[This is part 1 in a series on “Who Were the Biblical Prophets and What Were They Preaching?” See part two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

The neglect for the prophetic books of Scripture is probably the best explanation for the utter lack of awareness among Christians today of the sin and idolatry involved with the praise of the State and lust for human rulers and soldiers that takes place in our contemporary times — a central message on sin in the Bible that, for people today, does not even remotely cross their minds, and when it is finally called out they fight against it. For it is in the Biblical prophets where God’s will—both His desire that men be free souls under His Kingship and His abhorrence of the worldly kingdoms that men chase after in their sin—is best seen. It is in the books of the prophets where a man really becomes acquainted with who God is and what He is all about, what is His will and what are the things He hates.

As a brief personal aside and testimony, it was but a few pages into Isaiah—the first chapter alone—when I first realized I was handling the inspired, revealed word of God and not merely the words of men, which was immediately recognizable for criticizing the type of statist world that average men are comfortable defending, and which therefore could not have been something that was written by men, who most certainly would have written a statist document if the Scriptures were intended (as some suppose) to propagandize men. Isaiah begins with a God-given vision of the rebellion of the people of Judah and Jerusalem, who had turned from God in all their ways. 

“Listen, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the LORD has spoken: ‘I have raised children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against Me. The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master’s manger, but Israel does not know; My people do not understand.’ Alas, O sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a brood of evildoers, children of depravity! They have forsaken the LORD; they have despised the Holy One of Israel and turned their backs on Him” (Isaiah 1:2-4). 

He goes on to point out the circumstances that come upon any people who turn away from God by seeking protection and aid in the man-made institutions of the world. 

“Your land is desolate; your cities are burned with fire. Foreigners devour your fields before you— a desolation demolished by strangers” (Isaiah 1:7). 

The nature of this corruption was precisely of the political sort, where a people had prostituted themselves out to plunderous statist systems for their justice and welfare, only to find them living under a perversion of justice and welfare as a judgment against them for having outsourced their responsibilities to human rulers who inevitably corrupt these things. 

“See how the faithful city has become a harlot! She once was full of justice; righteousness resided within her, but now only murderers! Your silver has become dross; your fine wine is diluted with water. Your rulers are rebels, friends of thieves. They all love bribes and chasing after rewards. They do not defend the fatherless, and the plea of the widow never comes before them” (Isaiah 1:21-23). 

How lost our people are today

Any discerning man should be able to recognize these words of Isaiah 1 as the case with our society today. We have turned away from God precisely by turning toward systems of human government, which have only brought—as a very proof for God—all the things He has warned us they would bring: corruption, injustices, lawlessness, bribes, taxation, inflation, impoverishment, and thousands of different schemes against the people they claim to serve. 

It is becoming more common that men are able to see the problems today on their surface. But this by no means entails that they are able to see the reason why we have landed here (sin) or the way out of Egypt (repentance). It is easy enough to complain about the present situation without understanding it in context. Indeed, to merely point out problems—prices are rising and healthcare is unaffordable—is a tactic employed by demagogues to dupe the unwitting masses who don’t understand the casual laws of God into accepting more of the same causes of their problems—monetary inflation and government “regulations” and intervention—as the “solution.” It is easy enough for people of all types to agree on the problems. Anarchists and socialists can stand next to each other and agree that the prices of groceries are rising. The real question, which really distinguishes men from each other, is why have we arrived here and what are we going to do about it? This is the part that most men leave out in their casual analysis of basic social problems, but which was always present in the word of God as spoken through His prophets: our people have gone into captivity for their iniquity, eg., their lust for human government and rule, and they are paying the price for it today as judgment for rebelling against the Lord as their King.

What is needed then to understand and overcome our problems today, which are but a judgment for sin, is for people to understand the prophets through whom the word of Lord had come down to men to show them the ways of the Lord that they might make their paths straight again, repent for their sin, and turn back to the Lord in order to turn back the political captivity and avoid further judgment that is promised against those men who trust in human rulers as their lords, gods, and saviors. Plenty of people into this first quarter of the twenty-first century are capable of giving roughly the same assessment of the situation as Isaiah had given — your rulers are rebels and friends with thieves, your cities are burned with fire. There are millions of popular and influential people who are capable of pointing out that the world is evidently corrupted, justice is perverted, and people and their properties are plundered. And people are rallying around them just for pointing out what is really rather obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes.

But if this is the extent of their work, if all they’re doing is pointing out problems but not providing solutions, they’re not doing much more than telling people the things they already know and want to hear, and they still aren’t pointing people down the straight road out of Egypt. Much rarer is the man preaching sin as the root of our bondage, repentance as an urgent need, the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the transforming solution, and seeking the Kingdom of God as a duty. And many people don’t even want to hear it, despite being aware of their current situation of living in captivity to human governors who plunder them for all they’re worth. People will complain that their property taxes are rising every year, but then when you come along and tell them they’re under judgment for the sin of turning to human rulers to manage their social affairs, they start laughing at you and telling you how “we can’t do without police or schools.” These people deserve the bondage they’re under. They evidently hate the consequences of their sin, but still refuse to repent for the sin (eg., approval of human civil government) that led to their bondage. It makes for some difficult preaching that men hate repentance for sin as much as the consequences of it, that they know how bad things are but remain stubborn to change their ways. Every man and his brother complains about taxation, inflation, the surveillance state, or every other number of evils in our political society today, but they don’t want to confess their sin and complicity in it all, repent for their wicked ways, and turn back to the Lord and seek His Kingdom. Indeed, they mock you when you point out that men are in bondage due to sin. They want to believe they don’t deserve it, that some human rulers just thrusted themselves upon men who didn’t ask for it, whether explicitly in begging for rulers or indirectly in accepting their benefits. They stomp their feet like children and whine that they don’t deserve their property to be taxed, all while maintaining that government police and government schools are “necessary” to society. This whining about the consequences of their sin is of the same type of character that landed them in bondage in the first place. This is just “government is meant to serve me” becoming “this government isn’t serving me like it was supposed to.”

It won’t be until men realize they were never to rely on other men to serve them in the first place, and that it was always a sin to do so, that they might have a shot at avoiding the inevitably evil outcomes of these systems that are already upon us as a result of the associated sins of patriotism and idolatry that are always bound-up with human government. But they likely won’t realize this unless they become acquainted with the prophets, who spoke not just of the details of the bondage men were in, where rulers brought about great robberies and injustices against their people, but also of the sin-based cause of it and the need to repent of these sins and turn back to the Lord. 

Knowing the prophets 

The lack of understanding of God and His will, which is perhaps best known through the prophetic books of Scripture, is probably a major reason why so many men have been unable to put two and two together today. They have been unable to see that their circumstances today are the direct, rotten fruit of the wicked seeds they have sown by apologizing for the existence of human civil government in their idolatry. They have not been able to see that repentance is the way out of this bondage. This is arguably because most Christians do not know the prophets, aside from a few snippets of verses here and there. Jeremiah to them is just someone who said “before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5). They are likely unaware of the mission appointed to Jeremiah just a few verses later:

“Then the LORD reached out His hand, touched my mouth, and said to me:  ‘Behold, I have put My words in your mouth. See, I have appointed you today over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and plant’” (Jeremiah 1:9-10).

Many Christians today are really only familiar with the Pauline epistles and the Gospels, and even then loosely so, because it never sank in for them that a man cannot have two masters (Matt 6:24), that the Lord forbade His followers from exercising authority over one another (Mark 10:42-45), and that His Kingdom is not of this world and its institutions (John 18:26). The lack of familiarity with the prophets is thus not entirely an explanation for the failure of modern-day Christians to understand the causal reality around them, namely that their own sin has led to their bondage and that they were never to trust in human rulers rather than God in the first place; this concept is also seen clearly in the New Testament, too.

But it is really in the books of the prophets where the role of human government in society, “ordained” by God to deal out justice to those wicked-hearted people who trust in human rulers as their saviors and protectors, is most easily seen. It is in the prophetic books where one can really come to understand that we have gone into bondage due to our own iniquities and need to repent and turn back to the Lord.

Yet, if you asked most people what the prophets preached or what they were all about, they would probably not be able to tell you. They might have some faint hint, say, that Isaiah foresaw the Messiah or something like that. But they wouldn’t really have an idea of the typical mission given to the sixteen prophets (4 major and 12 minor) who have dedicated books in the Bible, who all have a more or less consistent message: we have gone into bondage to men due to our iniquity (Ezek 39:23), which God has “ordained” as a judgment against people who refuse to be ruled by God, and it’s time to turn back to the Lord to get out of the bondage we are currently in and/or to avoid further judgment. 

The true nature of the prophets is thus lost on most people today, who tend to think of prophets as some sort of spiritual mystics or fortune-tellers who were telling of events to come. To tell people that the prophets provide a scathing rebuke of statism and the idolatry for human rulers that we still see today—the very proof for me that I was handling God’s word—would be a foreign concept to them. Many Christians have been trained to think that politics and religion are distinct categories and have nothing to do with one another. They have been made to believe that God is apolitical and that they must seek their politics from the world if they want to form an opinion on such matters. To tell them that the Bible is a sacred civics textbook on anarchist political science would confuse them. To tell them that statism—both the idolatrous ideological belief in human civil government or the actual political practice of ruling over other men—is sin would likewise be lost on them, since they are the very people who, as in the case of the people who the Biblical prophets preached to, have failed to hear this message. Indeed, few Christians today even have any conception of sin as involving such things as statism (ie., the belief in, or practice of, men ruling over other men), which necessarily entails setting up other gods than the Lord and approving of systems of plunder, covetousness, and murder. Their idea of sin is thinking about their crush on a girl or something like that, not breaking God’s Laws. The most grievous manifestations of sin that is found in setting up and approving of human rulers is a foreign concept to them, so much that most so-called Christians will fight against it when they hear it. Tell most so-called Christians that statism, patriotism, and all the idolatry and evils associated with worldly human government and its ideology are really the essence of sin, and they will quickly tell you “that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” They will tell you this because they are statist idolaters who deep-down are convicted by this word, but who would rather fight against those who rebuke in the gate than to repent from their lifelong sin of supporting human rulers rather than the Lord as their only King.

Turning back from sin

Despite the people who are always ready to fight against God’s Law, which is done namely through setting up systems of human civil government and prostituting themselves out to the kingdoms of the world, these things are really what sin and the rebuke of the prophets is all about. The unified message of all the Biblical prophets was a call to reject sin, such as idolatry and reliance on man-made kingdoms (e.g., alliances with Assyria, Babylon, Egypt) that enslaved God’s people both spiritually, with the worldly ideology of statism, and physically through the systems that this ideology supports. They made a call to turn back from the sin that led to their bondage to men, by demonstrating the connection and appealing to the evident judgment that had come upon a people as a good enough reason that they ought to realize the pressing need to get back to the Lord as their only King, lest they suffer further.

In a great way, it has been the failure to absorb the teachings of God found in the books of the prophets that can help explain the fallacious political theology of Christians today, who have virtually no conception of statism as sin and its evil consequences as judgment for that sin of setting up human rulers and supporting them. If people had known the prophets, they would never fall for the statist ideology that they still hold today, which the prophets had always connected to judgment, which always came in the form of general government evils, domestic bondage, foreign invaders, being carried away captive into a foreign land, or any other number of consequences that were representative of the original political sins—the evil belief in human rulers—that brought them on. Few professing Christians today take their politics from the Bible at all. If they did, they would emerge as anarchists looking to serve the only legitimate King at the exclusion of all others. Most often, worldly idolaters come at God’s word with their preexisting statism, and rather than look to be transformed by Scripture, they seek a couple passages that they believe could be twisted to suit a statist worldview they already held before they picked up a Bible — hence the statist’s favorite citations of “Romans 13” and “render unto Caesar.”

Prophecy as an understanding of God’s social laws

So who or what is a prophet? As opposed to those who see a prophet strictly as someone who foresees some random events that will unfold in the future (which may also be the case) in a way that these judgments are disconnected from any sin that has brought them on, we cannot fail to understand a the Biblical prophets as men who expressed the will, ways, and laws of God to the people who they preached to in their times and in the God-inspired words that have been recorded for us. They were not just men who looked into a future that had causal connection to the present, sinful actions of men, but also teachers of this God-created, cause and effect reality that we live in. They explained why things had become the way they did and what else would come of a people should they continue to pursue their same path of sin, as well as what was needed to reverse this course and get back to the peace and prosperity and security from enemies that is only found in God’s Kingdom. They could have explained to the idolatrous statists of America today that adulterously trusting in police and soldiers would only lead to a massive system of taxation, inflation, wealth transfers, bureaucracy, wars, a police state, and no freedom or security to show for it (notwithstanding those who still kid themselves that “the troops fight for our freedom” and “the police keep us safe at night”).

In this sense, anyone who is capable of following the lessons of the Biblical prophets, eg., that the sin of men is to trust in Pharaohs and chariots and horsemen as their saviors rather than the Lord, is capable of being a “prophet.” Though the Biblical prophets heard, spoke, and wrote the inspired word of God, we need not necessarily think of a prophet as some special title or some person who does not exist at all today because they cannot see into the future. Anyone who understands the social laws of God as expressed by the Biblical prophets can effectively “see into the future” anyway. They know that sin leads to bondage, that idolatry leads to tyrannical human rulers, and that all these man-made systems bring about desolation upon all those who lust after them in their rebellion to God. They may not know the time or date that these systems will eventually fail, which has become fashionable among false prophets or people who want to present themselves as special people who receive a regular word from the Lord in their ear. But they can, knowing the laws of God, see that it is inevitable given the set of circumstances that prevail. They know, as a matter of God’s natural law, that X leads to Y, and that if X (human government) is present, then Y (social disorder) follows. 

The nature of prophetic ministry in the Bible

In this series, I intend to make a rather thorough investigation into the true nature of the prophets with a special emphasis on the specific missions that they were sent on (although given that phrases similar to “and then the word of the Lord came unto X” number into the hundreds, this study will not be entirely exhaustive). The role of the prophets in the Bible was most often to take the word of God to a people who didn’t want to hear it, oftentimes to a people already living in physical bondage to political rulers due to the sinful ideas and actions that they were still refusing to turn from despite living in tax shackles and under the restraints of kings, armies, and other agents of Pharaoh’s. At other times, the people had largely escaped judgment for their evils at the present time, and the prophets had come to warn that enemy invaders were at the gates or foreign statists were coming to carry them off into exile in a foreign land for their own wicked ways. The prophets were divinely appointed messengers who received the word directly from God that God wanted to be delivered to a people who needed to know that the harsh realities they were under, such as occupation by armies and other enslavers, were due to their own spiritual failings, such as whoring themselves out to the Egyptians for protection and aid, as men do today when they say they need police, soldiers, or socialist systems of welfare to keep them safe, free, and fed.

In short, the Biblical prophets had come to rebuke sin, particularly the idolatry that led to their praise and worship of false gods like the rulers of human civil governments that a lost people had come to rely on in their sin — in other words, they were rebuking statist idolatry, where men chased after human rulers, man-made kingdoms of the world, and the illusion of prosperity and security that they believed was worth it to accept even if it meant betraying their faith in God to provide for them, which of course produced neither liberty nor security, which is only found when men trust in God as their everything. The prophets had come to show people this connection—the cause and effect reality before them—between sin and bondage, between trusting human rulers as their saviors and finding themselves enslaved to these men who they mistakenly believed would protect them from their enemies. They came to show people that the reason they found themselves in exile, under oppressive rulers, occupied by men, or conquered by foreign armies, was their own sin, idolatry, covetousness, and slothfulness to seek God’s Kingdom. It is easy enough that a man can witness his captivity to men and his station as a tax-slave on a political plantation where men rule over other men; it is much rarer that a man can identify the reason why things have become the way they are, and even more rare that a man living as a slave to statists knows what to do about it and how to make the way straight again to get out of Egypt.

The point of the prophets and their God-given words was not just to show men that they were in bondage, which is still needed given that many can’t even see this and believe they live in a free country, but to show them that they are under divine judgment for their sin. Moreover, after demonstrating a connection between sin and bondage, the prophets’ job was to call men to repent for this sin as the means of turning back the judgment that had come upon them for this reason or the judgment which was soon to come. They were calling upon faithless people to acknowledge their iniquity and return to the Lord who was waiting to accept them back (Jer 3:11-12), for people to renounce their idolatry and faith in human governments and armies and trust in the Lord alone (Hos 14:1-3), and exhorting people to turn from the wicked ways that had always led to their people’s desolation (Zech 1:1-6). 

In the following segments of this article series, we will begin to dive into the specific missions of the prophets and show the undeniably political nature of their ministry, which cannot be separated from the statist evils that had gone on in these societies and the sins of trusting in human rulers that led to their bondage.