Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

If you looked into the types of prayers given up by the average Christian today, they would probably not look much like the prayers seen in the Bible, which were very often focused on repentance for the sin that led to bondage and requests for God to deliver the captives from this slavery to human rulers and armies. In a modern Christianity where almost all of believers’ hopes are heavenly-minded and escapist ones that don’t focus on our earthly lives, you might come across many prayers that are more oriented toward asking God to remove us from the earth or “take us to heaven already.” They may recite “your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven” (Matthew 6:10) as an obligatory prayer, but often in a vain a repetitious way that doesn’t actually seek to further God’s Kingdom and abolish the kingdoms of men. They are not very worried about the political slavery we have found ourselves in, which is all the evidence in the world that a people have turned away from God and His rule. Moreover, many argue that the Lord’s Prayer commands their involvement in the pagan kingdoms of the world, which shows they have no idea about the type of prayer we are speaking of that requests of the Lord to save us from these systems.

In a world where God’s salvation is seen as purely a soul-saving thing of the afterlife, few people see a need to ask God to save them from our real-world enemies, eg., the systems of state rule that have come upon us due to our sin. In fact, many so-called Christians see these men as their “saviors” and they pray to these false gods to protect them from the “bad guys” when it comes to finding earthly protection and aid, which they do every time they vote for human rulers or pledge their support for them otherwise. In their minds, the only way to keep other statists and “bad guys” away, such as the Chinese or the Russians they have been trained to fear, is to trust in a State of “our” own. Far from praying to God to protect us from domestic political plunderers who bring terrorism, injustice, taxation, and slavery upon our society due to the sinful idolatry toward these men and their systems, they are praying to false gods to protect them from false enemies — and paying the price for trusting in these false saviors.

In a world where people fail to recognize the political slave society we live in and their role in making it happen, there is just naturally not much prayer to God to save us from these men. People will have to first recognize the bondage of Egypt if they could be expect to pray to God for deliverance from it, and many people have bought into all the lies of Egypt about it being a “free country” and how the Egyptians are actually our “saviors” (eg., the soldiers who “fought for our freedom” and gave us the ability to eat fried chicken every day). They think that human civil government is “ordained” by God, rather than set up by sinners who are explicitly violating God’s law against having other gods and robbing their neighbors. They think God gave us the State as a justice-provider rather than as a judgment upon people who outsource their justice and law to human rulers and must pay the price in the form of political evils and corruption of law and justice for this mistake.

Thus we often see prayers that have nothing to do with God getting us out of Egypt, and everything to do with making Egypt more comfortable. Surely it is not uncommon for men to make prayers for worldly luxuries and gains, such as job promotions, bigger houses, mortgages, car loans, Harley Davidsons, etc. (Popular prayer articles emphasize things like “job troubles, family squabbles, rebellious children, and financial strain”).

Without a Kingdom-seeking mindset being dominant among Christians today, and without much recognition that we’re living in bondage to worldly kingdoms in our failure to seek God’s, there are probably very few people praying for God to restore the earth from the political bondage we have found ourselves in, protect us from our enemies, gather the remnant back together again, and help us live in a free society that is not ensnared in the bondage of man’s kingdoms. There are probably very few people making communal laments on behalf of others that confess our own responsibility in bringing rulers upon ourselves.

Prayer in the Bible

Not all the prayers you would find in Christians today are totally wrong, and we shouldn’t sound as if we are dismissing God’s ability and willingness to bestow great blessings upon individuals and heal their sickness. Much of the prayer in the Bible does also have to do with the things men pray about today. There are prayers thanking God for providing for them. It is easy enough for people to say “thank you, God” at life’s little blessings or narrow escapes from danger. Many people today are also quite willing to pray when they are grieved at something and life isn’t going their way. Many will also, along with the Bible, ask God for supplication or healing for their illnesses or troubles. Many others might loosely ask God to reveal to them what choices they ought to make between the options confronting them. This, again, is perfectly Biblical — though we might note that some prayers for God to provide guidance are even inseparable from the point that I aim to make here that Biblical prayer is very often about turning to God for liberation from our worldly enemies (Psalm 25). 

But a lot of the prayer today lacks the real essence of many prayers in the Bible. Taken against the individualistic prayers today where men ask for personal riches in their lives and are unconcerned about the Egyptian captivity we’re living under, it is likely rather uncommon for people to be weeping before God at the political bondage we have gotten ourselves into, confessing our sin and complicity in it before Him in an act of repentance, and praying for divine deliverance from it. For one, they don’t even see the bondage today; they think “we live in a free country” or that “God gave us the United States.” Secondly, their idea of God’s salvation is often very far from turning to Him to save us from our enemies, and much more an idea of being “saved” into heaven when we die.

Despite the type of prayer that is largely detached from looking at the sin that has landed us in bondage to the Egyptians and seeks the Lord’s help getting us out of it, a significant amount of prayers in the Bible have everything to do with praying to God for deliverance from real enemies: for God to free us from the hands of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Americans, etc., who stalk God’s people and pray on us for a plunder. Though many Christians today seem to view the Psalms as just some songs, poems, or comforting lessons for their own personal lives, the Psalms are actually rich with pleas to God for protection from enemies, cries for being reduced from the hands of men, trusting in God against our enemies, and for God to do justice against the wicked (eg., the men who rule the world).

Of course, some of the scriptures that account for this are done in a sort of casual way that might not have them classified as a “prayer” by some human editor who adds subtitles to Scripture. Some are just a psalmist slipping in “God save us from the wicked” in the middle of a passage that may not be a formal prayer or necessarily be wholly concerned with this concept. Nevertheless, prayers of repentance and deliverance are a very common theme across Scripture, and it is not hard to show that prayer is very often about a recognition of our bondage and pleas for salvation. We should expect this to be the case, too, given that the Bible itself is about people having gone into bondage to men for their sin and God providing a way out of this bondage through repentance and seeking His Kingdom.  

Counting prayers of deliverance 

Let us try and show that prayers for deliverance, which both recognize the political captivity and the sins that led to it, are not just an obscure topic in the Bible. Though these numbers may be subject to dispute, they are probably close enough. If anything, one could probably count more, and not less, examples that would demonstrate the thesis here that prayer is often focused on repentance for sin, recognizing of the bondage, calls for restoration, and pleas of deliverance and salvation — something that few men are really praying about today. (Articles that do loosely acknowledge praying for protection do not speak of the political captivity we’re under).

According to the Dake Annotated Reference Bible, there are some 222 sections of scripture identified as prayers, with 176 from the Old Testament and 46 in the New Testament. (With prayers tilted so heavily toward the Old Testament, it’s curious why popular articles on prayer focus only on the New Testament). Of the 222 prayers in the Bible from the Dake list, some 72 are deliverance-focused prayers, or over 30 percent of all Biblical prayers, showing once again a consistent theme and not just some cherry-picked notion that prayer has a little something to do with praying to the Lord for salvation from enemies and statists. (I would bet that if you investigated other prayers or praises that you would find they could be easily connected to this theme too. I have attempted to focus only on ones that are undeniably deliverance-oriented). 

Though mostly with the help of the Psalms, which contribute the most to our number, we could estimate that at least 70 prayers—that is specific requests to God—in the Bible explicitly involve deliverance from enemies and trusting in God to save them from the statist consequences of sin — enough to show that this is not just some obscure prayer that is thus different from the ways that most Christians pray today. Over 70 of the Psalms have been classified as “Prayer Psalms,” being that they contain personal requests to God. 50 of them—about 70%—are focused on deliverance from enemies or oppressors. There are at least 16 non-Psalm sections of scripture written as formal prayers that are not just casual talkings with God. 10 out of 16 of them involve deliverance from enemies or oppressive states (eg., Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, persecution), some 60 percent.

Prayers of deliverance

Though it is not very common today for Christians to pray to God to liberate us from political bondage and our enemies, because they either do not see the bondage or precisely pray to these false gods for their protection, this type of prayer is very dominant in Scripture, which ought to be instructive today for anyone wondering about the very things we should be praying about. Many people don’t seem to realize that a lot of prayers, poems, or “songs” in the Bible are all about this theme of deliverance from captivity, which is really what the whole Bible is all about: men living in bondage to human rulers due to the sin of turning away from God as their only King (Samuel 8), and their need for repentance unto the Lord as their Savior in order to be delivered from this bondage. The “Song of Moses” (Exodus 15:1-18) is one such “prayer” of victory that celebrated being delivered from the hands of statist captors, who can be simultaneously seen as evil and bringing judgment against a people whose wicked works (idolizing these men or accepting their deceitful benefits) wound them up as slaves to Pharaohs. 

We see in Scripture that a recognition of bondage and prayer to God for deliverance from it—whether these are structured specifically as prayers, words of praise, specific petitions, confessions, general laments, or just speaking to God in general—is common theme, as we should expect from this civics textbook that is all about the sin that leads men into bondage and the repentance which delivers them from it. Some of these lengthy “prayers” are oriented more as communal laments where a prophet cries to God on behalf of the enslavement of the people or triumphant recollections of the work that God had done for his people before. But they still give us a picture of what types of things people prayed about in the Bible. We see, for instance, how “the Levites…stood [up] and cried to out in a loud voice to the Lord their God” (Nehemiah 9:4). In this cry, addressed to God, He is remembered for getting a people out of bondage. 

“You saw the affliction of our fathers in Egypt; You heard their cry at the Red Sea. You performed signs and wonders against Pharaoh, all his officials, and all the people of his land, for You knew they had acted with arrogance against our fathers. You made a name for Yourself that endures to this day. You divided the sea before them, and they crossed through it on dry ground. You hurled their pursuers into the depths like a stone into raging waters. You led them with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, to light for them the way in which they should travel. You came down on Mount Sinai and spoke with them from heaven. You gave them just ordinances, true laws, and good statutes and commandments” (Nehemiah 9:9-13). 

This, of course, references one of the earliest of these types of prayers: the Israelites crying out to God under their Egyptian bondage, which God hears. 

“After a long time, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned and cried out under their burden of slavery, and their cry for deliverance from bondage ascended to God. So God heard their groaning, and He remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God saw the Israelites and took notice” (Exodus 2:23-25). 

How many people today are praying to be freed from their tax-bondage to the American State, which has come upon us for our sin of not making the Lord our only King? Most of them are doing precisely the opposite: praying to false gods (eg., presidents) who are funded by robbing their neighbors to “save” them from their enemies (real and imagined), thus only furthering the judgment against them. Moreover, some people have tax-revolts and violent revolution on their minds, not seeing that taxation and human rulers are a consequence of sin, which they still don’t want to repent from, preferring to resist the judgment rather than address the cause of it. How many people are repenting of their statism today? How many people are praying for God to “take notice” of this repentance? How many are turning away from the world and abandoned the voting booth rather than forsaking God, admitting before God that these were things they were doing when they still lived in darkness? Many people are still casting ballots and looking to false gods as their saviors. Many “Christians” say they don’t even need to repent of their statism and counsel others to pour into the polling stations and seek “better” Pharaohs for public office. How many are seeking divine liberation from human rulers after confessing they exist because men have idolized them and forsaken God’s Kingdom?

Yet, it is this very type of prayer—repentance for the sin of statism and a call upon God to free us from this political captivity—that causes God to open His ears to us and act! 

“I have heard the groaning of the Israelites, whom the Egyptians are enslaving, and I have remembered My covenant” (Exodus 6:5). 

The Lord hates that His flock has gone into captivity for their iniquity, as men were never meant to be the slaves of others men. Thus, a cry from a people living in bondage to the political systems of the world is precisely the type of thing that awakens God to do something about it. As men of the Bible always recalled, “You saw the affliction of our fathers in Egypt; You heard their cry at the Red Sea” (Nehemiah 9:9).

Where are all the people crying at the Red Sea today for God to provide us an escape from the wicked plunderers who rule the world and keep men as their slaves? Again, many of them are lining up at Pharaoh’s polling stations and still participating in the very systems of Egypt that have brought them under the yoke of men. Yet these are the very types of prayers that God is waiting to hear from us! He wants to see people who want to come into His Kingdom and leave the world behind. They are the types of Biblical prayers from the men of old, who knew that God’s salvation had very much to do with being liberated from statism.  

“The LORD said, ‘I have indeed seen the affliction of My people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their oppressors, and I am aware of their sufferings. I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey…And now the cry of the Israelites has reached Me, and I have seen how severely the Egyptians are oppressing them” (Exodus 3:7-9). 

There is never a good excuse for why men refuse to repent and remain in their bondage. It is always ultimately their own idolatry and slothfulness to the ways of God’s Kingdom that keeps them from seeking a way out of the kingdoms of this world. But men invent many excuses as to why they should just sit around and live a quiet life rather than stir up holy trouble in their communities and look to turn the world upside down with the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. Many of them are so comfortable in their Egyptian slavery, getting to stay on their houses so long as they keep sending Pharaoh their property taxes, that they choose to remain there. When Moses went to confront the Egyptian rulers with the cry, “Let my people go” (Exodus 5:1), the Israelites were angry they came under even more focus by the regime, rather than to look toward the Lord as having come to free them. They accused Moses of having “made us a stench before Pharaoh and his officials and have placed in their hand a sword to kill us” (Exodus 5:21). Most “Christians” today would take the same view of anyone out there agitating in the streets about the Kingdom of God, and would side with the statists as they came down on us, just as the ungodly men of old who said, “Crucify Him, we have no King but Caesar.”

Trusting in the Lord alone

As much as people are scared of the immediate potential for persecution should we begin to seek His Kingdom, God has equipped us even to deal with the more or less guaranteed outcome of statists coming down on men who are seeking to live under God alone: to trust in the Lord rather than fear men, which is one of the snares that allows men to be ruled in the first place, fearing what men will do to them if they actually obey God rather than men (Act 5:29). The problem is that men lack faith in God to fight for them, such that they keep their trust in human rulers and the man-made kingdoms of the world, despite God providing us with all the encouraging words needed to believe in His salvation from the hands of men for a people who trust in Him and seek His Kingdom alone. As Moses asssured the people in his day, who were beginning to doubt God would deliver them in the midst of the statists’ increasing anger, 

“Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the LORD’s salvation, which He will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians you see today, you will never see again. The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still” (Exodus 14:13-14). 

Few men actually think like this today. Even most so-called Christians wouldn’t dare to seek God’s Kingdom if it meant that it would be “against the law” and that the “law enforcement” officers who they idolize would come down on them. Even worse, they think presidents, soldiers, and law enforcement officers are the “saviors,” and thus see no need to be saved from them and the evil plunder systems they uphold. The entire belief in the State is a sinful rejection of Moses’s assurance that “the Lord will fight for you.” The belief in human government is the very opposite claim: that the Lord will not fight for us, and we need men to do so for us. 

Few people today know how to believe in the Lord in this way anymore, trusting that if we began to leave Egypt by repenting of the statist ideology and seeking the Kingdom of God, God would be with us. They are still trapped in the statist thinking of the world that tells them they are in need of human civil governments to keep them safe. Scripture, however, builds people up to put their faith for protection and salvation in God alone, even when confronted with our enemies directly. 

“Be strong and courageous; do not be afraid or terrified of them, for it is the LORD your God who goes with you; He will never leave you nor forsake you” (Deuteronomy 31:6). 

The word of God builds us up to trust that if we began to leave Egypt, meaning both the statist ideology that mentally enslaves men and the physical political bondage that we are under, that God will be with us, that the Lord fights on behalf of those who seek to be ruled by Him alone (2 Chronicles 20:17). That He drives out our enemies (Joshua 3:10). That He goes before us and watches our backs (Isaiah 52:12). That he makes our enemies turn and run (Exodus 23:27). That the evil men of the world flee at the presence of God (Psalm 68:1). That men scatter when God rises up (Isaiah 33:3). That God will show us the very road to walk on (Deuteronomy 1:33). That He is with us forever (Matthew 28:20). 

Praying for deliverance 

When we look into the types of prayers and requests to God in the Bible, we see that a lot of these pleas had everything to do with asking God to save us from statist slavery, which comes upon a people who refuse to make the Lord their only God as divine judgment for disobeying this command. The men of the Bible trusted in God to save them from their enemies and directly asked Him to do so. As often recalled throughout Scripture, 

“The Egyptians mistreated us and afflicted us, putting us to hard labor. So we called out to the LORD, the God of our fathers; and the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, toil, and oppression. Then the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror, signs, and wonders. And He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey” (Deuteronomy 26:6-9). 

The people of the Scriptures were not so purely heavenly-minded as men are today, nor were they foolish enough to neglect to turn to God in prayer to save them from their enemies and seek protection in a military instead (except in the many of cases when they were acting as fools and backsliders and God rebuked them for it by sending the invaders they thought they would secure themselves from by allying with other human rulers — a sinful and rebellious move that has to be punished). Many of the prayers in the Bible looked to God to save them from their earthly enemies in the here and now, not merely to secure them a place in heaven, as we might guess prayer today is focused on. 

Repentance and prayer 

However, these episodes of salvation—driving the statists away from men—always hinged upon repentance, something that our people are still not doing today when they pray to God but also pray to false gods in the voting booth and refuse to renounce their statism and idolatrous belief in human government. These people not only prayed to God to save them from their enemies, but they also knew that God also required that they put away their idols. At any rate, being confronted by plunderers everywhere, which is meant by God to teach us a lesson in the sin of state worshiping and show us the pressing need to turn back to the Lord, had often led men in the Bible to pray to God for deliverance from them. 

“The Ammonites also crossed the Jordan to fight against Judah, Benjamin, and the house of Ephraim, and Israel was in deep distress. Then the Israelites cried out to the LORD, saying, ‘We have sinned against You, for we have indeed forsaken our God and served the Baals.’ The LORD replied, ‘When the Egyptians, Amorites, Ammonites, Philistines, Sidonians, Amalekites, and Maonites oppressed you and you cried out to Me, did I not save you from their hands? But you have forsaken Me and served other gods, so I will no longer save you. Go and cry out to the gods you have chosen. Let them save you in your time of trouble.’ ‘We have sinned,’ the Israelites said to the LORD. ‘Deal with us as You see fit; but please deliver us today!’ So they put away the foreign gods from among them and served the LORD, and He could no longer bear the misery of Israel” (Judges 10:9-16). 

What we have today is some people who might be loosely praying to God to “save” us, while not actually repenting from the ways of the world that have led them into bondage. They may loosely and half-heartedly say a prayer to God to “save our country,” but they have not repented from sin of statism and idolatry that set these kingdoms of man up in the first place. Men are more likely to pray to God to “protect the president,” “bless our troops,” and “watch after police officers at work today,” than they are to pray to God to save us from presidents, soldiers, police, and state rulers in general, whose very existence is proof that we are a people under judgment who would not be ruled by God alone.

Ultimately, the prayers of men today are not like the Biblical prayers of old that truly repented and called upon God to save us from statists, confessing that their sin had led them into bondage. Many professing Christians in America today want to cling to two masters and two kingdoms, thinking they can be a “citizens” of the world who have a dual allegiance to both the “United States” and the Kingdom of God. But as we learn in Scripture, men always need to serve God in exclusivity and pledge allegiance to the Lord alone.

“If you are returning to the LORD with all your hearts, then put away the foreign gods and Ashtoreths among you, prepare your hearts for the LORD, and serve Him only. And He will deliver you from the hand of the Philistines” (1 Samuel 7:3). 

If men today want to be delivered from the hands of statists, assuming they can ever even recognize the need, they will have to repent of their idolatry for the kingdoms of the world and seek the serve God alone. They cannot continue to hold to some “two kingdoms” theology where they vote for “better” Pharaohs while professing the Lord with their lips. This will only keep them in bondage and keep God from removing the Philistines, so to speak. The men of the Bible realized the need to abandon their false gods if they wanted to experience the salvation of the Lord, which is to be saved from those very false gods that once ruled over them as judgment for their sin. “So the Israelites put away the Baals and Ashtoreths and served only the LORD” (1 Samuel 7:4). They were able to confess that their sin had led to their bondage, unlike most professing Christians in America today, who sinfully think that human civil government was given to them as a gift from God for a lawful and orderly society. “There they confessed, ‘We have sinned against the LORD’” (1 Samuel 7:6).

Anyone who plans on praying to the Lord for deliverance from their bondage must first repent of the sin that has led them into that bondage, namely the idolatry for human rulers and man-made kingdoms that statists regard as their protectors. Only then will the Lord hear their prayers and save them from the statists who were once a judgment on their sin. It makes little sense to pray to God to save you from your enemies if you also remain in a state of unrepentance toward the false gods of worldly kingdoms. For it is this sin that brings enemies upon a people.

Few men today are willing to wholly turn to God as their protector though. At the first sight of the Philistines or Assyrians (in our time the Chinese or the Russians), or even other “enemies” like immigrants, they turn to false gods and false kingdoms as their “protectors.” They tell us that we would unsecured and unfree if it weren’t for the “United States Military” to “save” us, that these men are the only reason we aren’t speaking German or Arabic today. But men of the Bible turned to God alone to save them from the prospect of enemies coming upon them. They prayed to God to keep their enemies away. 

“When the Philistines heard that the Israelites had gathered at Mizpah, their rulers marched up toward Israel. And when the Israelites learned of this, they feared the Philistines and said to Samuel, ‘Do not stop crying out to the LORD our God for us, that He may save us from the hand of the Philistines.’…He cried out to the LORD on behalf of Israel, and the LORD answered him. As the Philistines drew near to fight against Israel, Samuel was offering up the burnt offering. But that day the LORD thundered loudly against the Philistines and threw them into such confusion that they fled before Israel” (1 Samuel 7:7-10). 

Communal prayer 

Another way that prayer is sort of corrupted in our time is for these prayers to become self-centered and focused on the individual making the prayer. They pray to God to make their lives better, to get them and their families in a bigger house or nicer car or more stuff. In the Bible, however, we often see communal prayers where someone prays to God on behalf of a whole people, perhaps who have not all necessarily repented themselves and may even deserve the current judgment that is upon them, which often comes in the form of going into captivity to men. How often do you think anyone today prays for God to save us despite the tens of millions of idolaters in America who deserve nothing but judgment? How often does anyone pray for the idolatry of the American people? To save this people who finds themselves in slavery today?

This is common in the Bible, however. Nehemiah made such a prayer of mercy and restoration for the exiles in Babylon on their behalf after hearing of their distress (Nehemiah 1:5-10). He confesses the sins of his people for them. “I confess the sins that we Israelites have committed against You” (Nehemiah 1:6). He admitted that they had not been obedient to God’s Law, which is something most men cannot do today when they deny that human civil government is raised up in sin and rebellion to God’s Law. “We have behaved corruptly against You and have not kept the commandments, statutes, and ordinances that You gave Your servant Moses” (Nehemiah 1:7).

Prayer in the Psalms

Since I have already written about the dominance of this theme in the Psalms, I will spare the reader the full quotations of all these requests to God for aid from the enemy. However, I will cover a few of them here since majority of deliverance prayers needed to keep demonstrating the prevalence of this theme are found in the Psalms, and any attempt to show that prayer is often about calling upon God to save us from our enemies would be incomplete without referencing them. Of around 70 so-called “prayer psalms” that I can count, about 50 of them are explicitly about seeking deliverance from enemies (approximately 33% of all the Psalms, which may be interesting to note is the same percentage I have calculated for all the prayers in the Bible).

The Psalms are full of all these themes we have covered so far. There are calls to God to save us from our foes (Psa 3:1-8), to protect us from our enemies (Psa 5:8-12), to be be merciful toward us in times of anguish caused by our enemies and trusting in God’s deliverance from them (Psa 6:1-10), to deliver us from people like police and judges who pursue us and prey upon us (Psa 7:1-10), to fight those who fight against us (Psa 35:1-8), to deliver us from the men like police officers who lie in wait and set traps for us (Psa 59:1-17), to be protected from those wicked rulers of the world who conspire against us (Psa 64:1-10), to destroy those who have destroyed us (Psa 137:7-9), and to be rescued from violent men like those who call themselves the “government” (Psa 140:1-13).

Prayer in the prophets 

These same themes also continue into the prophets, who likewise experienced persecution because they were actually calling upon men to repent and serve God, unlike the relatively safe “Christians” of today who hardly face any persecution from the statists because they are largely apologists for the State and its false gods and thus not a threat to it, as were Jesus and the apostles who preached the Gospel of another Kingdom and went down for it. The prophet says, 

“The LORD is with me like a fearsome warrior. Therefore, my persecutors will stumble and will not prevail. Since they have not succeeded, they will be utterly put to shame, with an everlasting disgrace that will never be forgotten. O LORD of Hosts, who examines the righteous, who sees the heart and mind, let me see Your vengeance upon them, for to You I have committed my cause. Sing to the LORD! Praise the LORD! For He rescues the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers” (Jeremiah 20:11-13). 

The men of the Bible clearly trusted in God to protect them from their enemies, unlike the men today who claim to know God but trust in the very enemies themselves—the state rulers and all their evil servants—for their protection, who say that “Christ is King” but also that “Trump is my president.” This is what they were praying about: for God to remove their enemies and secure themselves and their people from them — a far cry from the people today who don’t even see themselves as living in captivity to men for their sin, and largely just pray for little personal wins within the confines of an Egyptian system of Pharaohs and horsemen that they don’t care to get out from living under. Whereas most men today seem to regard God as their personal little genie who fulfills whatever little self-centered wish they have (often a rather worldly desire that they hold all while caring little about the tax plantation they and their neighbors live on), the men of the Bible knew that the pressing issue before them was the political bondage they were in and the sin that led them there. Like the Psalmists, prophets like Jeremiah would thus also make imprecatory prayer to deal with those who stalk God’s people and persecute us. 

“Without cause my enemies hunted me like a bird. They dropped me alive into a pit and cast stones upon me. The waters flowed over my head, and I thought I was going to die. I called on Your name, O LORD, out of the depths of the Pit. You heard my plea: ‘Do not ignore my cry for relief.’ You drew near when I called on You; You said, ‘Do not be afraid.’ You defend my cause, O Lord; You redeem my life. You have seen, O LORD, the wrong done to me; vindicate my cause! You have seen all their malice, all their plots against me. O LORD, You have heard their insults, all their plots against me — the slander and murmuring of my assailants against me all day long. When they sit and when they rise, see how they mock me in song. You will pay them back what they deserve, O LORD, according to the work of their hands. Put a veil of anguish over their hearts; may Your curse be upon them! You will pursue them in anger and exterminate them from under Your heavens, O LORD” (Lamentations 3:52-66). 

Elsewhere, Jeremiah had also prayed to God to destroy his enemies before him and save him. In another subsection titled Jeremiah’s Prayer for Deliverance, the prophet says,

“A glorious throne, exalted from the beginning, is the place of our sanctuary. O LORD, the hope of Israel, all who abandon You will be put to shame. All who turn away will be written in the dust, for they have abandoned the LORD, the fountain of living water. Heal me, O LORD, and I will be healed; save me, and I will be saved, for You are my praise. Behold, they keep saying to me, ‘Where is the word of the LORD? Let it come now!’ But I have not run away from being Your shepherd; I have not desired the day of despair. You know that the utterance of my lips was spoken in Your presence. Do not become a terror to me; You are my refuge in the day of disaster. Let my persecutors be put to shame, but do not let me be put to shame. Let them be terrified, but do not let me be terrified. Bring upon them the day of disaster and shatter them with double destruction” (Jeremiah 17:12-18).

In our day, few men even care about the political bondage we’re in, much less pray to God—in repentance and for intervention—to get out of it. And among the people who do realize we’ve become captives of the statists and do not actually live in a “free country,” a small minority of this crowd realizes the bondage has come upon us to due to sin. They imagine they will resist their way out of it with firearms, launch a collective tax protest, or even vote for men to ease the burden of this bondage. They don’t want to man-up and confess their sins and begin to pray to God for liberation. But this is a common theme of prayer in the Bible. Rather than blame some other men for their problems, they could confess their complicity in them. They were not like the conservatives of our time who take the very signs of judgment against them (eg., being ruled by socialists) to be things they don’t deserve and should fight against, all while refusing to repent for the sins that led them there, namely their idolatrous belief in human civil government. As the prophet Daniel says, 

“I prayed to the LORD my God and confessed, ‘O, Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant of loving devotiond to those who love Him and keep His commandments, we have sinned and done wrong. We have acted wickedly and rebelled. We have turned away from Your commandments and ordinances’” (Daniel 9:4-5). 

Unlike the statists in America today who can’t recognize presidents and congressmen and governors as judgment against them, the prophets were fully aware that it was their own sin—violating God’s Law and setting up other gods to rule over them—that had brought about their bondage. As Daniel’s prayer continued, 

“To You, O Lord, belongs righteousness, but this day we are covered with shame—the men of Judah, the people of Jerusalem, and all Israel near and far, in all the countries to which You have driven us because of our unfaithfulness to You” (Daniel 9:7). 

How many people calling themselves Christians in America can look around them, see the existence of human rulers, and admit that they and their people have evidently sinned to go into bondage? Most people’s idea of fighting the consequences of sin—to be ruled by men who plunder you—is to keep contributing to the causes, such as voting for other men to rule over them and refusing to repent for the statist ideology that got them here.

The prophet Daniel, though, from the Babylonian exile, saw the desperate need to confess the transgressions against God at a time when it seems hardest to do so, but precisely when it is needed most: when you’re down and out and dominated by men. 

“We have rebelled against [the Lord our God] and have not obeyed [His] voice to walk in His laws, which He set before us through His servants the prophets. All Israel has transgressed Your law and turned away, refusing to obey Your voice; so the oath and the curse written in the Law of Moses the servant of God has been poured out on us, because we have sinned against You” (Daniel 9:9-11). 

Though God means for the judgment that comes upon a people—most often in the form of political bondage and the tyranny that these men bring to societies—to wake them up to the need to turn back to God and recognize that they have deviated from His commands, namely the commandments against having other gods (human rulers), most people continue to fight against confessing that they had anything to do with this judgment and cannot even see it as judgment. They get angry, play victim, blame others, and think they don’t deserve to reap what they have sown. Even worse, some blame God for all the evils that they have effectively brought upon themselves by turning against the free society that He desires for us to live under and toward the socialist system of statism and human rule.

At any rate, the utter corruption of a society that forsakes God’s rule to go under human rulers—the systematic injustices, legal plunder, social disorder, political lawlessness, and all the things that statists tell us would exist without human government—often fail to wake people up to the need to turn back to God, who has brought the harshest wake-up calls to a people who are still too hardheaded to return to the Lord. As the prophet mentions, 

“Just as it is written in the Law of Moses, all this disaster has come upon us, yet we have not sought the favor of the LORD our God by turning from our iniquities and giving attention to Your truth. Therefore the LORD has kept the calamity in store and brought it upon us. For the LORD our God is righteous in all He does; yet we have not obeyed His voice” (Daniel 9:13-14). 

What God is really looking for is a people who will confess their sins that have led them into bondage, see the connection between their idolatry and the political captivity, realize how much they screwed up, and then seek salvation through Him rather than through men (which was the very thing that brought us into it). In the prophets, this type of repentance and call for salvation were always intertwined in prayer. As Daniel finished out his prayer, 

“Now, O Lord our God, who brought Your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand, and who made for Yourself a name renowned to this day, we have sinned; we have acted wickedly. O Lord, in keeping with all Your righteous acts, I pray that Your anger and wrath may turn away from Your city Jerusalem, Your holy mountain; for because of our sins and the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and Your people are a reproach to all around us. So now, our God, hear the prayers and petitions of Your servant. For Your sake, O Lord, cause Your face to shine upon Your desolate sanctuary. Incline Your ear, O my God, and hear; open Your eyes and see the desolation of the city that bears Your name. For we are not presenting our petitions before You because of our righteous acts, but because of Your great compassion. O Lord, listen! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, hear and act! For Your sake, O my God, do not delay, because Your city and Your people bear Your name” (Daniel 9:15-19).

The reason for praying

Though we cannot discount the Lord’s intervention in our personal lives in every way, who tells us to ask and we shall receive (Matt 7:7), we should also see that there is quite a disparity between Biblical prayer and the type of prayer we see today, the latter which is a little bit more focused on individuals and their own lives rather than the deliverance from statism and the restoration of society as a whole. When the people of the Bible prayed to God, it was very often in recognition that their people had gone into bondage due to sin, that the human rulers who had came upon a people as judgment have destroyed everything, and that they were in desperate need to return to God and for God to return to them. 

“Do not be angry, O LORD, beyond measure; do not remember our iniquity forever. Oh, look upon us, we pray; we are all Your people! Your holy cities have become a wilderness. Zion has become a wasteland and Jerusalem a desolation” (Isaiah 64:9-10).

When men turn away from God’s Law, as they do namely through setting up human civil governments that call their own decrees “law,” then law and justice is perverted, and is done so even as a judgment against this sin. Thus, prophets who recognized that statism and all its corruptions are judgment for sin prayed to God for salvation precisely because of these social circumstances they found themselves in. As Habakkuk said in a call for help, 

“Destruction and violence are before me. Strife is ongoing, and conflict abounds. Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth. For the wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted” (Habakkuk 1:3-4). 

In the section of this prophet’s book that is given the subtitle of “Habakkuk’s Prayer,” the type of prayer is the same as we have seen so far in many others: remembrance of being delivered from the hands of our enemies by the hand of God. 

“You went forth for the salvation of Your people, to save Your anointed. You crushed the head of the house of the wicked and stripped him from head to toe. With his own spear You pierced his head, when his warriors stormed out to scatter us, gloating as though ready to secretly devour the weak. You trampled the sea with Your horses, churning the great waters. I heard and trembled within; my lips quivered at the sound. Decay entered my bones; I trembled where I stood. Yet I must wait patiently for the day of distress to come upon the people who invade us” (Habakkuk 3:13–16). 

Repenting for our sin

Although the increasingly obvious evils in our land today might lead men into prayer, they are still not quite praying as the men of the Bible did if they have not repented from their praise of men, their pride and patriotism in worldly kingdoms, and their participation in these worldly systems. Anyone who votes for men to rule over them and their neighbors is an ungodly man praying to false gods to “save” him and working to further the pagan kingdoms of the world. 

God is looking for people today who will turn away from the world and seek His Kingdom in exclusion to all others — a Kingdom where He is the only King, where there are no “presidents,” congressmen, Supreme Court “justices,” centralized militaries, or tax-funded “law enforcement” agents. People who still believe in these things are not repentant men, but worldly people who have no idea what God’s Kingdom looks like. If men refuse to repent from statism and admit that their love of the world—this is evident in statist ideology more so than anything else—has contributed to all their problems, why should God hear their prayers and liberate them? Statists are a people who evidently hate God and love their bondage. God is looking for repentant people who will turn back to the Lord as their God. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). He is not looking for people who “vote the Bible” or “vote your conscious” or who think that Babylon can be “Christianized” and that the violence of the State plays a role in carrying out the Kingdom of God. Repentance is the only way out of the bondage of Egypt, because sin was the way into it.

Conclusion 

If Christians today got back to Biblical prayer, it would have to go beyond the sort of self-centered prayer we can safely suspect that most of them make today. They would have to enter an uncomfortable realm of actually confessing their sins of statism in order to see state rulers as their enemies who have conquered them because they sought to be ruled by men instead of God, pray for God to handle these wicked men for us, and pray to be liberated from the bondage of Egypt that we have gotten ourselves in due to our sin and idolatry for men and their systems.

How many people think like this today when they pray though? How many people are making communal prayers and laments on behalf of the sins of our people today—the idolatrous American “patriots” who call themselves Christians—who have set up human civil government in their rebellion to God and are paying the price for it? Probably not many considering that few Christians today can even see that human government is sin and idolatry and are more willing to defend these worldly kingdoms than they are willing to seek the Kingdom of God in exclusion to them. How many people are willing to make imprecatory prayers against our enemies, that God destroy the wicked and exalt the righteous? Probably not many considering that they have been successfully fooled by their enemies to find them as their saviors instead. 

Whatever else it may be legitimate to pray about, we cannot ignore that Biblical prayer is often very focused on prayers of repentance and requests for deliverance from bondage and protection from enemies. Even the Lord’s Prayer, repeated almost ritualistically by churchians, ends with a call to “deliver us from the evil one” (Matthew 6:13). Jesus also had a lengthy prayer to God that included protecting His disciples and other believers after He was gone (John 17-1-26). After acknowledging the people who had preyed upon Jesus and themselves to hurt, cage, and kill them, the apostles also prayed to the Lord to “consider their threats” (Acts 4:29). 

Finally, as we also learn from Jesus Christ, we should also be praying for our enemies too (Matthew 5:44), perhaps one of the harder things to do for those who know just how evil these men are. Not that they succeed in their evils roles, as men seem to pray when they ask God to “protect the president” or something like that, but that all these men will repent, resign from the wicked path of political rule, and seek God’s Kingdom with us.