[This is part 2 in a series on “False Dichotomies in Political Theology.” See part one, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris 

Most of the false dichotomies that we will point out in this series all necessarily overlap one other. They are all more or less minor points that are isolated from the grand picture of the false dichotomy where men choose from different degrees or stylistic “differences” of the inherently ungodly system human civil government that conveniently (and even deceptively) excludes God’s anarchistic Kingdom order from the picture. And they all accomplish more or less the same end: working together, through various distortions, to further the ungodly system of human government by presenting false choices for men to pick from.

This case is no different with this one. It is more or less inseparable from the general fallacy that a “Christian” state or a “secular” state are the only options that men have to choose from.

This is the idea that we either have (1) a State that “keeps God’s law” and fulfills its supposedly “God-ordained” purpose of punishing only the guilty and being a terror to evil doers, or (2) a State that has run afoul of God’s Law and starts wrongly harming the innocent and perverting law and justice that it is supposedly tasked by God to uphold.

This whole picture where human government is supposedly “ordained” by God to maintain law and justice, but somehow or another fails to fulfill this role over and over, is another rotten fruit of corrupted statist thinking that wishes to find a Biblical justification for both their worldly ideology of statism and their slothfulness to maintain the weightier matter of law and justice out of personal responsibility.  

What they imagine here is the myth of a State that does not act evilly and which limits itself to some supposedly God-appointed task of punishing bad guys. Even though it should be obvious to anyone that States pervert justice and must do so as a matter of course, these people leave a place in their minds for a God-honoring State that doesn’t screw this up. They create the myth in their minds of a State that is not raised up in sin and rebellion against God and does not act evil.

The truth is that every State is raised up by sinners in direct rebellion against God’s law. In fact, the very act of erecting human rulers is one of the main ways that men break God’s law. Anyone who has ever opened a Bible and read it honestly should know this: human civil government has its origins and continuation in man’s refusal to be ruled by God. The only reason human rulers even exist is that men have refused to make God their King. That most professed believers still cannot see this is only proof that God’s Law is not written on their hearts, not that it isn’t sitting right there in the text for anyone to read and see. 

It is, therefore, impossible to have a system of human civil government that “keeps God’s Law.” These systems are erected against it. Those who obey God’s Law don’t raise up false gods (human rulers) at all. They don’t try to make ungodly systems “serve God” (whatever that even means). The result of evangelizing people to the Kingdom of God is the abolition of human government, which can never be “Christianized.”

Yet the statist idea is to maintain the core political structure of the world but have it pretend to be a “Christian” one that “follows God” (as if God ever commanded men to set up such systems and as if this has ever been the case). This idea of a human civil government that sort of imitates Godliness by claiming itself to be “Christian” is not what a Christian nation is, though. That’s what a nation of people who take God’s name in vain is. A Christian nation obeys God’s Law, not laws that are “based” on God’s Law. A Christian nation obeys God, not “reflects” obedience to God.

The role of human government 

What then is the role of human civil government given that it exists? Why do we even have these kingdoms? Is it true they have just deviated from the way God wished them to act? Do we just need to just get them in line with God’s will again? Do they just need to limit their role to law and justice and get them away from extrabiblical legislation? Should we work through them since they are here as another means of advancing “Christendom”? Don’t they serve some purpose? How did they come about?

The answer should be plain to see: the kingdoms of man were raised up in sin and a rejection by man of God as their only God. Their very origin lies in man’s rebellion against God and their mere existence—forget what it is they go on to do—is the chief mark of a people who rejected the Lord and chose other gods to rule over them. A statist society is all the proof needed that a people in it hate God, for a people who serve and love God would never raise up false ones. A godly people cannot be ruled and human rulers are exclusively a punishment upon ungodly men. Far from being set up by God as the divine institution for law and order, the State was set up by sinners and only exists as a judgment and a terror upon the very sinners who demanded it and think it’s needed to “uphold God’s Law.” God only passively allowed it once these people had already committed the sin. It wasn’t His desire for men to raise up human kings and civil magistrates. As one prophet’s book records, “I gave you a king in My anger” (Hosea 13:11). God allowed it to terrorize those sinners who had turned away from Him by turning toward human kings and governments. 

The sense in which the State is a “servant of God” and “terror to evildoers” is that it brings great tyranny upon statists whose evil-doing (setting up other gods than the Lord) must be judged. The State is a punishment for this grave sin of setting up kings other than the King of Kings. (Romans 13 is not a different political theology than Samuel 8, lest Scripture contradict itself). The “wrath” that States bring upon mankind is targeted against the societies themselves who support them. 

This idea that “civil magistrates need to uphold God’s law” or “proclaim the gospel” is an entirely mistaken view of the sense in which God makes use of the State, which is but as a “rod of His anger” to chasten a people who refused to be ruled by God alone, who now need to see the great tyrannies that result when men turn away from His rulership in an anarchistic society. In this sense, the State is doing its “divine job” perfectly: it is an evil organization that perverts justice and law in society and ensnares the people into bondage in a million different ways.

It is somewhat understandable how statists get it wrong here. There is a rather fine line in the sense in which the State is “ordained” by God, yet one that makes all the difference in the world to differentiate, because it will either lead men to think human government should be tasked with the role of law and justice or lead them to see precisely what it means when men pass off this godly responsibility to human rulers. For the sense in which the State is “ordained” by God is precisely to punish statist sinners who think justice and law should be handed over to human government, not to punish criminals as God’s prescribed crime-fighting agency. That the State is “ordained” by God only demonstrates His sovereignty even over the evil statists who believe they are acting on their own will (Isa 10:13). The sword that it bears is turned inward on the rebels who set these systems up in their sin, not outward as some divinely-appointed police force for the righteous. The State is used by God to punish the sin of statism itself by corrupting society and doing evils against a people who believe in them. It is not His appointed social institution for punishing criminals and putting the “bad guys” in jail for us.

The State was never a part of God’s creation order; it came only afterward under men who were specifically seeking to depart from the ways of the Lord. The State was only ever a reluctant concession by God to idolaters who set it up against His counsel and who, therefore, needed to be punished for this sin. The State was always a curse that followed man’s political rebellion against God, and never a part of God’s prescribed social order. God permits human rulers to dominate those men who refused divine kingship, but He does not instruct men to set them up and pursue these worldly kingdoms. Indeed, he warns everywhere that it will only mean their destruction and bondage. 

Those who cite Romans 13 as the supposed guide for how human civil government is supposed to act completely gloss over the fact that there is no command in Scripture for men to erect a system of human civil government, and that everywhere such systems are raised up they are shown to be in rebellion to God, from Cain’s city-state to Nimrod’s Babylon. 

Far from the idolaters’ claim that the “civil magistrate” ought to “promote true religion,” “enforce God’s Law,” or “return the nation to its Christian roots,” Scripture gives the State a very different and far more narrow role: States exists to punish the very wickedness that erected it in defiance of God. It is not “ordained” by God as a justice provider or a means of punishing ordinary criminals; it is a terror to the sin of statism that declares men need human rulers instead of (or in addition to) God. That is precisely why justice is so consistently perverted in our statist society today: men went after the ways of the world rather than the Lord who told His people to never adopt the customs, practices, laws, and political structures of man’s kingdoms and warned them they would be cursed if they did. Human kings and human governments are raised up in defiance of God who warns His people, “you shall not walk in the customs of the nation that I am driving out before you, for they did all these things, and therefore I detested them” (Leviticus 20:3). God always warned that men must not seek the ways of worldly kings and kingdoms, but rather “are to keep My statutes and ordinances” (Leviticus 18:26).

It is not possible for human government to “uphold God’s Law” or become a “godly institution,” because human government is decidedly raised up against God’s Law, which forbids men from having other gods than the Lord or practicing the theft and murder inherent to these systems. Nor is it possible for men to keep God’s Law and raise up these systems.

Far from being “ordained” in the sense that statists use it to mean the institution that God thankfully and graciously gave us human government to administer law and order on earth in the supposed absence of an earthly Kingdom of God, the only real “role” for human government—the way that God makes use of these evil systems—is to punish those men precisely who take this view that law and justice should be outsourced to human rulers, rather than upheld by free men out of personal responsibility who are carrying out the work of God’s Kingdom outside the politics of the world.

It is only in this sense—as a terror to statists themselves—that human government can be called “a terror to evildoers.” It brings distorted law and perverted justice precisely as God’s chosen means of judgment upon those who, in their worldly-political rebellion to His Kingship, erected these man-made law systems against His direct rule and Kingdom order. God permits such governments only under His permissive will. It is not because human government is part of God’s perfect design that it exists, but because such evils inherent to these systems are precisely fitted to serve as a rod of discipline for a people who insisted they must have them. As David Lipscomb explains, 

“So long as men refused the rule of God, God ordains that they shall be ruled by their own governments and eat the fruit of their own ways and be filled with their own devices, showing clearly that when men turn from the government of God to their own inventions and government, that God ordains these governments as a means of punishing them for their rebellion, and that while punishing them, they are God‘s ordinances for this work” (Lipscomb, On Civil Government, p. 27).

The only sense in which we can make the risky submission—as Christian Anarchists—that the State is “necessary” or “ordained” by God is that it is God’s means of punishing those men precisely who refuse to abandon their statism. As Lipscomb puts it, “God has ordained [human government] as a punishment to man for refusing to submit to the government of God and it must exist so long as the human family or any considerable portion of it refuses to submit to the government of God” (pp. 10-11). If men began to submit to God and seek His Kingdom rather than man’s, there would be no room for the human in the picture; it has come solely as judgment for the refusal to do so. There can thus be no argument that we must seek the kingdoms of man or participate in them in the meantime or attempt to make them resemble or imitate “God’s Law.” For they are the consequence precisely of this sort of sinful thinking.

If statists knew their Bibles, they wouldn’t be statists, and they wouldn’t conflate the existence of something as God’s moral approval. They would be able to see that what God allows to exist is not always proof that it was part of His perfect will, and that in many places God allows things like human government as a concession to man’s sin. As the psalmist recalls the groaning in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt:  

“Yet they soon forgot His works and failed to wait for His counsel. They craved intensely in the wilderness and tested God in the desert. So He granted their request, but sent a wasting disease upon them” (Psalm 106:13-15). 

A snag in the statist theory

There’s one glaring problem with this idea that human civil government is “ordained” by God in the sense that He gave it to us as our institution to use to uphold law and order: the fact that it never does this.

The only explanation the statist has it to try and suggest that it has merely run off-course and gotten away from its “true purpose” that God intended it to serve. Their “solution,” of course, is to “reform” it back to its supposedly-Biblical purpose of “maintaining God’s Law” and keeping justice in society.

A much easier explanation is that the State is functioning exactly as we should expect it to: as a terrorist organization that brings great evils to all those sinners who think it is necessary to society beyond its “necessity” as a judgment for their sin. It is not that human government has “strayed from its godly role prescribed in the Bible,” as claimed by those who treat Romans 13 as a positive blueprint for the State. On the contrary, these systems are functioning exactly as Scripture says they will: plundering the very people who trust in man-made kings to save them and to raise up militaries to keep their enemies away (1 Samuel 8).

The State has never been appointed by God to “uphold true law and justice” and evidently does not fulfill that imagined role (hence the source of complaints by statists that “it needs to get back to its proper role of law and justice”). The task of upholding law and justice was always given to God’s people through personal and communal responsibility (1 Cor 6), never through the Babylonian and Roman legal systems of the world. 

The erroneous idea of these people is that the State has simply deviated from its “true purpose” and can be reformed or brought back to a “godly” operation. This is just another myth in the statist’s cannon of myths. From the days of the Pharaohs of Egypt, or the Babylonians and Assyrians that were always coming against the Biblical people called Israel, God has used such governments as instruments of judgment against the wicked people who raise them up in rebellion against His direct rule and who practice the worldly-political methods of social organization. As most all the Biblical prophets record, the Babylonian and Assyrian invaders functioned as a judgment against the sinful practices of domestic political plunder. 

Since statists struggle to grasp the Biblical sense in which the the State “serves” God by sinning and bringing judgment upon those who rejected God’s direct rule, they arrive at a difficult position of having to explain how it is exactly that it has “deviated” from its supposedly “ordained” (in a good sense) role of “keeping God’s law and upholding justice.” They fail to see that just as God had called clearly evil regimes like Assyrians and Babylonians His “servants” that this did not imply it was a “good” thing. As the Christian Anarchist, Kevin Craig, explains, “We must remember that often in Scripture, good-sounding words (‘servant’ or ‘ordained’) do not necessarily refer to good things.” States can—and do—“serve” God by being evil, which is a judgment upon the evil men who support it.

The anarchist is content seeing that States are acting just like they always do. He has no problem trying to explain the present political corruption of the world, because he doesn’t hold the ridiculous belief that the State is supposed to be something else other than what it is. He sees that this is what statism always brings upon a people. The statist however is in the awkward position of trying to explain how a system that is supposedly “ordained” and approved by God to uphold justice and maintain social order is instead plundering the population and perverting law at every turn. The anarchist has no such difficulty: human government is behaving just as Scripture says it will — oppressing and distorting justice as divine judgment on the very sin of statism. The statist, on the other hand, is stuck insisting that the State is “supposed” to be doing the opposite of what it actually and evidently does: pervert and corrupt everything that men let it touch.

The ironic thing about those who insist God “ordained” human civil government for some noble purpose beyond judgment is that our position (government as divine judgment upon the very people who demanded it) is the only one that perfectly matches observable reality. Law is paralyzed, justice is perverted, rights are trampled, and non-criminals are plundered, which is exactly the rotten fruit that Scripture said would grow from the tree of statism. The statist, on the other hand, is left with the impossible task of explaining why an institution supposedly established by God to secure justice and bless society has always been the chief means of perpetuating injustice and oppression in society. What went wrong here? Did God make a mistake? Did His great gift to humanity of human civil government somehow malfunction the moment it left the factory? Is this just the ideal God gave us but we didn’t take Him up on it properly? Has it not been “real human government” just how socialists claim their failures weren’t “real socialism?” 

God’s failed plan for human government?

The typical excuse here is indeed to blame its failures and supposed-malfunctioning on the lack of “Christian” participation in political office, in the same way regular old statists suggest that the only problems today are that “we stopped following the Constitution.” This still leaves open the question of when human civil government has ever acted any differently! It isn’t like these are problems of the last few decades; human government has, throughout the recorded history of mankind, functioned as the main vehicle for wannabe thieves and murderers to rob and murder the masses and fulfill their sick and evil desires to rule over their fellow man. These systems even murdered tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people in the twentieth century alone. Why weren’t they acting as God’s law-providers instead?

The statist “Christian” who thinks the sinful institution of human government has a role as one of God’s law-keepers in society is chasing after an unbiblical unicorn. When has there ever been a system of human government that “follows God’s Law”? There has never been one. And this is a priori true anyway. For God’s Law forbids men from raising up false gods, such that we know, without even investigating the historical record, that such a system is not even theoretically possible. Yet this has always been the case with all systems of government. It was always the very corruption of these things under a statist system that the prophets gave their assessment of the scene. “Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands afar off…The LORD saw it, and it displeased him that there was no justice” (Isaiah 59:14-15). 

As we see, it is extremely difficult for anyone to point to a time when human civil government fulfilled some supposedly “godly function” of “maintaining law and order,” and much easier to show all the instances in history and at present that it has never acted in this way. If the State were truly God’s ordained minister of justice—understood as upholding law and order rather than corrupting it as a judgment upon a people who raised it up—then one would think history would provide at least one enduring example of a long-lasting State that preserved law and order in a society, and yet it can’t be found. The whole historical record of statism, in the days of the prophets who authored holy scripture to the centuries that followed it, are nothing but a standing testament to the evils of man-made political order and a confirmation of anarchist political theology. 

A more honest (and obvious) assessment is that human government is far from “broken” or “malfunctioning” or “deviated” from its “true purposes”; it is working exactly as it is supposed to work: plundering the people who supported it to the benefit of the rulers, and standing as a curse to the masses who believed it was “necessary” for the provision of various “public goods.” The State is by no means failing to judge wicked works; this is what it does with all the evils that it must necessarily bring upon a society of wicked people who believe in human rulers. 

In their idea that human government is “supposed to be” upholding justice (rather than perverting it as God means for it to do), these people will often claim that “the government needs to get back to terrorizing wicked conduct.” But the human governments of the world, in fact, are fulfilling their Biblical role: they are terrorizing wicked conduct of raising them up. That’s why justice and law is perverted. As much as statists think we’re the ones who are crazy for seeing the true picture here, the much more odd position to take is to say that “God ordained government as our justice provider” and then claim that it isn’t living up to this standard. Did God’s (alleged) institution for law and justice fail? Does it just need to be reordered sometimes? When has it ever done anything different but plunder and pervert? 

God affirmed through statist evils  

All that is happening here is that statists fail to understand God’s anarchist order and the only “role” for human government in society as a judgment upon a people who went down this wicked road of worldly political organization in the first place. If they knew God and their Bibles, they would have no difficulty understanding the corrupt political order of the world as the divinely-promised result of having turned away from God and His Kingdom order that is not of this world. They would see, rather, that the very corruption and oppression that they complain about in “their” governments is only the exact fruit God warned would come from rejecting Him as King (1 Samuel 8). 

Statists are then in the impossible position of claiming that human government is “supposed” to be doing something else than what it is. In fact, they are in the downright embarrassing position of thinking that the State is supposed to “serve” God into some other sense than judgment upon wicked works like the sin involved in statism itself: idolatry, covetousness, and the slothful failure to seek God’s alternative and non-authoritarian methods of social organization. For whereas our current political situation today should be all the proof needed that it is not what statists tell us it is, Christian Anarchist are only being affirmed as its evils progress. The tyranny of statism is only proof that God’s warnings were not bluffs and that Christian Anarchists who see statism as judgment on sin, as opposed to an institution we are to reform and make Godly, are the only people who have understood God’s word and warnings of the consequences of raising up other gods than the Lord. Every new tax, legal decree, war, prison, scandal, false flag event, or global psyop, only works to confirm this Biblical pattern that statism is a judgment unto these very statists for the sins involved in this ideology and practice. Meanwhile, statists are forever shocked that government has turned out this way and can only, at best, explain it by suggesting that it was “supposed to be” doing something else. Their best excuses are something like “democrats came along and corrupted government” or that “things were going fine before Obama got in there.” They refuse to see these very things—being ruled by socialists—as a judgment for their own socialism of supporting government justice, government law, government police, and government soldiers. They think it should be some other way than what it understandably is.

Far from the State supposedly deviating farther and farther away from its “Biblical” role of functioning solely as a God-given institution for the maintenance of social order, the obvious contradiction of this thesis in today’s society only affirms the Christian Anarchist understanding that it was never intended by God to be anything else than what it is today: a wicked plunderer that plunders men who had plunder in their heart by supporting it. Far from the State getting more distant from some “true purpose” of being a force for public good, here’s an irony the statist can’t understand: The worse it gets, the more Biblical it becomes. 

States as judgment for statism 

Human government is not failing at some imagined “true purpose” of providing justice, but rather is faithfully executing the only purpose God has “ordained” it for: to pervert justice and oppress the very people who demanded human rulers in the first place. The growing evil of the State today is not evidence that it has drifted from “God’s design for law and order.” On the contrary, it is the very confirmation that the State is doing exactly what God said it would do: act as a judgment against the rebellious act of outsourcing law and justice to human rulers instead of trusting God alone, who corrupted and perverted what could only have been be preserved if they had kept law and justice for themselves rather than sinfully believed that this anarchism would mean lawlessness and chaos.  

Far from getting off-course and not “serving” God anymore, human government today is—just as the Assyrias and Babylons and Egypts of the Bible—perfectly fulfilling its Biblical role of keeping a people in bondage and captivity who would not be ruled by God, as a punishment for this political rebellion. This was always the explanation of the prophets: law had become paralyzed and justice perverted domestically under a system of human government that everyone supported in their sin (Hab 1:2-4), which then invited the Chaldeans, Babylonians, and Assyrians to come in and punish a people as chastening rods of the Lord (Isa 10:5-6).  

The evils that have proliferated in society today as a result of its sinful political organization are but the divine consequences promised by God upon a people who turned from His Law by setting up systems of human government (not, as the statists would have us believe, by failing to keep human  government godly). The perversion of law and justice under human government, which has become nothing but a system of legal plunder, are what a people get who turn their back on God and find that God has turned His back on them.

This is largely the scene we’re dealing with today. Men are complaining of the effects of their own sinful statist order, but not acknowledging the sin-root of this system or repenting for it. And so God mocks them and laughs in their faces, as they did His. “You will cry out because of your king…but the LORD will not answer you in that day” (1 Samuel 8:18). If men want to trust in men to save them, as all statists do when they set up or support human governments to “protect and serve” them, then God walks away from them in return and tells them to seek salvation in these men who they originally trusted in but who are now destroying them. “Where is your king now to save you in all your cities, and the rulers to whom you said, ‘Give me a king and princes’?” (Hosea 13:10-11). Yet rather than weep and repent over this lamentable situation, the statist, in their reprobate mind, continues to believe that the only problem here is that we didn’t do human civil government the “right” way. Their “answer” to the lamentable effects of sin are to keep sinning.

Statist judgment as correction

The whole point of the evils that come from human government—the sense in which it is “for your good”—is to lead men to confess their own complicity in it, repent from the sins that raise up rulers and trust in militaries and police forces to protect them, and lead men back to God as their only King. As the prophet Jeremiah told the people, 

“Have you not brought this on yourself by forsaking the LORD your God when He led you in the way? Now what will you gain on your way to Egypt to drink the waters of the Nile? What will you gain on your way to Assyria to drink the waters of the Euphrates? Your own evil will discipline you; your own apostasies will reprimand you. Consider and realize how evil and bitter it is for you to forsake the LORD your God and to have no fear of Me,’ declares the Lord GOD of Hosts” (Jeremiah 2:17-19). 

For a statist people to be under increasing judgment in the form of government evils should easily provide proof that they have turned the wrong way. However, the unfortunate effect of statist evils is often that men don’t learn their lesson until they are utterly destroyed. They mock the prophets of God until the Lord’s anger is stirred up beyond remedy and continue on in their same old ways as before, hoping that human government can become something else than what it always has been. Though God means for the evils of government to lead them to repentance, these evil men at best settle on the idea of refining the rod and “making it serve Christ again.” Yet God himself is not looking to “fix” the State or make it do something other than what it is doing currently; he is using its inherent wickedness to lead men to repentance. 

Conclusion 

The common conception of a free, Christian society is an absurd scene where professing “Christians” seize the reigns of political power, make human government “serve” God and obey “God’s” law, and make Jesus the “King of America.” It is a scene where human civil government is maintained and kept rather than abolished, where it is reformed rather than done away with, and rebranded rather than removed from sight. 

But if one were judging from the Bible, a free people under God looks more like a meek remnant inheriting the earth where God has wiped out a statist people in judgment and cleared the land of archists for a people to live freely in a Christian Anarchist society, with just us and the Lord, no man-kings needed.

For people to be minded in reforming human civil government and “getting it back to its godly purpose” shows just how far-gone they are from the ways of the Lord, who never commanded men to set up rulers and always said it was a rejection of Him when they did. If you’re not thinking about the abolition of human government, you’re not thinking about getting back to the way God intended men to live. If all you think about is “legislating Christianity” and pursuing the Kingdom of God through the politics of the world, God’s Law is far from your heart. 

There is no such thing as “Christian government,” save the Kingdom of God. Human civil government is always evil. “Government leaders” can’t obey God’s Law. They exist in violation of it. God’s Law forbids human civil government. God hands all those who think otherwise over to the evil systems they beg for in their sin, which have been “ordained” for this purpose.