[This is part 9 in a series “Who Were the Biblical Prophets and What Were They Preaching?” See part one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, ten]

Being that the Bible is an anarchist manifesto that preaches the Kingdom of God and the abolition of the evil and rebellious kingdoms of man, there are a handful of verses in holy scripture that statists desperately seek to use to make a case for their own participation in and furtherance of the kingdoms of the world. Anyone who wishes to remain a statist while professing to be a follower of the Lord has to make some vain attempt to reconcile their worldly ideology and evil footsteps with God. Otherwise, they’re left with two options: give up any claims to being a servant of the Lord and admit that statism is ungodly and evil and that you don’t care anymore to prove differently, or acknowledge statism as antithetical to God, repent of its ideology and deeds, and begin to serve the Lord alone. Since men rarely want to take one of these paths and either outright admit that they are false converts whose actions contradict their professions of being one of the Lord’s servants or abandon their idolatry and careers in worldly governments and confess that it is sinful to do so, the typical route is to attempt make a case for remaining on the evil path and fooling yourself (or having others do it for you) into thinking God approves of it.

If you’re a “military chaplain” then (a phony gig by the way), you have to hunt in vain for a few Bible verses that can allegedly show God’s endorsement of serving Babylons or at least be used to pump-up new recruits with the idea that they’re on a mission from God by “serving their country.” Since the whole of Scripture is a condemnation of people who have gone the ways of the kingdoms of the world rather than God’s Kingdom, it is necessary for all false converts (ie., people who claim to know the Lord but do not do as He says) to scrounge a few verses here and there that can make them feel their evil work is fine by God, or better yet, that it is a divine commission on par with the greatest of Biblical prophets. Whereas the only true role of a minister to soldiers would be to call them to repent, lay down their swords, and to prevent others from ever enlisting, the “military chaplain” comes along to make it seem as if signing up to fight on behalf of Babylon has God’s stamp of approval.

One of the verses commonly employed by these perverse men is Isaiah 6:8, where the prophet answers God’s need for someone to go forth and speak His message of rebuke of the sins of the people of the day in the words, “Here am I, Lord, send me.”

Whereas this is the famous commissioning of Isaiah from God to preach against all the statist ways of the world and warn people of judgment and destruction for having gone this route, it is widely adopted by state rulers and their propagandists to glorify state violence and blasphemously present the mission of Babylonian empires as aligning with God’s will, as if making an oath to obey orders or enforce the legal decrees of Babylonians is no different than the prophets answering a call from God. Isaiah 6:8 is regularly cited by soldiers of worldly militaries who are actually convinced that trusting in and serving Egyptian armies—the very thing rebuked by the prophet Isaiah—is doing “the Lord’s work.” The divine appointment to Isaiah is somehow taken to be a “call of duty” to human rulers and their armies. This misappropriation of Scripture—any use of God’s word to defend statism is a perversion—has even been invoked by former presidents to link military service to answering a call from God. It has also been used to address West Point graduates and make them think they’re in the position of the Biblical prophets who are answering a divine call in their commission to serve Babylonian empires as its uniformed sword-bearers (compare this even to the prophets—Isaiah among them—who seemed to have preached in the nude). Most recently, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) even referenced this Isaiah verse as a propagandistic recruiting tool to sign people up as boot-wearing kidnappers and enslavers of the State’s many law enforcement agencies. 

Though I usually attempt to write about Biblical truths that others haven’t really covered before, in this case, a few others have actually pointed out the perversion here. And though this is somewhat of a deviation in this article series, it will still be useful in further making the case that the prophets preached against the statist ideology of the world by showing showing one way that people come to an opposite conclusion than what the prophets actually taught. 

The context of Isaiah’s calling 

Before I cover the ministry of the major prophets at length, we can quickly address this verse by Isaiah that is commonly cited by statists as a case for God calling people to serve human government — not necessarily directly by them as some sort of prooftext for military service, but more so in their own corrupted thinking that joining the military is kind of like God’s calling to the prophets. Just as they are playing dress-up as soldiers to begin with, they add to this sin an imagination that the are prophets of God, too.

This regular citation of Isaiah’s words are important because the statist’s illegitimate appropriation of this verse is the opposite of our thesis here that the prophets call people away from their support and service for worldly systems of government and warn of the judgment that comes to those who stay on this wicked road of sin.

The statists attempt to take this verse where Isaiah unhesitatingly accepts the offer to serve the Lord as a prophet, and use it for the purpose of telling soldiers who serve in modern-day Egyptian armies as order-takers for Pharaoh that they are likewise hearing a calling from the Lord to do His work. Even though they are more akin to the people who pursued the Israelites out of Egypt with chariots and horses, they imagine that they are people who are taking up a divine duty on the level of the prophets of God. 

To see how corrupt and evil it is to take the words of Isaiah and use them to act as if jointing the United States military is some divine commission, we should first look at the nature of the verse being hijacked toward that end. What God was looking for was a prophet, and precisely one who would rebuke the corrupt political order of the day and call people to turn back to serving God rather than whoring themselves out to the kingdoms of the world, whether as men who enlist in Pharaohs’ armies or as one of the idolaters who shout “support the troops” from the sidelines. 

Anyone who knows the anti-statist nature of the Bible in general and the rebuke of idolatry among the prophets more specifically can instantly see how great of an evil it is for statists to adopt any Bible verse for their own ends. For statists to turn Isaiah’s answer to God’s calling into some recruitment tool for worldly armies is the height of Biblical perversion. Whereas the divine mission of the prophets is one of rebuking the sins which raise up human rulers and bring a people under judgment, the statist’s appropriation of this scripture is used to call people to a mission of serving human government!

What God is sending Isaiah to do here is precisely to warn of an impending judgment at the hands of the foreign regimes (Assyrian invasions and Babylonian exiles) which will leave the entire land desolate — a judgment that, as we know, only comes upon people precisely for acting like Babylonians themselves (eg, administering systems of human government, joining their militaries, praising soldiers and police as your saviors, etc). How great a perversion of truth it is for soldiers and those counseling them to adopt Isaiah’s calling as their own. For they are the very hardheaded people on the receiving-end of the prophets’ ministries, who are still not getting it that statism is sin and and still rejecting this message from the Lord to turn from these very evils. As Albert Jay Nock wrote,

“The Lord commissioned his prophets [Isaiah] to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. ‘Tell them what a worthless lot they are.’ He said, ‘Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don’t mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you,’ He added, ‘that it won’t do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life.’”

The prophet’s rebuke of faith in human rule 

What is amazing about the statist appropriation of Isaiah’s calling for use as a supposedly calling for those who serve human government is that this is the same prophet who warned of destruction and judgment that awaits those who trust in and serve these worldly political systems, which God specifically says is against His voice. 

“‘Woe to the rebellious children,’ declares the LORD, ‘to those who carry out a plan that is not Mine, who form an alliance, but against My will, heaping up sin upon sin. They set out to go down to Egypt without asking My advice, to seek shelter under Pharaoh’s protection and take refuge in Egypt’s shade. But Pharaoh’s protection will become your shame, and the refuge of Egypt’s shade your disgrace” (Isaiah 30:1-3). 

Far from the thoughts of those evil statists who imagine themselves in the seat of Isaiah’s commission from God as they embark on the evil work of soldiering and policing within the Egyptian plunder systems of the world, deluded by notions such as these institutions “fighting for our freedom,” “laying down our lives for our brothers,” or “protecting and serving the people,” the prophet himself pronounces judgment against these very types of men and declares that they don’t even know the Lord! 

“Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, who rely on horses, who trust in their abundance of chariots and in their multitude of horsemen. They do not look to the Holy One of Israel; they do not seek the LORD” (Isaiah 31:1). 

Far from thinking that military enlistment—a ritualistic sacrament of the statist religion—is hearing the voice of the Lord as the Biblical prophets had, these people are precisely ones who failed to see that “the Egyptians are men, not God” (Isaiah 31:3). They are precisely men who believe that men (eg, militaries and “commander in chiefs”) are their saviors. Far from knowing the words of the prophets, whose whole ministries were a standing rebuke of statism, anyone who joins the military has not the slightest whisper of the Lord’s voice in their ear and His prediction of the disappointment, disapproval, and demise of all those who trust in and serve the kingdoms of the world, whether as the fools among the public who shout “support the troops” at the “veteran’s day” parades or the sinners willing to put the uniform on. 

“Look now, you are trusting in Egypt, that splintered reed of a staff that will pierce the hand of anyone who leans on it. Such is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who trust in him” (Isaiah 36:6). 

Anyone who was actually hearing the voice of the Lord wouldn’t even believe in the existence of Egypt, much less apply to Pharaoh to join his army. It is more than safe to say that statists do not hear the voice of the Lord; it is the whole message of Scripture that those who place their faith in human systems of government are rebels against the Kingdom of God. We know that those statists who support and serve the military or police forces of the contemporary Egypts and Babylons of the world do not hear the voice of the Lord, because if they did they would know they are taking part in a system that only ends in disaster. They would know that “those who made Cush their hope and Egypt their boast will be dismayed and ashamed” (Isaiah 20:5). If statists knew the Lord, they wouldn’t be statists. People who know the Lord never trust in presidents, congressmen, or police and military forces, to save them but know rather that these men are false saviors, false lords, false gods— that “a horse is a vain hope for deliverance” and that “despite all its great strength it cannot save” (Psalm 33:17). 

The mutual exclusivity of military service and prophetic calling 

There is all the difference in the world in joining the militaries of the kingdoms of the world and hearing the voice of the Lord to preach against these kingdoms. God has never called men to make a contract with the devil to shoot children on his behalf. Indeed, it is this very decision—to serve the governments of the world or to seek the Kingdom of God—that separates the ungodly from the godly. Serving the militaries and police forces of human civil government is not something that can be done alongside serving God. These are mutually exclusive decisions that a man must make this day, which determines which Kingdom it is that he serves, whether the satanic political systems of the world or the Kingdom of the Lord that is not of this world. A man cannot “serve his country” and serve God. Scripture draws a sharp dichotomy:

“Some trust in chariots and others in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God” (Psalm 20:7). 

There is all the difference in the world—indeed the main one that all Christian need to discern—between the mission that God sends His people on and the mission that false gods and false prophets send their people on. As we have argued in this series on the prophets, the mission of the Biblical prophet is largely to rebuke the sins inherent to the worldly ideology of statism that says that human rulers and man-made law systems are “necessary” for protection, justice, welfare, or social order and society altogether. The mission of the statists is, of course, to call people to enlist in and serve the kingdoms of the world that God’s people call men away from serving. For statists to think they can adopt a divine initiation of a prophetic mission for their own purposes goes against everything we learn in the Bible. For the mission of the Biblical prophets is a specifically anti-statist one. A true prophetic mission would precisely be rebuking the sinful thought or act of joining the military and sternly counseling men against any type of service to worldly kingdoms, for to do so is to serve the devil and walk the path of evil.

If the prophet Isaiah were around today, he would absolutely scold these military apologists who use his calling as an excuse to serve the government of the devil. For anyone who is answering a call to serve the kingdoms of the world is an ungodly man who, far from hearing the voice of the Lord, is answering a call from the devil to strap on boots and wield machine guns in his cause of death and destruction around the world. 

The perverse use of Isaiah’s calling

It is peak absurdity for statists—those who believe in the existence and alleged necessity of human civil government—to attempt to argue that military service is “answering God’s voice” in the same way the prophet Isaiah was answering it when he took up God’s task of judging the very statist order of his day that the modern statist still supports. But this is what they imagine in their corrupt thinking, where they can read the words of the Bible but not even know what they mean or think they mean something else — the very thing God told the prophet he would be up against (Isa 6:9-10). By citing Isaiah’s answer to God, they somehow imagine that their service to and faith in human government is also hearing the voice of God. It is an answer to (false) gods, to be sure, but not to the God of the Bible. 

This whole appropriation of Isaiah 6 for a case that soldiers, police officers, or federal agents, are adopting a divine mission from above is the rotten thinking of a debased mind that could imagine that their evils are not only divinely endorsed, but part of an explicit calling. Yet ideologically supporting and directly serving human government is precisely the sin that men need to repent from, not some sort of prophetic vocation where the man enlisting in the military is putting himself in the place of a prophet of God. The equation of enforcing state laws with prophetic obedience is astounding here. It is nothing but an attempt to transform the call of the prophets to rebuke power into a supposed endorsement of it.

Prophets like Isaiah were specifically sent by God to expose the idolatry in trusting in Egypts, Pharaohs, and their armies, not to call men to join them! For one to genuinely think that watching one of the Army’s propaganda commercials on television is akin to hearing “the voice of the Lord” shows the reprobate mind of the statist, who denied God’s word for so long that God has shut their minds off to the truth — to believe lies, have darkened hearts, and be ever hearing but never understanding. 

The hardened hearts of statists 

What’s amusing about the statists’ use of Isaiah’s answer to God is that they are actually the very people seen all throughout the ministry of all the prophets with hardened hearts who mocked the prophetic voice and refused to listen, not those in the position of the prophets. Statists are people precisely who refuse to repent when prophets come against them. Those who would join the military and kid themselves that they’re answering God’s call are the very type of people that Isaiah was up against. Since the people had been so hardened and unresponsive to calls for repentance for the injustices mentioned by the prophet in preceding chapters, now God was sending the prophet to pronounce judgment upon these hardheaded people (vv. 9-10), who were precisely like those today who cite this verse in defense of their military service, unable to see how it contradicts God’s calling upon our lives in general, and more specifically, the ministry of His prophets.

It may be hard for one to understand why the prophet would preach to a people who would only fall further into their sin as a result. Isn’t the purpose of a prophet to bring one to repentance? Isn’t it always to get a people to turn from their sin and avoid judgment? Again, the prophets here were up against a people who had long refused to hear the voice of the Lord and were not about to hear it now, despite warnings from men of God. They were a people who were so lost in their idolatrous support for worldly governments and their militaries—just like the people citing Isaiah 6:8 to defend military service—that they now deserved to come under harsh judgment for their sins.

This warning of the hardheaded people who the prophet would have to preach to—cited also in all the Gospels—might call to mind the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart at the hand of God, so as to assure his destruction after initially having hardened his own heart. When a people reject God for so long, practicing all the evils of statism, being consumed by all its idolatry, and praising military and police and counting themselves as patriots, eventually God just gives them over to a reprobate mind so that they aren’t even able to see their way out of their current path of destruction. It wasn’t that God arbitrarily hardened Pharaoh’s heart, that He wants men to sin, or that He doesn’t want statists to repent, but rather that after long periods of unrepentance such people are due for judgment and get sold out to their own follies to continue headlong on that path of destruction. Pharaoh hardened his own heart (Exodus 7:13; 8:15, 32); God only hardened it further after repeated refusals to heed His warnings and sealed the deal for them (Exodus 9:12; 10:1). 

For years and decades of having a stubborn heart and refusing to hear the voice of the Lord calling you away from it, even believing that the calling of the prophets is akin to joining up with Pharaoh and his army, God allows people to remain in their ignorance until they are utterly consumed by the consequences of their sins, which in the case of Isaiah here would last “until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left unoccupied and the land is desolate and ravaged, until the LORD has driven men far away and the land is utterly forsaken” (Isaiah 6:11-12). He withdraws opportunities to repent that could avoid destruction, once He has decided that judgment must go forth. 

This may well be the case with Americans today, who have had more than enough opportunities to see that their statist idolatry is sin that has brought about their bondage and is deserving of further destruction. Though it becomes increasingly evident that Americans are under judgment as the surveillance-police state advances, as people are evicted from their homes for not paying property taxes to Pharaoh’s agents, or as the price of all their goods and services continues to rise, these people still continue in the same sins of voting, praising human rulers, and believing in the general ideology of statism, even if they think the current regime at any given time is imperfect and in need of reform. Though God means the political evils in statist societies to provide evidence of His existence and the urgent need to turn back to the Lord as our only King, statists often at best lament the current regime in power and blame all their problems on “the democrats,” “the female vote,” or the lack of “Christian” participation in worldly politics, rather than confess their own sins and complicity in these evils and repent. God may well be keeping American’s hearts’ hardened today so that they cannot turn back and will only continue in their path of destruction, after a self-hardening that occurred many generations ago and after many calls to repentance for these political sins, which they repeatedly mocked. 

Jesus cites Isaiah 6 here to give a rough explanation of why he spoke in parables (Matt 13:10-16), which were easily understood by those who hear the voice of the Lord but left dumbfounded those who did not. This explains why all the professing Christians today, who are actually just lost sheep who have bought into the ideology of the world, still cite things like “render unto Caesar” as a defense of human government today: they don’t actually know the Lord, hear His voice, or have His Law written on their hearts. The parables of Christ easily reveal Kingdom truths to those whose hearts are receptive enough to hear them. But they conceal these truths from the spiritually calloused whose reprobation keeps them from understanding the word of God, just like the Pharisees of Jesus’s day who were probably excellent orators who could cite many scriptures and impress crowds of people with their sermons, but who actually didn’t know God and His main message, just as the majority of Christians today who “go to church,” sit down for sermons, or say they read their Bibles, but really have never even met the Lord who hates these sinful kingdoms of the world. Again, this isn’t arbitrary exclusion from the truth, but more so a confirmation of self-chosen hardness, where a people had denied God for so long that He was now refusing to give it to them as simply and plainly as before, all while the message remains right there for anyone with eyes to see. Speaking in parables was a way for Jesus to sift those who hear His voice from those whose hearts were already hardened.

Those who can cite Isaiah’s calling as similar to their own mission to serve statist militaries are in the same boat to hell that all the Pharisees and false prophets of old were, who presented themselves as experts on the word of God but didn’t even actually know Him. Those who know God don’t even need an explicit text telling them that they aren’t to join the militaries of the world; this truth is pressed upon their hearts. Those who ask “chapter and verse” for things that are either omitted from Scripture or not explicit, like “do not join the military,” are not actually the profound Biblical scholars they imagine themselves to be, but rather only men who show that the Law of God is not impressed upon their hearts and minds.

Far from taking upon a mission of prophetic importance by joining the military of Egypt, these people are the very Egyptians and statists of the world who the prophets rebuked as having hearts so hardened that they couldn’t even hear the Lord’s voice. Statists are precisely the people on the receiving-end of prophetic rebukes in the Bible, not rebuking end. Those who serve human government and support these systems, which are nothing but substitute gods for the Lord our God, are the main people in the world today who have calloused and uncircumcised hearts. They are the main people, in fact, who define what we mean by worldly, which is not just “someone who enjoys material pleasures and wealth” but the very people who take part in the political institutions of the earth. 

Far from being in Isaiah’s shoes in their felt-calling to serve the governments of the devil, statists are precisely the people described in Isaiah 6 and throughout the Bible who are blind, deaf, obstinate, with hearts of stone. They pretend to be Christians but don’t truly hear His voice; if they did they wouldn’t support the kingdoms of the world. Far from occupying Isaiah’s seat, anyone who thinks the Lord is calling them to become a police officer, soldier, or serve worldly governments in some other official capacity, is one of the people who Isaiah was preaching against who were hardened in sin. They are the ones the prophets call to repent, yet who mock and kill the prophets. 

Far from joining the military or police forces of human kings and their governments being something that God has called the people to do, such a thing is, in fact, one of the forms of judgment God listed that will come upon a people who trust in men to rule over them rather than God. Though there is not currently conscription in the United States, as there was with during the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam, these forced enlistments—not to mention everyone the existence of “selective service” so-called—were not some sort of answering of a prophetic call by God upon the lives of the individuals, who would have gone into ministry against the statist systems of the world if this were so. They were part of the judgment against a people who had already sold themselves out to the Egyptian systems of the world and sold their kids into bondage to them (1 Samuel 8). For anyone to enthusiastically join voluntarily and claim they are answering a call from God is even more ridiculous. Because God allows conscription as judgment upon a statist people provides no proof whatsoever that He endorses these practices, in the ways that God’s permissive-will of allowing statist systems to exist and plunder people is a concession to those whose sin is deserving of bringing them into bondage to men.  

Besides, the only alleged “need” for a military anyway is because statists are a people who have forsaken God and therefore forgone His protection. Those who make the Lord alone their King would not even be in some alleged need of military or police; their protection from enemies would be providentially provided in this anarchistic society that was “ruled” only by the Lord our God. Anywhere there is a military or police force is the proof that a people have forsaken the Lord and trusted in men as their lords and saviors, as well as proof that they are under judgment for this sin and occupied by a system of government employees who, at the very least, cost them trillions of dollars a year to maintain, and who, at worst and always-likely, are dominated by these men who maintain one giant plantation of slaves who must obey and worship their new masters. Setting up statist militaries is precisely what men do when they abandon God as their King, because they realize they have likewise abandoned His protection and need to now develop a substitute for it.

The true mission of a prophet 

For statists—both police officers, soldiers, and their superiors in this case—to have taken the moment of Isaiah’s divine commissioning and act as if it could be used to pretend that their intention of serving human government is answering a call from God is purely evil. It is not only inaccurate, but a deliberate corruption of God’s word and of the true missions that He sends people on, which is to rebuke statists, not to join up with them. 

In every way, the statist’s attempt to twist Isaiah 6:8 into a call for government or military service is profoundly perverse, as if prophetic obedience means serving and furthering the very empires that the prophets criticized and pronounced judgment upon. For statists to co-opt this text for their own ends just shows that they are the very people whose sins have given them over to a reprobate mind to even think such things. Isaiah was sent to warn of judgment for the very sins of acting like Babylonians yourselves, not to recruit for their armies. The prophets had come to confront the very statism that statists think they can partake in, all while kidding themselves that they are like one of the prophets answering a call from God as they become direct servants and friends of the world and hence enemies of God. 

It is the height of Biblical corruption for a statist to appropriate the prophetic calling upon the life of one of God’s prophets, who are sent specifically to rebuke those who walk on the wicked path of political violence and bloodshed, and use it as if the Lord was speaking to them to join the armies of Egypt and Babylon of the world. If there is any lesson at all to be taken from Scripture, it is that God hates the ways of the kingdoms of the world and wants men to repent from serving and supporting them and turn back to Him alone. God has never called anyone to enlist in Pharaoh’s military. He calls all men to repent of their support and service to worldly governments of men, and to seek His Kingdom instead. To think that joining the military or enforcement arms of Pharaoh’s law systems is answering a call from God is a total inversion of prophetic calling. God calls people away from serving the evil systems of the world. The main sin of man throughout history has been the rebellion against God’s anarcho-theocracy, which is accomplished precisely through the support and service to the kingdoms of the world. For one to become a soldier or law officer for the man-made systems of government in its devilish work of stealing, killing, and destroying is not just missing the mark of a prophet, but is entirely opposed to the work that men of God are to be on. Statists aren’t just not Isaiah; they’re one of the people who the prophet would have reproached.

Connecting military service to serving God is evil. The soldiers of worldly governments are archists, against Jesus Christ’s command to be anarchists, which means that far from fulfilling some role or a Biblical prophet, they are acting as the people who God hates. Those who look to Egypt to sign up for their militaries or police forces are Babylonian whores, by Biblical standards. They are people who commit adultery against the Lord by serving men rather than their Maker and who bring judgment upon themselves for prostituting themselves out to these worldly powers.

The evil of a military or police “chaplain”

Probably one of the main groups of people who cite Isaiah 6:8 as if it military service or policing were some prophetic calling are so-called “chaplains,” whose very duties are to prop-up these systems of political violence by reassuring those who carry it out that they’re doing “the Lord’s work.” The whole idea of a military or police “chaplain” is purely a corrupted one, providing spiritual cover for war and violence that indeed cannot be reconciled by the voice of the Lord. These chaplains, therefore, act as if they are the voice of the Lord to people who wish to be deceived in their commission of evil against others. They are people who spread ideas against the ways of the Lord, on behalf of people who act against the Lord but don’t want to confess this to themselves.

In every way, a “chaplain” to those who serve Pharaohs are antithetical to the true work of servants of God, who actually rebuke sin. Whereas true prophets of God rebuke those who serve and support Egyptian statist societies, these “chaplains” are necessarily false prophets by trade who have come to tell these badged and booted workers of iniquity that their sins are right by God, that they’re serving the Lord faithfully while they’re really serving the devil and his worldly system of government and going against all the commands of the Lord. They exist solely to console violent plunderers in their sin, such as telling police officers after a traumatic shooting of an innocent man that Jesus still loves them and supports them and that they should press on in their sin. Whereas true prophets of God work to tear down the ideology that raises up rulers and their accomplices in camouflage or blue, “chaplains” work to enable state violence and bless the actions of these wicked men by providing the needed mental tricks to keep men defying God’s voice. “Go to war, Jesus is with you!” “Stop weeping over shooting that kid, he was a terrorist anyway!” 

Far from being men who deliver God’s word themselves, which rebukes worldly systems of political power, military and police chaplains are men who have come to sanctify war and home invasions in the minds of those who carry it out. They work to conflate the mission of God’s prophets with the empire’s violence in the minds of those who are experiencing the moral dilemma of performing these evil deeds while considering themselves “Christian soldiers.” 

It is no wonder that these “chaplains” don’t call upon servants of worldly kingdoms and their militaries to repent: they are in need of repentance themselves of living a lie and signing-off on bloodshed as fine-by-God. Furthermore, they are in need of maintaining their careers as false prophets. If their only message was that one could not serve Pharaohs and count themselves as a servant of the Lord, they would be out of jobs. So they compromise and water-down the message of God’s true prophets, making men think there is no contradiction between following God’s commands and Pharaoh’s orders.

It is understandable how the false prophets called “military chaplains” came to be though, since many of them are clergymen of the institutional church, which one article notes have always “conformed, respected, and often supported state authorities and in the process have tolerated and participated in the most grievous evil.” There is no legitimate role for a “military chaplain” from a truly Biblical point of view. They are among the false prophets of scripture who spew lies to defend the statist ideology of the world as being God-approved. As another writer of the Anabaptist tradition suggests, Chaplains are “sell-outs to Constantinian religion.” He adds, “Canons are meant to be fired, and military chaplains should be too.” 

Contrary to the lies that their “chaplains” or “commanders in chief” are filling them with, joining the military is all the proof in the world that one does not know Jesus Christ, whose message had to do with loving enemies rather than waging war on them (Matt 5:38-48), who rebuked Peter’s violence and taught that all who live by the sword will die by the sword (Matt 26:52), and that His Kingdom was not of the world and its systems that militaries fight for (John 18:36). Soldiers and police are people who never learned that these carnal weapons are unfit for the Christian (2 Corinthians 10:3–4). They are people who never learned that “friendship with the world means enmity against God” (James 4:1–4). And so they are left with pretending like they’re one of God’s prophets, all while putting on a uniform issued by the satanic systems of government of the world.