[This is part 6 in a series on “statism and adultery.” See part one, two, three, four, five, seven]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris 

There are many ways that the false prophets, pastors, and priests of the modern church water-down scripture in order to deliver soft, sophist sermons to people that keep them from breaking out of our Egyptian bondage and seeking the Kingdom of God as an alternative to the false, plunderous kingdoms of this world. One of these ways has been to reduce the necessarily political message of the Bible into something more of a message about our personal sins. Forget idolatry for the political systems of the world. “Sin” here is regarded as nothing more than, say, our lust for women (which, to be sure, is part of the story and our quest for holiness). Rarely ever will one of these pulpit pimps speak of the lust for human rulers, and many of them will decidedly point to the alleged “Christian” obligation to vote for the myth of a “godly ruler.” Rarely ever will they speak of the sin and idolatry of statism, ie., the worldly ideology where men claim that human rulers are “necessary” for social order, even though it makes up the essence of the Biblical message that the kingdoms of this world are at enmity with the Kingdom of God.

Although the whole of scripture is about falling into political captivity for our sin and our need for redemption in Christ who has paved the way for us to repent and come out from under the dominion of men into His jurisdiction, we often get watered-down messages that fail to address the sin of men who prostitute themselves out to the kingdoms of this world. There’s little need to wonder why we never hear about this sin of national adultery: a majority of the people in these so-called churches are these very men who don’t want to be rebuked for the sin of statism and pointed in the direction of abolitionism as repentance for this sin. (Whether their idolatry for men keeps them from seeing this sin in God’s word, or whether they are consciously obscuring this message and aware of their status as false pastors and subverters of the word of God, doesn’t really matter. For teaching that human government is necessary, whether as fools or corrupters, serves the role of false prophecy anyway, which is to make men believe that it is fine by God to support the kingdoms of the world).

One way the Biblical message is watered down then is to feed people a generic message about how “Jesus died for our sins” without much understanding or specification of these sins, which seem to just be some general, inherent bad things about men (ignore the willful idolatry that men have for worldly kingdoms and the state of unrepentance they are in when they serve them). Again, it is rare to hear a preacher or even anyone on the street say that Jesus came to liberate us from human bondage and bring us into His Kingdom. In fact, I’ve never heard it. The idea of salvation for most Christians is just being “saved” into heaven when they die, not actually being redeemed and brought into a new literal Kingdom where we love and serve each other freely and voluntary as the Lord commands (Mark 10:42-45) and where we rely on His protection and provision for those who are seeking His Kingdom. Even worse, many of them have unwittingly bought into the contradictory idea that salvation is found in the State, which they confess merely by believing that human government and tax-funded soldiers should exist to “protect our freedoms.” Since “the gospel” message for most Christians is nothing more than eternal salvation in heaven, they have not found it hypocritical to trust in salvation through human government on earth. Hence the common excuse that while Jesus saves our souls, we are still (supposedly) in need of presidents, congressmen, soldiers and police, to look after “our freedoms” down here on earth. “The gospel” message for most Christians is not the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, ie., the good news of peace and prosperity through faith in the Lord, as opposed to the false gospel of peace and security that human rulers offer. It is more so just a generic message about how Jesus died, was buried, and arose from the grave on the third day. Since the Gospel is not a political message in the eyes of most Christians of another Kingdom, they are able to stay invested in the kingdoms of the world and believe they are not in need of repentance from these systems.

Between the watered-down and confused ideas about sin, salvation, and the gospel, which all necessarily have political implications about not idolizing human rulers and deciding whether you give your allegiance and faith to God or men and their kingdoms to protect you and prosper you, Christians have not seen any need to draw a sharp line and reject worldly kingdoms and seek the Kingdom of God alone. Indeed, most of them are more interested in defending man-made kingdoms as compatible with God, than they are in defending the Kingdom of God against its enemies. And if you press them hard enough, they will say, “we have no king but Caesar!” Indeed, this is what they effectively do anyway when they continue to defend human civil government as you show them that it is antagonistic to God’s Kingdom. (To be sure, I am not merely saying that the problem with statism is that it’s “secular,” such that it would be fixed if “Christians” took it over. Rather, I am saying that all human government, which is based on force and operates on exercising authority and domination over other men, is opposed to the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, which is an entirely non-authoritarian method of providing for our neighbors through love, free will contributions, and voluntary service).

Many Christians then have not known that to partake in the darkness of the kingdoms of the world is incompatible with seeking God’s Kingdom, and have even been told it’s their “Christian civic duty” to do so. These things are either unknown or deliberately kept from men, likely because the people preaching these messages wish to cling to the false kingdoms of this world and don’t want to believe that Jesus is the King of another Kingdom that we are to seek at the exclusion of all others. Thus, we get a watered-down message that permits men to hang on to this “two kingdoms” theory where “we need to be politically involved because we’re still living in the world.” They are unable to conceive of seeking the Kingdom of God on earth while having nothing to do with the kingdoms of the world — that being physically on earth does not necessitate that we associate ourselves with worldly political systems. In their minds, one either must be involved with political systems, or they’re apathetic altogether to God’s Kingdom. They have no concept of the early Christians living within Rome’s territory, but having repented of subject citizenship and living under an effectively separate Kingdom — “in the world but not of it,” as the saying goes. For most Christians today, there is no need to reject the “citizenship” of the world and identify as a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven alone. Indeed, most of these people are still “proud Americans” who see no godly obligation to stop voting and participating in these false kingdoms. They are lukewarm people who, at best, have a toenail hanging into God’s Kingdom while the rest of their whole body stands in the kingdoms of men, seeking to reform them rather than repent from them entirely.

In the modern church today, there is no sharp distinction between the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world, such that one is sought at the expense of the other (whichever one you choose to expend), and there are no harsh rebukes—every Christian must come out of these false kingdoms if they want to call themselves a Christian at all—for those who remain idolatrous for these systems, which they do merely by believing they should exist, much less with their unashamed and open praise for men like Donald Trump who they proudly accept as “our president.” There is no condemnation in the modern church that this statism and idolatry for human government is the essence of sin, that it is rejecting the Lord our King for false kings, false gods, and false saviors.

The sin of statist adultery 

The omission of statism as sin among those who proclaim to be men who spread the word of God is an amazing one, because it is these very things—fawning over presidents, trusting in state militaries and police forces to protect you, and seeking the benefits and provisions that are dispensed by these tax-funded regimes that operate by plundering our neighbors—are what adultery, prostitution, fornication, idolatry, whoredom, and harlotry, are all about in the Biblical sense of the terms (ie., in the way the prophets use these metaphors to describe a people who have went behind God’s back to have relations with the kings and kingdoms of this world).

One area then where the truth of scripture has been severely watered down has been the reduction of things like adultery, prostitution, fornication, idolatry, whoredom, and harlotry into nothing more than infidelity to one’s spouse, sexual promiscuity, or buying hookers from the street corner, when the context in which this language is most often used is to refer to the adultery of cheating on God with the statist systems of this world — of whoring yourselves out to Egyptian militaries for protection and prostituting your people out to the rulers of this world for your daily bread, benefits, dainties, and other deceitful meats that men eat to go into bondage.

We are clearly not getting the whole picture if we make these terms out to be nothing more than the sexual sins of individuals and leave out the larger picture of statist idolatry, which is seen in the United States perhaps more than any other country in the world. Much of the “adultery” referred to in the Bible is the very type of national idolatry common in the “United States” today, where men idolize human government and place their saving faith in the institutions of men. The real “whoring” and “fornicating” that men engage in is seeking aid, protection, and benefits in a political system that are to be paid for through coveting their neighbors’ property in a socialist system of tax-funded public goods, whether the various welfare programs of food and housing assistance or the “protection” and “law and order” they believe they will find in submitting to human lawmakers, law enforcers, magistrates, or other ruler-gods. For the prophets to charge that men who seek protection from state soldiers were adulterers was meant to teach them that God hates seeing these things. Against the counsel of God, men “go whoring after other gods” (Ex 34:15). They feed at the temples of false gods and eat from the welfare offices of political rulers and their systems that work to bring men into bondage by tempting them with free bread. 

God’s word vs. the false pastors

There is always a wide discrepancy between what the Bible teaches and the average sermon emanating from the so-called “churches” on Sunday morning across America. In no area is this gap wider than between the worldly (statist) politics of church-going men and their sophist pastors, and the anti-statist teachings of the Bible. One would be hard pressed to find a pastor speaking of seeking political and military alliances with men as symbolizing spiritual infidelity to God, and yet the prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, etc) consistently use the example of an unfaithful woman to explain man’s statism and military-idolatry as an unfaithfulness to God. One would be hard-pressed to find a pastor telling people to not vote and to turn away from the systems of the world entirely, and yet God explicitly says that those who seek human kings reject Him as their King and ruler (Sam 8). One would be hard-pressed to find a pastor emphasizing the political nature of Scripture in general, and yet this is the nature of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God: that we are to be seeking another Kingdom entirely.

So in the modern “churches” today, we often only receive half-truths at best. The false shepherds of the world are not calling their flocks to leave the worldly systems behind because supporting them is adultery and whoredom, and even positively endorse these things as not being sin at all. They openly praise and support soldiers while neglecting to learn for themselves and teach others that this very statism is the essence of how men turn their backs on God and disobey His commands to have no other gods before Him. They teach that adultery and sin are nothing more than spousal infidelity or maybe flirting with another woman, but neglect to learn or teach you that statism is adultery. Yet this is the real sense in which we should understand adultery, whoredom, prostitution, promiscuity, and fornication: a people who should be faithful to God, such that the Lord is their only King, but who instead go under the jurisdiction of false gods by idolizing them and accepting their tax-funded offers of “protection” (military and police) and “benefits” (welfare). But you won’t hear this in the safe, soft, Sunday sermons of the state-approved, flag-donning buildings called “churches” that make up the institutions of the world. They would have to take their flags down and repent, and for some reason men find it less embarrassing to remain in their ignorance than they do to change their minds and admit they were wrong. They are too proud to admit they have been whoring after false gods, which takes a humble heart to admit. And so they find it easier to remain hardheaded than to repent, even though it’s way less embarrassing (really it’s praiseworthy and commendable) to turn from your old errors and become a new man. For many “men,” however, it’s apparently just too much to admit that you were duped the older you get — that for fifty years you believed statist propaganda about the “constitution,” the “republic,” and the “founding fathers.” So they prefer to die believing in lies.

Though we might give the benefit of the doubt and say that most of these people are just ignorant to the prophets’ use of adultery to point to the very type of military-praise we see in American culture today, there is another reason why this wouldn’t be taught even if these people were aware of it and making a conscious effort to hide the truth from the people they’re preaching to: many of these false pastors who keep things in the safe zone of spousal infidelity are raging statists who are themselves guilty of the sin of statism, patriotism, and apologia for the kingdoms of this world from which they were supposed to repent from. In other words, through their love of the world and the political institutions who they trust in for protection, provision, and salvation, they are adulterers and prostitutes. They whore themselves out to the Egyptians for protection, thinking that protection from earthly enemies can only be found in state militaries, state police, or other agencies of worldly political systems, effectively believing that God doesn’t save! They praise presidents as their kings and saviors who are going to “Make America Great Again” and “fix all the problems caused by the democrats.” In order to avoid this indictment against their own patriotic flag-waving, police-praising, saluting of “the troops,” and voting for human kings, they are forced to keep the Biblical concept of adultery confined to spousal infidelity and are able to point to their loyalties to their wives as proof that they are not adulterers. “Sin” is only such things as thinking about women who you aren’t married to; fawning over men, such as presidents, soldiers, and police officers, is completely acceptable and conveniently not sin at all! 

Often when the talking heads of Christianity do get around to addressing the concept of idolatry, they severely limit it to things like the “idolatry of materialism” or “prioritizing relationships” over God, again as another means of taking the spotlight off the political idolatry that they are likely engaged in. They reduce sin to nothing more than bad habits, addictions, seeking comfort, or some other relatively benign thing that God doesn’t even emphasize and which is not nearly as destructive as the statist systems of the world that exist in violation of all of God’s main commands: setting up false gods, robbing people for trillions of dollars, murdering millions of people, bombing children, and hauling off men to prisons and labor camps for not obeying them. In their minds, these things are not sin at all, just the affairs of “government,” which they suppose is “necessary” to social order. Violating God’s commands is just the price we pay for “civilization,” guys. We have to break the laws of God and set up States if we want to live free!

Whatever men can do to reduce God’s commands and laws to almost nothing in order to approve of their own sin and worldly idolatry is thus what is often practiced among so-called Christians, who don’t actually want to be about the ways of the Lord but only want to call themselves Christians for fun. We cannot let them off the hook so easily and strip the meaning of sin, idolatry, and adultery of its political implications. We cannot allow it to merely mean a people who turn away from God by, say, narcissistically looking at themselves in the mirror or flirting with girls in public. Idolaters, whores, adulterers, harlots, and prostitutes, are statists, and statists are whores, adulterers, harlots, and prostitutes. They are overt and unrepentant sinners, par excellence. They engage in the very acts that God says a people do when they reject Him: seek human kings (Sam 8), trust in state militaries (Isa 30), etc.

Sexual immorality and statist adultery

As we see especially in the Allegory of the Two Sisters in Ezekiel 23, it would be far from complete to simply write off Biblical stories of adultery and such as mere sexual immorality, as if God is really only interested in criticizing actual prostitutes as we know the term today. Rather, God is far more angered by the statism that is held by many of these people who think that God is merely speaking of sexual promiscuity. What a fascinating scene where a “patriotic” American might complain of some street-walkers in the cities as sinners all while they themselves prostitute themselves out in voting booths and trust in militaries and police to save them! This is a fantastic case of one needing to remove the log from their own eye before pointing out the speck in another’s — or maybe removing the howitzer and humvee out of their eye before criticizing the dust particle in another’s that those vehicles kicked up in their invasion of other peoples. They criticize the street prostitute, all while they are statist whores who support the destruction of children, dropping bombs on foreigners, and enslaving their own people in political bondage. They have downplayed the sin of adultery to cheating on your spouse, which everyone knows is wrong, all while these Biblical lessons often point to adultery as precisely the adulterous relationships with the kingdoms of this world, where many men proudly place their citizenship and praise.

When God says that a people “have played the harlot with many lovers” (Jeremiah 3:1), He is not merely speaking of a people that have been so sexually promiscuous that He is now enraged, although we may well consider this to be a part of the statist societies of the world, but of a people who have sought Babylons, Egypts, Assyrias, Americas, and other statist systems to “protect” them, rather than abide in God alone for their protection.

By making artificial distinctions between heaven and earth, when Jesus said He rules over both, it has been possible for men to believe that they can share their faith between God and the systems of men — that they can be statist adulterers who praise police and soldiers as their “protectors” and “saviors” without being considered as men who are cheating on God with worldly systems and their system-makers and betraying their allegiance to Him. (To anticipate another excuse, these false converts like to argue that they don’t “actually” believe that agents of the State are their gods, lords, and saviors, purely because they don’t call them that. This is beside the point. The point is that all men who trust in human civil government whatever are trusting in false saviors and false gods, whether they announce it or not, because God’s salvation is not limited to the eternal soul but extends also to real-world protection, and the belief in a State is the belief that we are in need of human rulers to protect us and save us from our enemies).

This idea that one can serve both the Lord and Caesar is false. Allegiance to God—our full faith and trust in His providence and our devotion to His Kingship and Kingdom—must be to God alone. Trusting in God or men is an either-or problem, not one of “Jesus my soul-saver” and “Caesar my earthly-king.” There is no case for believing in a heavenly Lord and an earthly one, which treats God as if He is incapable of protecting and prospering a people down below, who supposedly need man-gods to do it for them. God never tells us that His salvation is limited to the eternal soul, and again says that a people who seek earthly kings reject Him as their protector (Samuel 8). Evidently, God wants us to trust in Him for protection for enemies just as much as anything else. There is then no Christian excuse for so-called “Defense Departments” to “keep us safe and free.” There is no excuse for our allegiance to God not being exclusive. Our allegiance to God is not to be shared in some sort of “God and country” concoction under the excuse that “we put God first and America next” and pretend that our hierarchy of values is at least correct (though many professing Christians can’t even help themselves from saying they are “America First”). Rather, allegiance to God is mutually exclusive with the kingdoms of this world. God’s lament against all the Babylonian whores in scripture is not that they failed to rank Him first among other kings, but that they regarded other men as legitimate kings and rulers at all. God does not approve of men who, in some sort of “two kingdoms” theory, evilly say that, “Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my President.” God is our King in a total sense, not some half-assed sense that allows us to erect earthly kings in addition to His heavenly rule. The type of sentiments that we see from so-called “Christians” on idolatrous holidays like “Memorial Day” or “Veteran’s Day” where “Jesus died for my eternal soul, and the military died for my freedom” are false distinctions that separate the Lord into some inactive “heavenly realm” that supposedly leaves us in need of earthly political rulers in His supposed absence from the social affairs of men. The Lord is our King in a total sense, and likewise seeks to liberate us from human domination, too. There is no situation where those who follow the Lord are in need of the “American soldier” to “save” them from their enemies; this is what God does for all those who make Him their King (1 Samuel 8). The idea that “soldiers die so we can be free” is a purely evil one that substitutes men in the place of Jesus Christ. It makes Jesus into one who came only so that we may have a ticket into heaven, while making men the earthly saviors who secure our liberty on earth. Again, those professing Christians who say “soldiers paid the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom” are probably not even aware of what they have done here. This is why Jesus says “father forgive them for they know not what they do.” This is why God points out that the people of Nineveh didn’t know their left hand from their right. Most people are hardheaded statists who hate truth and refuse to repent, putting us in the frustrating situation of having to rebuke them and warn them while knowing that they likely aren’t going to listen and learn. At any rate, to think that man-saviors are needed in addition to the Lord is wrong and we must tell them. The Lord our God is not just some otherworldly soul-saver, but our Lawgiver, Judge, and King (Isa 33:22). Christians are not in need of presidents and executive branches, congressmen and legislatures, or state judges and supreme courts. We already have all these things in the Lord. The “constitution” and the “American Republic” are nothing more than perversions of liberty under God, where all these things are provided from God alone, without a need for human rulers. Being that God provides these things alone, those who seek presidents, congressmen, legislatures, “defense departments,” and “law enforcement” agents, are whores and adulterers. They are seeking protection from men, when they are supposed to be in an exclusive relationship with God.

I don’t intend to sound dismissive of these sexual sins, as we might call them. God demands righteousness from us all around, and a free society cannot exist without strong families. Indeed, I only aim to point out that those who are hyper-focused on sexual sins are dismissive of the sin of statism. They think it’s okay to fly the flags of worldly empires on their homes, vote for human rulers, and praise the military and police, so long as they have never snuck around on their wives. Sure, God is happy to see the latter. But He by no means thinks that they are off the hook for the adultery of statism. Loyalty to your wife is not a free pass to be disloyal to God in the form of trusting in worldly rulers to “protect and serve” you, which is always, in the very least, to violate the commands to have no other gods and to not participate in the theft that is involved with seeking state protection and benefits, which are paid for by robbing our neighbors. Men are not free to idolize men and set them up as their kings, lords, and saviors, so long as they maintain a good marriage with their spouses. What about their marriage with the Lord? This demands that they be faithful to Him, which they fail to do when they seek to be ruled by the false gods that are civil rulers and give their allegiance and citizenship to States. 

Seeing the deeper meaning

Very often in Scripture, there is a deeper meaning in the words and stories that we are to gather by reading them. If men read these things at a mere surface level, they are unlikely to see all the things that God is trying to tell us. They may take a few lessons from certain verses, but miss the further points that God was hitting on in His endlessly enriching Word. When men disregard the allegory of the scriptures, they are likely to miss these metaphors—adulterers as statists—and simply write these things off as nothing more than cases of literal prostitution, rather than seeing this figure of speech is used as a way of explaining the whoredom of statism where men cheat on God to trust in the systems of men for their protection and salvation. Statists are prostitutes and whores of the worst kind. They sell their neighbors into bondage and give up their liberty to men who they believe are needed to rule over them as their “protectors.” It is these people who are the real whores, and yet these men think they’re exempt from being charged with such whoredom and prostitution so long as they are faithful to their wives. Those who chase after the kingdoms of this world, voting on men and placing their hope in political systems for salvation from their enemies, are adulterers who show themselves to be enemies of God. As one apostle famously says, 

“You adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore, whoever chooses to be a friend of the world renders himself an enemy of God” (James 4:4). 

The political intention of these terms cannot be removed without stripping the lessons of Scripture down to nothing. An adulterer is not just a bad husband or wife. An adulterer is someone who trusts in Pharaohs, chariots, and horsemen—in “commander in chiefs” and tanks and soldiers—rather than God to protect them. In a great sense, a prostitute is one who engages in fornication with the statist systems of the world, whether the one they perceive to be “their” own or a neighboring regime who they are seeking protection in. The whores spoken of by the prophets are people who are promiscious with every agency of the political systems of the world, saluting the military on one hand and praising police officers as their heroes on the other. They are people who cheat on God all day long with various departments of worldly governments that they should be repenting of supporting and praising. But you won’t hear this from the false pastors of the world who hang American flags on their false churches. They’re adulterers of the type spoken of by the prophets, and they aren’t about to indict themselves as statist sinners.