-time traffic offenders through their doors each day to take them for their money. And they write it on their fiat paper currency, which they inflate to fund their trillion-dollar spending sprees.

  There is no Biblical reason we must accept that a man is a servant of God simply because he says “Lord, Lord.” We should be far more willing to see that there are millions of people among us who are false converts, who remain in spiritual and physical bondage to the kingdoms of the world because they have not repented from their ideological support and idolatry for them. The prophets always took up this theme, too. “Though they say, The LORD liveth; surely they swear falsely” (Jeremiah 5:2). This has always been the case for men. “There is a generation of those who are pure in their own eyes and yet unwashed of their filth” (Proverbs 30:12). Just because someone claims God is not proof that they are godly. Do they rob people for a living? Do they pull people over on the side of the road and impound their vehicles because they didn’t register them with the king? Do they put people in prisons for possessing firearms and plants? Then they’re not of God. The only sense that presidents and police are “servants” of God is that they’re agents of evil upon a people who should have known better than to proudly shout “I voted” or “back the blue.”

  But God sees through such vain uses of His name to cover for evils. He knows statism is not godly, but is a violent rebellion against His law. Again confirming that king-seeking is rooted in rebellion rather than it being the divine law order provided to us by God, as statists tell us, the prophet tells us, 

  “The people have transgressed My covenant and rebelled against My law. Israel cries out to Me, ‘O our God, we know You!’ But Israel has rejected good; an enemy will pursue him. They set up kings, but not by Me. They make princes, but without My approval. With their silver and gold they make themselves idols, to their own destruction” (Hosea 8:1-4). 

  The short phrase here, “they set up kings, but not by me,” which can even be used as a primary scriptural defense of the idea that the kingdoms of men are set up in rebellion to God, serves to prove the point of the 18th-century Bible commentary Matthew Henry that “a weighty adage may sometimes do more service than a labored discourse.” Though such sayings and phrases could always benefit from theological and intellectual support, we see how popular phrases like “taxation is theft” may have been even more powerful than whole economic treatises on taxation (e.g., Rothbard,Power and Market). It is little, but powerful, scriptural sayings like this that help men to realize that the kingdoms of the world are set up by men in their rebellion against God. They are not part of God’s plan for social order, and God does not approve of men embarking upon the statist political organization of society. Though the men who serve the American State may claim, “In God We Trust,” we know that they are using the Lord’s name in vain, as God does not support these evil systems. They are vainly invoking His name as they, on the other hand, hold a contradictory allegiance to the false god systems of men to whom they have sworn an oath. It would make no difference if a police officer today were wearing a cross necklace as he hung Jesus on a cross. It makes no difference that one of Pharaoh’s extortion agents says he “goes to church” while remaining on the force. What matters is the actions of the man, not what comes out of his mouth — and they are men who follow the law-orders of men, not the commandments of the Lord. As Jesus said, quoting the prophet Isaiah, “These people honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men’” (Matt 15:8-9). 

  Even though men invoke God’s name and might even ritualistically go through some vain praise toward the Lord, so long as it is done in vain, as it surely is when people say such evil things as “God bless the United States Military,” then God doesn’t count it (Hos 8:13). Men who turn toward the statist systems of the world demonstrate their lack of faith and allegiance toward God, and their devotion to the false god system of statism. As the prophet said for such seeking after these systems, which is perfectly applicable to the Americans who worship the State today and necessarily forsake God in the process, “Israel has forgotten his Maker” (Hosea 8:14). Statists are people who have forgotten the Lord. 

  Nowhere in God’s word are men instructed to set up a State. These systems are always erected by men in their rebellion against God, who uses them as a judgment against people who have turned away backward from Him. The work of state rulers is the business of workers of iniquity who have come to plunder God’s creation. These ways are against every way that God has instructed us to live. God gave us clear instructions on how to have a godly social order, which necessarily means that we were to avoid the inherently ungodly statist systems of the world and the theft and murder that cannot be removed from them. The Lord Jesus walked the earth telling men to repent and seek the Kingdom of God, and they killed Him. The perennial problem for mankind, which leads to the perpetuation of evil political systems that are of the world, is that they refuse to obey the word of the Lord. It isn’t that God never showed us the way, but that men have failed to heed the word, or didn’t believe its words when prophets had told it to them. As the prophet says, “Though I wrote for them the great things of My law, they regarded them as something strange” (Hosea 8:12). They wanted their own kings, presidents, judges, “lawmakers,” “law enforcement” officers, all who enforce a man-made system of law rather than God’s vision of a natural order of liberty under His providence. By setting up States, which are nothing but coercive monopolies over the provision of law and justice, men abandoned the Lord God and sought to be their own “gods.”

Prophesying the destruction of statism 

Though most Christians forsake their duty to seek the Kingdom of God, evangelize others, and agitate the culture around them toward liberty, it is the job of every prophet of God (those men capable of teaching the ethical lessons of the Biblical prophets) to warn men of the great evils and widespread social consequences—the divine judgment—for holding onto the worldly ideology of and supporting the political systems that this philosophy empowers. Such a commission was not just something that God gave to His prophets thousands of years ago that is no longer relevant today. It is every godly man’s job, seeing that his neighbor’s house is on fire and that he’s going to be destroyed if he isn’t rescued from it, to “put the ram’s horn to your lips” (Hosea 8:1) and let everyone know that the statist societies that men sinfully trust in to save them only come crashing down in the end and result in a weeping and gnashing of teeth. 

  We have a responsibility, as men who know God, to tell others that statism and socialism lead to famines and police states, that this political sin leads to bondage and captivity and labor camps. When men set up such systems, which are always done against the approval of God, they should expect their productive efforts to be plundered and to be occupied by police forces or even foreign armies. God assures that such production comes to an end under these statist systems and that it’s turned over to the plunderers, who men sinfully had foolishly thought they needed for their protection.  

  “For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. There is no standing grain; what sprouts fails to yield flour. Even if it should produce, the foreigners would swallow it up” (Hosea 8:7). 

  Those who celebrate the American plunder system today as “the best country ever” and imagine themselves to be part of the “free world” are in for a rude awakening once these systems fall apart, as God promises they always will and as history attests to this matter. Those who can see it should know that we are but “reaping the whirlwind” sown long ago when men set up the statist system that we live under today (that is, the “United States Government” that the “Constitution” supposedly authorizes). But most men are in the dark about our present-day reaping of the wicked seeds that have been formerly sown. Those who extol the alleged virtues of statism and its lawmakers and police as the best system for law, order, and justice ever known to man are in for a great surprise when they fail to live up to their claims anymore, and God brings them to a halt. Far from state-seeking leading men to liberty, as most men foolishly believe, such political roads that they laud as the source of civilization and order are viewed by God as cheating on Him and are thus punished by giving men over to the slavery they were evidently (if unwittingly) seeking. Thus, the prophet gives a word of caution to those who may get too excited about their beloved political systems, which were but disobedient imitations of the systems of the world we were told to avoid (Deut 18:9, Lev 18:26, 2 Kings 17:8). 

  “Do not rejoice, O Israel, with exultation like the nations, for you have played the harlot against your God; you have made love for hire on every threshing floor. The threshing floor and winepress will not feed them, and the new wine will fail them. They will not remain in the land of the LORD; Ephraima will return to Egypt” (Hosea 9:1-3). 

  Contrary to those idolatrous men who refer to human rulers as “great leaders” who guide the country, States are political systems that are full of “rebellious leaders” (Hosea 15:9). God does not approve of these systems, and so, being at enmity with the Lord, they cannot survive. As the prophet knew, “My God will reject them, because they have not obeyed Him” (Hosea 9:17). All statists are men who reject God to make men their gods, and all statists are people who are being actively cursed by God for this great sin of political rebellion, which is necessarily the main way that men turn away from God. The practices of statism, which are always based on violence and theft, are abhorrent to God and cannot be the source of His blessings. What men call God’s blessings today are mostly the fleeting riches of Egyptian plunder systems that, for some time, manage to climb their way to the top of a global system of plunder that grows at the expense of other people around the world. In the end, all these statist systems that men affectionately defend as “the richest country in the world” prove to be entirely bankrupt and begin their fall after the empire is no longer able to maintain the violence needed to prop their systems up. The chickens come home to roost, and all the proud men of these statist societies are eventually forced to silently concede that statism is really just the broad path of destruction, not the means by which men find God’s blessings, which come only to those who seek His Kingdom and abandon man’s systems entirely. 

We reap what we sow

If there is anything we can be certain about in life, it’s that we will always reap what we sow. God has created a causal social reality of rewards and consequences, blessings and curses, that result from doing good or evil, respectively. While we must say more about what this means, given that many men cannot tell the good from the evil and are liable to call evil “good” and believe that they are thus sowing good when they are doing evil, we can at least establish with this dictum that we do, in fact, live in a cause-and-effect reality that was given by God: what you put out is what you get back.

  Many people in our world do not like to acknowledge that there is a providential law built into the nature of our world by its Creator. They wish to continue in their evil without facing the consequences for them. This is particularly evident in America today, where people are surprised by the outcome of decades and centuries of statism. They can’t understand how all these things that they are now seeing, such as rising prices, vast government waste, or even cultural degeneracy, ever came to be. In their mind, there was nothing wrong with the origins of the American State or even its great expansion in the latter half of the twentieth century. Its only problem is the last couple of “Democrat” presidents who have ruined things in the otherwise great “Constitutional Republic.” They can’t understand that all the evils we’re seeing today are only the product of political systems that contained the seeds of their own destruction — late-stage manifestations of an empire in decline. They thought it could be something else if only they had been successful at getting other men into power than the ones who came to be. They have expected a corrupt tree to bear good fruit, or at least thought they had planted a non-corrupt tree. They can’t understand why things are going wrong today and treat it as a mistake, anomaly, or some glitch in the system. In their eyes, this is “our great country” that should have never been able to turn out this way. They don’t see that the very origins of statism are evil and demonic and must result in the things we’re seeing today. 

  Without seeing that human government is always corrupt and rebellious at its genesis, men come to believe the solution to our present political problems, which are only more obvious today than they were before (but which have always been there), is to return to the political systems of the past rather than seek a more righteous path forward. They argue we must “get back to the Constitutional Republic the way our Founding Fathers intended it to be,” failing to see that the very problems we face today stem from the flaws inherent in all these man-made systems of government. These men refuse to acknowledge their own sin and complicity in the current state of political affairs either, seeking to blame the country’s decline on something else than the system itself: the fault of immigrants coming for welfare, democratic presidents who ruined things, or socialists in government, when in reality the issues that we confront today are the God-ordained outgrowth of the political systems and statist ideology that these men have long championed without any bit of shame. Rather than introspection, they blame everyone else for the political problems that they are evidently facing, without ever seeing that the manifest evils of our time are but the consequences of their own actions simply becoming ever more apparent. Men thought they could wave flags forever, vote on various Pharaohs, cheer for the State and “the troops” in war, shout “back the blue” from their porches while their neighbors get evicted from their properties for tax delinquency, and never have anything go wrong! And now they are crying that “this isn’t the country I used to know,” all while they were complicit in raising up the evil system of human government that is only more obviously evil than it was before, but not anymore evil than they are intrinsically at the very inception. 

  While evil political times like ours present the perfect occasion to admit our wrongdoing and repent before the Lord, the idolatry that men have for political power—their sin for human rulers—is often strong enough to outweigh any underlying realization that we are in desperate need of an alternative social order, which is to be found only in the Kingdom of God. Despite the harvest growing more evil and obvious as a result of old wicked sowing, men still stubbornly refuse to turn to the Lord. For them, the only problem has been the wrong Pharaohs and not the Egyptian plunder system per se. They fail to see that the root is their own sinful support for statist systems in any capacity, which are always erected and supported in man’s rebellion against God. They fail to see that they bought into this evil, worldly ideology that deems human government as legitimate and necessary for civilization. Now that they are reaping the consequences of their own beliefs, they have decided they don’t like the consequences of them. Yet, they remain unwilling to abandon the very sin, and the systems that this sin creates, that have led to our situation. But we’re only getting what we deserve today. As the prophet puts it, 

  “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, the roar of battle will rise against your people, so that all your fortresses will be demolished as Shalman devastated Beth-arbel in the day of battle, when mothers were dashed to pieces along with their children. Thus it will be done to you, O Bethel, because of your great wickedness” (Hosea 10:13-15). 

  Our people have placed their faith in state violence and the vain philosophies of the world rather than in the Lord to protect and guide them. They have put their faith in presidents, congressmen, judges, and soldiers and police to protect them, and relied on their own “wisdom” to get them by. And now that such things are proving disastrous, they are complaining about what has come upon them while stubbornly clinging to the very ideas that led up to here. Instead of repenting and turning back to God to save them, they are looking for anyone else to blame. They are like addicts who refuse to quit their destructive habits, even as their health deteriorates. As we see, just because some men may be dissatisfied with the current order is no reason to think they are repentant toward its causes. More often than not, they lament the outcomes while remaining trapped in the very mindset that created these problems. They still do not want to turn to the Lord, but seek salvation in the political systems that have been the very source of their troubles. They hold on to the hope that the empire can be salvaged with the “right” people in power and a handful of new legislative decrees to get it on track. 

 Depending on their approach to social organization, men can either achieve the benefits and blessings of peace and prosperity in a free society under God, or the disorder and impoverishment that comes to all statist societies. It is up to men to decide which road they will take, but God has already laid out the positive effects of obedience and the negative consequences for disobedience to His Law. As the prophet explains our causal reality, 

  “Sow for yourselves righteousness and reap the fruit of loving devotion; break up your unplowed ground. For it is time to seek the LORD until He comes and sends righteousness upon you like rain” (Hosea 10:12). 

  If righteousness were sown, i.e., if we adopted the economic means of free exchange and voluntary charity as opposed to the political means of violent exchange and the compulsory methods of serving others, and choose to love our neighbors as ourselves rather than sell them into Pharaoh’s system of welfare, retirement, or protection, then we would reap the good fruit of the Lord’s way: peace, prosperity, and harmony among men. If we seek the Lord rather than men (ie., a free society rather than one of political rulers), He will bless us. “He will set you high about all the nations of the earth” (Deuteronomy 28:1). We would not starve (Deut 28:4-5) nor face any of the enemies that statists tell us we need a State to defend against (Deut 28:7). But if we don’t obey, if we sow evil instead and accept the violence of political rule as a means of social organization, then we reap injustice. We will face famines (Deut 28:17-18), enemies all around us (Deut 28:25), find ourselves up against taxmen who rob us for all we’re worth (Deut 28:30), and be otherwise cursed.

God’s salvation and man’s rejection of God

Given God’s provision of the knowledge and wisdom needed to escape the enslaving Egyptian societies that we live in today, and his past deliverances of men from these systems, one of the saddest things about our captivity to men today and the idolatry for human government is that it rejects God’s offer of true liberty. There is nothing else that could so easily make a man’s eyes well up with tears than to see all the things God was willing to do for us, but which men handed over to statists who enslave them, only to deliver on none of their promises. There is scarcely a thought more depressing than the offers of God to liberate a people who follow His ways from the bondage of Egypt, only to see that mankind has slapped the cuffs on their own wrists. “I lifted the yoke from their necks and bent down to feed them” (Hosea 11:4), God says, and men still rejected Him. They preferred instead to chase after the false gods of the statist society and to put their faith in men who have done nothing but rob and abuse them.

  Since men desperately beg for statism and all its evils, God is willing to give men over to these systems — to let men be enslaved by the statists that He would have rescued and saved us from if we had chosen the Lord to be our God rather than Pharaohs and Caesars. When men refuse to turn back to the Lord, He permits them to go about their path of destruction. As the prophet writes,

  “Will they not return to the land of Egypt and be ruled by Assyria because they refused to repent? A sword will flash through their cities; it will destroy the bars of their gates and consume them in their own plans” (Hosea 11:5-6). 

  God is not happy to see people choose the road to serfdom, but it is just the facts of the matter. Men fervently seek to be ruled by other men and wind up in captivity for it. As God observes, “My people are bent on turning from Me” (Hosea 11:7). But this doesn’t mean that God lacks mercy; besides, the evils that come about are what men have brought upon themselves. Even when God sees to it that statist rebels must be rebuked and judged, He often adds that “I will not execute the full fury of My anger” (Hosea 11:9). God could absolutely destroy us (or allow the State to do it) for our evils, but chooses not to bring it to ashes. That we are still standing today, among one of the most evil and destructive empires in the history of the world, is alone a testament to God’s mercy. Even though an idolatrous and statist people are ours highly deserve to be wrecked, God’s compassion remains (Hos 11:8). Even though men have forsaken the Lord who brings His people out of Egypt by turning back to these ways themselves by seeking kings, rulers, laws, tax regimes, socialist welfare programs, etc., God still has mercy on such men. 

  It is not that God lacks mercy, but that men, even when having been shown mercy and deliverance, still refuse to accept it, until the Lord eventually loses His patience and must see to it that state worshipers pay for their sins and idolatries, in which case the evils of men are met with God’s wrath. It is not that God is not long-suffering, but that there still comes a point where His patience is up for people who, by remaining in their evils, express no desire to reform themselves and stop walking in their old wicked paths. It is not that God is a tyrant who takes joy in executing judgment on state worshipers or the rulers themselves. Indeed, He says He doesn’t. “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live” (Ezekiel 33:11). Rather, it is that men refuse to ever stop idolizing tyrants, such that God eventually hands them over to their hearts’ desire. As one commentator notes, “The ruin of Israel was the natural product of the sin of Israel. If they had not first revolted from God, they would never have been rejected by him; God never leaves any till they first leave him” (Matthew Henry Commentary, Hos 1:8-11).

  God turns away from those who turn away from Him, but He always desires for us to return. He yearns to be, and is, our true Father. Yet, He wants us to turn away from the false “civil fathers” of the State — the “founding fathers” in the United States that many revere as heroes and saviors, when in fact they set this oppressive and rebellious system into motion. God remains watchful over us, aware that we have placed our trust in fallible men rather than in Him and have yet to repent. Despite our sinful allegiances to Caesars and state flags and armies, He has repeatedly given us chances and continued to bless us, granting us far more time than we deserve before statism descends into complete totalitarianism. The Lord still loves the men who wave the flags of Caesars and turn away from Him, though they demonstrate their disdain for Him by doing so. He has dealt with men turning toward Egypts and Assyrias since He created us, and yet somehow, by His grace, we are still here. If it wasn’t for the Lord’s mercy, we would all be packed into a Siberian labor camp by the evil men of the world already. God is always merciful enough not to absolutely wreck men and hand them over to all the enemies who they have incessantly begged for. “Except the LORD of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah” (Isaiah 1:9).

Turning from statism to avoid judgment

Despite God’s judgment on those who have turned away from Him and HIs rule by turning toward the man-made governments of the world as their gods and saviors, we must always remember His desire to bring them back and His willingness to relent from the disaster He plans to bring upon corrupt social orders and their participants if they repent, no matter how grave their sins may be and no matter how dark they have made their societies by refusing to heed His words of wisdom for so long. God would rather see awful sinners repent, such as seeing the Stalins and Lenins of the world turn back and change their ways, than to see lesser sinners refuse to admit to their evils and remain stubbornly in them. God constantly offers us the opportunity to change our destructive path and get back on the narrow road that few men find. He offers us redemption and restoration of our society, where we live under His Kingship rather than suffer under the false kingdoms of men, which are but a product of our rebellion against Him.

  To this end, we ought to be begging God to turn our path around from the current captivity we’re living under, knowing that the ungodly road only gets worse as time goes on. We might cry, “Restore us to Yourself, O Lord, so we may return; renew our days as of old” (Lamentations 5:21). For our people are currently lost and have strayed into the unprotecting arms of human rulers, whom they have foolishly believed exist to protect them. We ought to be on our knees praying to God to end this rebellion that mankind has been in for so long, where they turn to men as their protectors and find themselves enslaved for having done so. We ought to be praying to God to wake men up and break the spell of statism they have been under for so long, where they couldn’t see any other way to organize their society than to put men into power and claim they have the right to beat up anyone who doesn’t obey the edicts of men who they have set up as their lawgivers. We ought to be seeking ourselves to avoid this cycle of rebellion and judgment that men have been on throughout history, as recorded in the Biblical prophets who show that these things are nothing new and that men have been prostituting themselves out to human rulers for thousands of years to save them, only to be enslaved by the men who they thought would bring them liberty from their enemies. To do this, we must turn away from statism for the sinful ideology that it is, or hope that God will turn back the hearts of our people, who have hardened their hearts to His words. For man’s very rebellion against God has always been turning toward human rulers for salvation. As the prophet accounts, 

  “Ephraim chases the wind and pursues the east wind all day long; he multiplies lies and violence; he makes a covenant with Assyria and sends olive oil to Egypt” (Hosea 12:1). 

  While God is always willing to take us in, it is always the evils of men that turn Him away and lead people back into the bondage of Egypt that they were told to leave behind forever. But as long as men refuse to repent from their ways and turn back to the natural order of non-violence and peace among neighbors, statism must always bring judgment upon a people, as the institutionalization of violence must always disrupt social order. “The LORD also brings a charge against Judah. He will punish Jacob according to his ways and repay him according to his deeds” (Hosea 12:2). Despite whatever evils may prevail in our society, the prophets call upon men to hold fast in the Lord. “But you must return to your God, maintaining love and justice, and always waiting on your God” (Hosea 12:6). Though many men who call themselves “the government” operate as “gods” and “saviors,” even if they may not explicitly say this in our times, we know that they are false gods and that only the Lord saves — that only God can deliver us from our enemies, and that all the state-gods do is act as them and invite them in. If men knew the Lord, they would never trust in “presidents” to fix their societies for them, but would stay in the Lord. 

  “Yet I am the LORD your God ever since the land of Egypt; you know no God but Me, for there is no Savior besides Me. I knew you in the wilderness, in the land of drought” (Hosea 13:4). 

  If we wish to avoid the evils of statism, we must repent before the Lord and confess that our belief in the alleged need for human rulers has been a sinful one and that we will never go that way again, trusting in Him alone from here on out to be our King and protector. We must promise to God that we will never trust in these men and their systems ever again, but will rather organize our societies around the ethical principles of voluntary interaction with other men and voluntary charity to our neighbors who we love as ourselves, in an anarchist society with God at the center as our one and only Sovereign (1 Tim 6:15). The reason we are falling and failing today is because we have sought the statist method of social organization that can only ever bring destruction to men, rather than to provide for our people on our own and trusting in God to bless us in doing so. Our people have sinfully said that we are to “thank the troops” and “back the blue” for keeping us “safe” and “free,” when it was all a lie. We must turn from our support for presidents, soldiers, and police—things that are not coincidentally widely praised in our godless statist society—if we ever wish to turn back to the natural order that God has planned for us. The prophet presents to us a call to repentance just along these lines:

  “Return, O Israel, to the LORD your God, for you have stumbled by your iniquity. Bring your confessions and return to the LORD. Say to Him: ‘Take away all our iniquity and receive us graciously, that we may present the fruit of our lips. Assyria will not save us, nor will we ride on horses. We will never again say, ‘Our gods!’ to the work of our own hands. For in You the fatherless find compassion'” (Hosea 14:1-3).

  Whereas men say, in this time, that “we have the most powerful military in the world that has kept us safe and free,” we must repent from all these sinful clichés that our fathers handed down to us. We must repent of all these statist ideas that hundreds of millions of men in American society have held if we ever wish to truly repent and turn away the judgment that is owed to everyone who goes down the statist road of bondage. If we wish to no longer live under the tax plunder that necessarily always comes with serving human government, whether ideologically in advocating its existence or physically by strapping on boots and becoming one of its agents, we must acknowledge before the Lord that “Assyria will not save us…nor will we ride on horses.” For it has been all the men who agree to strap on boots for Pharaoh, ride around in his patrol cars, and do his bidding for him, and all of the people who cheered this system on, that has brought us into great bondage. If men want true protection, which is that of the Lord and not of men, they must say, with the psalmist, “I do not trust in my bow, nor does my sword save me” (Psalm 44:6). Men of God simply do not believe in the statist militaries of the world or serve them, but put all their faith in God to protect them from the men who often serve as justifications for erecting police and militaries of “our” own. Rather, godly men profess, “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God” (Psalm 20:7). 

  The primary way of arousing God’s anger is the very statist practices that men continue in believing that they are fine by God. When we repent from these ways, when we no longer trust in Assyrians and chariots and horsemen that lost men tell us we are to thank for “our freedom,” God will relent in the disaster He plans to bring upon systems like ours and fix our minds away from these false orders. “I will heal their apostasy; I will freely love them, for My anger has turned away from them” (Hosea 14:4). If men care to know the Lord, they will see these things and desire to turn away from them; they will want to abandon the worldly philosophies that told them statism was their protection and trust, rather than abandon God for these systems of men. 

  “Whoever is wise, let him understand these things; whoever is discerning, let him know them. For the ways of the LORD are right, and the righteous walk in them but the rebellious stumble in them” (Hosea 14:9). 

The pride of statism

It has been said that “strong men create good times and good times create weak men.” This is true to an extent. It might be better stated that God creates good times and that good times cause men to forget God. This is the case in America today, where the true source of wealth has been forgotten, and men believe they could go on enjoying these things without obeying the Lord. (Even worse, statists often attribute everything they have to the State, which is even more rebellious against God than those who pay vague homage to His name while still supporting the system in general). Thus, the phony prosperity of the debt-fueled empire has caused men to forget God. As the prophet says, 

  “When they had pasture, they became satisfied; when they were satisfied, their hearts became proud, and as a result they forgot Me” (Hosea 13:6). 

  Men love to boast about how they live in the “richest country in the world” without acknowledging their Creator. “Ephraim boasts: ‘How rich I have become! I have found wealth for myself. In all my labors, they can find in me no iniquity that is sinful’” (Hosea 12:8). These are the men who believe they can live on bread alone, never seeing how much they need the Lord. They say, “I am rich; I have grown wealthy and need nothing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked” (Rev 3:17). When men live under the dominant empire of the world that extracts wealth from others through monetary inflation, military adventures, and controlling trade, they can momentarily believe that their (false) prosperity is forever and that they have no reason to seek God. As other prophets have seen, “By your great skill in trading you have increased your wealth, but your heart has grown proud because of it” (Ezekiel 28:5). They forget the Lord their God and trust in their worldly wealth, when they should precisely be worried about judgment coming upon their empires, when they should precisely seek the wisdom of the Lord warning that “neither their silver nor their gold will be able to deliver them on the Day of the LORD’s wrath” (Zephaniah 1:8). They believe they have done it all on their own, and have not seen, as God says, that “your fruit comes from Me” (Hosea 14:8). 

  It is all the more difficult to prophesy to men the judgments of God, as Hosea was doing, when an empire is still experiencing a false run of prosperity and they have believed that the strength of the military—a great means of siphoning off the production of their people—will be able to keep them on top forever, as if “America” is an exception to the way that Rome went and which the Egypts and Babylons before it have gone. It is difficult to tell people about the recessions, depressions, famines, wars, police states, surveillance apparatuses, and other such calamities that await men as a result of their violent, statist intervention into society when these effects have yet to fully develop. (Though, in our time, they are beginning to reveal themselves, and likewise men are struggling more and more to hold on to the narrative that there can exist good times forever in a society that operates on political plunder). Most men, seeing that things haven’t gone entirely wrong yet, assume that they never will, and they mock or kill the prophets of God who come to foretell the destruction that awaits such a people who have made human rulers their lovers and fornicated with the kingdoms of men. They laugh in our faces and suggest that we are just “conspiracy theorists” who must have missed “civics class” in Caesar’s school, where they were obviously indoctrinated. As they see things, everything is all good and well in Babylon, and we are just hateful naysayers who have no “data,” “science,” or “peer-reviewed” articles to back up our wild claims.

  Even if things are seemingly safe for the time being, this should never keep us from telling men what must result from the transgressions they have committed in throwing their faith and support behind the systems of political violence, which pervert God’s natural order with theft and violence. We should never be intimidated out of the truths of God just because the people who are friends with the world stand ready to make us a laughingstock in front of their friends, who love them for all the lies they tell their people, which attract a following among fools who are just as lost as they are. As one commentator say, “Men are not to be flattered in their sinful ways because they prosper in the world, but even then must be faithfully reproved, and plainly told that their prosperity will not be their security, nor will it last long if they go on still in their trespasses” (Matthew Henry Commentary, Hos 1:1). 

  Other prophets have observed that God-given prosperity, which men mistakenly credit to their rulers or themselves, often leads them to turn from the Lord and embrace evil, only to eventually realize they can no longer depend on that false prosperity.

  “They will throw their silver into the streets, and their gold will seem unclean. Their silver and gold cannot save them in the day of the wrath of the LORD. They cannot satisfy their appetites or fill their stomachs with wealth, for it became the stumbling block that brought their iniquity” (Ezekiel 7:19).

  So God has to prove these people wrong and show them that their ingratitude and their belief that governments keep them rich and protect them is wrong and must come to an end. For this pride in their prosperity, God says, 

  “So like a lion I will pounce on them; like a leopard I will lurk by the path. Like a bear robbed of her cubs I will attack them, and I will tear open their chests. There I will devour them like a lion, like a wild beast would tear them apart” (Hosea 13:7-8).

The end of statism

Although they may manage to scrape by and plunder others for a little while, those men who stand up States against God cannot last forever. All those who trust in police and military to “save” them will have to learn the hard lesson that “a war horse is a vain hope for salvation; even its great strength cannot save” (Psalm 33:17). All those who trust in political gods to guide their political orders in the right way will learn, whether they want to or not, that “the Egyptians are men, not God; their horses are flesh, not spirit” (Isaiah 31:3). 

  Though God offers His aid to us, men reject it and choose statism as their false salvation. But it is divine law that all those who oppose God must come to an end. “You are destroyed, O Israel, because you are against Me—against your helper” (Hosea 13:9). God mocks those people whose faith had been in statism to “save” them, who thought that man-kings were needed to fight their battles and wars for them and keep the enemies away (1 Sam 8:20). God proves that He is more powerful than all of these state rulers by wrecking them, and then laughing at those people who thought man-kings would be their protection. “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). When presidents and congressmen fail to “save” the countries they ruined and people are still begging them to fix things, God laughs — “Where is your king now?”

  Even though some rebellious systems may prosper for some time, having, e.g., plundered their neighbors, managed to gain “world reserve” status for their money, or inflated their currency to fund the adventurism of the political rulers, these systems must always come to an end at the hand of God. The plunderers will become the plundered and left desolate and at the mercy of their enemies. The very things that men feared would happen if they didn’t have these men to rule over them become true of having such systems control them in the name of “safety” and “defense.”

  “Although he flourishes among his brothers, an east wind will come— a wind from the LORD rising up from the desert. His fountain will fail, and his spring will run dry. The wind will plunder his treasury of every precious article. Samaria will bear her guilt because she has rebelled against her God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to pieces, and their pregnant women ripped open” (Hosea 13:15-16).   As gruesome as it sounds, such is the nature of statism: violence, rape, torture, murder, incarceration, slavery, robbery, etc. It is not that God desires that pregnant women be ripped open, children to be slaughtered, populations to suffer famine, or men to be executed on the side of a highway by police officers, but that this is just what happens to societies that trust in men rather than God to protect and feed them, thus inviting enemies to rule over them and devour them. The reason we are occupied by domestic terrorists who call themselves “the government,” are taken for trillions of dollars worth of property every year in taxes, fines, and fees, and are reaping all the evident evils of these systems today, is that we forgot about God and put our faith in men. Men must always think twice before they forget about God and expect their deliverance to come from men, for they will only get the opposite from this grave error and make God into one of their enemies. “Now consider this, you who forget God, lest I tear you to pieces, with no one to rescue you” (Psalm 50:22). If we had trusted in God and refused to erect the systems of men as our alleged protection and means of ordering society, we would not be facing the enemies and evils that surround us today, but would instead be living freely under God, as He intended men to live.