[This is part one of an article series on “statism and salvation.” See part two, three, four]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

One of the major distortions of God’s message to us that is almost totally unquestioned in Christianity today is the near total spiritualization of the concept of salvation into being nothing more than an escape to heaven in the afterlife. The popular Christian concept of salvation has become a purely otherworldly idea focused solely on our eternal souls while neglecting the political captivity that we’re living under today and which Jesus came to liberate men from. Suggest that much of the references in the Bible to salvation have a this-worldly context of God liberating people from the rule by human kings and their armies and police forces, and you’re likely to be met with great opposition. This is because most Christians are lazy and have taken a defeatist approach to the social order around them. They hope to be removed from any earthly obligations and duties to their neighbors, all which are precisely the very things that have led to the downfall of society around us today and our captivity to men in the absence of our Kingdom-seeking. They don’t believe we need to be doers of the word of God and seek the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth — to keep the commandments of God and seek liberty for them, their brothers, and neighbors. For most Christians, feel-good notions like “going to church” or merely proclaiming “I believe in God” are sufficient for serving the Lord. They don’t believe they need to do anything more than that. “Works” is almost a swear-word in modern-day Christianity, even though the Apostle James tells us that faith without works is dead. 

What we have among most Christians today then is largely a dead faith coupled with an escapist desire to be shipped off to heaven after the trials and tribulations of this life are through. They long to escape from God’s supposedly cursed creation where everything we do is a losing battle and we only lose down here below. The object of the Christian faith in the eyes of these escapists is not to seek the Kingdom of God or to pray that God’s will be done on earth as in heaven, as Jesus taught us, but to simply say “I’m saved” and allow the world to go to hell in the meantime. Most Christians are more looking forward to the “end times,” where they believe they will be raptured into heaven, rather than to seek the Kingdom of God and pray for salvation from our statist captors. They take comfort in an escapist notion of getting off this supposedly cursed earth, rather than to become doers of the word of God and seek an alternative “government” to the violent kingdoms of this world. As the Christian anarchist Kevin Craig explains,

“One of the greatest myths of the 20th century is that God intends only to snatch a few individuals from the global dictatorship of ‘The New World Order,’ taking them off to heaven while all of culture goes to hell. The modern ‘gospel’ is that I get to go to heaven; me, me, me, the big Numero Uno; I get to go to heaven while the nations around me collapse.”

Most Christians today express this generic “I’m saved” message while living in the middle of Egyptian captivity today, their idea being that God has reserved them a place in heaven when they die and that they do not need to do anything in the meantime to bring heaven to earth. Very few Christians today have any sort of concept of salvation as an earthly one regarding our relationship (or subjugation) to the rulers of worldly kingdoms. Indeed, many of them support the existence of these kingdoms, which is also helped by the fact that they only see the Lord’s salvation as a purely heavenly one that apparently leaves us in need of earthly saviors (eg., presidents, police, congressmen) to fill the void God leaves us by acting only as a passive heavenly God who is doing nothing more than tallying up the names of people who He is going to let into heaven when they die. These people don’t believe they need to repent of their support for these political systems, because their focus is entirely spiritual and otherworldly. Social change, in their minds, is not part of their idea of what it means to be a Christian. They essentially believe that they can go on sinning, as if seeking political systems isn’t forbidden by a God who apparently doesn’t care much for which kingdoms we are loyal to on earth. Since their idea is almost entirely otherworldly, they think that nothing they do down below matters or is even irrelevant to their hyper-spiritualized religion, which in their eyes is not much more than making sure you’re in line for heaven after life down here is over. One can walk in the dark path on earth so long as they have professed Jesus as their soul-saver for their heavenly days. As one State Trooper responded to me upon calling him to repent and quit his job, “I’m saved.” In his mind, it is perfectly fine to engage in all the acts which God says He hates, because he’s “going to heaven.”

Naturally, these “Christians” today have ignored any commands by God to seek justice and liberty, which God always says is one of the most important causes to Him. Indeed, they have forgotten about the idea of justice and liberty altogether. If our only purpose on this earth is only to get off it and get to heaven and sing with the angels for the rest of time in our mansions in the sky, then why concern yourself with justice and liberty?

These escapist Christians who more or less despise the earth are in direct opposition to a God who calls us to obey His commandments and seek His Kingdom. They are the very people to blame for the statist captivity we’re living under today. Their opposition to seeing that God’s will be done on earth as in heaven—Jesus’s lesson on how to pray—leads them to forsake all their Christian duties to go into bondage to men. For if we have no earthly duties here below, then who cares if human kings reign today and subjugate everyone under their rule? “This is just the way things are on earth.” Even worse, many of them reason that if the Christian faith is nothing more than deciding our place in the afterlife (which we will argue here makes up a relatively small amount of the Bible compared to earthly salvation), that they may as well engage with the kingdoms of this world and erect or support human kings in the alleged absence of the Lord’s Kingship. Not only have many Christians illegitimately spiritualized salvation into a purely heavenly idea, but they also hope to have it after a life of proudly supporting Caesar. 

What we get today is largely a spiritualized version of salvation that has nothing to do with God smashing our enemies for us and saving us from their boot on our necks. Of course, Christians today may read Revelation and say that God is going to smoke kings in the “end times.” But they largely do not live as if they are to seek His kingdom in the present. As for the early Christians who read Revelation, it was probably still more of a hope for them that God was going to bring down the statists, more so than it was a message of going to heaven. Even the tone of Revelation itself expresses this earthly hope of salvation. “How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You avenge our blood and judge those who dwell upon the earth?” (Revelation 6:10). The language here isn’t begging for a trip to heaven so much as it seeks justice on earth.

Corruption of the Gospel message 

In this watered-down and otherworldly gospel, Jesus is treated more as a spiritual soul-saver than a King who brought with Him a Kingdom. The idea of “preaching the gospel” is stripped of any message of calling people into another kingdom and getting them to repent from the kingdoms of this world. The “gospel” is no longer thought to be a political message to be preached, as Jesus preached it, as being “at hand” and to “seek first” with the faith that it will be advanced. Our evangelist efforts in a heavenly-minded Christianity today are, at best, to seek to “save souls” here and there before everything implodes and the last chances for getting on the boat to heaven have passed. This is the nature of “gospel” preaching in their minds: to secure a place in heaven for a man’s soul, rather than build the Kingdom of God and free people from statist slavery. We get a generic message about how Jesus has come to “save us from sin” that does not mean very much to those who repeat it besides them being redeemed into heaven one day; the idea of the creation being reconciled to God, men being made anew, and a restoration of the Dominion Mandate that was originally given to Adam is almost completely off the table. The Gospel message is reduced to professing that you “believe in Jesus” or have “accepted Jesus into your heart” rather than a call to seek His literal Kingdom. 

Naturally, if there is nothing here for us on earth and salvation is purely heavenly, then these people will also corrupt the Gospel message and give it very little meaning. Salvation, for them, is not much more than the hope of heaven, and “the gospel” is just the “good news” that Jesus is taking us there. It is no longer the Gospel of the Kingdom of God that has been at hand since the time Jesus walked the earth; it is just “the gospel,” stripped of all its political meaning and reduced to the good news that you get to go to heaven after all the earthly trials are through and you have remained a faithful believer.

The real Gospel, however, is the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. It is a political message of another Kingdom. It has to do with being saved on earth, with a peace and prosperity brought about by those who seek the Kingdom that Jesus the Christ has already inaugurated. As one article explains well enough, 

“When we hear this word [Gospel] today, our minds immediately tend to associate it with spirituality in general, or Christianity in particular, but originally, this word was political in nature.  In the Greco-Roman world, from the time of Alexander the Great and on into the Roman Empire, this word was used to refer to history-making, world-shaping reports of political, military, or societal victories.”

If by “Gospel” we are to understand it as the “good news” of a new age, era, or kingdom at hand, which is what Jesus was preaching, then we should see that the Gospel of Jesus is a direct challenge to the false gospel of Rome, which says that the pseudo-divine Caesars are bringing with them a new era of peace and prosperity, which was what people thought with the emperor Augustus and the Pax Romana. That is, the Gospel message is not purely otherworldly as it has been turned into in modern Christianity; it was a challenge to the false gospel of the false gods that are human political rulers — of a new Kingdom being brought to earth by Jesus the Christ. As the above article went on to explain,

“When we understand this term ‘gospel’ (euangelion), and how it was used in the ancient Greco-Roman world, we can begin to better understand the specific way in which the Christian gospels of Jesus Christ were written. They were written in such a way as to present Jesus as the true divine King, who had come to bring true salvation to the whole world, and they were written as a direct challenge to the so-called ‘gospel’ of Rome and its peace which was enforced through brutality, and which did not provide any actual salvation.”

Earthly salvation

The common “going to heaven when we die” view of salvation held by many professing Christians today is rather removed from Biblical references to this concept of being saved from our enemies. Though many Christians today are content forsaking any earthly duties to God and neighbor in order to comfortably sit on the couch knowing their eternal destination, the Bible frequently presents salvation as freedom from human rulers and not merely an escape from this earth (though, at risk of confusion, we might well say it would be an escape from this world). To deny any earthly notion is unbiblical. The psalmists could even say that “God is my King from ancient times, working salvation on the earth” (Psalm 74:12). To confine things to a heavenly, afterlife salvation is not giving us a full picture of what being saved often looks like in the scriptures. God saving people was very often an immediate and physical salvation from rulers — from kings, armies, and other oppressors that God wrecked on behalf of the people He was saving. It was much more than just some backstage pass to heaven. God speaks of delivering people from political slave societies. “Remember that you were slaves in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God redeemed you” (Deuteronomy 15:15). And doing it by putting hands on the rulers. “The LORD your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm” (Deuteronomy 5:15).

This view is not popular today however, and even considering it is likely to get one called a “heretic.” With most Christians today, we run into this escapist sentiment rather than a people who want to become doers of the word and seek the Government of God. Their view of any incoming social collapse, which is already caused by their lack of responsibility toward God’s commandments (Prov 12:24), is a rapture-minded “we’ll be out of here by then” approach that arguably misses the deeper meaning of salvation revealed in Scripture that they don’t want to see. Since these people already have a propensity to do nothing to change society around them, their theological view of salvation is watered-down to an afterlife ride in the clouds with the Lord where there is no more sickness, no more sorrows, no more pain, and—most importantly for them—no more responsibility. They do not want to see that the Lord offers protection and deliverance in the here and now against real world enemies for those who seek His Kingdom, because that would require them to repent, act, and actually seek it, which is too much work for them. Better to sit around thinking, “I’m one of the people who gets to go to heaven.”

It is much harder to square this heavenly-minded view of salvation with scripture than it is a real-world divine deliverance from Egyptian captors. God’s references to saving people in His word typically has much more to do with yanking His people from the jaws of earthly oppressors than it does some ethereal ticket to the pearly gates. Very little scripture even deals with the afterlife, contrary to what one might think if they had never read the Bible but took it from Christians that it’s not much more than a document on heaven and hell and how to get to one and avoid the other. Most of it has to do with God’s law and its application to us on this earth, in the cause and effect reality of God’s providential order, where God saves and blesses those who abide in Him from the statists of the world, and judges and curses those who chase after worldly kingdoms instead of His. The majority of references in the Bible to salvation deal with God granting deliverance from real enemies, ie., freeing us from kings, presidents, soldiers, police officers, and other statist tyrants. Very few references to salvation are of the nature of seeking God and being assured a trip to heaven when you die. Salvation is often framed as being liberated from the shackles of human tyrants more than it is a profession of faith that allows one to dodge a trip to hell when they pass from this supposedly cursed earth of God’s where nothing can go right for us. 

As opposed to the common spiritualized version today that ignores our earthly enemies, true faith and hope for salvation is more about putting our entire faith in God for protection and trusting that He will deliver us from any and all of our enemies. Salvation is less about what happens to us after we die than it is about being saved into God’s Kingdom in the present, and freed from the dominion of man over men represented by the kingdoms of this world. The Bible hardly deals with this topic as much as it does worldly systems of political slavery, which make up the bulk of its themes, settings, narratives, and lessons.

This idea of the Lord as nothing more than a spiritual soul-saver arguably even strips Him of His earthly power and authority as a King, despite His proclamation that all power has been given to Him in heaven and on earth (Matt 28:18). It is easy to see how men adopt a statist worldview when their idea of salvation and the Lord is one of Him waiting around in the heavens to receive souls and nothing more. If people truly believed the Lord was their King, they would believe also in His salvation from enemies and not fall for the worldly temptation to seek human rulers for their protection. They would say with the prophets, “For the LORD is our Judge, the LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is our King. It is He who will save us” (Isaiah 33:22). As opposed to statists who trust in men, they would say with the Psalmists that the Lord is their King their literal means of defense (Psa 44:4, 74:12, 89:18).

Biblical examples of salvation

Somehow this concept of salvation as being delivered from our earthly enemies is missed in scripture. The spiritualization of this concept among the false pastors of the institutional churches doesn’t help, most of whom teach the dispensationalist framework that we only fail down here on earth below, before we’re taken off to heaven in the soon-to-arrive end times. Furthermore, the State is many of these false Christians’ actual god who they have placed their faith in, giving them an incentive to not see that God speaks of freedom from statism for those who believe in Him. 

But if we look around at most of the cases of “saved,” “delivered,” and such words and contexts in scripture, we see that God is speaking of a this-worldly, physical salvation from enemies, not an otherworldly and spiritual salvation of the soul that makes up the dominant idea today. This is just another instance of many where the Bible more or less overthrows everything that you would think was true of God if you only listened to people who profess His name (eg., pastors and churchians). Their idea is that the salvation Jesus brought was only a path to being “saved from hell.”

Many scriptures, however, point to the idea that God’s salvation is both physical—the enemies and those being saved are flesh and blood—and regarding this earth and life. Being “saved” as being saved from our enemies to where we can live free without fearing badged home invaders is a consistent theme (Num 10:9; Deut 33:29; Psa 44:7). As John the Baptist’s dad, Zachariah, wrote,

“Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, because He has visited and redeemed His people. He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of His servant David, as He spoke through His holy prophets, those of ages past, salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us, to show mercy to our fathers and to remember His holy covenant, the oath He swore to our father Abraham, to grant us deliverance from hostile hands, that we may serve Him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of our lives” (Luke 1:68-75).

It is not difficult to point to very this-worldly examples of salvation. Even those who have never read the Bible but have a loose idea of Bible stories (the Exodus, David and Goliath) should be able to think of some. We could easily start with the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. Moses doesn’t tell Pharaoh, “Let My people go, so that they can float off to a heavenly paradise later.” Far from it. It’s a jailbreak—a literal escape from political slavery, from a brick-making bondage under Pharaohs. God literally and physically liberates them from being under the thumb of oppressive state rulers. The exodus episode, where God safely gets His people out from the hands of Pharaohs and their Egyptian political bondage and leaves the statists behind to drown in the sea, is frequently recalled throughout Scripture as a sort of way of reminding people that trusting in the Lord’s salvation alone is the way out of slavery and that seeking political gods is the way back into it. 

“Now when the Israelites cried out to the LORD because of Midian, He sent them a prophet, who told them, ‘This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: I brought you up out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. I delivered you out of the hands of Egypt and all your oppressors. I drove them out before you and gave you their land. And I said to you: ‘I am the LORD your God. You must not fear the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you dwell.’ But you did not obey Me” (Judges 6:7-8). 

The Israelites had gone into bondage over their own sin. They forsook the Kingdom of God, where men provide for their brothers in voluntary and free networks of private charity and mutual aid, and agreed to hand over their goods and labor to the Egyptians for bread. But God works both ways, bringing judgment upon people who turn toward human rulers, as was the case with their captivity, and salvation from slavery upon those who seek to turn away from them, as we saw in their exodus from Egypt. We often see how God punishes a disobedient people with the state rulers they deserved to be dominated by for their sins (idolatry, covetousness), and that He likewise liberates a people—saves them—from their statist captors when they repent and call out to the Lord to be saved. The Old Testament is a consistent story of this back-and-forth where God literally saves people, they fall away from Him again into political slavery for not keeping His commandments, cry to Him again when in bondage, and He is once again merciful and throws off the yoke of oppression. Nehemiah 9 is a particularly good example of this endless back-and-forth of hardheadedness to the word of God that leads to bondage, only to return to the realization that one cannot do without God if they wish to avoid it.

“So You delivered them into the hands of enemies who oppressed them, and in their time of distress they cried out to You. From heaven You heard them, and in Your great compassion You gave them deliverers who saved them from the hands of their enemies” (Nehemiah 9:27). 

When men seek protection from men (ie., Egyptian political systems), they are people who “forgot God their savior who did great things in Egypt” (Psalm 106:21), and so God gives them what they beg for and allows them to be oppressed by statist regimes. 

“And again the Israelites did evil in the sight of the LORD. They served the Baals, the Ashtoreths, the gods of Aram, Sidon, and Moab, and the gods of the Ammonites and Philistines. Thus they forsook the LORD and did not serve Him. So the anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and He sold them into the hands of the Philistines and Ammonites, who that very year harassed and oppressed the Israelites, and they did so for eighteen years to all the Israelites on the other side of the Jordan in Gilead, the land of the Amorites.  The Ammonites also crossed the Jordan to fight against Judah, Benjamin, and the house of Ephraim, and Israel was in deep distress” (Judges 10:6-9).

But then He turns around and saves them from out of the hands of these enemies He once used as a form of judgment against them. All throughout the Scriptures, God’s salvation deals with saving people directly from their enemies. In the early Biblical stories, God was always raising up “saviors” to deliver people from their enemies. “But when the Israelites cried out to the LORD, He raised up Othniel son of Caleb’s younger brother Kenaz as a deliverer to save them” (Judges 3:9). We see this theme in many places. 

“Then the LORD raised up judges, who saved them from the hands of those who plundered them. Israel, however, did not listen to their judges. Instead, they prostituted themselves with other gods and bowed down to them. They quickly turned from the way of their fathers, who had walked in obedience to the LORD’s commandments; they did not do as their fathers had done. Whenever the LORD raised up a judge for the Israelites, He was with that judge and saved them from the hands of their enemies while the judge was still alive; for the LORD was moved to pity by their groaning under those who oppressed them and afflicted them” (Judges 2:16-18).

Jesus was one of these saviors who has come to redeem man from the dominion of man — to reconcile the creation to the Creator, open up the way toward liberation from man’s domination systems, and restore the Dominion Mandate to men where they rule over their own bodies and properties rather than be dominated by other men calling themselves the “government.” Jesus the Christ is called the savior of the whole world (John 1:29, 3:17, 4:42; 2 Cor 5:19; 1 John 2:2, 4:24). The name Jesus is even derived from the Hebrew word yasha, which is the word that is at the root of translations for “save,” “deliver,” or “rescue.” Jesus likewise saves people from their enemies when they repent of their love of and participation in the kingdoms of the world and abide in His way and Kingdom instead. What we need to be saved from is statism and the political captivity we have found ourselves in for our sin of trusting in these men as ruler-gods, which has come from our failure to seek His Kingdom and walk in His ways. If we are living in bondage to human rulers, we are not yet saved; we’re under judgment. Jesus has come to do just this: to redeem man from the dominion of man and bring His repentant people into His jurisdictional government. 

At any rate, the salvation in the Bible, the hope of the authors who lived through these times, was often very focused on their present lives and not some far-out future in the afterlife. The prophets hoped to be saved from violence (Hab 1:2), eg., the type which is systematically perpetuated by States who enshrine their plunder into “law.” They trusted that God would protect them in the here and now and prayed for Him to do it.

This real-world salvation is impossible to avoid in the Bible. The whole nature of God is bound up in saving us from enemies — a promise that men forsook to trust in the false salvation of statism from which God delivers people from.

“For the Lord your God is He who goes with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you” (Deuteronomy 20:4).

Very often, not being “saved” is fully bound up with being plundered.

“You will not prosper in your ways. Day after day you will be oppressed and plundered, with no one to save you” (Deuteronomy 28:29).

What people were praying to God for in the Bible was precisely to be literally saved from their (statist) enemies in the here and now, not purely some spiritual-eternal future.

“The people of Israel said to Samuel, ‘Do not cease to cry out to the LORD our God for us, that he may save us from the hand of the Philistines’” (1 Samuel 7:8). 

Even when they realized the error and sin in erecting human kings in what is really one of the greatest betrayals of God possible, the people started asking for prayers to God to be saved from death.

“They pleaded with Samuel, ‘Pray to the LORD your God for your servants so that we will not die! For we have added to all our sins the evil of asking for a king’” (1 Samuel 12:19).

Salvation in the Psalms

The psalms in particular are filled with prayers to God to literally and physically save us from our enemies, not to ship us off to heaven when we die. They were calling out to the Lord,

“Deliver me from workers of iniquity, and save me from men of bloodshed” (Psalm 59:2). 

Their focus was real-world enemies, not just some request to be spared from hell and go to heaven when they die. 

“Arise, O LORD! Save me, O my God! Strike all my enemies on the jaw; break the teeth of the wicked” (Psalm 3:7).

The Psalmists believed that God could destroy our earthly enemies for us. 

“By your mighty power you rescue those who seek refuge from their enemies” (Psalm 17:7).

The psalmists could speak of a God “who delivers me from my enemies. You exalt me above my foes; You rescue me from violent men” (Psalm 18:48). They could say, “For You save us from our enemies; You put those who hate us to shame” (Psalm 44:7). It is the unjust political plunderers—the violent political rulers who prey upon God’s children for their property and their lives—who we need to be saved from.

“Deliver me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the grasp of the unjust and ruthless” (Psalm 71:4).

If we took it from the Bible rather than the modern church today who thinks they are “saved” because they are going to heaven when they die, we would see that there is most often a real-world, enemy-fighting sense in which the Biblical authors spoke of God’s saving ability. Another psalmist calls the Lord, “O GOD the Lord, the strength of my salvation, You shield my head in the day of battle” (Psalm 140:7). These type of calls to God to be saved from enemies more or less fills up the entire Book of Psalms. 

“Depart from me, all you workers of iniquity, for the LORD has heard my weeping. The LORD has heard my cry for mercy; the LORD accepts my prayer. All my enemies will be ashamed and dismayed; they will turn back in sudden disgrace” (Psalm 6:8-10).

The Psalmists treat God as if He will literally and physically save them from their enemies, eg., from the political plunderers of the world who come after us to take us for a spoil. “O LORD my God, I take refuge in You; save me and deliver me from all my pursuers” (Psalm 7:1). Men of the scriptures could speak of “the God who avenges me and brings down nations beneath me” (2 Samuel 22:48). What God saves His people from is violent statist plunder systems. 

“My God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation. My stronghold, my refuge, and my Savior, You save me from violence” (2 Samuel 22:3).

Amen. Praise God. He saves His people from statism!

I do not attempt to disparage the salvation of the eternal soul here. I trust that God will look after our souls as much as He will our earthly bodies against those who wish to harm us. The point is that most Christians today only trust in the former. They are guilty of disparaging God’s earthly saving ability of His people from physical harm by political rulers. They have failed to regard the Lord as having any power here below to save us from plunderers, and, even worse, most of them abide in these plunderers as their “saviors,” effectively thinking that men can do more for them than God. They believe that their enemies would come after them without human government, even though God makes these same offers of protection for those who trust in Him, and furthermore makes it clear that state rulers come as a judgment upon a backward people and not as their saviors. They have arbitrarily limited God’s saving power to the afterlife, which has opened the door to the idea that we need a State down here below to protect us.

But the Lord our King is not a halfway King, as seen in the episode in Samuel 8 where the Israelites wrongly assumed they needed human kings to make up for some alleged shortcoming of God to fight our battles for us. The type of salvation God offers is genuine protection — in this life. God wants to be our defense as much as our provider of anything else, which shows how seeking “defense” from so-called “defense departments” is both a betrayal of the Lord and only achieves everything but defense: tax bondage to pay for the system, waste and fraud of funds that go to the politically-connected politicians and corporate contractors, murder of innocent people, sacrifices in their wars, or soldiers marching down your street. The Biblical writers expected nothing less from God than that He can free His people from the scheming political rulers of this world. 

“In You, O LORD, I have taken refuge; let me never be put to shame; save me by Your righteousness. Incline Your ear to me; come quickly to my rescue. Be my rock of refuge, the stronghold of my deliverance. For You are my rock and my fortress; lead me and guide me for the sake of Your name. You free me from the net laid out for me, for You are my refuge” (Psalm 31:1-4). 

God’s salvation is a real-world salvation from the evil plunderers who rule the world, who at one time act as judgment upon a sinful people in the form of bringing injustice and lawlessness to society, and at another time are destroyed by God for their own evils on behalf of those repentant people who now deserve to be saved from statism. 

“The transgressors will all be destroyed; the future of the wicked will be cut off. The salvation of the righteous is from the LORD; He is their stronghold in time of trouble. The LORD helps and delivers them; He rescues and saves them from the wicked, because they take refuge in Him” (Psalm 37:38-40). 

We live in a dangerous world full of predators who call themselves “congressmen” or “law enforcement officers,” and the type of salvation we should seek from the Lord is freedom from these men. 

“Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve my life; you stretch out your hand against the wrath of my enemies, and your right hand delivers me” (Psalm 138:7).

Salvation in the prophets 

This theme of earthly salvation from enemies is continued in the prophets. Jesus Himself quoted the prophet Isaiah on how He has come to bring “liberty to the captives” and to “set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Luke 4:18). The prophets themselves are not telling us to conduct rituals and liturgy as they are understood in the modern church today and “save souls” by singing songs with them, sitting in pews, and listening to sermons. God always tells us how He values liberty and justice over vain rituals or churchian ceremonies. “Isn’t this the fast that I have chosen: to break the chains of wickedness, to untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and tear off every yoke?” (Isaiah 58:6). We are to be seeking the liberation of our brothers and sisters through the preaching of the Gospel message of a Kingdom of God, where men repent from the kingdoms of this world, are baptized into the Kingdom of God, and freed from the evils of political rule.

For people to have made salvation into a purely afterlife matter has been to dumb-down God’s word and strip men of any hope for victory in God against the statists of our time. This is a much different perspective than the Biblical authors. The books of the prophets also show salvation as being saved from statist enemies.

“I will deliver you from the hand of the wicked and redeem you from the grasp of the ruthless” (Jeremiah 15:21).

The type of people God deals with when saving a people are the evil statists who need repayment for their own evils of enslaving and plundering men who they saw as their property.

“Indeed, this is what the LORD says: ‘Even the captives of the mighty will be taken away, and the plunder of the tyrant will be retrieved; I will contend with those who contend with you, and I will save your children’” (Isaiah 49:25).

God ultimately doesn’t allow His people to be dominated by statists forever. “I will save My flock, and they will no longer be prey” (Ezekiel 34:22). And this isn’t just in the sense that some heavenly escape would effectively be freedom from statism too, but that our very earthly existence can be one where we need not fear being preyed upon by state rulers in a society that has sought God’s protection alone (Isa 65:17-23). The type of salvation God offers His people is one where we no longer need to fear police preying upon us for papers and cattle-tags as we leave our homes, receiving letters in the mail from tax collectors telling us that we owe them money, being evicted from our property by tax agents, or getting orders to appear in court and face incarceration for violating the edicts of men.

“I will make with them a covenant of peace and rid the land of wild animals, so that they may dwell securely in the wilderness and sleep in the forest. I will make them and the places around My hill a blessing. I will send down showers in season—showers of blessing. The trees of the field will give their fruit, and the land will yield its produce; My flock will be secure in their land. Then they will know that I am the LORD, when I have broken the bars of their yoke and delivered them from the hands that enslaved them. They will no longer be prey for the nations, and the beasts of the earth will not consume them. They will dwell securely, and no one will frighten them” (Ezekiel 34:25-28).

God the state smasher

God’s track record of smashing human political systems would really contest this view that the Lord’s salvation has nothing to do with freeing people from tyrants. We might even go as far as to say that God is obsessed with dethroning all these proud men of the Bible — of “humbling” the haughty rulers in the many Biblical stories of the falls of human governments and their pretend-kings. By leaving out these stories of salvation from state rulers from our understanding of what God does for those who trust in Him alone, it has at least had the effect of taking some of the fire out of men to seek liberation through God from the kingdoms of this world. Christians have just simply not believed it is part of their purpose on earth to seek abolition, evangelize for this cause, and pray to God for divine deliverance from our enemies. Their idea is largely just getting in God’s boat to heaven as the waters continue to rage around them. Who cares if the water is rising upon your neighbor’s house, so long as you have your life jacket on?

The reason that God relentlessly destroys statists in the scriptures is not only because these regimes represent sin par excellence, but also because there are people living under them—the repentant men who have turned back to God as their only hope and salvation—who need to be saved from them. God pulls the Lots out of the city before He destroys the Sodom and Gomorrahs. He puts the Noahs on an ark before flooding the earth (as he would have done for any other repentant men should there have been any).

Thus we see an endless run of judgment even upon the statist systems of the world that once were used by God as judgment upon those sinful statists who deserved to reap what they had sown. God saves His people from statists, and brings proud statists down (2 Sam 22:28). The psalmists made this clear. “For You save an afflicted people, but You humble those with haughty eyes” (Psa 18:22). As in the exodus from Egypt, the salvation of the Lord deals with smashing statists for us, eg., drowning kings, soldiers, and police officers in the sea as they pursue God’s children. 

“The Lord is at Your right hand; He will crush kings in the day of His wrath. He will judge the nations, heaping up the dead; He will crush the leaders far and wide” (Psalm 110:5-6).

Smashing state rulers who plunder us for a living is what God does for those who trust in Him rather than men.

“May he vindicate the afflicted among the people; may he save the children of the needy and crush the oppressor” (Psalm 72:4).

To put it bluntly, God’s salvation often has to do with dead statists — an assertion sure to offend those who believe that statism is their salvation, that “the troops fight for our freedom” and “the police keep us safe at night.”

“That day the LORD saved Israel from the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the shore” (Exodus 14:30).

Indeed, Moses’s song directly makes the connection between God’s smashing of our statist enemies and God as a savior.

“I will sing to the Lord, for He is highly exalted. The horse and rider He has thrown into the sea. The LORD is my strength and my song, and He has become my salvation. He is my God, and I will praise Him, my father’s God, and I will exalt Him. The LORD is a warrior, the LORD is His name. Pharaoh’s chariots and army He has cast into the sea; the finest of his officers are drowned in the Red Sea. The depths have covered them; they sank there like a stone. Your right hand, O LORD, is majestic in power; Your right hand, O LORD, has shattered the enemy. You overthrew Your adversaries by Your great majesty. You unleashed Your burning wrath; it consumed them like stubble. At the blast of Your nostrils the waters piled up; like a wall the currents stood firm; the depths congealed in the heart of the sea. The enemy declared, ‘I will pursue, I will overtake. I will divide the spoils; I will gorge myself on them. I will draw my sword; my hand will destroy them.’ But You blew with Your breath, and the sea covered them. They sank like lead in the mighty waters” (Exodus 15:1-10).

Drowning statists is an old pastime for God.

“He rebuked the Red Sea, and it dried up; He led them through the depths as through a desert. He saved them from the hand that hated them; He redeemed them from the hand of the enemy. The waters covered their foes; not one of them remained” (Psalm 106:9-11).

Those worldly fools who say such sinful things as “God bless our police officers” or “pray for our president” would not like to find out that God destroys these types of men and liberates people from them.

“He divided the Red Sea in two. His loving devotion endures forever. And led Israel through the midst. His loving devotion endures forever. But swept Pharaoh and his army into the Red Sea. His loving devotion endures forever. He led His people through the wilderness. His loving devotion endures forever. He struck down great kings. His loving devotion endures forever. And slaughtered mighty kings. His loving devotion endures forever. Sihon king of the Amorites. His loving devotion endures forever. And Og king of Bashan. His loving devotion endures forever. And He gave their land as an inheritance. His loving devotion endures forever. A heritage to His servant Israel. His loving devotion endures forever. He remembered us in our low estate. His loving devotion endures forever. And freed us from our enemies” (Psalm 136:13-24).

Those who say “God bless our troops” would not like to discover that God “completely destroys” Egyptian armies (Deut 11:4).

Repentance and deliverance 

Just as God uses States as a tool of judgment against people who turn away from Him, so He saves people from statism who turn toward Him. God’s salvation almost always directly or indirectly deals with actual rulers, not matters of heaven or hell, unless we are to consider the hell on earth that is statism.

“Do not be afraid of the king of Babylon, whom you now fear; do not be afraid of him, declares the LORD, for I am with you to save you and deliver you from him” (Jeremiah 42:11).

Just as God delivers disobedient statist idolaters into the hands of state rulers, so He delivers the obedient seekers of His Kingdom from the statists — He saves them. When men repent of their statism which wound them up living as subject citizens of human kingdoms, God delivers them from the enemies they once regarded as saviors in their sin.

“Then they cried out to the LORD and said, ‘We have sinned, for we have forsaken the LORD and served the Baals and Ashtoreths. Now deliver us from the hands of our enemies, that we may serve You.’ So the LORD sent Jerubbaal, Barak, Jephthah, and Samuel, and He delivered you from the hands of your enemies on every side, and you dwelt securely” (1 Samuel 12:10-11).

We should be repenting of the kingdoms of this world today, seeking the Kingdom of God by organizing into congregations of mutual aid with our Christian brothers, and praying to the Lord for our own exodus today and deliverance from the hands of men whom we have found ourselves captives to for our own sin of idolizing them and failing to live as God has instructed us. 

Looking to God for salvation from statism 

God tells us to rely on Him for salvation — again, not in some otherworldly sense but from the very-earthly troubles of statist societies from which we need to be divinely liberated from. “Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will honor Me” (Psalm 50:15).

So few people have a serious enough faith to trust that the Lord will do things that they cannot imagine (protect them from their enemies) that they don’t trust in God to protect them in ways that they erroneously expect from human government. They do not listen to the words of the Lord, “Call to Me, and I will answer and show you great and unsearchable things you do not know” (Jeremiah 33:3). All they know is the lies of the worldly ideology of statism from which they haven’t repented, and refuse to see another way in the salvation of the Lord. All they can imagine is what they’ve been told: human government is needed for protection, and such earthly matters as this are not the domain of God, which is merely religious/spiritual and concerning questions of the soul and heaven.

Then and now

What we see today—waiting around for our glory in heaven—appears to be a departure from the way earlier Christians thought. The early Christians do not seem to have had this waiting-around-to-die mentality of Christians today. They were not just hunkering down for martyrdom and awaiting their inevitable fate of murder by the regime on earth (though they were being persecuted by the Romans). On the contrary, they were acting out the government of God and actually feeding one another and providing for each other all while they dodged the Romans. They were acting as a Kingdom-people who served each other and believed in God’s protection and providence of His Kingdom-seeking people. They were organized into congregations that served each other in mutual aid. They had a literal Kingdom of God with their own government, laws, customs, and systems of welfare. And they did not feed from the hands of Caesars as men do today, nor preach the false gospel of salvation through statism. They actually believed in and worshiped God, not the Caesars of the world as so-called Christians do today. They weren’t just waiting on their heavenly hour, but believed that God was with them as they moved on the earth. Despite the odds against them, they were still evangelizing and stirring up holy trouble in the land and seeking to turn the world upside down, not merely waiting for a rapture like so many Christians today who long for their lives and for earth itself to be over with — as if God screwed up when He created both. Their hope was not a purely eternal one, and they were even praying to God to liberate them from jails and their enemies. After all, they were steeped in the Old Testament ideas of God saving in history, not just beyond it. 

None of this is to say that endurance isn’t part of the deal. We have found ourselves in bondage for our sins at the present time and are unlikely to escape unscathed. Jesus warned that those who follow Him will be hated and persecuted. But this is no reason that we cannot have faith that if we sought God’s kingdom earnestly, which we haven’t done under this escape-to-heaven mindset, that we may well look to an exodus of our own — and not one where we are evacuated to heaven with no more earthly cares or obligations, but where we are safely delivered from the hands of statists and free to produce and live without being plundered by these enemies of liberty.