[This is part one in a series on “The Abolition of Statism and Liberation From Political Bondage”: See part two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

Whenever one is truly touched by the Holy Spirit and given eyes by God to see the evils of the world, they are bound to have impressed upon their hearts and minds the motivation and drive to do something about the social order around them. They are likely to witness the work of the prophets, Jesus Christ, the apostles—all who turned the political world order around them upside down and were persecuted as subversives for doing so—and feel the same calling upon their lives to go out and confront the world in the same way with the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, preaching repentance not only to individuals who are living in political bondage but to princes and kings who maintain these systems of human slavery. It becomes no longer acceptable to just sit around and watch the world burn around us, but to stand up and agitate the people of the world to repent of their allegiance to these political systems and seek the Kingdom of God as the only viable alternative to the inherently corrupt and perverted kingdoms of man that were raised up in sin and rebellion to God and are failing for that reason.

While the initial steps of spiritual transformation by the Lord that makes one a zealous Kingdom-seeker entail one’s personal awakening, repentance, and realization of the political captivity that we’re living under, the next impulse is to do something about it — to “be doers of the word and not hearers only” (James 1:22). When the word of the Lord lights a fire under a man, he can no longer be comfortable enough to sit down and watch society around him collapse and take everyone down with it. He becomes compelled, with every fiber of his being, to get out there and show others what the Lord has shown him: that our people are ruled by wicked plunderers because of their own iniquities and idolatries that led them to whore themselves out to human rulers for protection, but that Jesus came as a liberator to free us from this bondage and pave the way for men to seek His Kingdom. Those who see the relentless political narrative of Scripture, where a people go into bondage to men for turning away from God but are redeemed in their repentance and crying out to the Lord to be rescued from these Pharaohs that they once foolishly trusted in for their salvation, become inspired by God to show their contemporary people the way out of this bondage and lead the charge of getting them moving again. They will want to be just like all the men of Bible—the prophets and Jesus Christ and His disciples—who went around preaching repentance from the idolatry for the systems of the world that have led to man’s bondage. And so they might begin praying that the Lord give them as heavy of a load as given to Moses or Isaiah or Jeremiah, to take this word of the Lord to the people who find themselves in bondage to political systems and call them to repent, or to the rulers themselves, saying, “Let God’s people go.” Naturally, the man who is convicted by the Holy Spirit and the word of God is going to recognize that the perversions of law and justice that have come upon us today are a result of outsourcing our godly responsibilities to authoritarian rulers and even divine justice for this sin of statism, and as a response begin seeking His kingdom and heed the call to seek justice, free the prisoners, and attempt to bring liberty to society with God on His side. And he is going to call upon all those around him to likewise come out of the world and its systems, repent from serving two masters, and follow the ways of the Lord and His kingdom alone as a member and citizen of His kingdom and jurisdiction exclusively. 

It isn’t good enough however to merely address the problems with our society, make the causal connection between sin and the curse of statism, complain about the resulting slavery to political rulers, or just hear the word of the Lord. We are called to a much higher standard of becoming doers of the word. The Lord reveals His ways to us, against the faulty ways and ideologies of the kingdoms of this world, so that we can do something about it and lead others on the righteous path.

The question often arises, where do we start? Our people are so lost that they cannot even begin to think about becoming doers of the word who work to further the Kingdom of God, because they haven’t even been hearers of the word. They don’t even see that we are living in Egyptian captivity and that it is the result of seeking other gods than the Lord our King. They don’t even see that they hold a worldly, statist ideology from which they need to repent from. Indeed, they are often deeply lost in the lies of the world and have bought into all of its schemes and distortions of truth and profess men and their systems as their saviors, not even seeing how much this contradicts their alleged faith in God to save us. To even begin to show people the way out of Egypt, we have to first get them to even see that they’re living in Egypt, not the “land of the free” as the statist propagandists have led them to believe for generations, and that the evils of statism are a consequence of trusting in men rather than God.

While the first step is getting people to realize that they’re living in captivity to human rulers for having forsaken the ways of God to go into bondage, and to show them the reason they found themselves here (namely through the sinful idolatry toward men and covetousness of their neighbors property through the socialist system of statism), the next step is show people the way out of such bondage — how to abolish the systems of political slavery that have come upon us as a divine punishment for the sin and unrighteousness of handing over our inheritance to strangers who gladly seize on our irresponsibility to provide for our own neighbors by instituting their own systems of welfare based on force rather than freedom. We have to show them another way, the Way of Christ, who forbids His followers from becoming archists (statists) and calls us to be servants of one another in a Kingdom-network of congregations that are organized for the purpose of taking care of our people through voluntary charity, as opposed to the tax-funded legal charity of the systems of men, which have become a snare and a trap for those who are willing feed from the hand of Caesar, take his benefits, and eat the dainties of rulers rather than set the Lord’s table. 

A plan for abolition and liberation

Those who have become convicted by the Holy Spirit to act and seek the Kingdom of God, as Christ preached and called us to seek, will hear the word of the Lord and become a doer of the word. They will dedicate their lives to furthering the Kingdom of God and freeing their brothers and sisters from bondage by preaching the Gospel, where Christ has come to liberate us from the dominion of man over man. They will want to get their neighbors out of the tax slavery and tribute that we have come under through our slothfulness to the Lord’s kingdom, where we have allowed Caesars and Pharaohs to feed, house, and “protect” our people (ostensibly) rather than do these things on our own. They will want to liberate the captives and free the prisoners. They will weep that our people have gone into captivity and will want to do something to turn back the curse of statism that God has sent for our sins of turning away from Him and toward the kingdoms of men. 

Men have hitherto thought it to be easier to allow so-called “governments” to feed and look after their people rather than do these things themselves, as the Lord has called us to do personally and directly, and for this have accepted their own tax bondage and brought politically tyrannies on themselves for allowing ruling men to do what they were supposed to be doing as Christians. They fell under the temptation of socialism, where rulers, who operate on authority, take over all of society under the false claim that they exist for the “public good.”

This stunt was not hard for the rulers to pull upon a weak and idolatrous people who are always tempted to do as little as possible to help others. Even as economics could teach, people always want something for nothing, which leads them to approve of monetary inflation and the apparently “free” goods handed out by governments. So it didn’t take much to turn men away from seeking God’s Kingdom and serving their neighbors, to being slothful to His Kingdom and allowing human rulers to do it for them. It appears to be easier to just pay taxes and allow state welfare systems to take care of the needy for us. But this is actually the hard road of bondage. As has become more evident than ever, the State is a gang of plunderers who exist to squander our money on their pet projects and line their pockets and that of the beneficiaries who are plugged into the system of political privileges. By believing that human government can serve your people, which they do by exercising authority over other men, we end up paying hundreds of billions of dollars a year in taxes, only for them to be wasted and sent to foreigners; we find ourselves living under thousands of man-made laws, most of which have nothing to do with protecting people from crime but are criminal themselves; and, in general, find ourselves robbed by the very people who the masses thought existed to protect us. 

Though it would have been much easier to live as God has commanded us, which does require responsibility but which is also met with liberty and prosperity, we have now found ourselves living as captives to men and their false kingdoms and are in need of God’s liberation from these men through our repentance and seeking of another way. It is for this cause that we must become ideological for.

Nothing about this plan will be easy, but we can rest assured that it will be rewarding — that he who labors for the Lord does not do so in vain (1 Cor 15:54). We must begin to become radicalized for God’s Kingdom, which is carried out by organizing our people into congregations of mutual service and benefits across a global network, knowing that “in due time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9). Though this is not easy work, it is righteous, and we know that God will bless it, and that no matter the struggles we face, we will “be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power” (Ephesians 6:10).

Moreover, we don’t deserve to have it easy for the slavery we have gotten ourselves into through our own iniquities, which requires great repentance and a change of heart and mind. Even the early steps that we propose here of becoming ideological for the cause of God’s Liberty ourselves and agitating our communities toward a different Kingdom and worldview is something very few people are willing to do. Most Christians are not willing to even hold a sign on the street to try and stir up holy trouble in their communities and find God’s remnant who will want to build with them.

Yet, we all know the old phrase that “nothing worth having comes easy.” This is probably nowhere more true than with matters of great social change and freeing a people from Egyptian captivity. It is time for us to get to work and start building, first within ourselves by becoming new men in Christ and keeping His Kingdom at the forefront of our minds, and next by leading others to do the same. All the prior generations before us have refused to lift a finger toward the Kingdom of God and have given their children over to human rulers to be used as “their” property. Our parents and grandparents have sold us into bondage for tax write offs, registered us with the state through birth certification and given us “Social Security” numbers to sign up for employment and benefits from the state-run society, put us through Caesar’s government-school system, and signed us up to be conscripted by the military. It’s time that we begin the work that will change our society so that our progeny can pick up and advance God’s great cause of human liberation once we’re gone. 

In this series, I will be outlining some approaches to liberation from political bondage as roughly proposed by the Christian abolitionist anarchist, Michael Plaisted, in a recent article of his published by our ministry. The steps, of course, begin with the fact that we are living in captivity due to the existence of millions of mental slaves and idolaters who have worshiped human government and (justly) found themselves living as slaves for their sins of patriotism and president and police worship. Even this first step requires an enormous amount of work to overcome. Most people, perhaps Americans more than anyone else in the world, are entirely fooled by statist slogans of “the troops fight for our freedom” and “police keep us safe at night” and “this is a free country” and “the government is We the People,” and many other lies they have always known. To even get them to see this, which we must agitate them to see, is already an incredible undertaking, much less to see the need to walk out of their Egyptian bondage, which is another undertaking in itself. After all, the worldly ideology of statism—the idea that we need human rulers—is sinful, hence why it grips the man so strong and people refuse to abandon these ideas. To even get people willing to walk out of Egypt, so to speak, these people have to be willing to let go of their idols and false gods, eg., flags and presidents, and the land currently occupied by the “United States Government” is full of these people and their idols, in every neighborhood across the country, including the so-called churches. Necessarily, men will have to repent from statism, as buying into it was not merely due to errors in economic or ethical reasoning, but a result of sin.

The ideological drive toward abolitionism

Before we can begin agitating others, the first step is to really start looking at ourselves and seeing the seriousness of our situation, where Pharaohs rule over millions of people and hold in their hands the ability and desire to tear down whole economies and murder men with wars and weapons of mass destruction (to borrow one of the tyrants’ own terms). Before we can begin to call on others to repent and start forming godly congregations and Christian anarchist societies that seek to abolish human government, we must get the fire in ourselves to be able to attract others to the cause. We ourselves must be serious enough about this cause of liberation from statism and serving the Lord that we may attract others to take up actions with us to restore our society from the breach that has occurred through our own apathy toward the encroachment of ungodly social systems like the State, and even worse men’s participation in them.  

One of the very first steps then to freedom from political domination, before any others are taken, is to become ideologically-driven and to get others as fired up about the Kingdom of God as are the remnant who now seek to deliver this message to the people around them by whatever means available to them, and from every angle of attack by which we can agitate the culture around us to repent from the sinful ideology of statism and seek the righteous cause of living freely under God.

What does it mean to be ideologically driven? We must take a serious, principled, and uncompromising approach to this cause of liberty under God and freedom from the rule of men. We must treat it like it is the most important thing we could ever do and that it is our life-purpose given to us by God to take dominion of the earth and reclaim the land He has given us as our inheritance, but which is presently controlled by systems of human domination. We must see that the time is over for jokes, games, and distractions, because we are a people living as captives under men and can no longer give into the entertainment, distractions, and benefits fed to us by the Egyptians to keep us from looking for the way out. To do this, we must be driven for the cause and make it a part of every fiber of our being. No matter is more serious for the man who finds himself living as a captive of the kingdoms of this world than to seek the Kingdom of God and believe in his soul that Christ has come as a King to set the captives free, redeem man to the Dominion Mandate, show us another Kingdom than the political plunder systems of the world, and clear the way for us to advance its cause by definitively treading on the forces of evil and taking authority over Heaven and Earth.

This is no light matter that we have been tasked with acting as prophets and apostles in the Kingdom of Christ. The Gospel of the Kingdom of God is that Jesus has come to redeem men from the dominion of men and to set the captives free and tear down every yoke of bondage and give us Liberty. With the Lord on our side, we must work to free man from the dominion of man, ie., from the mental and physical chains of the Pharaohs and Caesars of the world that have always been able to ensnare men into their tax-based systems of slavery through tempting them with the alleged benefits of empire, patriotic propaganda about the greatness of the political system, and just plain coercion when other things weren’t working.

Is the fire burning in you for it? Do you see that we are living in bondage to human civil government and that all these political evils have come upon us as divine judgment against this sin? Do you see that your neighbors are living in darkness and bondage too and that we need to wake them up and free them? Do you see that God made men to be free and not the human property of men who call themselves the government? Do you see that everything has gone wrong because we deviated from the way that God has told us to live? Then you’re fit for the kingdom-seeking that we must now embark upon. It’s time to start laying bricks.