[This is part 8 in a series “Who Were the Biblical Prophets and What Were They Preaching?” See part one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, nine, ten]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

After setting the stage with a handful of articles that have explained the nature of judgment, political corruption, and persecution of the prophets, as well as a lengthy article showing some major and consistent themes of the prophets, we can finally get to the meat of this article series and analyze in detail the nature of the divine preaching missions that the prophets were sent on by God in order to further a case for Christian Anarchism out of the books of the Biblical prophets. We can show, without a doubt, that the specific missions the prophets were sent on by God were to rebuke the corruption inherent to all statist societies, like the very ones we still live under today in mankind’s ongoing failure to heed this thousands-of-years-old message from God. 

I do not necessarily aim here to detail all the teachings of the prophets and provide all their lessons, so much as I wish to defend the thesis here by looking at the specific missions the prophets were sent on by God, often which occur at the beginning of their books or the chapter divisions that were added later, so as to show that the mission of a prophet is an anti-statist one that warns men of impending judgment for the sins of statism, eg., raising up other gods than the Lord and supporting the theft and murder that is necessary to the existence of these institutions that operate on compulsory taxation as opposed to the freewill offerings of God’s Kingdom order. Often it will be necessary to show what the prophets were teaching anyway. But when possible, I will attempt to show what the specific mission and message was that God gave to the prophets to give to the people, so to make the case that God’s main issue with mankind throughout the history of the mankind and the world, from Babylon to Egypt to Rome to the United States, the main reason that He sent prophets out to preach a word to the people, has been their sinful erection of political plunder systems and all the evils, tyrannies, violence, bloodshed, and general plunder that have always come along with them.

This scene of violence has been God’s complaint against mankind since before the days of the Great Flood, when God saw “the earth was filled with violence” (Genesis 6:11-13). And the main perpetrators of such violence have always been human rulers, who in the twentieth century alone killed hundreds of millions of people and have legalized their violence into “law.” It has not been anarchists, which the Lord commands us to be, who have carried out these acts; this has been one of the greatest lies of history. It has been archists. Thus, the people God was rebuking were archists, ie., state rulers, who, with the help of an idolatrous people who put them into power out of some perceived necessity for them, have always been the main people in any society who corrupt and pervert His Law.

Though there is much more to be taken from the prophets than what I will cover here, to look at the God-given role of the prophets each time they were to speak the words to a people that the Lord was giving them provides a strong defense for showing the very basis of God’s indignation with a people who had gone down the road of statism by showing what it was the originally prompted the prophets to begin to speak their words. It was always a political message—repent from the sin of seeking human rulers as your saviors—that made up the essence of prophetic ministry in the Scriptures.

In this article, I demonstrate this thesis with a thorough look at the all the missions given by God to the so-called “minor” prophets, whose shorter books often make it even easier to show that the Biblical prophets were men who, with the voice of the Lord on their side, condemned statism—the organization of society via the political means as opposed to the voluntaristic means prescribed by God—as sin, preached repentance for this sin, and pronounced judgment upon a people who refused to turn back from these wicked ways. 

Just as Jesus was telling people that “unless you repent, you too will all perish” (Luke 13:3), so the prophets before His earthly ministry were going around warning people that destruction awaits those who won’t turn back from their sins and idolatries, which were namely of a political nature: a lust for rulers, adultery with armies, moral approval of political violence and theft, the injustices and lawlessness of statist systems, and all the other evils bound up with such worldly systems of human government. The prophets were rebuking all the same idolatry present in America society today, where millions of people say, “back the blue,” “support the troops,” or “vote Trump.”

Hosea and Israel’s idolatry 

Though Hosea is thought to be one of the earliest writing prophets, Biblical canon has him listed as the first of the “minor” prophets, which has more to do with the length of their sacred texts rather than the content. For Hosea was preaching the same essential message given as all the other prophets: that the people of these political societies, just like ours today, are all a bunch of idolaters who have whored themselves out to human rulers and their militaries to “protect” them, rather than to trust in God alone as your King and protector, and that men will pay the price for this spiritual adultery with another kingdom than God’s.  

The mission given to the prophet Hosea was highly relevant to the main point we have been trying to demonstrate here that God’s main grievance with a given people, which leads Him to send out prophets to call for repentance and warn of judgment should it not be forthcoming, is that they are Babylonian whores who confide in other kings and kingdoms than the Lord and His Kingdom. 

“When the LORD first spoke through Hosea, He told him, ‘Go, take a prostitute as your wife and have children of adultery, because this land is flagrantly prostituting itself by departing from the LORD’” (Hosea 1:2). 

Just as Americans today, these people had played the harlot and pursued other lovers than the Lord their God. No doubt, they were saying the equivalent of “support the troops” and “back the blue” that we hear in our time. Statism is an ancient sin that is characteristic and definitive of man’s rebellion against God. Notwithstanding the rarity of this observation, nowhere else is man’s sin more evident than in his erection of human rulers and man-made systems of government, which is the main thing a man can do to defy God’s kingship. The idolatry for human government we see in America today is no different from that rebuked by the prophets. All statists are people who have no faith or trust in the Lord and begin to trust in human rulers for their provision of welfare, protection, and law and order. They do not believe that God will keep them safe from their enemies, so they place their trust in worldly-human institutions like a legislature or the military to do it for them, which was the main sin of the Israelites under Samuel who had lost their trust in God to do these things for them (1 Samuel 8).

The story of Hosea taking a prostitute as his wife was to illustrate these very ideas of statism. Hosea was sent to marry an adulteress to symbolize God’s love of His people despite the statist adultery and idolatry among such as people who “turn to other gods” (Hosea 3:1). The prostitution of his wife Gomer was symbolic of the very whoredom of statists today, who, rather than trust in God alone, sleep around (sometimes literally) with presidents, soldiers, police, congressmen, senators, judges, and the statist system as a whole, which they look to as their protectors and saviors. Hosea is more or less in the position of God, learning how to love a whorish people who demonstrate their lack of faith in Him by looking to Assyrians and other mighty men to have a relationship with. Hosea represents God’s mercy and patience even with a statist people, who are undeniably whores in the Biblical sense of the term, and who for that reason are entirely deserving of judgment. 

In another instance when the word of the Lord had come upon the prophet that he was to speak to the people, it was decidedly another instance of God’s disapproval with the statist political order of the people and the land.

“Hear the word of the LORD, O children of Israel, for the LORD has a case against the people of the land: ‘There is no truth, no loving devotion, and no knowledge of God in the land! Cursing and lying, murder and stealing, and adultery are rampant; one act of bloodshed follows another” (Hosea 4:1-2). 

If a reader here were only acquainted with the watered-down teachings of the modern church that (by design) strip words like the gospel and salvation of their political understanding, images might come to mind of just a land of private criminals, petty thieves, and sexual promiscuity, all which may have also been going on in the land. But we can be sure that this condemnation also had to do with the adultery that is statism, ie., seeking human rulers as your gods and protectors, not just spousal infidelity. A figurative meaning of the Hebrew word “naaph,” which is what is translated into “to commit adultery,” is to apostasize, ie., to slip away from God and start trusting in other gods (eg., human kings and military commanders). Men act as adulterers when they vote for human rulers to be their fathers and husbands who claim to watch over them and who dole out benefits, paid by robbing their neighbors, for their welfare, which is but a trap to bring them into bondage. They were supposed to make the Lord their King, who teaches to “call no man father,” but they went and whored themselves out to other ruling fathers of the earth instead. Men commit adultery when they seek the kingdoms of the world rather than seek to live under God’s civil covenant. It is this type of statist adultery, where men trust in men rather than God, that the prophets could say that a people had a “spirit of prostitution” (Hosea 5:4). This was not just some assertion that a people had turned to the streets to find a prostitute for the night, but a metaphor for a people like ours today who had placed their faith in the State and its agents for their salvation. Statists are the Biblical definition of a whore and adulterer. Statists are apostates par excellence. God, after all, is our King, and the main way that He is defied is by setting up men as your kings.

The false “Christian” conversion of statists

We might anticipate people who will counter the accusation that Americans are perfect candidates for being the unfaithful, statist “whores” described by the prophet Hosea with the weak claim that “Americans are Christians” and that this is a “Christian country,” unlike the pagan kingdoms of old. However, Scripture often addresses people who rebel against God in deed or matter-of-factly, rather than through their words or verbal professions. Very often, those who commit this “adultery” by pledging allegiance to human government are depicted as people who still profess the name of the Lord with their lips. It was their hearts, not their mouths, that were far from the Lord. They still claimed some vague notion of “believing in God” or even said unknowingly evil things like “God bless America.” The point is that their deeds and actions proved otherwise, which is the very fruit that we are to know men by (Matt 7:16-20).

This was also true for the people Hosea preached against. They denied God not in words—just as nominal Christians in America do not deny Him with their lips—but through their actions against Him. As a result, judgment was headed their way, despite their belief that they were a “Christian nation” that held Christ as their King, all while seeking other kings to rule over them. God is not impressed by people who merely claim to know Him; He wants to see good fruit, and a statist people only have rotten fruit. 

“The people have transgressed My covenant and rebelled against My law. Israel cries out to Me, ‘O our God, we know You!’ But Israel has rejected good; an enemy will pursue him” (Hosea 8:2). 

There are always people in these statist societies who “profess to know God, but by their actions they deny Him” (Titus 1:16). There are people who profess with their lips that they know the Lord, huddle into the farcical “churches” of the world and pretend they are God-fearing men, and even who may read their Bibles from time to time. Yet they turn around and exalt men as their kings and governors and lawmakers, take it upon themselves to make legislative decrees, violently enforce them, and man the cages these evil plunder systems. Contrary to the professing Christians today who present “atheists” as the big threat to society, we could even go as far as to say that statist societies, especially prior to the twentieth century, are rarely ever overtly “atheistic” socialist ones, such as seen with the communist phenomenon in the early to late twentieth century. Most of the time, the wicked statist regimes of the world consist of “conservative Christians” who take the Lord’s name in vain. These statist societies are full of people who say “Christ is King,” but who seek to elect human kings and gods to the political office of worldly kingdoms. As Hosea charged, “They set up kings, but not by Me. They make princes, but without My approval” (Hosea 8:4).

God has judgment planned for all statist societies, and the consequences for the sin of statism are not averted by having some men in office or among the population take the Lord’s name in vain. Having a statist people merely say some corrupted conception of Jesus’s Kingship like “Christ is King of the United States” does not satisfy God. The Lord does not relent in bringing disaster upon a wicked statist people simply because their society consists of some men who claim to know Him but who do not do as He says. These false converts have always been around, and they don’t keep God from His plans to judge those who, in their deeds of seeking other kingdoms, prove that they hate God. He still sees them for who they really are: statists who are in rebellion against Him through their worldly-political acts.

“Though they offer sacrifices as gifts to Me, and though they eat the meat, the LORD does not accept them. Now He will remember their iniquity and punish their sins: They will return to Egypt. Israel has forgotten his Maker and built palaces; Judah has multiplied its fortified cities. But I will send fire upon their cities, and it will consume their citadels” (Hosea 8:13-14). 

Especially with the example of Israel, we see how people were always claiming to know the Lord while actually chasing after the kingdoms of the world, which were actions that God did not hesitate to judge just because a people said they knew Him. God does not hesitate to judge a statist people because they say they are Christians; if anything this is a greater reason to bring the Babylonian boot down on them to teach them a lesson in the sin of state worshiping and taking the Lord’s name in vain (see, for instance, the people in Matthew 7 who said “Lord, Lord” but didn’t do His will; the “whitewashed tombs” that Jesus called the Pharisees in Matthew 23 for their outward piety and inward evil; or Judah in Jeremiah 7 that claimed God’s protection but practiced injustices). God always speaks about all the liberation from bondage that He had done for a people, only for them to go trust in human rulers as their liberators, while still claiming to know their God, like the people today who say evil things like “Jesus is my savior and Trump is my president.” As God says, 

“I lifted the yoke from their necks and bent down to feed them. Will they not return to the land of Egypt and be ruled by Assyria because they refused to repent? A sword will flash through their cities; it will destroy the bars of their gates and consume them in their own plans. My people are bent on turning from Me. Though they call to the Most High, He will by no means exalt them” (Hosea 11:4-7). 

The main complaint given by the prophets is almost always this same message: people who claimed to know God rebelled against Him by placing their faith in other gods to fight their battles for them and provide military protection and welfare for them, and who were now facing judgment for this sin and rebellion that is inherent to trusting in these plunderous, man-made kingdoms of the world. They brought a charge against a people who had “multiplied lies and violence” and who had “made a covenant with Assyria” (Hosea 12:1). As always, God’s concern was with the actions of the people, not their vain professions of faith. “The LORD has a charge to bring against Judah. He will punish Jacob according to his ways and repay him according to his deeds” (Hosea 12:2). 

It is this type of calling—preaching the connection between the sin and idolatry of statism and the judgment and captivity that comes upon a people—that is more or less given to all the rest of the prophets who have dedicated books. The prophet Hosea called people to repent from their idolatry or face captivity to the Assyrians. The main way that men turn against God is not just to turn to “idols” or “gods” in a way that is disconnected from any political sense of these terms, such that they had just chosen the wrong, pagan religion out of thousands to choose from (this is an argument often employed by “atheists” to reject the God of the Bible as some arbitrary tyrant who sentences to hell all those unlikely enough to find Him among an assortment of other equally-valid religions). Rather, men always rebel against God by trusting in human kings and militaries to “save” them, hence the episode recorded in Samuel 8, which gave way to all the kings of Judah and Israel, which eventually gave way to exile and bondage. It is statism—the belief in human government and the practice of ruling over other men—that is really chief among man’s sins. Notwithstanding the “Christians” in America today who compartmentalize their politics as distinct from their “faith,” which they see as nothing more than their spiritual beliefs about God or the afterlife, it is the politics that men hold—specifically their support for worldly kingdoms—that are characteristic of their rebellion and sin against God. A man’s politics is his religion, and religion is politics. It has only been under the illegitimate separation of these concepts in an age of hyper-compartmentalization of everything that has made it seem possible that one could be a “Christian statist” without contradicting themselves, and that calling yourself a “Christian” means nothing more than some vague confession that you “believe in God.” In truth, the politics of statism is the main way that men show themselves to decidedly not be followers of the Lord, but instead adherents to a worldly philosophy of political violence that works against God’s Kingdom and has not come from the Lord.

It is these things—telling people they have whored themselves out to the Egyptians for their salvation through their rulers and armies and bureaucrats—that the prophets had come to show people and even directly represent before them. Again, this is why Hosea was instructed by God to marry an unfaithful woman as a way of symbolizing Israel’s adultery, which was always about a people whoring themselves out to human rulers and militaries as their protectors rather than trusting in God alone, which is exactly what men do today when they seek the protection of national armies and police forces for their “freedom” and “safety,” which, as the prophets teach, only brings the opposite of those things. 

The very thing that the prophet Hosea called people to repent from was their sinful, statist belief that human rulers and their armies can save and protect a people — a lesson completely lost on the majority of Americans today and the rest of the people around of the world, who say that they cannot do without these institutions and be free and safe. They needed to renounce their statism and belief that political rulers serve them and that they are permitted to serve these institutions themselves. 

“Return, O Israel, to the LORD your God, for you have stumbled by your iniquity. Bring your confessions and return to the LORD. Say to Him: ‘Take away all our iniquity and receive us graciously, that we may present the fruit of our lips. Assyria will not save us, nor will we ride on horses. We will never again say, ‘Our gods!’ to the work of our own hands’” (Hosea 14:1-3). 

The main type of repentance that men need to perform within themselves is a repentance of the worldly political idea of statism, which says that “Assyria will save us” or that “we need to run for office to fix the country.” They need to embrace the Godarchist society, which is a society that is absent of human civil government and has made the Lord their only King. They need to turn away from their sinful reliance of government militaries and police to “protect and serve” them — to save them.

Warnings of judgment, calls for repentance, and restoration in Joel

The prophet Joel (830 BC), the second of the minor prophets in Biblical canon, was preaching a coming judgment in a time of pre-exile. Joel was sent to “blow the ram’s horn” and “sound the alarm” in warning of the coming Day of the Lord, or in other words a day of judgment from God upon a people for their sins. This is something we should still be doing today for the statist society in America, where these idolatrous people are so proud they think they are right by God and exempt from judgment. We need to be telling them that statism is the path of sin and that they must turn back and seek God’s Kingdom or be destroyed with the empire as it comes crashing down. This is the very nature of prophetic ministry: to warn people of judgment (eg., economic collapse, social disintegration, domestic tyranny, foreign invasion) for sins like voting for human rulers and trusting in these people to feed, protect, and provide for us. Though our people are too proud and patriotic to repent today, this is nevertheless what the Lord wants us to tell them, even as the Day of the Lord approaches. 

“‘Yet even now,’ declares the LORD, ‘return to Me with all your heart, with fasting, weeping, and mourning’” (Joel 2:12). 

As much as we have a tendency to emphasize the pronouncements of judgment upon a people and their need to repent, we cannot fail to also emphasize restoration as part of God’s plan for a people who do repent, lest we make God out to be nothing but an angry person bent on punishing others without good reason. All too many people get caught up on the “negative” side of things, almost as if they want things to go bad for a people. But the reverse side of the coin of judgment is God’s mercy and willingness to relent of the disaster He had planned to bring upon a people who repent. 

“So rend your hearts and not your garments, and return to the LORD your God. For He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in loving devotion. And He relents from sending disaster. Who knows? He may turn and relent” (Joel 2:13-14). 

Just as much as we see God’s willingness to bring judgment upon a people, which often comes internally by the corrupt and unjust societies that statists must endure or externally by invading armies who show these domestic sinners what it’s like to have the boot on their own necks for once instead of just the neck of their neighbor’s or some foreigner’s, we also see messages of restoration for a repentant people. “Then the LORD became jealous for His land, and He spared His people” (Joel 2:18). Whereas God may plan to send some evil statist army upon a people, He is also willing to be merciful to a people who repent of their own like evils of setting up police states and militaries as their source of protection. “The Northern army I will drive away from you” (Joel 2:20). Just as judgment serves as a proof of God, which is meant to lead them back to the Lord and wean them off their reliance on human government, so does God’s willingness to be merciful and restore a people and, say, feed a people who before their repentance deserved to suffer a famine for their socialist practices (Joel 2:27, 3:17).

God is not just a God of judgment; He is a God of instruction in right living and avoiding judgment, whether one has to turn the hard way by finding themselves living as captives under a plunderous police state or the easy way by listening and turning back from their sins. God is never just judging a people who didn’t deserve it and couldn’t have known any other way, but is always counseling men, through His word, on the way out of the bondage they have found themselves into due to their own sins and refusal to process the knowledge given by the Lord.

“Seek good, not evil, so that you may live. And the LORD, the God of Hosts, will be with you, as you have claimed. Hate evil and love good; establish justice in the gate. Perhaps the LORD, the God of Hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph” (Amos 5:14-15). 

To avoid judgment, however, a people must heed this word and repent from the idolatry, theft, covetousness, and murder that is inseparable from their support for human civil government. Should a people repent and begin to seek God’s Kingdom, the Lord offers a restoration of their society as a free people under God’s sole rulership. Should a people continue down the wicked statist path of sin, God will keep them in bondage to men as a punishment for their refusal to be ruled by Him alone. 

Amos’s warnings of exile for injustices

Amos (750 BC) was another pre-exile prophet trying to warn the people of a coming judgment (exile) for the vast injustices and idolatry in their society, all which were surely indictments against the political system of the day, both its rulers and supporters. The prophets of God were often from humble beginnings. Amos was a sheep herder (Amos 1:1) who was called by God to prophesy to Israel of their sins (Amos 7:15). 

The prophet Amos had come to preach in the same statist setting as the other prophets, where a ruling elite, assisted by a wicked-hearted people whose immorality and sin empowers these people, had corrupted society with their injustices and violence. God brings the same indictment as always:

“The Lord GOD has spoken— who will not prophesy? Proclaim to the citadels of Ashdod and to the citadels of Egypt: ‘Assemble on the mountains of Samaria; see the great unrest in the city and the acts of oppression in her midst.’ ‘For they know not how to do right,’ declares the LORD. ‘They store up violence and destruction in their citadels” (Amos 3:8-10). 

As always, this statism (ie., political violence) being practiced invites enemies and invaders as God’s judgment upon these people — contra the typical statist narrative that the only way to keep the bad guys away is to be a practicing statist yourself and erect a military and police force by robbing your neighbors. 

“Therefore this is what the Lord GOD says:  ‘An enemy will surround the land; he will pull down your strongholds and plunder your citadels’” (Amos 3:11). 

The judgment that the prophets preached as either already being upon a people or soon to come upon them is one that is meant by God to be harsh enough to turn people back to Him. But as we know, people are hardheaded and hate the truth, like all the statists today who reject the anarchistic Gospel of the Kingdom of God and continue to sing the praises of worldly empires instead and preach salvation through the voting booth. Amos himself knew this and was silenced for his prophetic ministry against the people of his day, who didn’t want to hear what he had to say. “Do not prophesy against Israel; do not preach against the house of Isaac’s” (Amos 7:16). They didn’t want to hear that their people will “fall by the sword” or “will surely go into exile” (Amos 7:17). 

God knows that despite all the judgment He brings upon a people, which often just comes in the form of all the injustices, lawlessness, plunder, murder, and incarceration that they must face at the hand of “their” own government, most of the time people continue in their old statist ways, refusing to repent for these sins. 

“‘I afflicted all your cities with cleanness of teeth and all your towns with lack of bread, yet you did not return to Me,’ declares the LORD. ‘I also withheld the rain from you when the harvest was three months away. I sent rain on one city but withheld it from another. One field received rain; another without rain withered. People staggered from city to city for water to drink, but they were not satisfied; yet you did not return to Me,’ declares the LORD. ‘I struck you with blight and mildew in your growing gardens and vineyards; the locust devoured your fig and olive trees, yet you did not return to Me,’ declares the LORD. ‘I sent plagues among you like those of Egypt; I killed your young men with the sword, along with your captured horses. I filled your nostrils with the stench of your camp, yet you did not return to Me,’ declares the LORD. ‘Some of you I overthrew as I overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and you were like a firebrand snatched from a blaze, yet you did not return to Me,’ declares the LORD” (Amos 4:6-11). 

At any rate, if no one listens to the prophets of God warning that the evils of their statist societies will turn them into a cursed people who are under divine judgment and repent upon hearing this prophecy, the judgment itself is meant to lead people to repentance the hard way: through going into bondage to men or being absolutely dominated by tyrants and state rulers, which will then ideally lead people to question their complicity in their own bondage, confess their sin, and cry out to the Lord in repentance to be saved and delivered from the hands of men. If men don’t want to repent the easy way, perhaps because the peak days of the empire (approximately 1950-2000 for the American system) blinded them to the reality that things will soon go south, then there’s only one option left: “Prepare to meet your God” (Amos 4:12). 

The societies the prophets were rebuking were statist ones that had corrupted everything that was good about God’s natural, anarchistic order that everyone thought was “lawless” and replaced it with a political plunder system. They were preaching against a system and a people “who turn justice into wormwood and cast righteousness to the ground” (Amos 5:7), against system-makers who “trample on the poor and exact from him a tax of grain” (Amos 5:11) and who “oppress the righteous by taking bribes [and] deprive the poor of justice in the gate” (Amos 5:12).

What God wants is for a people to do justice and turn away from their unjust, immoral, and evil support for human civil government, and instead begin to administer the Kingdom of God, which funds its charitable network on freewill offerings of families congregated into this network through servant-ministers who make up the “government” of God and do not exercise authority over other men, as opposed to the kingdoms of the world that operate their enslaving welfare schemes through compulsory taxation against whole populations through “congressional representatives” who rule over a people who they call their “constituents.” This is the true church, which is the body politic of the Kingdom of God that distributes this voluntarily-offered charity of private families who are congregated together as a Kingdom-people who are “in the world but not of it.” God is not impressed by people who “go to church” today to partake in rituals and traditions of men, which only make the word of God to no effect by forsaking the weightier matters and substituting ceremonies and sermons for the true work of watching over, protecting, literally feeding the sheep, and being involved in a daily ministry to provide for those you watch over, which all the false pastors of the modern “church” have always (purposely) failed to do, thus keeping the people they “shepherd” over turning to the welfare offices of the world for their daily bread, whose benefits come at the price of going into bondage to these ruling benefactors. God does not care about the institutions called the “church” today and the rituals that take place in them, whether they call themselves Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox. God does not care about these people’s singalongs, sermons, or so-called “worship services” or “Divine Liturgy,” and says so Himself. 

“I hate, I despise your feasts! I cannot stand the stench of your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer Me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; for your peace offerings of fattened cattle I will have no regard. Take away from Me the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps” (Amos 5:21-23). 

However, in what is probably the most well-known line from the prophet Amos, He says, “But let justice roll on like a river, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). This is the real work that God wants people on — not popping their heads in a so-called church building every Sunday and counting themselves as a servant of their neighbors for doing so. God wants a people who seek another Kingdom that is entirely different and set apart from the corrupt and evil kingdoms of the world. He is looking for a people who do away with all the evils and unrighteousness that can’t be disentangled from these worldly-statist kingdoms and which have only been a curse upon them and have meant their enslavement. Those who “go to church” as we understand it today are slothful people who do not care about the things that God actually cares about, which is the injustices and evils in a political society and not the “church attendance” record or the participating in the “bulletin” programming of these institutions. 

The word of the Lord that came upon the prophets was one that was almost always concerned with the injustices that were prevalent in their societies (all which were tied to the political order of the day) and that contained warnings of judgment that were directed toward these types of people. 

“So the LORD said to me, ‘The end has come for My people Israel; I will no longer spare them.’ ‘In that day,’ declares the Lord GOD, ‘the songs of the temple will turn to wailing. Many will be the corpses, strewn in silence everywhere!’ Hear this, you who trample the needy, who do away with the poor of the land, asking, ‘When will the New Moon be over, that we may sell grain? When will the Sabbath end, that we may market wheat? Let us reduce the ephah and increase the shekel; let us cheat with dishonest scales. Let us buy the poor with silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, selling even the chaff with the wheat!’” (Amos 8:2-6). 

The problem with all these societies in the days of the Biblical prophets, as well as ours still today, is that people have always been statists who placed their faith for salvation and social order in men as their kings, lawmakers, and law enforcers, and they have always found themselves in bondage and eventual ruin for this sin of making other gods than the Lord. The prophets had come to show men that this statism—this faith in human government to serve the people—was the essence of their error, and to thereby point them back to trusting in the Lord again as their sole providential provider of protection and welfare. A statist people who are already backward enough to trust in human government for their protection and welfare in the first place will only continue to fall deeper into their errors as these systems progressively pervert law and justice and they become increasingly unable to see the way out of a mess of their own doing, whether because the Tradition Fallacy leads them to believe that the historical precedence for these erroneous practices are proof of their validity and necessity, because they are men who were born into a world that has adopted the ideology and idolatries of statism and are simply inheriting the sins of their fathers who passed their patriotic ideas down to their children, or because they had become dependent upon this socialist system of welfare and public provision of goods and services as their source of income or employment. The often unwelcome appearance of the prophets of God was to rebuke these sins of trusting in human government to solve the problems they had created, and to attempt to show men the way of the Lord again, against a people who had long forgotten it and were liable to stone and imprison anyone who came to contest their practices or pronounce judgment upon a people for having bought into them. Between the impending judgment upon a statist society and the political bondage that has come upon a people who have turned away from God and chased after false gods to rule over them, prophets of God come to deliver one simple message: “Seek the Lord and live” (Amos 5:6). 

The prophet Obadiah 

The same anti-statist message as all the other prophets is clear in the Book of Obadiah, too. This is the little-known prophet who, for the small size of his book, seemed to be the most humble and unique option for my pseudonym. His name means “servant of God,” which I aim to be. He isn’t well-known either, among the public today or through any historical research about him, which also reflects my status and station as one who writes about the unpopular anti-statist politics of God. Even the dating of this prophet’s short work is debated. 

But he has a dense and strong message in this shortest book of the Old Testament, which is but a single chapter containing God’s anger against Edom for its betrayal of Judah. Edom had sat idly by as Judah was razed and exiled. They “stood aloof while strangers carried off his wealth and foreigners entered his gate and cast lots for Jerusalem” (Obadiah 1:11). They probably even made opportunistic actions during this time to plunder refugees, expand their own kingdom, and aid in the siege as an ally of the Babylonian empire, even turning fleeing men over to their enemies (1:14). Edom was something of a smaller, client-state whoring itself out to Babylon for that empire’s scraps, thinking God wouldn’t notice their association with all this evil. 

All in all, Obadiah is but another continuation of the anarchist manifesto that is Holy Scripture, another message that statism is a bloodsoaked religion that God hates, where empires and their allies ruin other men, secure themselves in mountain strongholds, and believe that they can escape God’s judgment for all their injustices. The prophet came to show these statists that they only had an illusion of security and exemption from God’s justice. Though state rulers, in their pride, believe they can hide out in castles, palaces, White Houses, underground bunkers, mountain hideouts, Eagle’s Nests, and other supposedly safe places where they can never be stopped, God likes to prove them wrong and bring judgment down on them in their hiding. 

“The pride of your heart has deceived you, O dwellers in the clefts of the rocks whose habitation is the heights, who say in your heart, ‘Who can bring me down to the ground?’ Though you soar like the eagle and make your nest among the stars, even from there I will bring you down,’ declares the LORD” (Obadiah 1:3-4). 

This is a perfect depiction of the statist delusion that armies, foreign alliances, fences, border walls, infrastructure, or geography alone, can keep away enemies from a people whose evils will assure that God’s judgment will find them. The essence of Biblical pride is the statist attitude that they cannot be stopped, that the strength of Pharaoh’s arm and chariots can even outmatch God, much more so everyone else around them.  

The book begins with a classic case of what this article series aims to show: a divine message to a prophet to relay God’s judgment coming upon a people for their statist sins, coming in the form of foreign statist invaders. 

“This is the vision of Obadiah:  This is what the Lord GOD says about Edom — We have heard a message from the LORD; an envoy has been sent among the nations to say, ‘Rise up, and let us go to battle against her! — ‘Behold, I will make you small among the nations; you will be deeply despised” (Obadiah 1:1-2). 

As always, the message was that plunderers will now be plundered. This is a consistent Biblical message that those who engage in statist evils will eventually experience for themselves what it’s like to be dominated by men. As the prophet Obadiah states it, “The Day of the LORD is near for all the nations. As you have done, it will be done to you; your recompense will return upon your own head” (Obadiah 1:15). Edom, for thinking they could get away with their own plunderous practices, will now face judgment from God. 

“‘If thieves came to you, if robbers by night— oh, how you will be ruined. Would they not steal only what they wanted? If grape-gatherers came to you, would they not leave some gleanings? But how Esau will be pillaged, his hidden treasures sought out! All the men allied with you will drive you to the border; the men at peace with you will deceive and overpower you. Those who eat your bread will set a trap for you without your awareness of it. In that day, declares the LORD, will I not destroy the wise men of Edom and the men of understanding in the mountains of Esau? Then your mighty men, O Teman, will be terrified, so that everyone in the mountains of Esau will be cut down in the slaughter” (Obadiah 1:5-9). 

Despite their size difference, Edom, to be sure, was guilty of the same sins of statist plunder as the Babylonians, even siding with them to loot Judah. As Obadiah records, “You were like one of them” (Obadiah 1:11). They had made an alliance with other statist regimes to sell out other men, rather than aiding them in their time of distress. They were prostitutes who made compacts with empires, seeking a share of their gains, rather than men who sought the Lord as their God. 

As with other prophets, God was not preaching a “reformation” of these statist orders either, but a total extermination of this system. Edom was to be burnt to “stubble” (Obadiah 1:18), not just replaced by “better rulers,” as statists think is the only problem as they go to elect new presidents to supposedly solve the issues inherent to statism. Notably, the scene of deliverance and change was not one of new tyrants taking over, but “delivers” who would ascend the mountain which would then belong to the Lord (Obadiah 1:21). 

Jonah and Nineveh

The theme continues in the prophet Jonah, as most people are probably more familiar with. Off the bat, the mission given to Jonah is to bring a word of rebuke against the Assyrians and warn them that God plans to judge their sins.

“Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before Me” (Jonah 1:2).

As everyone knows, Jonah chickened-out, fled from the mission God appointed to him, and wound up in the belly of a whale as a punishment. After this scene though, which I don’t have any trouble taking to be a metaphorical one, the same mission—warn these statists of incoming judgment—was resumed.

“Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message that I give you” (Jonah 3:2).

Micah’s preaching against corruption 

Micah was another pre-exile prophet, writing somewhere between 740-700 BC, who, like the rest of the prophets, had made an assessment of the corruption, injustices, and evils that come along with every system of human government and had come to warn of impending judgment against them. In his case, he warned of the looming threat of Assyrian invasion — God’s typical method of judgment against a people who had adopted and practiced the political ways of the Assyrians themselves and were now due for justice for their own (Assyrian) ways. Like with other prophets who had a consistent theme of warnings of judgment, Micah came to bring God’s word of warning that “Samaria will be made a heap of rubble” for its idolatries (Micah 1:6).

As with the other prophets, the words of Micah were very clearly directed to the ruling elite of the day, to the political plunderers who conspire against the masses to rob them and fleece them in any way possible, just as modern-day governments do in their creation of thousands of legislative law, codes, and statutes that they cite as justification for extorting men and their property.  

“Woe to those who devise iniquity and plot evil on their beds! At morning’s light they accomplish it because the power is in their hands. They covet fields and seize them; they take away houses. They deprive a man of his home, a fellow man of his inheritance” (Micah 2:1-2).

For supporting the evils of taxation, legislation, policing, etc., all which define systems of human government and which are already a judgment against a people who live under them, the prophets had warned of further judgment at the hand of God. For all the pride, patriotism, and confidence in a statist people that their country is “the best country in the world” and that they have “the most powerful military in the world” that cannot be moved, the prophets had come to bring God’s message that the proud days of their political rule or reign as the world’s “superpower” would soon be over. 

“Therefore this is what the LORD says:  ‘I am planning against this nation a disaster from which you cannot free your necks. Then you will not walk so proudly, for it will be a time of calamity’” (Micah 2:3). 

It is clear that the rebuke of the prophets was not just coming upon some vaguely defined “sins” or corruption of the people, such as the moral failings of individuals alone or common street criminals, but precisely upon the ruling elite of the day who had perfected the plunder system by legalizing their robbery and murder of the people. To be sure, it was always the political system that was shown to be responsible for the main injustices being perpetrated in society that had caused God to send out prophets to warn of divine judgment coming against them for these sins inherent to statism. 

“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.” 4Then they will cry out to the LORD, but He will not answer them. At that time He will hide His face from them because of the evil they have done” (Micah 3:1-4). 

It is simply undeniable that the societies that the prophets were bringing God’s word of rebuke against were statist societies, ie., political plunder systems that had legalized their violence and robbery by claiming it to be “the law.” And not only this, but just as in the United States today where people profess to follow the Lord but erect false gods as their “presidents” and “lawmakers,” these people had always claimed to have had the Lord on their side, too. As the prophet went on,  

“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. Yet they lean upon the LORD, saying, ‘Is not the LORD among us? No disaster can come upon us.’ Therefore, because of you, Zion will be plowed like a field, Jerusalem will become a heap of rubble, and the temple mount a wooded ridge” (Micah 3:9-12). 

As we see, for all these evils that are an intrinsic part of all worldly systems of human government, God had promised to judge these sins. It was always these very things, like the mass plunder or monetary inflation of governments and central banks today, that incited God to anger and judgment. 

“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 6:10-13). 

Aside from a few brief prophesies of a world-wide restoration (ch. 4) and visions of a coming Savior in Bethlehem (ch. 5), this denunciation of the political plunder system of the day is more or less the focus of the entirety of the Book of Micah, showing a strong and consistent anarchistic message. The prophet was seeing a world full of ungodly statists who set up worldly kingdoms in the land he was preaching against, or in other words an absence of godly anarchists who acted righteously and made the Lord their only God. 

“The godly man has perished from the earth; there is no one upright among men. They all lie in wait for blood; they hunt one another with a net. Both hands are skilled at evil; the prince and the judge demand a bribe. When the powerful utters his evil desire, they all conspire together. The best of them is like a brier; the most upright is sharper than a hedge of thorns” (Micah 7:2-4). 

Nahum against Nineveh 

Like Jonah who went to Nineveh over a century before him, the prophet Nahum was sent by God to preach a sure judgment upon the Assyrians this time for all their evil ways connected to their political violence, such as their conquering of the Northern Kingdom (Samaria) around 722 BC. The surprising and brief moment of repentance that came under Jonah’s prophesying, which is dated around 780-750 BC, was short-lived, and the Assyrians were once again partaking in all of the grave sins bound up with statism: idolatry, violence, exploitation, and general imperial cruelties that all worldly empires engage in when they are on top of the world, so to speak. Around a century or more later (650-612 BC), Nahum came to prophesy their destruction at the hand of God. 

The name Nahum means “comfort” or “consolation,” which can probably be understood in connection with the type of prophecy he was delivering. Though Assyria was largely the target of this prophecy, it served also as a sign of hope to the people of Israel and Judah, who the evil Assyrian regime had once oppressed and done so even as divine judgment against them, that they would receive recompense themselves for the political violence and plunder done against them. For those who might have thought that evil oppressors would escape judgment, the prophet came to confirm that “the LORD will by no means leave the guilty unpunished” (Nahum 1:3). 

Though the themes of the prophets often include God’s warning of the judgment, calls for repentance, and His extension of mercy, the time had run out for the Assyrians this go-around. God had seen enough of their political plunder at this point. And so right off the bat, Nahum came preaching the “burden of Nineveh” (Nahum 1). As with all statist regimes, all which are involved in violence and evils against their people and others, the prophet came preaching that God “will make an end of Nineveh” (Nahum 1:8). All man-made systems of government are “plotters of evil against the Lord” and “counselors of wickedness” (Nahum 1:11), and for this reason are judged by God. 

Though a theme of calling for repentance is strong in other prophets, in this case, Jonah had already done it over a century prior, and Nahum had come to preach that judgment was coming to the Assyrians this time, as a sort of consolation for those who had suffered under them. The specific mission of the prophet here is consistent with our thesis that the message of the prophets is almost always a political one. 

“This is what the LORD says: ‘Though they are allied and numerous, yet they will be cut down and pass away. Though I have afflicted you, O Judah, I will afflict you no longer. For I will now break their yoke from your neck and tear away your shackles’” (Nahum 1:12-13). 

Though the prophets are usually warning of judgment against a people who should be serving God (Israel), this time around the prophet was preaching that God was going to judge their enemies, that “the wicked will never again march through you” and “will be utterly cut off” (Nahum 1:15). Whereas God at one time makes use of foreign statists to judge a people who had been domestically practicing the same methods of the heathen of violent political organization, these statists (eg, Babylonians) who God has “appointed to execute judgment” (Hab. 1:12) against another statist people are not exempt from judgment themselves for their own evils, despite once being “ordained” by God to dish it out, and eventually the old tool of judgment finds itself on the end of the rod, and the plunderers become the plundered, the statists must face the judgment of God for their evils. 

“Woe to the city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without prey. The crack of the whip, the rumble of the wheel, galloping horse and bounding chariot! Charging horseman, flashing sword, shining spear; heaps of slain, mounds of corpses, dead bodies without end — they stumble over their dead, because of the many harlotries of the harlot, the seductive mistress of sorcery, who betrays nations by her prostitution and clans by her witchcraft. ‘Behold, I am against you,’ declares the LORD of Hosts. ‘I will lift your skirts over your face. I will show your nakedness to the nations and your shame to the kingdoms. I will pelt you with filth and treat you with contempt; I will make a spectacle of you. Then all who see you will recoil from you and say, ‘Nineveh is devastated; who will grieve for her?’ Where can I find comforters for you?” (Nahum 3:1-7). 

Habakkuk’s warning of Babylonians

The Book of Habakkuk records a dialogue between the prophet and God more so than taking a message directly to a people, as with other prophets who were sent on specific missions to people. Yet it is still highly pertinent to the thesis here that prophetic rebukes and complaints in the Bible are all about the sins involved with statism, ie., with man’s rebellious ideological support for human government and for the practice of organizing societies by the means of political violence.

Habakkuk’s prophecy is thought to have taken place around the 7th century BC (dated somewhere between 612-589 BC) in the kingdom of Judah before its fall. His words came during a time when the Assyrian empire had fallen and the Neo-Babylonian empire was on the rise, and it stood as a warning of the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem that eventually came to pass in 587/86 BC and would exile Judeans in the process.

The complaint of Habakkuk (given to God) is the same as all the other prophets and only continues to make the case that the prophets were preaching against and observing all the injustices and evils that are always involved with human government, which is always a man-made legal order that derives law from itself rather than God (Hab. 1:7) and is “bent on violence” (Hab. 1:9). The prophet was a witness to the plunder of worldly political regimes and was crying out to God to hear him. The political landscape was full of all the typical things that are always present in any statist society: corruption, perversions of law, injustices, idolatry, violence, and legalized crime. Thus, he told God, in a sort of lamentation of the scene, 

“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). 

It was for all these things—the violence that is inherent to all human governments that are always set up against God and His Law—that the prophet warned was inviting judgment upon the people of Judah. Just like the American people today who support the political system called the “United States” and the human rulers who actually administer this system, Judah was probably involved not only in the practices of general wickedness of taxation and violence that come with every State, but probably all manners of greater darkness like child sacrifice, human trafficking, organized child abuse rings, and everything else that is coming to light today as an inherent part of these worldly governments of the devil, which God hates.  

The judgment of Judah and of Babylon

As is common in the prophetic books, we see both a domestic statist society (Judah) coming under judgment by foreign statists (Babylon) for their sins and this tool of judgment being judged for its evils, too. This is the case in Habakkuk, who warned that Judah would be judged by the Babylonians, who would themselves would be punished for their own evils, violence, and pride. God does not support state rulers because He is willing to send them against a statist people; the practice of statism by those who are targeted for judgment is indeed why He sends other statists. Though human government, as a tool of judgment against the wicked works that set it up, may be said to be “ordained” by God for this purpose, we can by no means infer that these systems receive God’s moral approval or that we are instructed to engage in these practices on our own. While God warns a people that “I am raising up Babylonians” (Hab 1:6) as a judgment against a people, He in turn preaches “woe” to the Babylonians and warns of judgment against them, too (Hab 2:6-20). For the evil statists (Babylons) that God uses to judge a certain people (Judahs) are also themselves evil, which is precisely why they are so suitable for bringing judging a people (eg., Judah) whose practices were also evil and who need to feel the full effect of their ways. (The failure to understand this is why people think that the sense in which a State is “ordained” by God is that it is “good” and non-sinful, when the real case is that States “serve” God precisely by sinning — by bringing the evils of political violence against a people whose own wicked ways made them deserving of experiencing it for themselves in a very direct sense: by being under the boot themselves rather than just putting it on everyone else’s necks, as the American military has been able to do for around a century now).

For their own domestic plunder systems or their own wicked support of political violence among the people, all statist people face divine judgment from both from “their” own domestic government, which corrupts a society and makes it nearly impossible to get by in life, and from other statists who are just as much, if not more, evil than they are. This was the case with Babylonian judgment upon Judah, just as much as it would be the case if the evil system called the United States, which however is presently one of the most wicked systems on earth, were theoretically invaded by an alliance of Russians, North Koreans, Chinese, etc. That God may make use of “Soviet Unions” to stop “Nazis” by no means implies that God is a communist. It only means that it was time for the wicked works of one group of statists to come to end. The Babylonians in the case of Habakkuk were probably even more evil and violent as a matter of degree and might than the kingdom of Judah. But this was only a matter of degree and not of principle; Habakkuk had laid out that all these practices were taking place in Judah, too, hence why they deserved to be invaded. The point is that the statist regimes that God uses to judge others are not themselves “good.” The Babylonian regime was one that, like all statist systems that are funded on taxation and violence, had “built cities with bloodshed and established towns by iniquity” (Habakkuk 2:12). The Babylonians would have to be repaid as well, after being used by God to serve “justice” upon a people who needed to feel the full effect of their own wicked ways. 

The prophesy of Habakkuk is then one of twin judgment: a warning to the people of Judah that they would face Babylonians for their own Babylonian ways at home, and a warning to the Babylonians that their own evils of building towns with plundered property and going on imperial conquests around the world would too mean their end. Though God uses State A to punish State B, thereby giving State B a taste of their own medicine, so He also judges State A for their own evils. As the prophet expresses toward the Babylonians (State A), who God was using as a judgment upon Judah (State B) for their evils, “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” (Habakkuk 2:8).

The statists who God uses to judge other statists are both evil and guilty of the same sins. Judah was under judgment by Babylon for the same sins that the Babylonians had carried out above: idolatry, raising up human kings, placing your trust for security and welfare in human government, making alliances with men, pledging allegiance to them, etc. 

Zephaniah and the “Day of the Lord”

I could already stop here to sufficiently prove the point that the prophets were rebuking the statist order of the day and warning of judgment precisely for the sins related to setting up the unjust and plunderous systems of human government. It is obviously a major theme of the prophets so far. But I want to make it impossible for the statists—the same people who the prophets were rebuking in their day and who fought against their message—to claim that we are simply cherry-picking a few scriptures, when the fact is that this theme—God hates the wicked systems of human government of the world—is more or less the whole theme of the Bible, which is not a “religious” book in the modern sense and understanding of this term, but a civics textbook of anarchist political science — a freedom manual for getting out of the bondage of Egypt by turning back to God.

The Book of Zephaniah is similar to Habakkuk, who had a dialogue with God that also preached judgment upon Judah for its rampant sin. However, Zephaniah is somewhat broader in scope. Whereas Habakkuk took up a personal lament against God for allowing wickedness to reign and cited Babylon as a specific tool of divine judgment, Zephaniah came preaching a wider picture of judgment, called here the Day of the Lord, that spoke of an event that would “devour the whole earth” (Zephaniah 1:2). Moreover, his warnings of judgment included many more people than just Judah and Babylon, encompassing also the Philistines (Zeph 2:4-7), Moab and Ammon (Zeph 2:8-11), Cush and Assyria (Zeph 2:12-14). Though Biblical canon has them swapped, Zephaniah’s prophecy came slightly before Habakkuk’s, being dated around 635-625 BC. 

As with other prophets, “the word of the Lord that came to” the prophet was one that was to be brought against the people and rulers for all their idolatries and evils. “I will stretch out My hand against Judah and against all who dwell in Jerusalem” (Zephaniah 1:4). The very target of the prophets’ warnings of a coming judgment is very often directly upon the plunderers themselves, ie., the people who make up the political systems of the world that rule over other people, however much it remains true that the sins of the people themselves contributed to their situation. (It is likely that Zephaniah’s lineage—a descendant of king Hezekiah as suggested in the first verse of his book—gave him access to prophesy to the political elite in Jerusalem directly). After Zephaniah prophesies judgment, he makes it clear that the targets are statist plunderers. 

“On the Day of the LORD’s sacrifice I will punish the princes, the sons of the king, and all who are dressed in foreign apparel. On that day I will punish all who leap over the threshold, who fill the house of their master with violence and deceit” (Zephaniah 1:8-9). 

The problem in the societies where all the prophets preached, who had been sent by God to rebuke and warn of judgment, was necessarily that they were statists: they were people who ruled over other men and robbed, extorted, imprisoned, and murdered them, just as all the governments of the world today still do. Statist violence was almost always the scene of the prophets’ ministry. 

“Woe to the city of oppressors, rebellious and defiled! She heeded no voice; she accepted no correction. She does not trust in the LORD; she has not drawn near to her God. Her princes are roaring lions; her judges are evening wolves, leaving nothing for the morning. Her prophets are reckless, faithless men. Her priests profane the sanctuary; they do violence to the law” (Zephaniah 3:1-4). 

On the negative side of the equation, the very people that avoid God’s judgment are those who live just and righteous lives, ie., those who do not support the statist violence in society or partake in it as one of their tax collectors, law enforcement officers, soldiers, voters, welfare recipients, or ideologues. In his call to repentance, the prophet says, 

“Seek the LORD, all you humble of the earth who carry out His justice. Seek righteousness; seek humility. Perhaps you will be sheltered on the day of the LORD’s anger” (Zephaniah 2:3).

As I wrote in the article covering the various themes of the prophets, we would only be explaining the “negative” side of things if the prophets merely spoke of judgment or if it was all that we emphasized in speaking of them. As we see, repentance and eventual restoration are also consistent themes. Like the prophet Habakkuk, Zephaniah gives a scene of restoration that is notable in that it would be one where “no one would make them afraid” (Zephaniah 3:13). This is significant as far as presenting the prophets as critics of statism and as preachers of anarchist political science themselves. For while it was the injustices inherent to statism that had once brought judgment upon a people, the scenes of restoration depicted a community without a political hierarchy that would thus invite judgment upon a people.

How to stay free of human domination

The fundamental irony of statism is that its adherents claim that human governments and their armies are necessary to keep them safe and keep their enemies away (1 Sam 8:20), while God and His prophets teach that the sure way of inciting foreign invaders and domestic tyrants upon yourselves is to engage in this sin of trusting in kings and their armies rather than the Lord alone. If anyone truly wanted to prevent themselves from being ruled by tyrants, dominated by a police state, or conquered by various bad guys across the world, the last thing they would want to do is pursue the statist path, which is always judged by God. The surest way to the “national security” that statists seek in human government is—ironically to them—to live as anarchists and trust in God alone as your security plan. Yet this is unfathomable to the statist, who are under a strong delusion to believe in lies and interpret the world in an inverted way. They are so concerned with law, order, protection, and “national security,” that they seek it in the one place—the erection of human government—that is sure to bring all their fears upon them.

Despite history and the current circumstances of the world proving it true that statism only invites God’s judgment against a people in the form of empires fallen into the hands of their enemies and political law systems becoming perverted and corrupt, as opposed to existing to repel the various “bad” guys around the world that statists tell us they are needed for, statist idolaters still insist, in all their reprobation, that only human government can deliver these things and that God’s anarchist order would be chaos and lawlessness and leave everyone open to attacks by criminals and global bad guys.

Scripture and common sense however attests to the opposite of the statist theory of protection via human government. If Judah had not done evil in the sight of the Lord by engaging in all the evils that come along with statist law systems, they would have never had to fear the Babylonians, no matter how evil or present somewhere in the world the Babylonians were; they would have stayed where they were or been used to judge someone else who didn’t want to learn. The prophets came preaching Babylonian invasions as a judgment against sin, and not as some unavoidable thing that even people who obeyed God and never erected false gods to protect them would have had to face, too. We have to remember that judgment and liberation is in the hands of the Great Sovereign, and that God sends tyrants only for the statist sins of the people.

Statists then have a completely backward theory of preventing tyranny and invasion. Mankind has still not figured out that they will only find the law and order and security that they search for in a State, in the anarchistic Kingdom of God. Indeed, the whole preaching of the prophets was a means of refuting the type of pride that comes along with all statist societies such as the America one today, where it is arrogantly thought that the allegedly “best country in the world” with “the most powerful military in the world” can never be stopped.  

“This carefree city that dwells securely, that thinks to herself: ‘I am it, and there is none besides me,’ what a ruin she has become, a resting place for beasts. Everyone who passes by her hisses and shakes his fist” (Zephaniah 2:15). 

The prophet Haggai 

There isn’t much to comment on for the prophet Haggai. His prophecy is a short one, consisting of only two chapters. He was furthermore a post-exile prophet, thus lacking the warnings of incoming exile and judgment that makes up a significant portion of the other prophets. Perhaps the most relevant prophecy of Haggai for our purposes is his sort of eschatological vision of God dismantling earthly powers. 

“I will overturn royal thrones and destroy the power of the kingdoms of the nations. I will overturn chariots and their riders; horses and their riders will fall, each by the sword of his brother” (Haggai 2:22). 

All the man-made kingdoms of the world are set up against God. Earthly thrones are but man’s attempt to substitute human gods for the rulership of the Lord, whether they call themselves kings or presidents. All the state armies of the world and its systems are a result of man’s lack of faith in God to protect them and save them. Thus, Biblical prophecies often speak of a day where all the false kingdoms of the world will be replaced, destroyed, or consumed by God and His Kingdom. Perhaps most well-known is the prophecy of Daniel.

“And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever” (Daniel 2:44). 

It should be difficult for any statist to defend the participation in or upbuilding of the kingdoms of the world, considering the vision of the prophets of these systems being completely destroyed by God rather than just “reformed.” Why attempt to reform something that God plans to abolish? Why not seek abolition in harmony with God’s plan? Why seek to continue the kingdoms of the world when we have a King, one Jesus, who of the increase of His government there is no end? Why seek to maintain a worldly system that is coming to an end rather than become a part of a Kingdom in which there will be no end? 

The prophet Zechariah 

The prophetic ministry of Zechariah occurred after the Babylonian exile (586-538 BC) and thus had more of a focus of restoration and rebuilding than the concerns of majority of the pre-exile prophets. It is also covers a handful of different visions the prophet had. Nevertheless, the themes are roughly the same, and even a people who had been destroyed at the hand of God by foreign statists who served as a tool for His judgment need to learn how to turn back to Him alone. Accordingly, the early word of the Lord that had come to the prophet Zechariah was one of calling a people to repent who had long ago deviated from the Kingship of the Lord by setting up human kings to protect and serve them, only to have their societies corrupted and plundered for this sin. 

“This is what the LORD of Hosts says: ‘Return to Me, declares the LORD of Hosts, and I will return to you, says the LORD of Hosts.’ Do not be like your fathers, to whom the former prophets proclaimed that this is what the LORD of Hosts says: ‘Turn now from your evil ways and deeds.’  But they did not listen or pay attention to Me, declares the LORD” (Zechariah 1:2-4). 

The problem in all these societies whom the prophets brought a word against was that they had departed from God’s exclusive rulership and had gone down the wicked statist road of trusting in human rulers as their kings, lawmakers, and law enforcers, rather than the Lord who is all these things for us (Isa 33:22). They trusted in authoritarian political systems under the sinful and satanic delusion of statism that erecting tax-funded human rulers is the only means of having protection from their enemies, only for these people to pervert law, justice, and—probably most ironically for the statist—open them up to being occupied by domestic tyrants and invaded by the foreign statists who they said would come about if they didn’t pursue the statist path. And once things get bad, a statist people always double-down on their sin and say that another ruler, another set of laws, more soldiers, or more funding for law enforcers is the solution. They think that more political violence is all that’s needed to correct society, not seeing that God will heal our problems without these worldly political methods, that God can do these things because He works “not by might nor by power, but by My spirit” (Zechariah 4:6). 

Those who trust in God alone to keep their enemies away are not in need of state armies, police forces, or fortifications like border walls, all which are developments of statist societies that seek salvation through human government and its rulers. As God says of Jerusalem, “I will be a wall of fire around it” (Zechariah 2:5). One might also recall the pillar of fire in the Exodus from Egypt that God used to shield His people in the wilderness (Ex 13:21-22). Those who make the Lord their only King do not have to worry about being invaded by Babylonians or Assyrians or other state rulers around the world, as this is a problem exclusive to statists who forsake the Lord’s protection by setting up human rulers and thus fall under judgment for this sin. Anarchists who trust the Lord alone to protect them needn’t worry about being dominated by other men because they do not practice the political sin of statism that brings divine judgment upon a people. But statists, who depart from God’s law by setting up false gods, very much need to worry about internal domination and external conquest by foreign enemies, because it is this very act of setting up human kings that God promises will bring a people under judgment for this sin (1 Samuel 8).  

God’s love of justice 

The scene that the prophets had always come upon was a society that had been utterly corrupted by the plunderous political practices of these people. Just like ours today, they were full of men who claimed they knew the Lord, but who turned around and made men their lords and kings, ie., voted for presidents and congressmen to rule over them. They think they “worship” God because they “go to church,” but they merely substitute rituals, sermons, and Sunday singalongs, for the real way that God says He is served: by loving your neighbors, feeding them, sheltering them, looking after their justice, and liberating them from the bondage of the kingdoms of the world. These people do not know the Lord, who says, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6; Matt 12:7). 

This message of God’s preference for actual service to others—literally setting the Lord’s table and feeding bread to the hungry sheep who are joined with you in a charitable network of congregations gathered for this express purpose—over the Sunday rituals that men call “religion” today is common throughout Scripture and particularly prominent in the prophets. We see that God always seeks obedience over ritualistic performances (1 Samuel 15:22; Jeremiah 7:22-23), that He takes no pleasure in these things (Psalm 51:16-17), that what He really wants from us is to defend the weak and oppressed and deliver our brothers from the hands of wicked rulers (Psalm 82:3-4) and to actually serve them (Hosea 6:6), that seeking justice and righteousness rather than “going to church” is the real work of godly men (Proverbs 21:3), that God does not care about “burnt offerings” but requires of us “to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:6-8), that loving your neighbor by directly serving them is the essence of the Lord’s commandment to us (Mark 12:31-33), that all these ritualistic displays of “religion” were always false in the eyes of a God who truly desired that people abandon their evil practices like statism and actually serve their brothers freely (Isaiah 1:11-17), that the real “fasting” and pleasing works to God are “to break the chains of wickedness, to untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and tear off every yoke, to share your bread with the hungry, to bring the poor and homeless into your home, to clothe the naked when you see him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood” (Isaiah 58:6-7), that God does not care about whiney “church services” and feast days and “liturgical calendars” or even the “praise songs” that people sing to him as their idea of “worship” but wants mankind to seek justice and righteousness which has gone by the wayside in a society of people who have turned to human rulers as their means of managing the social affairs of men (Amos 5:21-24), and that people have always used these traditions and rituals as substitutes for the weightier matters of personally seeing to it that your brothers are fed, clothed, housed, protected, and free (Luke 11:42).

Zechariah was bringing this same message to the people, too. Just like all the prophets before him who explained that God is not served by vain rituals, the book of Zechariah explains how God desired to see a people who turned away from all their old evils that were bound up with the political order of old, such as putting millions of non-criminals in cages for not obeying the decrees of the rulers, extorting the population for trillions of dollars a year to fund a military-industrial complex, or sending out federal agents to round up men deemed to be “illegals.” This was the word of the prophets. 

“This is what the LORD of Hosts says: ‘Administer true justice. Show loving devotion and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. And do not plot evil in your hearts against one another’” (Zechariah 7:9-10). 

Whereas statism—the perversion of justice under human rule—curses a people as part of God’s plan to correct a people who have deviated from His law order, so turning things around and abandoning the sinful route of statism bring about divine blessings. This was the message that had come to the prophets to deliver to others. 

“For this is what the LORD of Hosts says: ‘Just as I resolved to bring disaster upon you when your fathers provoked Me to anger, and I did not relent,’ says the LORD of Hosts, ‘so now I have resolved to do good again to Jerusalem and Judah. Do not be afraid. These are the things you must do: Speak truth to one another, render true and sound judgments in your gates, do not plot evil in your hearts against your neighbor, and do not love to swear falsely, for I hate all these things,’ declares the LORD” (Zechariah 8:14-17).

Rule by men and the rule of God

When God judges a people, He sends human rulers upon them to be a terror to their wicked works that sinfully set these men up. He sends, eg., Babylonians or Assyrians to dominate them or carry them away as exiles. (To be sure, we mean rulers, period, not just “wicked rulers” as has been a quote attributed to John Calvin. There is no such thing as non-wicked rulers. Godly men do not rule over other men; they serve them. All people who have human rulers over them are under divine judgment and have clearly substituted man-gods for the Lord as their God).

On the flip side, when a people turn back to God’s ways and abandon the practices of statism that originally invited judgment on them, then God turns around and keeps these terrorist states (redundant) away from us and even judges them. As much as foreign human rulers may be used as a tool of God’s judgment, they are due for judgment for their own evils too. Thus the prophet says, in this scene of repentance and restoration, that “the pride of Assyria will be brought down and the scepter of Egypt will part” (Zechariah 10:11). 

When men turn against God and commit the sins involved with going into bondage, like covetousness of their neighbors property through seeking socialist welfare benefits, slothfulness to build God’s Kingdom alternative, and idolatry for state rulers, then God allows people to be dominated by Egyptians. However, when men repent of the sins that led to their bondage, then He provides dry ground for His people to walk on to escape the Egyptians while allowing the seas to come down on their pursuers. Getting dominated by statists is only a problem for ungodly men, such as those who seek out man-gods to rule over them. Godly men cannot be ruled by men; this is exclusively the judgment against a people who would not make the Lord their God, against a people precisely who believe that they won’t be protected without setting up human rulers to protect them or, in other words, by trusting in God alone in an anarchist society. State rulers come only upon sinners, ie., upon people who beg for human rulers, vote for men to be their kings, fail to trust in God alone and ask for soldiers and police to protect them, who covet their neighbors’ property via tax-funded “public” goods, and who fail to seek and build God’s Kingdom of voluntary charity and service to one another. When men repent of the sins of statism that lead them into captivity to statists, however, God “makes a way in the sea and a path through the surging waters [and] brings out the chariots and horses, the armies and warriors together, to lie down, never to rise again; to be extinguished, snuffed out like a wick” (Isaiah 43:16-17). 

The statist idea of setting up human rulers to protect us from “bad guys” both at home and abroad, most of whom are bogeymen used to scare them into submission, is antithetical to the providential protection that God provides to those who trust in Him to save them rather than domestic kings or foreign armies. Just like with Haggai before him in Biblical canon, Zechariah envisions God overthrowing multiple statist systems of the world that come against Jerusalem but are defeated, not by their own might, as statists tell us is necessary to ward of enemies, but by divine intervention (Zech 12:1-9, 14:1-3). God says that He personally will “strike every horse with panic, and every rider with madness” (Zechariah 12:4). Contrary to the statist narrative that we must set up states, kings, armies, and police forces of our own, in order to ward off invaders and uphold “national security,” the examples in Scripture show God taking care of these things for a people who turn back to Him. In this instance, God says, “I will set out to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem” (Zechariah 12:9). Just as God is in control of judgment against a people, which often means sending in the Babylonians to bring divine justice against a people who acted like Babylonians themselves, so He is also sovereign over a people’s liberty and protection who repent from their Babylonian ways that once fooled them into thinking that statist systems were necessary to their security. Godly men don’t need to worry about raising up armies to “save” them when they have God on their side; God “puts the wicked to the sword” for them (Jeremiah 25:31). The only people who need to worry about getting dominated by human rulers—ironically to the people whose philosophy says the exact opposite—are statists who forsake God’s protection for man’s. The only people who need to worry about Babylonians are people who act like Babylonians themselves. The only people who need to worry about being enslaved by systems of human government, which God uses as a judgment upon a people who trust in these men, are those who do not obey Him (Micah 5:15). When men trust in the Lord as their only King and Lawgiver, they have no need to fear other men coming upon them, nor any need to set up human rulers to protect them, which is the very sin and fear of man that leads to bondage. The relationship between God and those who serve Him is an anarchist one requiring no human kings or “presidents” to stand between them. It is one, God says, where a people “will call on My name, and I will answer them. I will say, ‘They are My people,’ and they will say, ‘The LORD is our God’” (Zechariah 13:9). 

Like the whole of Scripture, the Christian Anarchist themes in Zechariah are strong. The prophet gives us scenes of God supernaturally tearing down earthly powers (Zech 1:18-21, 9:4, 12:1-4, 14:2-3, 14:12), without a need for us raising up statist armies to do so; we see rejections of militaristic might for victory through God’s Spirit (Zech 4:6, 9:10, 12:4); also, criticisms of foreign coalitions and alliances with empires for relying on God instead (Zech 9:8, 12:2-3); and other similar themes. The prophecy of Jesus’s arrival as a Savior also makes a strong case for a non-violent Kingdom. We have the humble king riding on a donkey (Zech 9:9–10) as opposed to a war-horse, which surely symbolizes a rejection of the worldly model of warrior-kings, where peace in promised by cutting off chariots and bows and giving us a picture of a non-violent, anti-imperial kingdom.

The divine, political ideal of God—an anarcho-theocratic society where the Lord is our only King—is one of divine order centered on direct obedience to God without any political mediators standing in between them and the Lord. This anarcho-theocracy of God is one where people worship the Lord freely and voluntarily, without the need for any middle-men (human kings to stand between them). As the prophet portrays this post-judgment scene of restoration, “Then all the survivors from the nations that came against Jerusalem will go up year after year to worship the King, the LORD” (Zechariah 14:16). God “rules” His people by writing His Law on their hearts. He doesn’t require human kings to force men to obey God’s Laws, which would itself require a violation of God’s Law to even install these tax-funded rulers into place. Those who believe they need a State to make men act Godly only confess that God has not written His Law on their hearts. For they still sinfully believe in raising up human rulers to force men into acting how they believe they should. God does not need human intermediaries, period. The ideal and desired political order of God was always one of just God and His people, with no kings in between — in other words an anarchistic society. The statist politics of men, where human rulers are raised up to govern the affairs of men, was always a deviation from the divine rule and politics of God. God never wanted “Israel” to have kings; they did this in defiance of the divine, anarchist plan.

Malachi 

It is amazing how few Christians today seem to flip just a couple pages back from Matthew in their Bibles to read the prophets. For some reason, it has been common for modern Christians to think that the Old Testament is somehow irrelevant to them now. How much they could learn if they just spent a few minutes reading Malachi alone! This shouldn’t be hard considering how short these books are. Yet the minor prophets seem almost foreign to average Christians today, who have almost no idea what their message was aside from a few loose conceptions of, say, predictions of a coming messiah. 

Malachi was the final prophetic voice of the Old Testament, both canonically and chronologically. His ministry, which took place in Judah, is generally dated in the mid-5th century BC, between 450-400 BC. He is often considered the last of the old prophets that God sent out before the so-called “silent years” or intertestamental period before the arrival of John the Baptist, which lasted some 400 years.  

Malachi’s ministry was upon a post-exilic people who had apparently still not learned their lesson even after previously being drug off into Babylon and now falling back into their same old ways after returning. This has been the case for most all of the history of men except for brief periods where men may have realized the truth before backsliding again. The judgment for the sins of statism, which come in the form of domestic bondage, foreign conquest, or being carried away captive to another land, have not yet led men to repent and seek God’s Kingdom alone, despite the pain involved with staying on the statist path. 

Like the scathing rebukes of statism that came before him, Malachi keeps the scorching indictments against a corrupt and complacent society going, that, much like ours today, was one that consists of an intertwined political and religious elite that have worked to corrupt God’s anarchistic order by raising up their own institutions, both political and “religious.” He came to criticize the injustices among the ruling elite and the perversions of truth among the people who claimed to be men who disseminated the word and truths of God. Like other prophets before him, Malachi came preaching this “day of the Lord” too, ie., judgment upon all state rulers and their accomplices among the population who apologized for the existence of these wicked systems of human rule and domination. 

“‘For behold, the day is coming, burning like a furnace, when all the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble; the day is coming when I will set them ablaze,’ says the LORD of Hosts. ‘Not a root or branch will be left to them’” (Malachi 4:1). 

For those who believe it is the job of “godly” men to play the game of worldly politics and seek incremental changes in the world, it should be noted that was no gradual reform or effort to maintain the political systems in principle but get it to “clean up its act,” such as that sought by worldly political pragmatists in their sinful attempt to make political judgment against them a little lighter; this was an image of abolition, of the wicked” being “trampled” as “ashes under the soles of your feet” (Malachi 4:3). Contrary to those sinners who tell us we need to make human civil government—that is the government of the devil—more “godly” and “obedient to God’s laws,” prophetic images in Scripture give us more of a picture of a total annihilation of statism. Christ’s Kingdom is not one where human kings “submit to Christ” as some sort of subordinate “lesser magistrates”; this Kingdom, rather, totally subverts all empires, thrones, scepters, and swords of men, replacing them entirely. God has no room for human rulers in His political order, where He is the sole legitimate archist. These men have only existed to corrupt His anarchistic order, and as a judgment against a people who wouldn’t be ruled by God. 

As always in the prophets, then, God’s dispute with a people has been the plunder of the political regime that has existed to extort men and round them up and cage them. 

“‘I will draw near to you for judgment. And I will be a swift witness against sorcerers and adulterers and perjurers, against oppressors of the widowed and fatherless, and against those who defraud laborers of their wages and deny justice to the foreigner but do not fear Me,’ says the LORD of Hosts” (Malachi 3:5). 

And as with all prophetic rebukes, the warnings were the same: turn away from your sin or else God will “come and strike the land with a curse” (Malachi 4:6). Man’s great sin has always been raising up human kings to fight their battles for them. More than anywhere else, man’s spiritual rebellion from God is seen in the statist ideology that says that human rulers are needed for protection, law and justice, and welfare of the people. 

We see that in all of the prophets, a major attack is leveled against the religio-political regime of the day — against the state rulers for perpetuating the plunder, and the religious establishment for defending it and grifting off the tithes of the people themselves while leaving them to starve and depend upon human government for their daily bread, which allows them to go into bondage to the world and become human merchandise to the worldly benefactors who hand out these benefits in order to ensnare men into bondage and dependency upon the ruling elite. 

Thus, even when we see a strong theme of criticism against the “religious” establishment, such as Malachi’s words against the corrupt priesthood of the day (Malachi 2:1-9), this is still highly pertinent to the general religio-statist order in society, just as the false pastors of the institutional church today work to spread half-truths and keep people supporting the kingdoms of the world rather than the Kingdom of our Lord. As recorded in the prophet’s book, God accused these false representatives of God of having “departed from the way” and told them that “your instruction has caused many to stumble” (Malachi 2:8).  

The religious establishment in any age has always been instrumental in leading people astray down the statist path of sin and bondage. Though we can ultimately only blame the people themselves, whose sin and lack of truth-seeking allowed them to be deceived, the class of clergymen or institutionalists in any age have always existed to cause other men to stumble. They have always been there to flaunt their credentials as being the proof that they are an “authority” on the word and will of God, so that weak men will believe what they say, accept their interpretations, and be led to the slaughterhouse with the rest of the lost sheep who have been deceived to going down the wide road of destruction. It is thus no coincidence that the American Civil Religion has dominated in the so-called churches in the United States, whose main role was to act as statist propagandists for the kingdoms of the world to all those people who would need to believe that it was right by God if they were to accept it. Hence the typical rotten fruit of this largely successful campaign against the minds of professing Christians, where men endlessly cite “Romans 13” and “render unto Caesar” as the supposed nails in the coffin of anarchist political theology. It is not out of place that the so-called “churches” in the United States have flags out front or in their sanctuaries; it is perfectly fitting given their role as state-approved institutions for them to work to defend and ultimately to further the kingdoms of the world. As much as one may be tempted to appeal to these institutions to remove the flags of worldly empires as blasphemy toward the Lord, it doesn’t really make sense to do so; they are not the “houses of the Lord” they claim to be anyway, but mere ideological extensions of the State. Instead, we should have nothing to do with these institutions, as much as they claim to be “houses of God.” They are not the true church anyway, just another set of cronies who lull the sheep into pews and allow them to go down with the Babylonian societies that they’re living in and still serving in the “church’s” deliberate failure to feed the sheep and keep them free from Pharaoh’s hands.

Institutionalized religion, for lack of a better term, has always been fused with statism. When the prophets criticize false priests, false prophets, false pastors, and false shepherds, such rebukes can necessarily be considered as further attacks on statism, which is the worldly political order that these false leaders work to maintain through their outright lies or their failure to organize men into a network of abolitionist societies that serve each other directly and keep their people unstained from the world. These types of men, from the false shepherds of old, the Pharisees of Jesus’s day, the Roman Catholic priesthood of the Middle Ages, and the pulpit pimps of the “Protestant church,” have always operated as the State’s spiritual enforcers, existing to give the stamp-of-approval for human government on behalf of a God who, in fact, hates these systems and their apologists. They have taught that it is possible for human civil government to be “Godly,” that it is possible for these men who exercise authority over others to be “Christians,” that it is possible to serve the Lord and Caesar. They have been instrumental in training men to believe that statism and Christianity are not only non-contradictory, but even completely compatible with one another, when nothing could be further from the truth. They have worked to make men believe that there can be such a thing as a “Christian president” or a “Christian police officer.” They are the people who call good evil and evil good, ie., who say that “anarchism is of the devil” and that statism is of God. They have been central figures in making it impossible for men to “distinguish between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not” (Malachi 3:18). 

Human rulers and institutionalists posing as “pastors” and “priests” exist only as an attempt to thwart the work of God. The Kingdom of God is between God and man, without any need for priestly or kingly mediation. These men have always been nothing but false, substitute leaders and gods who stood in the way of God’s Kingdom, so that when people went looking for it, they only found pews and voting booths. When mankind finally learns how to be ruled by God alone and throw off the yoke of bondage they have always been under, it will be an anarchist society of direct submission to God, not one where men are huddled in so-called churches or have their man-made legal orders legislated by so-called “godly” men. It will be one where “those who feared the LORD spoke with one another, and the LORD listened and heard them” (Malachi 3:16).