[This is part 4 of an article series on “Who Were the Biblical Prophets and What Were They Preaching?” See part one, two, three, five, six, seven, eight, nine]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

In previous articles in this series, I have explained God’s use of human government as a tool for divine judgment as well as roughly shown how calling people away from trusting in human rulers was exactly what the prophets were doing. In this article, I will try to lay some more ground work for the political setting that the prophets had preached upon, to continue to give a foundation to the thesis of this whole series that the prophets were necessarily rebuking statism and all the related idolatries and injustices that come along with this worldly ideology that raises up false gods to rule over other men.

The scene the prophets had come upon were necessarily statist societies whose very sins had been to part with God’s Law and set up and support human rulers, with the evils that always result from these systems being the very judgment against them for the root sins of idolatry, theft, covetousness, and slothfulness to seek God’s Kingdom that are at the base of every system of human civil government. It was political corruption, which is inherent to all man-made systems of government, that largely makes up the context of the prophets’ ministries to both the people who supported these systems and the chariot-operators and horsemen who actually carried them out and actually put their boots to evil. The prophets had come to criticize the political systems of the kingdoms of the world, which often by the time of their arrival were so deep in their evils that almost everything had been corrupted in regards to justice, law, and social order, all which statists tell us cannot be upheld without the State!

And this essentially was the reason for the prophets pronouncing judgment upon people or simply explaining the current political environment as already being their form of judgment. For the wicked statist belief that human rulers are “necessary” to justice, law, protection, welfare, and civilization itself, all these things had become utterly corrupt, perverted, and backward as a judgment against them and as a means of teaching these people that they had sinned by setting up authoritarian systems of human civil government to perform the acts that they should be doing out of personal responsibility and service to others. They had come to demonstrate the cause and effect nature of God’s creation: that He blesses those who seek His Kingdom with liberty and prosperity, but curses those who rebel against Him—which is done namely through engaging in the political practices of the world—with poverty, captivity, and finding themselves living as human property on a giant tax-farm. They had come to show that all the evils in their society, all the things which people had even come to hate and bemoan, were but the result of their own worldly-statist philosophy that supported the political order around them. They came to teach people, who were surely feeling the effects of their own ideas, that these ideas and practices were the source of their problems — that there is no such thing as setting up human kings without running into the problems they were experiencing. It was the wicked fruit of these statist societies, which were sown with wicked seeds and had their origins in rebellion against God, that gave the prophets something to denounce.

It was then an utterly perverted and backward society, which always results from passing off our godly responsibilities to human rulers, that was cause for God to send out prophets, both to criticize the worldly-statist ideology that empowered these systems to begin with and the inevitable society-wide injustices and perversions of law that it entailed once these systems were in operation. The prophets warned that these statist systems and the evil effects that inevitably follow from human government were already divine judgment upon the people and/or that they were sure to bring more of it at the hand of God who is always watching a people who practice the evils of statism, both ideologically in their minds and physically by putting their hands to evil and ruling over other men. For practicing the very evils, injustices, plunder, murder, and immorality that are associated with statism at the conception and origin of human government and sustained on them so long as they exist, these societies had become corrupted and backward. Justice was perverted, the people were robbed, beaten, caged, killed, and used as tax cattle on one giant political plantation. This present corruption was both a judgment upon these people already for approving of these very things through a statist ideology that was only bearing its expected fruit, and the cause of further evils that God had intended on sending upon a people who are evil enough to approve of and support human civil government. 

Systematic injustices as a cause for judgment 

It was thus necessarily a statist scene that the prophets had came upon to deliver their message. They preached to a people whose main way of turning away from God was to trust in systems of human government and their rulers, lawmakers, and armies. It was not just a condemnation of the immorality, injustices, or personal sins of people that the prophets had brought a warning of further judgment against, such that these things were going on without statism in the picture, but more specifically an immorality and corruption that was bound up with the political landscape. An immoral people will always set up a system of human rulers as their chief way of acting immorally, and these systems may in turn further degrade the morality of society. But the ministry of the prophets was never really just of some society of immoral people, separate from the political context in which these immoral people lived in and had created. This judgment that they preached upon a people, whether explaining the present one or the coming one, was precisely because the people have turned away from God by whoring themselves out to false gods, eg., human kings and their armies. The prophets were sent by God to preach a message of repentance to various people, towns, and cities, precisely for the immoralities, injustices, and evils that are intrinsic to the statist systems of the world. These societies that the prophets were rebuking were full of men—both the rulers themselves and their apologists among the population—“who turn justice into wormwood and cast righteousness to the ground” (Amos 5:7). In other words, like our wicked statist societies today that pervert everything that is true about law and justice, these people had either supported systems of human rule or had taken it upon themselves to dominate others, both equally a sin. These were places that had human rulers, human lawmakers, law enforcement officers, standing armies, and people who supported their existence and claimed they were essential to society, just as our people do today who say “back the blue” and “support the troops” and “go vote” who make the whole system of invasion of liberties possible through their idolatry and worldly political ideology. 

Bringing the message to the rulers

Though we should always conceive of state rulers and their evils as judgment upon the people for their sinful ideology of statism that deserves to be punished by having to live under the terrorists who they trusted in for their salvation, we should not forget that these people who carry out this judgment are nevertheless evil too and are only God’s “servants” and “ministers” in this sense of the term. Indeed, they “serve” God well because they are evil and highly capable of bringing terror upon a people who deserve to be in bondage for their lack of faith in the Lord to save them and be their King. State rule is thus more so the effect of a statist people than it is a bandit gang randomly conquering a people. State rule is possible only over a statist people who beg for it. We know this, for one, because God would protect us from being dominated by these men if we trusted in Him alone, and secondly, because He is the one who sends them as judgment for this very sin. Statist societies are not full of victims, but full of people whose statist philosophy makes them deserving of the bondage they have found themselves in.

For these reasons, it is always more sensible that we deliver the message of repentance to the people first, for they are the ones who have gotten themselves into statist bondage; the rulers themselves, while also being evil plunderers, are more so in the position of carrying out God’s will that a statist people should fall under His judgment for their abandonment of His Kingship and Kingdom. Nevertheless, the rulers are also (of course) complicit in the evils. While the people support them through their belief in the alleged need for human rulers, they are the ones who actually strap boots on and do these dirty deeds and walk the evil path that God calls us away from (Psalm 1 and Proverbs 1 come to mind). Naturally then, the prophets were not only taking this message of repentance to the people themselves, whose wicked hearts allow for these systems to function and whose repentance alone would turn things back around, but to the rulers who actually administer these systems and carry out the evils on a practicing level. They were being harshly rebuked for their brutal plundering and enslavement of other men, which continues to this day. 

“Hear now, O leaders of Jacob, you rulers of the house of Israel. Should you not know justice? You hate good and love evil. You tear the skin from my people and strip the flesh from their bones. You eat the flesh of my people after stripping off their skin and breaking their bones. You chop them up like flesh for the cooking pot, like meat in a cauldron” (Micah 3:1-3). 

They not only rebuked the statist public, whose sins made them complicit in the political systems of the day and brought them into bondage to these rulers, but bravely took this message to the corrupted ruling elite too, undeterred by dungeons and dens of lions. 

“I am filled with power by the Spirit of the LORD, with justice and courage, to declare to Jacob his transgression and to Israel his sin. Now hear this, O leaders of the house of Jacob and rulers of the house of Israel, who despise justice and pervert all that is right, who build Zion with bloodshed and Jerusalem with iniquity. Her leaders judge for a bribe, her priests teach for a price, and her prophets practice divination for money” (Micah 3:8-11). 

It was these political evils that were practiced by the men who actually take up political office and by the men who support the existence of these offices, all which are always a part of every system of human rule, that were both a form of judgment upon the people while they lasted and the cause of further judgment upon the whole evil systems themselves.

“Therefore, because of you, Zion will be plowed like a field, Jerusalem will become a heap of rubble” (Micah 3:12). 

Cause and effect

The real need for the prophets was to explain to people the cause and effect nature of the universe that was created by God, which has it that men cannot violate His Law—such as the setting up of false gods that statism entails—without reaping negative effects for doing so. It always easy enough for a man to observe that he does not like the society he has found himself in. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it’s getting harder to “make ends meet” and buy groceries or pay for a home. It isn’t much harder to see that the “Justice Department” is corrupt, that the “Defense Department” perpetuates wars, that “law enforcement” are nothing but revenuers working the plantation to bring back money for the crown, and that the whole government is run by satan-worshiping pedophiles who control the whole world system. Most people indeed find our situation lamentable and they complain of all these things.

But these complaints among the people, Christian or not, aren’t always clearly connected to man’s lust for political power — to sin. As much as men may complain about the consequences of their sin, they don’t always realize the causal reality at play, and thus many men hate the effect of their sin as much as they do repentance for these sins. It is always much harder then to explain to men the reason they have found themselves in the current situation, especially because it requires that they confess their complicity in it. The role of the prophet was to point out that sin had led to bondage. They were there to teach men that everything they were experiencing was of their own doing. That the evils that had come down on their head had come from their own evil hearts that supported these systems in principle, that these injustices and perversions of law that had manifested on a society-wide scale were but the result of their own statist ideology that was unjust, immoral, and perverted in its mere theoretical form, which had now grown up into the monster that anyone who half and brain and a heart should have been able to realize from its very wicked inception.

The injustices and lawlessness of statism

In summary, it was the corrupted political beliefs of men and the political systems they had created that prophets were sent and that God had a reason to bring judgment against a people, who were so turn around from His Law that they were defending evil systems as “necessary” for “public good.” The backward morality of many people in our time, as expressed by the prophets before, is probably most familiar in the prophet Isaiah, who popularly-enough wrote “woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who turn darkness to light and light to darkness, who replace bitter with sweet and sweet with bitter” (Isaiah 5:20). This is what we see today when men call human government good and just and lawful and suppose that God’s anarchistic society without human rulers is the one that is evil, unjust, and lawless.

It was almost always a departure from truth, justice, and law, which is always present anytime that men turn to human rulers to administer their social affairs for them, that God had sent prophets to criticize and preach repentance to a given people, very often a hardheaded people who didn’t want to hear that their own sins had led to their bondage. The scene that the prophets came upon with a word from God was almost always the type of perversions of law, justice, and morality that are only found in a statist society, which substitutes violence and theft for the service and freewill offerings that make up God’s Kingdom order.

It was these very things—man’s choice of state violence over voluntary service and love of his neighbor—that had worked to separate God from these social orders, who were then declining and under judgment for that reason. As Isaiah witnessed, 

“Your iniquities have built barriers between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He does not hear. For your hands are stained with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, and your tongue mutters injustice. No one calls for justice; no one pleads his case honestly. They rely on empty pleas; they tell lies; they conceive mischief and give birth to iniquity. They hatch the eggs of vipers and weave a spider’s web. Whoever eats their eggs will die; crack one open, and a viper is hatched. Their cobwebs cannot be made into clothing, and they cannot cover themselves with their works. Their deeds are sinful deeds, and acts of violence are in their hands. Their feet run to evil; they are swift to shed innocent blood. Their thoughts are sinful thoughts; ruin and destruction lie in their wake. The way of peace they have not known, and there is no justice in their tracks. They have turned them into crooked paths; no one who treads on them will know peace. Therefore justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us. We hope for light, but there is darkness; for brightness, but we walk in gloom. Like the blind, we feel our way along the wall, groping like those without eyes. We stumble at midday as in the twilight; among the vigorous we are like the dead. We all growl like bears and moan like doves. We hope for justice, but find none, for salvation, but it is far from us. For our transgressions are multiplied before You, and our sins testify against us. Our transgressions are indeed with us, and we know our iniquities: rebelling and denying the LORD, turning away from our God, speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering lies from the heart. So justice is turned away, and righteousness stands at a distance. For truth has stumbled in the public square, and honesty cannot enter. Truth is missing, and whoever turns from evil becomes prey. The LORD looked and was displeased that there was no justice” (Isaiah 59:2-15). 

This scene of lawlessness and injustice, which statists tell us is only comes about when there aren’t human rulers to save us from “anarchy,” was also the assessment given to us by the minor prophets, whose shorter books were often more devastating in tearing down the statism and idolatry and wasted no time getting to the point. The vision given to Habakkuk was the same vision as given to all the other prophets: that the societies before them were corrupted by evil men, both the rulers and those who set them up, who perverted all truth and justice in society and, like today, surely still called their lawless and unjust systems “law enforcement” and “justice departments” and other such misnomers.

“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). 

As always in the prophets, it was the plunderers—both the people directly partaking in these systems and those who approve of it by thinking that taxation is necessary to society—who judgment is coming upon. 

“Woe to him who amasses what is not his and makes himself rich with many loans! How long will this go on?’ Will not your creditors suddenly arise and those who disturb you awaken? Then you will become their prey. Because you have plundered many nations, the remnant of the people will plunder you— because of your bloodshed against man and your violence against the land, the city, and all their dwellers. Woe to him who builds his house by unjust gain, to place his nest on high and escape the hand of disaster! You have plotted shame for your house by cutting off many peoples and forfeiting your life. For the stones will cry out from the wall, and the rafters will echo it from the woodwork. Woe to him who builds a city with bloodshed and establishes a town by iniquity!” (Habakkuk 2:6-12). 

It is the very type of people who occupy seats of political power who God brings judgment upon for the evils that are inherent to all systems of human rule, often after making use of their evils as judgment upon the wicked-hearted people who allowed them to exist in their sin. The prophets tell these rulers and those involved that judgment comes upon them “because of your bloodshed against men and your violence against the land, the city, and all their dwellers” (Habakkuk 2:17). Who could say this isn’t relevant to state rulers in our time? Human government is founded in bloodshed and violence against men. Statism is the most wicked philosophy ever, and is characteristic of man’s sin. This is why it must be judged, both the people themselves who are made to live under a State as punishment for their statism, and the state rulers who eventually become the target of God’s judgment, which in turn often takes the people down with the ship again.  

Throughout the books of the prophets, it is always injustices (eg., state rulers who tax people, cage them, kill them, hustle them through their courthouses to extort them) that have provoked the desire by God to bring judgment upon a people and send a prophet to warn them in the chance they might turn back. Returning to Isaiah, we have seen how the first chapter of the first dedicated book of a prophet in the Bible covers this very topic. 

“See how the faithful city has become a harlot! She once was full of justice; righteousness resided within her, but now only murderers!” (Isaiah 1:21). 

The actions that God hated to see were the very things that still take place all over the world today, where men exercise authority over other men and pretend to be their servants, all while they are plunderers who are keeping these men as their tax-slaves. It was these societies where men run socialist systems that operate under the guise of “we the people” or the “common good,” but who exist only to loot the masses and enrich a class of people who are friends and beneficiaries of the political plunder machine, that incited God’s anger.

We need to be sure to defend this point, lest the statists try to make God’s judgment into something that came down for some generic conception of “sin” that has nothing to do with the political sin of raising up human rulers and championing the associated evils and injustices that come with these systems. It was always seek human-kings and protectors that God said was turning away from Him and would bring evils upon a people as judgment (Samuel 8). We can’t let the statists try to dodge the charge that the prophets were preaching precisely against statism, and not just a perversion of law and justice to be understood outside of these political systems that are the main ways of perpetuating legal plunder and corruption in society. It is these people—presidents, congressmen, judges, law soldiers, law enforcement officers, bureaucrats, etc—who God pronounces judgment upon. 

“Woe to those who enact unjust statutes and issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of fair treatment and withhold justice from the oppressed of My people, to make widows their prey and orphans their plunder” (Isaiah 10:1-2). 

It is societies where human rulers pretend to be the “representatives” of “the people,” whether overtly socialist regimes or the deceitfully socialist “constitutional republics,” where the ideas of the people and the practices of the rulers arouse God to anger for not having kept the commands to love our neighbors, but instead opting to outsource our duties to others to people who not only do not take care of those who are in need, but who prey on the poor for taxes, fines, fees, incarceration, and murder. 

“For among My people are wicked men; they watch like fowlers lying in wait; they set a trap to catch men. Like cages full of birds, so their houses are full of deceit. Therefore they have become powerful and rich. They have grown fat and sleek, and have excelled in the deeds of the wicked. They have not taken up the cause of the fatherless, that they might prosper; nor have they defended the rights of the needy” (Jeremiah 5:26-28). 

It was almost always great perversions of justice—carried out by the rulers of the day to be sure—that led God to send a prophet to preach the word to the people that the judgment that has come upon them is the result of their evils, namely those of doing violence against others and operating evil systems of human civil government. We see a classic example of these things being the very visions and callings that God gave to the prophets in Ezekiel 22: 

“And the word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘Son of man, say to her, ‘In the day of indignation, you are a land that has not been cleansed, upon which no rain has fallen.’  The conspiracy of the princes in her midst is like a roaring lion tearing its prey. They devour the people, seize the treasures and precious things, and multiply the widows within her. Her priests do violence to My law and profane My holy things. They make no distinction between the holy and the common, and they fail to distinguish between the clean and the unclean. They disregard My Sabbaths, so that I am profaned among them. Her officials within her are like wolves tearing their prey, shedding blood, and destroying lives for dishonest gain.  Her prophets whitewash these deeds by false visions and lying divinations, saying, ‘This is what the Lord GOD says,’ when the LORD has not spoken. The people of the land have practiced extortion and committed robbery. They have oppressed the poor and needy and have exploited the foreign resident without justice” (Ezekiel 22:23-29). 

Those who do evils against other men, whether they carry them out directly as “law enforcement” agents or indirectly through shouting “back the blue” from the sidelines, are inviting all these same evils back upon themselves. As always, the prophets make it clear that these evils, and the scarcity of men who could identify them, are the cause of judgment. 

“I searched for a man among them to repair the wall and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, so that I should not destroy it. But I found no one. So I have poured out My indignation upon them and consumed them with the fire of My fury. I have brought their ways down upon their own heads, declares the Lord GOD” (Ezekiel 22:30-31). 

In so many instances where the voice of the Lord had come upon a prophet to deliver to a people, this message was entirely inseparable from the corruption of their societies that had been carried out both by human rulers and those who support them, things like violent enforcement of man-made decrees and corruption and inflation of the money that are inevitable anytime people set up systems of human civil government. 

“The voice of the LORD calls out to the city (and it is sound wisdom to fear Your name): ‘Heed the rod and the One who ordained it. Can I forget any longer, O house of the wicked, the treasures of wickedness and the short ephah, which is accursed? Can I excuse dishonest scales or bags of false weights? For the wealthy of the city are full of violence, and its residents speak lies; their tongues are deceitful in their mouths. Therefore I am striking you severely, to ruin you because of your sins” (Micah 6:9-13). 

In the shorter prophetic books, like Micah or Habakkuk, you often see the message even faster than in the longer books of the major prophets. The message of the minor prophets like Micah are almost wholly focused on repenting for the moral and ethical failures in society, which certainly must include setting up violent, plunderous human civil governments that are funded through taxation as opposed to the voluntaryist nature of God’s Kingdom order. As always, Micah was rebuking the idolatry that leads to a people’s bondage, which men still practice today in the form of voting, apologizing for the existence of human government, and calling on these systems to save their societies. 

In a coming series, we will analyze the specific ministries of each of the prophets with recorded books and show that in so many instance where they were sent by God to preach repentance and judgment upon a people, that this was the scene: society-wide evils as perpetrated by the political system of the day, which was carried out by men who actually strapped boots to their feet to enforce it as well as by the evil-hearted populace whose ideology and apologia are always necessary to their existence.