Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

There is a social law in our world that governs the interactions between men, such that harmony, peace, and prosperity prevails when men operate on the Lord’s command to “love your neighbor,” which forbids exercising authority over other men; and where conflict, war, and impoverishment arise when men reject these principles and permit worldly systems of political violence to manage human affairs for them. Our people, for now, have chosen the latter, which explains all the troubles we face in society today.

But how do we know it? Isn’t this just the logical reasoning of some economists who are trying to perform intellectual propaganda for a free market? Isn’t this just the “theory” of some “neoliberal propagandists” or even “racists?” If you asked unashamed socialists, you would probably get an answer something like this.

One thing we do know is that men surely haven’t believed it. They thought they could violate these social laws with violent political intervention and create statist utopias through man-made legal decrees. They believe that there is no divine law keeping them from doing whatever they want to society through the instrument of political power, hence why they set up false gods to make legislative decrees to attempt to achieve certain ends which they think can be brought about through the stroke of a pen and a waving of the sword: They think they can break away from God’s law and not be bound by it anymore (Psa 2:1-3). And in their pride and ignorance, they try to force socialist schemes upon men and manipulate society according to their image.

Colleges and culture have helped to raise generations of subjectivists and moral relativists who think “there is no truth,” “that’s your truth but not mine,” that “anything is possible,” and that we could centrally plan societies and violently intervene in private transactions and communities without bringing about severe negative consequences for social order, which ought to be understood as God’s judgment upon a wicked people who would not heed His ways.

In the so-called “secular” world that does discover and attempt to establish such an “economic” or “moral” law, the main tools for convincing others and defending the natural order against invasions by statists and socialists have been theory, logic, reason, historical evidence, and philosophizing in general. And these have more or less failed to turn back the tide of statism.

The moral and economic relativism of men, which holds the views that “we can’t know anything” or “there are no absolutes,” quickly serves as the basis of the technocrats’ philosophy of the social engineering state: that “anything is possible” and “we’ll just have to try out X policy and see if it works or not” and “haha, if it doesn’t do what we said it would, sorry, we’re keeping it anyway.” These people have not been forced by public opinion to be held to Biblical standards of truth, law, and justice, and these systems wouldn’t even exist if they were. The masses, having separated themselves from a Biblical worldview, have not coincidentally drifted off into worldly ways of thinking that permit false gods to set up false kingdoms that concoct thousands of schemes against the people in the belief that these men can run whole societies on political intervention alone. Few men have been around to assert that they won’t work and will always fail, because they are set up against God and His Law.

Social law as God’s Law

But it isn’t just an “ethical” law or “economic” that it is unjust to invade a man’s body or his property and that the violence and evils of statist societies are going to lead to wars, poverty, famines, prisons, conflicts, crime, etc. It’s a Law of God. These are the things that God promises will always come upon a people who forsake Him by turning toward the law systems of men rather than keeping His Law, which forbids that they set up the false gods of human civil government, whose evil acts are used as a judgment and curse against them.

Though the “secularists” would contest this as an appeal to mythology or religion, the better way to understand our cause and effect reality is to see it as either reaping divine blessings or curses for sowing good or sowing evil. God has shown us the straight path and the way of peace and prosperity, but men didn’t want to walk on it, choosing instead to rebel against Him and set up human rulers in His place. This is why our society is corrupted today: men outsourced their godly responsibilities to authoritarian rulers to carry out their justice, defense, protection, and welfare for them, and have thus reaped just what they have sown by receiving injustices, insecurity, crime, and a great squandering of resources, all while still being taxed to pay for it all, which has served as a divine judgment against this error, which is then used by God to wake men up to this sinful statist mistake.

Divine cause and effect

We ought to see that we are not only seeking to be in keeping with the moral and economic law as observed by philosophers and economists, but that we are also actively dealing with blessings and curses dealt out by the hand of God. The way to avoid all the evils that can come upon a society is to obey God in the first place and never turn to these systems of men for our provisions of protection and welfare, and to trust in God alone. It is obedience to God—not forsaking Him for false gods and their immoral law systems, and preserving a free and righteous society as we are shown in the scriptures—that leads to the production of food and feeds people. As the prophet Isaiah said,

“If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land” (Isaiah 1:19). 

God was not lying. He means it. If we wanted to live freely and under the Lord, we could have and still can. And there would be—ah, the “prosperity gospel!”—relatively greater prosperity than in our society of political plunder and man-made impoverishment through the man-made legal system. 

But those who disobey God, i.e., those who erect statist/socialist societies that they allow to be in charge of law, protection, production, etc., bring destruction upon themselves (see, e.g., the Soviet Union). Trusting in human rulers to feed and protect you leads to poverty and war, not food and protection. It leads to judgment by God. As Isaiah went on,

“But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword” (Isaiah 1:20). 

Those who forget God and trust in Pharaoh’s system of violence for their bread give themselves up to statism and slavery. It leads to plunder and famines, not peace and prosperity.

God has always called on His people to hear this word of seeking His Kingdom and being blessed, or turning toward the kingdoms of the world and coming upon curses, but men have not wanted to hear it, preferring to trust in the Egyptians—the statists of the world—instead of the Lord alone. For all this hardheadedness to His call, God himself has given these people over to a reprobate mind, allowing them to believe in even greater delusions than they did in the first place when they refused to hear Him, hence the endless variants of statism and socialism in our world today that men wholeheartedly buy into. Nevertheless, God wants us to turn back to Him and seek His ways as a means of overturning the political captivity that has come upon us for our own sin.

“Hear, O My people, and I will warn you: O Israel, if only you would listen to Me! There must be no strange god among you, nor shall you bow to a foreign god. I am the LORD your God, who brought you up out of Egypt. Open wide your mouth, and I will fill it. But My people would not listen to Me, and Israel would not obey Me. So I gave them up to their stubborn hearts to follow their own devices. If only My people would listen to Me, if Israel would follow My ways, how soon I would subdue their enemies and turn My hand against their foes! Those who hate the LORD would feign obedience, and their doom would last forever. But I would feed you the finest wheat; with honey from the rock I would satisfy you” (Psalm 81:8-16).

To find peace and prosperity, and to avoid social disorder and impoverishment, men must seek to keep the Lord’s commandments and walk in His way. The corruption of the world today indeed exists as a very proof and evidence for God, showing us that we have evidently turned away from Him and all His warnings have come true.

These blessings and curses that come upon a people who seek the Lord or turn from Him are not some arbitrary or sick social experiment, as “atheists” like to imagine it. For God amply warns people of the consequences of turning away from Him, which is done chiefly by turning toward the farcical law systems of men that call themselves “government.”

“My son, do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments; for they will add length to your days, years and peace to your life” (Proverbs 3:1-2).

Trusting in God’s word

“But how do we know the laws are true?,” the statists will out in their sinful desire for their imaginations to be true and for their false gods to be the true deliverers and liberators. How do we know that turning away from God and trusting in Egyptians, Romans, or Americans, will only bring captivity, slavery, wars, impoverishment, famines, etc? A big enough fool might even ask, “Couldn’t we just pass a ‘law’ that says famines are illegal?” This is what statists effectively do anyway when they attempt to enact, say, price controls to mitigate the effects of their own prior inflationary policies. They believe that they can abolish some evil with the stroke of an evil pen (or, when that doesn’t work out, lining everyone up against the wall and shooting them).

So how do we know that statism and socialism must always lead us to violence and destruction? That socialism will definitely lead to famines and war? That political power leads to police states? That only God’s order feeds people and provides peace? Isn’t this just our opinion? Isn’t this impossible to actually prove? Or isn’t it conditional upon some other factors that haven’t yet been considered? Isn’t it open to endless debate that can never be settled?

I know this will not be a satisfactory answer for the statist who wants to imagine that their own arbitrary socialist inventions can produce a utopia with just enough laws and police force behind them. It will not even be found sufficient by many worldly economists and philosophers who, although sometimes arriving at anarchist conclusions themselves, often wish to ground them in reason, logic, or theory alone.

As for me and my house, I am content to know this cause and effect reality—that blessings come upon those who obey God and curses befall those who abandon Him to be ruled by men—is true for this reason alone: “For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it” (Isaiah 1:20). Amen!

A voluntary society, where people serve each other freely because they love God and their neighbors, works because God made it that way. It is the society that is conducive to His intended order, which thus cannot be violated without severe negative ramifications that function as a divine rebuke for deviating from God’s Law. On the other hand, socialism, where people covet their neighbors property through violent man-made legal systems as their means of providing for the “welfare” or “protection” of their people, doesn’t work and only leads to bondage because God made it that way and told us so.

And that’s good enough for me. As helpful as they might be, strictly speaking, large economic treatises and philosophical tomes are not needed to teach us what can be found in the word of God: that statism is evil, contrary to God’s natural order, and will only bring negative effects upon a people who sinfully experiment with them in their prideful attempt to act as gods themselves.

We know that statism, which is sin and idolatry, brings evils upon society, which necessarily act as God’s form of judgment upon a people, because God says they will.

“I will make you a ruin and a disgrace among the nations around you, in the sight of all who pass by. So you will be a reproach and a taunt, a warning and a horror to the nations around you, when I execute judgments against you in anger, wrath, and raging fury. I, the LORD, have spoken. When I shower you with the deadly arrows of famine and destruction that I will send to destroy you, I will intensify the famine against you and cut off your supply of food. I will send famine and wild beasts against you, and they will leave you childless. Plague and bloodshed will sweep through you, and I will bring a sword against you. I, the LORD, have spoken.”

Standing our knowledge on God alone

While it’s hard to think we shouldn’t welcome detailed theoretical demonstrations of why socialism is an unworkable system that must fail (i.e., murder and starve people), the main reason why it doesn’t work, and the final word on the matter, is that God says it doesn’t. It would be better and more powerful if a man knew this simply from knowing God, rather than having known it because he read some economists and philosophers. This man would be even more intimately acquainted with the law of Liberty because he would know it as God’s law and not just the logical deductions of theoretical economists who had come to roughly the same conclusions. He would be even more unmoved that this law can be violated, because he would know any attempt to do so as a futile effort to rebel against the Author of this Law.

If we began to base our arguments on the word of God rather than the theoretical exercises of the philosophers of liberty, who are no less right to identify the superiority of liberty and free trade to statism and political control, we will have a much more solid case for liberating the slaves. These things will no longer be seen as the potentially contestable deductions of some theoretician who may have holes in his logic or gaps in his reasoning, but the unassailable word of God that lays down the law directly from the Creator himself.

What men need to come upon true knowledge is not to read more books, but to get closer to the Lord. As Scripture famously states, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). Those with a healthy fear of the Lord, ie., those fear of the judgment or consequences that result from turning from His ways, will be on solid ground with which to understand the world and its workings around them, the way that God made it. No one who fears the Lord would ever trust in human rulers to act as their saviors, because they would see that these worldly systems are rooted entirely in a lack of faith in the Lord as our protector.

It’s time that we become much more willing to rely on the word of God for our knowledge about the world, because it is the word of God, as well as to receive our righteous discernment from the Holy Spirit about what is good and what is evil. It isn’t as if there is some peer-reviewed journal anyway to provide some academic proof, agreed upon by many scholars, that human government is evil; we know this from the Spirit anyway. But even though there is a philosophical edifice that points out the unworkability of violent government intervention into private society and can help men to understand the world around them, we don’t strictly need it to make our case. God’s word has already given it to us. Christians should be able to come to anarchist conclusions that the kingdoms of the world stand opposed to the Kingdom of God without needing anarchist philosophers to help them. They should be able to see that socialist systems, which are based on political violence, are antagonistic to the Lord’s prescribed way of doing things without reading an economic treatise that breaks it down for them.

Let us now fall back on faith in God’s word and the discernment against evil that God has planted on our hearts. We don’t need some textbook, treatise, or academic journal to tell us good from evil or hundreds of pages of logic and reasoning, which for the majority of worldly philosophers only produces thousands of different statist and socialist conclusions. We know that statism and socialism do not work and cannot work because the Lord has set His order up against these man-made inventions — and has told us so.