[This is part 4 in a series on “False Dichotomies in Political Theology.” See part one, two, three, five, six, seven, eight, nine]
Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris
As with the other articles in this series, all the false dichotomies I will attempt to put forth here more or less overlap with all the rest and are just isolated points on the same theme. This one could just as easily have been placed under the false dichotomy between “politics” and “religion,” where “religion” is thought to be a private or spiritual matter concerning the salvation of the soul, and “politics” a public and practical matter concerning the provision of protection, law, and justice on earth through human government. This division of “religion” as a private or spiritual matter to be confined to one’s home or “church” and “politics” as a public or practical matter involving the organization of society is another false dichotomy that has been used to pave the way for the advancement of the man-made kingdoms of the world under the belief that the basic ideas of Christianity are just a “religion” that have nothing to do with a Kingdom.
In this article, we will aim to focus on the shortcomings of the understanding of gospels themselves, particularly the gospel of Jesus the Christ and how it is not merely a “religious” one as the term is thought of today. This distorted and highly diluted gospel is one of the root reasons that professing Christians today are able to accept false dichotomies that portray the Kingdom of God as merely a heavenly, spiritual, or otherworldly realm, while treating the man-made kingdoms of this world as legitimate, non-contradictory tools for securing liberty, prosperity, and order here on earth. If what is shortened to “the gospel” is not understood to be the gospel of another King and Kingdom that is inherently opposed to the kingdoms of the world, but only a gospel of salvation of the soul into heaven, then the politics of man’s kingdoms are able to be seen as a necessary stand-in for the apparent shortcomings of what has been neutered into being a mere “religion.”
The effects of this diluted and non-political gospel and the false dichotomy between heavenly/soul-salvation through Jesus and earthly/physical-salvation from invaders, criminals, poverty, etc., through the State should already be obvious. A sanitized “gospel” that has nothing to do with being saved by Jesus on earth through seeking another literal Kingdom not only produces weak Christians who fail to further the Lord’s work on earth, but it accomplishes an even more evil end of producing professing Christians who are loyal to the wrong kingdom and buy into the gospels of human rulers instead! If “the gospel,” as men call it today, is merely of the “religious realm” of a man’s private and spiritual practices or devotions, then it looks as if engaging in worldly politics is necessary for the organization of society. If “the gospel” is not leading us to another Kingdom, then it seems as if man’s system of government should be kept and modeled after God’s Law as much as they can be.
What we aim to understand here in looking at the political nature of gospels (yes, that’s plural) is to identify reasons that it has become possible for professing Christians to become statists without realizing the inherent contradiction between the two. How is it that people who count themselves as men who trust in the Lord Jesus Christ can also believe that human civil government is needed to protect them from foreign invaders and domestic criminals, for the establishment of law and order, and to fight wars that bring peace to their societies? What made them believe that Jesus’s salvation was less than the promises of human rulers to provide for those who trust in them? How has it come to be that people can call themselves Christians all while claiming that human kings and human lawmakers are needed to secure their liberty, deliver them from their enemies, bring peace and prosperity, and provide for those who vote for them and trust in their promises?
We are looking to get to the root of how men can form such false dichotomies like that between a “Christian” State and a “secular” State or between a heavenly/spiritual kingdom and an earthly/civil one, which is often used by “Christian” nationalists and other statists to justify “Christianizing” the Babylonian kingdoms of the world or otherwise engaging in worldly politics under some assumption that it is part of “our Christian civic duty” or at least permissible under the idea that “religion” does not provide anything in this area.
One major reason that Christians have been able to believe they can or should participate in the politics of Babylonian has been the sinister dilution of such basic Christian concepts as “the gospel.” When the Gospel of Jesus is not understood as a political message that directly confronts the kingdoms of the world by speaking of another King and Kingdom, but is rather reduced to a mere “religious” idea where assenting to the biographical facts of Jesus’s life (His death, burial, resurrection, ascension) is part of one’s ticket to heaven, without any earthly/political significance to this message, then it becomes possible for men to compartmentalize their “faith” into some “religious” or “spiritual realm” that is disconnected from the “earthly realm,” where the category of politics (supposedly) comes into play. In this false dichotomy between a religio-spiritual realm and an earthly-political one that places the nature of “the gospel” into the former category and leaves it there, men are able to say that they “believe the gospel” all while being practicing statists on the other hand who can (supposedly) non-contradictorily depend on men to “protect and serve” them.
All these dilutions of the truth in modern Christianity—namely here the idea that gospels are just a religious idea having nothing to do with the earthly-political realm—have allowed men to continue calling themselves Christians while actually pledging their allegiance to human kings and their kingdoms and believing that salvation rests within them. This is how we have Christians today who use all these political titles such as “Lord,” “Savior,” and “King” in reference to Jesus, only to go on and negate all these claims by raising up false gods (presidents) for their law, justice, defense, and freedom. This is how we get the common slogan in recent years that “Jesus is my Savior and Trump is my president.” Jesus is thought to provide a heavenly-only salvation of the religious realm, such that human rulers are said to be needed to fill the void of the Lord’s apparent lack of concern for our salvation on earth from those who hate us and wish to enslave us under their rule.
The advancement of the State under a diluted gospel
One thing that has largely enabled the idea that the State must be employed to provide us with salvation on earth has been the loss of any real conception of the Kingdom of God and the gospel of this Kingdom as a literal, earthly Kingdom that is to be advanced and administered here and now by His faithful servants who love their neighbors and who organize together as a Kingdom-people for mutual love and service to one another. The State is not only the visible institution in society with thousands of years of sin on its side to support the idea that it is to be a fixture of social organization, but Christians have largely failed to recognize the gospel that they say they believe in to be a political message that directly contests the existence, rule, and promises of human government.
The statist systems of the world have largely advanced under the more or less complete absence of any understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a message regarding salvation in a holistic sense that is not just confined to the heavenly or spiritual realm regarding the eternal soul, but extends to all areas of earthly existence, including all the things that statists promise us with their gospels.
It is easy to see how the lack of political understanding of gospels allows for the advancement of the man-made kingdoms of the world as the alleged saviors on earth. When the salvation proclaimed in the gospel of Jesus is reduced to a merely “religious” promise of going to heaven when you die, it suddenly seems possible to believe that human rulers are needed in the “earthly realm” to provide what the Lord, in His supposed absence from earthly affairs, either cannot or will not do. This watered-down gospel (if we can still call it that) presents the earth as ungoverned and without a king, save for the Caesars and Pharaohs of the earth who come to be seen as the necessary stand-ins for a Lord who is hiding out in heaven and merely awaiting souls as they pass away from this cursed existence below. If Jesus does not save on earth, then men will be seen as saviors, and those who profess to believe in the Lord as their savior will see no contradiction, because they will conveniently confine His salvation to a heavenly one. If Jesus’s Kingdom is postponed to the future and relegated to the heavens rather than “at hand” as He said it was and available right away for men to seek and expand from a mustard seed beginning, then the kingdoms of the world are seen as not only legitimate but even desperately needed to fill-in the gaps Jesus supposedly left us. If Jesus is just the King of Heaven but not the King of freemen on earth, then men are not actually professing that “there is another King, one Jesus” (Acts 17:7), but are still making room for Caesars and Pharaohs as kings.
When the Christian gospel is stripped of its promises of true peace and liberty in the here-and-now Kingdom of Christ and is instead reduced to a purely other-worldly ticket to heaven that is relevant only for our end-of-life journey, it becomes easy to unwittingly buy into the false gospels of man-made kingdoms and create this false heavenly/earthly dichotomy where Jesus is said to secure our souls for heaven when we die, while human rulers are still needed in the “earthly realm” to save us from enemies, establish law and order, and deliver the real-world blessings that “the gospel” (in its watered-down “religious” sense) does not. It begins to seem as though the gospel promises of statists are acceptable beliefs to hold for our earthly existence, in the supposed absence of an earthly Kingdom that Jesus calls men to seek today. If “the gospel” is just a message about Jesus getting us to heaven when we die, then Pharaohs are (supposedly) needed to supply the chariots, horses, and horsemen until then. A gospel that merely offers a spiritual salvation of the soul leaves men believing that they must participate in the politics of Egypt and Babylon and make pragmatic compromise with worldly kingdoms as some sort of realistic, earthly solutions to the void left by a Lord who is only sitting on His heavenly throne to receive men as they pass away on their earthly deathbeds. A gospel that has no immediate cause of seeking the Kingdom of God on earth and today, or a gospel that is not of another Kingdom entirely, leaves men open to believing that “we are citizens of two kingdoms” or that human civil government performs the work of God in the earthly/civil realm while the role of “the church” is just to “serve our spiritual needs” and “preach the gospel.” When “the gospel” is seen as nothing more than an evacuation plan to heaven in the future, or even as some message about conquering the kingdoms of the world rather than seeking another one entirely, then men are left believing they need human rulers in the meantime to protect and serve them down here below.
The statist contradiction of the gospel of Jesus
Once we see that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a political proclamation that announces salvation into a literal Kingdom that is not of this world and its political systems but is still very much so of the earth, with its own political-law order, we can then see just how contradictory it is to be a professed “believer” in the Gospel of Jesus Christ while simultaneously claiming that human government is needed to “save” us on earth, protect us from our enemies, and provide law and order to society. Once we see that what is called “the gospel” is not just an afterlife escape-plan to heaven, but a message about another King and Kingdom that rivals the kings and kingdoms of the world, we see just how impossible it is to conceive of the idea of a “statist Christian.” To say that human rulers are needed is to explicitly deny Jesus’s Kingship and Kingdom. To accept the premises of statism—that human rulers are needed to establish law, order, and to bring peace to society—is to accept the very definition of a gospel and to profess that human rulers are, in fact, your gods, lords, and saviors. Statism is not just loosely incompatible with the Christian gospel, but is the primary way by which it is rejected for another! For what other way could men even oppose the kingship of the Lord than by raising up other (human) kings? Statism is the very way that men reject the Gospel of Jesus Christ and find salvation in the kingdoms of the world, having bought into their gospels instead.
Yet Christians have mostly been unable to see the contradiction of statism because they do not know what a gospel even is. Once we see that Caesars and Pharaohs have gospels too and that what is called “the gospel” today is not just some entirely heavenly or purely religious conception of the Lord’s salvation that is apparently lesser than the promises of peace and freedom made by worldly rulers, we can start to see how embracing the basic ideas of statism—the claim that human rulers are needed for law and order and peace and freedom and basically life on earth—that most falsely converted Christians adhere to is actually to buy into another gospel that is entirely contradictory to the very basic professions of the Christian faith.
In short, when the gospel is no longer understood as an announcement that Jesus is a conquering King who has “disarmed the powers and authorities” (Col 2:15), is presently ruling at the right hand of God (Ephesians 1:20-22; 1 Peter 3:22), and has had “all authority” given to Him (Matt 28:18), but is seen rather as merely a ticket to heaven when we die, a vacuum is left open for human rulers to happily swoop in and fill as the allegedly necessary saviors on earth who are needed to keep us free in a “political realm” where Jesus supposedly does not operate. If Jesus is just our soul-saver who gets us to heaven when we die and if this is the extent of His Gospel, then men come to believe they can vote for men, rule over men themselves, or otherwise advance worldly human-governments in the meantime down on the earthly plane. If Jesus only takes care of souls in heaven, as opposed to saving men into His literal Kingdom on earth, then it seems true that Caesars and Pharaohs are needed to take care of our physical security—our salvation—on earth, when the truth is that there is no heavenly/earthly dichotomy, no salvation of Jesus that is purely “spiritual” that leaves us in need of salvation through the State on earth, no Gospel of Jesus that is confined to the afterlife that requires us to accept the gospels of men.
The corrupted gospel of the “church”
This entirely spiritualized Gospel message of Jesus Christ, ie., the Gospel of the Kingdom of God that He said was “at hand,” may well be ranked among the top distortions in modern Christianity, along with related concepts like salvation that have been confined to an otherworldly life that will take place beyond and after our earthly existence. This inherently political declaration, which meant the arrival of a new King and Kingdom that rivaled the human governments of the world, has been reduced to little more than a catchy buzzword tossed around with almost no reference to an actual and alternative Kingdom that we are to be seeking that is furthered wholly outside the violent political systems of the earth, which are of the world.
Even worse, the false pastors and false prophets of the institutional “church” promote this diluted version in a way that allows for them and others who they counsel to continue supporting the kingdoms of the world and believing in the rival gospels of presidents and congressmen, rather than pushing them to seek God’s Kingdom as an alternative to the kingdoms of the world. Indeed, they preach a false religion that keeps men dependent upon the kingdoms of the world for their welfare and protection, rather than to teach them that the practice of pure religion (actually serving others) would mean the abolition of the kingdoms of men.
Whether they are unaware that they are preaching another gospel or are deliberately diluting it while fully conscious of their status as wolves who drain the sheep of all their money in exchange for feeding them a watered-down “religion” rather than providing for them and serving them as another Kingdom-people set apart from the world, these churchmen often will directly commission their congregants to get out and participate in the kingdoms of the world or at least do so by omission by making them think that Christianity and “church” is nothing more than their religio-spiritual aspect of their lives. They will teach men that human rulers are needed to provide us with “law and order” or even welfare and that we should trust in the promises of one of them to “fix the country” and to “save” us from the “greater evil” of the other. By saying that men must trust in the promises of one president to “fix the country,” these false pastors effectively preach another gospel than the gospel of Jesus, or perhaps we might even say it is a combination of two false gospels: a “religious” one that doesn’t go much beyond “believe in Jesus so you can go to heaven” and a “political” one where human government is thought to be necessary to our protection and freedom (salvation) on earth.
Whereas Jesus came preaching “repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand,” which was clearly a challenge to the human systems of government of the world, the “gospel” in the institutional church and among professing Christians today is so adulterated that it has made room for the statist gospel that human kings and presidents are needed to “save the country.” Thus we have professing Christians who don’t think twice about uttering “Jesus is Lord” on Sunday while saying “God bless the troops” and singing the praises of presidents, legislators, and police officers every other day of the week. Whereas Jesus taught “seek first the Kingdom of God and all other things will be added unto you,” the “gospel” of most so-called Christians is that human governors are entirely necessary to “national defense,” “public safety,” “law and order,” or, in other words, to salvation. When Jesus is seen as nothing more than a religious matter of private devotion who is worshiped through Sunday rituals rather than by furthering His Kingdom and serving our neighbors directly out of love and charity, then there is nothing compelling or commanding those who say they “believe the gospel” to repent of statism and seek the Lord’s Kingdom exclusively.
The corruption of Christian political concepts
The problem today is that most the central ideas in Christianity have been turned into empty slogans. Phrases like “the gospel” or “Christ is King” are thrown around without those who use them having the slightest idea of the anarchist political implications of these words, thus allowing millions of professing Christians to carry on in their worldly-statist ideology without realizing just how much the statist philosophy is directly at odds with the their professed belief in “the gospel” on the other hand. In many cases, this may be the deliberate work of false pastors who water-down all the major concepts of Christianity (gospel, salvation, worship, etc) in a way that allows men to remain ultimately devoted and faithful to the State and its gospels. As a result, we have tens of millions of people who call themselves Christians but who have never repented of their statist ideology and subject citizenship under false kingdoms and never recognized that they were in bondage due to all the sins associated with this worldly-political order: the positive idolatry for human rulers, coveting benefits from their neighbors, and the slothful failure to build God’s Kingdom. Though, we can never underestimate the ability of the blind to the lead the blind out there.
For the most part, modern Christianity has just become a “religion” that is not thought to contain an inherently political message of another King, one Jesus, which has therefore allowed the worldly political ideology of statism to co-exist alongside it without any objections by most professed adherents of “the faith,” who are really just adherents of the statist gospel of salvation through human government. These people use all the common Christian words, as they are obligated to, but they don’t even realize how profoundly opposed ideas like a gospel, salvation, worship, and praise are to their statist allegiances on the other hand. So millions of men have largely been able to loosely claim to be Christian without actually professing allegiance to another King and Kingdom, beyond vain professions of their lips that that only make them even worse in God’s eyes than those who don’t claim His name at all in their support for Egypt and her Pharaohs. We have men delivering sermons using Biblical words and talking about “the gospel” or being “saved,” but these words are stripped of their political meaning and entirely weakened into ideas like being “saved from sin” that don’t speak of the sin that has led to our political bondage and the salvation of the Lord from these systems for those who repent. They never teach that “gospels” are political messages that were used by Romans before they were applied to Jesus, that they were the “good news” of a superior kingdom and the victory of its king over all other kings and their kingdoms.
Without this political understanding, “the gospel” just becomes another phrase that never really changes anything in a man’s mind and compels him to abandon his worldly loyalties to false kings and kingdoms. But when Jesus used the term gospel originally, everyone knew it meant you could either submit to the rule of Jesus or Caesar, but never both. They knew that they were now confronted with a choice between kings and kingdoms, and which one would actually serve them: God’s Kingdom order or the Roman political systems of the world. But nowadays, one can run around and claim they “believe the gospel” that “Jesus died for our sins so we can spend an eternity in heaven,” all while they continue to believe in the gospels of the kingdoms of the world: that salvation is coming through the next president, king, congressman, police chief, or legislative decree. Statists are people who have not known the words of the Lord, saying, “I, even I, am the LORD; and beside me there is no savior” (Isaiah 43:11). They are people who believe in another gospel: that there are also man-saviors who are needed to keep them safe and free.
The gospel and the “church”
The corruption of such basic words and concepts has a compounding effect once one error builds off another. The Christian idea of fellowship and worship, helped out by this weakened idea of a gospel, comes to be seen as nothing more than attending a religious institution called “church” where men gather to perform rituals on Sunday, as opposed to men assembling as an actual body politic that administers the government of God. Thus we have the idea that “the role of the church is to preach the gospel and not get into politics,” which for them means nothing more than repeating the same old lines that “Jesus died for our sins” without connecting any of this to its political conclusions — whether because this is the blind leading the blind or the work of deliberate deceivers. The real work of the Lord then becomes nothing more than some religious-only idea of “going to church” and “hearing the gospel,” without any conception or teaching that this gospel is an inherently political message of another Kingdom. Churchians go around saying how great the sermon was today and how the “pastor” did his role and everyone “heard the gospel,” with no idea at all that “going to church” is not actually seeking God’s Kingdom and serving their neighbors through actual service and charity.
Without seeing that the Gospel of the Kingdom is the good news of salvation into a real and rival Kingdom that is not of this world and its authoritarian systems and is rather formed wholly apart from and distinct to them, Christianity is reduced to a mere “religion” that is divorced from the politics of an alternative way of organizing society than the kingdoms of the world who rule over their subjects. This allows professing Christians to believe they can pursue the politics of man-made kingdoms while feeling no gospel-obligation to seek first the literal Kingdom of God. If “the gospel” is not a message about salvation under another King and Kingdom, then professing Christians believe they can play worldly politics while reducing their obligations as a Christian to nothing more than gathering in a building every Sunday that calls itself a “church” and imagines that they are the “body of Christ.” With this depoliticized gospel, Christians take no issue with their worldly citizenship and even maintain that they have “civic duties” as citizens of the kingdoms of the world.
Under all these diluted ideas in modern Christianity, the Christian idea becomes nothing more than “going to church” or “believing in Jesus.” Rather than seek another Kingdom that stands opposed to worldly kingdoms, the Christian idea becomes nothing more than attendance and membership in an institution called a “church” that works to substitute man-made traditions for the weightier matters of the law, justice, and works of mercy and charity toward one another. Without the gospel and its salvation being about another Kingdom than the man-made political institutions of the world, professing Christians are able to compartmentalize “politics and religion” as two separate things, suggesting that “church” (religion) is for their rituals and human government (politics) is needed for their law, justice, welfare, etc. Under this belief that “religion” and “worship” extends no further than churchian rituals they perform each Sunday, they are able to outsource all the very things that they should be doing themselves out of personal responsibility as God’s Kingdom people (feeding, serving, and protecting their neighbors) over to human rulers, who supposedly were given by God to provide for the “political” side of life. There is no conception whatsoever of an ecclesia that administers the government of God that operates completely differently than the governments of the world — so much that it entirely replaces it. There is no idea of the true responsibility of Christian leaders being to administer God’s government and feed Christ’s sheep through a daily ministration of freewill offerings to sustain a kingdom with social welfare that rivals that of pagan kingdoms because it operates by voluntary charity rather than taxation.
What is a Gospel?
What we see is that most modern Christians really don’t think of Christianity as anything more than a “religion,” which to them just means partaking in churchian rituals like sitting in pews, singing songs, and listening to sermons. They couldn’t actually tell you what real “worship service” means beyond their idea of “Sunday church service.” They have no conception of worship actually being service to their fellow brothers and sisters in a network of charity that makes worldly kingdoms obsolete. They have no idea what religion means either when they restrict it just meaning one’s beliefs about God or their private devotional practices.
Likewise, if you asked the average churchian what the Gospel of Jesus Christ is, it would be an entirely diluted one that has nothing to do with another Kingdom that stands opposed to the Roman kingdoms of the world like “America,” which they still support. It would run something like this:
“It is the good news that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. And all who believe and receive that good news are saved.”
They would not know how to tell you that this “good news” is actually the good news of another, superior kingdom and its conquering king. Their idea of “the gospel” is nothing more than a call to “believe in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.” As much as it is true that Jesus definitively conquered these kingdoms of the world through His death and resurrection, which is what makes His gospel true, this is not itself the gospel.
One of the main reasons Christians have failed to grasp “the Gospel” of Jesus is that they do not know what a gospel even is to begin with, which is not just some religious term invented by Christians but instead a political one that was already in use by statists long before it was applied to King Jesus. Rome and its rulers had gospels, too, just as do all human rulers and systems of human government today. In the same way the gospel of Jesus should be understood, the Roman gospels were the official proclamations that Caesars were (supposedly) bringing peace, prosperity, and salvation through their reign in power. The births of emperors, their military victories, or accessions to the throne were all called “gospels” and were all claimed to be the source of a people’s salvation.
When we understand that there is also a gospel of Rome and of their Caesars, we can begin to see just how antagonistic the Gospel of Jesus is to the statist gospel, given that the idea of a “gospel” was already in operation before Jesus came along and was one that was being applied to the kings and emperors of the governments of the world. Thus, when Jesus is said to have a gospel, it should be seen as the appropriation of statist language for use by a non-statist King and His Kingdom. It should been seen as a great and glorious hijacking of Roman propaganda tools for purposes of turning them on their head and announcing that there is another King (one Jesus), who is the head of another Kingdom, and who is also promising to deliver the peace, liberty, and salvation that Caesars can only pretend to supply. It was a message that salvation was arriving through another King, not through Rome and its false gods.
When nearly every major Christian idea today has been stripped of its political edge and reduced into mere “religious” matters of churchian rituals, slogans, or private feelings, people can say how they “believe the gospel” or even shout “Christ is King!” without any idea whatsoever that these things mean to proclaim a rival Kingdom whose citizens are commanded to repent from the kingdoms of this world and serve another King. Unfortunately, most everyone who can be found saying “Christ is King” or “Jesus is Lord” is a statist who not only believes in the existence of human civil government, which alone is idolatrous, but furthermore believes that these worldly kingdoms are needed to save them from various enemies who they see as threatening their peace and freedom, eg., democrats, communists, immigrants, Chinese, Russians, gangsters, criminals, and various other bad guys — from real, imagined, or brought on themselves by trusting in human government to begin with.
For the most part, Christians today have hardly cared to investigate the meanings and use of the terms they popularly adopt and use. The problem in this case is that this shortened version of just calling it “the gospel” leaves out that it is actually the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, ie., of promises of salvation under another Kingdom that is not of this world of Babylons, Egypts, and Romes. It was about another government where, contrary to the authoritarian governments of the world, people would gather together to serve each other freely and no longer outsource the personal responsibilities to authoritarian rulers. Jesus was pointing toward another Kingdom and another Way of living that was much unlike the worldly systems of government as men still know them today. As one article on this Gospel of the Kingdom of God states,
“Jesus said the kingdom of God was not to be like the governments of the world that had benefactors who exercise authority but depended instead upon a voluntary system of charity of the people, for the people, and by the people, which sets men free, through the perfect law of liberty.”
When gospels are not understood to be political messages of a conquering King, then it becomes possible for statists to continue to profess to be Christians while actually believing in the gospels of man’s kingdoms (“the president will restore law and order to our country”), without ever seeing the contradiction here. As the Christian Anarchist, Michael Plaisted, explains:
“Perhaps most of the problem of the confusion between what modern Christians believe and what the early Christians practiced lies within the scope of the meaning of the word ‘Gospel,’ and how the definition cannot be contextually or essentially separated from civil and political implications; for the exact same reason why every would-be political savior (god) has a political campaign message (gospel) for societal redemption and reformation (salvation). Contrary to popular assumption, the term ‘gospel’ was not invented for Christian use concerning Christ’s message, but was assimilated and repurposed as a sort of plagiarized competition with the message of the efficacy of Roman citizenship.”
As we see, there’s no such thing as “the gospel.” There are many gospels. The Christian gospel is shorthand for “The Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven.” It is not just a religious term concerning merely the details of Christ’s life. The term gospel was not invented by Christians and predates Christ. They co-opted it and plagiarized it for their kingdom. This mean you have to know what gospels are before you can begin to know what the Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven is, as preached by Jesus. Otherwise, it will just become a fancy word for some vaguely understood “good news” about the life of Jesus, disconnected from the good news of His Kingdom that was not of this world and its systems, which is what He called men to repent and be subject to. If we take the explanation of the average Christian that gospel just means “good news,” then we may well claim that any good news is the gospel of Jesus. Obviously this is problematic and doesn’t tell us what a gospel really is.
The important thing to grasp is that a “gospel” is not an exclusively Christian concept but is terminology that was borrowed from the gospels of man’s kingdoms (eg, the claim that the next Caesar would bring peace and prosperity) and repurposed for use as a political message of the Kingdom of God as opposed to the gospels of man’s political systems. As one Chris Jordan wrote on a since-expired site Altar and Throne, the idea of a gospel has much more to do with the political promises of rulers (whether earthly kings or King Jesus) than simply being a term that is exclusive to the belief in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
“Gospels did not originate with Jesus and his followers. Rather they co-opted them for reasons that will become apparent as this article progresses. Gospels worked something like this:
– a battle between two competing rulers would take place, and one would win a divisive victory
– the victor would send out his heralds (official messengers) to the different territories of the empire declaring that so-and-so (Augustus, for instance) had won a great victory, and he was now the world’s new emperor.
– the new emperor was described as ‘Lord and Savior,’ as well as ‘Son of God,’ and worshiped as God. Peace and prosperity were promised to come with the establishment of his rule.
If you heard a gospel in that time, you had a decision to make. Would you believe the messengers? Would you pledge allegiance to this new ruler, or would you stay loyal to the old? If you came to the conclusion that they were in fact telling the truth, you would reorder your life as if the new emperor was already there, and his reign was already established in your locale. In this way, you were manifesting his rule. You would become a living preview of the new age this ruler was to bring.”
When men believe that the next politician or president will “save” them, they are buying into a different gospel that promises salvation through a king other than King Jesus. Whether they realize it or not, they are placing their faith in a rival gospel of human rulers and their kingdoms.
As the article went on.
“This [political meaning of a gospel] should sound off alarm bells in our heads. The message of the apostles, the gospel they proclaimed, was the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ (his victory over Satan, sin, and death), his accession to the right hand of the Father (the establishment of his rule), and the birth of the church (his body, the physical expression of his kingship on the earth). Put simply, the world had a new emperor, and it was Jesus, not Caesar.”
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a political message that is directly antagonistic to the gospels of the rulers of worldly (statist) kingdoms. Once “the gospel” is rightly understood as the announcement of another King and Kingdom, it becomes impossible to be both a Christian and a statist. These are two opposing ideas of salvation. There is no way that Christianity and statism could ever be compatible with one another, given that these are wholly separate Kingdom models and ideas of salvation and liberty. Statism is its own religion with its own gospel, its own saviors, and its own false gods. When we get away from seeing Christianity as merely a “religion” in the modern sense as some private spiritual beliefs of a man and begin to see this gospel as an inherently political declaration of a rival Kingdom that demands our exclusive allegiance, it is evident just how irreconcilable statism is with the most basic tenets of Christianity. It is not that Christians must object to statism over some obscure, skimpy, or cherry-picked scriptures that may or may not allude to the need to be an anarchist if one wants to truly be loyal to Jesus, but that statism cannot even be reconciled with the most basic of Christian concepts of the Gospel of God’s Kingdom, rightly understood. All the words of men of the Bible were not just “religious” terms about who takes us to heaven when we die, but directly confronted the claims of Caesars, who promised salvation on earth under their rule. When the apostles asserted that “salvation exists in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12), they proposed a direct challenge to the Roman rulers who had already made similar claims regarding their status .
Which gospel will you accept?
Once we see that “gospel” is not an exclusively Christian concept and not just a description of Jesus’s life that men assent to in order to get to heaven when they die, it should be easy to see how the political promises of human rulers of salvation under their kingdoms are false gospels that compete against the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which is that salvation rests in His Kingdom and those who seek it — and not just in heaven or in the future, but “on earth as in heaven” and a Kingdom that was already “at hand” in Jesus’s time.
Once we see that gospels deal with certain salvation-promises of liberty and security and provision from either God or false gods (presidents), we can see that the gospel of Jesus and the gospels of state rulers are at enmity with one another and cannot be held at the same time. The false gospels of presidents, congressmen, and political parties promise the same blessings through voting booths, legislation, and political violence that Jesus does for those who seek His Kingdom, making it impossible to confess the Gospel of King Jesus while simultaneously trusting the gospel of any other king.
What we see is that men must make a choice between God’s Kingdom and the statist systems of the world and decide which one he believes saves him. A man cannot serve two gospels anymore than he can serve two masters or else he will believe the one and hate the other. When men believe that human rulers save them (a belief that is inherent to the claim that human government is needed for peace, law, protection, and various other things), they decidedly abandon their belief in the Gospel of Jesus Christ (though, of course, they don’t see or admit this, lest they also admit they are not real Christians). Men must choose whether they believe Jesus saves or whether Caesar does. There is no believing both. There is no actual dichotomy between a heavenly/soul salvation and an earthly/civil salvation through human government that presents two kingdoms for us to juggle between. The salvation of the Lord contains real, earthly blessings of peace, liberty, and prosperity that come to those who seek His Kingdom and repent from the belief that these things can be obtained through man’s kingdoms and their false gospels. We must give our exclusive allegiance to the Lord and believe in His gospel alone, as contrasted with the gospels of statists. Our allegiance and Kingdom-loyalty cannot be shared with the Lord Jesus and the false lords of human government. The gods of this world, ie., the Caesars and Pharaohs of the political plunder systems of the earth, have a statist gospel of salvation through human government that is completely at odds with the salvation of Jesus Christ, which is not only salvation unto another Kingdom but precisely salvation from the kingdoms of Pharaohs and Caesars.
The real choice that every man faces is not between God or no gods, theocracy or no theocracy, religion or no religion, gospel or no gospel, heaven and earth, but between who your god will be (Jesus Christ or Caesar), what theocratic order you will live under (God’s Kingdom of man’s), which religion you will practice (pure religion or socialism), or whose gospel you will accept as true. We are not saying enough if we just ask if people believe “the gospel.” The real question is whose gospel do you believe in? What do you think a gospel is? Again, “the gospel” is not just some religious concept, but a political message containing promises of real-world salvation under a King. Every ruler (Caesar as much as Jesus Christ) proclaims a gospel — a message of salvation, peace, security, and provision under their reign or rule. Jesus’s promise is not any less Caesar’s promises of liberty, freedom, prosperity, and salvation on earth; it is a competing one that rebuts the gospels of Caesars as false and shows that their kingdoms only end in disaster. A man cannot believe in both, ie., cannot say He “believes the gospel” while voting for men to save him. A statist is a person who confesses that he believes in the gospels of human rulers, not the gospel of Jesus Christ. To believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which is to trust that true salvation is found only under His Kingship and Kingdom, is necessarily to discard and reject entirely the gospels of human rulers and the salvation they promise through theirs. The two are mutually exclusive.
Politics and religion
The abilities for men to claim Christ and His gospel while also being adherents to the statist ideology of the world has been largely possible under this arbitrary division of politics and religion. The Christian idea and its gospel is thought to be a “religious” concept concerning one’s private, spiritual, or non-political ideas centered around the afterlife, while politics is thought to be of a separate “realm” or discipline that concerns the real-world, public, and practical matters of social organization.
If we saw the Gospel of Jesus was a political message about another Kingdom, if we saw that its core ideas are not just a “religion” about the pathway to heaven but an instruction for another way of life than the statist one we have known, we could see all the inherent contradictions between Christianity and statism. We could see that there is no such thing as “I believe the Gospel of Jesus and I trust in presidents, soldiers, legislators, and police to save us from our enemies.” This is a contradiction that is only possible under the modern false dichotomy between “religion” and “religion,” where the Christian gospel is assumed to be a non-political “religious” idea and where the false religion of statism is assumed to be a legitimate and non-contradictory path for earthly salvation. This idea that “Christianity is my religion” and “statism is my politics” is how we have “Christians” who vote without once thinking that casting a ballot for the false gods of worldly kingdoms is to place their faith in a rival gospel. This is how we have men who effectively believe they are in need of two saviors: a heavenly-religious one for their soul, where Jesus makes a brief appearance, and an earthly-political one for their safety, where human government dominates their everyday thoughts.
But the salvation of the Lord is not confined to mere heavenly matters, such that worldly politics is needed to come to the rescue. All the men in the Bible who prayed to God did so for deliverance from their real-world enemies, not for God to remove them from the earth as the method of liberating them. God did not provide for the soul-salvation of men but leave us hanging in our earthly existence, such that human kings would be needed to do what He is apparently unable to do. Jesus’s Kingship is not one that does something lesser than what the false kings of the world promise to their followers. Indeed, the Lord our God is the only one who can actually deliver on the false promises of human rulers of peace, freedom, and prosperity, which they proclaim as their (false) gospels. The whole point has always been that men must decide between Jesus or Caesar as their savior, not to make Jesus some mere “religious” soul-saving figure while treating Caesar like a physical savior of the earthly/political realm. The promises of Jesus of salvation in His Kingdom, and the promises of human politicians for salvation in theirs, are competing gospels that men cannot waver between accepting. Jesus brought a Kingdom that challenged everything Rome represented. The gospel of Jesus is about salvation unto another Kingdom, about being liberated from the Roman kingdoms of the world that have been a judgment upon those sinners whose idolatry, covetousness, and sloth brought them into bondage to them.
Heaven, earth, and the world
It is only when the idea of a gospel is stripped of its earthly-political essence that one could think that “the gospel” (of Jesus) is just some heavenly, spiritual, or religious idea of salvation that has nothing to do with physical life on earth, such that they could buy into the gospels of human rulers as their earthly, physical, and political saviors without thinking these are in conflict. Jesus precisely said that His Kingdom was not of this world, ie., not of its political systems.
Unfortunately, most Christians today have taken this to mean that it is otherworldly in a non-earthly sense, such that they have abandoned the mission down here below. But by saying that His Kingdom is “not of this world,” Jesus did not mean that His Kingdom was otherworldly or “spiritual” in some non-physical sense. This did not mean that it was “not of this earth.” Rather, the term “world” (kosmos) means that the Kingdom of God is not of the political systems of the earth, ie., that it was unlike the Babylons, Romes, and Americas that have always been rival kingdoms with rival gospels. In other words, it meant that the Kingdom of God is an anti-statist one that rejects the promises of peace and prosperity through human government. It is “political” in the sense that it refers to another, juridical kingdom, but its politics (the acts of administering a government) are not of the politics of the world that work to further and advance man’s authoritarian systems of government that have existed precisely as a usurpation of God’s Kingdom order.
In sum, for Jesus to say that “My Kingdom is not of the world” expresses an entirely anarchistic concept that pits His Kingdom against the worldly (ie., statist) kingdoms of the earth that operate on taxation and force, and points instead to another way of social organization based around voluntary charity between families who are networked together by servant-ministers who are freely appointed by these families to act as the government of God that, contrary to worldly kingdoms, do not exercise authority over others. It was not a teaching that the Kingdom of God was not of the earth, and that you will find yourself in need of human civil government to make up for God’s purely heavenly arrangement that He left for us. It was a description of God’s Kingdom as an anti-statist one that displaces and abolishes man’s kingdoms as false ones.
The political essence of gospels
The way that Christians use the term “gospel” today has rendered it more or less meaningless, since they have not under the political implications of this word as it applies to Jesus: that it is the gospel of another King and Kingdom that is not of this world. Most Christians’ idea of “the gospel” going forth is just everyone hearing a message about the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus and saying they “believe” it happened, as their “religious” means of getting into heaven when they die. Very few Christians have a view of a literal Kingdom being expanded by a Gospel message that is inherently political, where believers in this gospel go around preaching and call men to join us in building this Kingdom with the aid of the Gospel message working to transform the lives of those who hear it, who then join us in turning the world upside down and exposing the gospels of man’s kingdoms as false. What is called “the gospel” today is no threat at all to the gospels of Caesars, and is indeed so neutered that it has made room for the false gospels of statism to exist alongside it. It is not even realized that Caesar has a gospel too, and that although it is false, it is of the same nature of Jesus’s gospel, making promises of peace, prosperity, and freedom on earth. There is little need to wonder how it is that Christians today have such an aversion to prosperity despite the Biblical promises of material blessings to those who seek the Kingdom of God: they don’t understand the essence of gospels as political messages of real salvation on earth.
In our aim to sharply contrast the gospel of Jesus against the gospels of false gods and of false kingdoms, we might be tempted to say that it is a non-political one. In a world where men cannot imagine the “politics” (administration) of another kingdom than the authoritarian ones of the world, the popular understanding of “political” is taken to mean statist politics as we know it today. And we must differentiate it from this in every way possible. But the Gospel of God’s Kingdom is non-political only in the sense that it utterly rejects the politics of the world, ie., the establishment, upbuilding, and furthering of the coercive, centralized, and violent systems of man-made government of the world through voting, campaigning, registering voters, running for office, or administering these systems otherwise. In every other sense, the Gospel of Jesus is inescapably political: it proclaims salvation into another Kingdom, under another King, another citizenship, another law-order, and another future. This is why this gospel is in conflict with the gospels of man’s kingdoms: it is precisely a message of salvation from these kingdoms and their pretended salvation, ie., the false promises of politicians that never do what they say they’re going to achieve.
It is not possible to believe the Gospel of Jesus and remain a statist who pledges allegiance to worldly kingdoms, because the salvation provided by the Lord is of actual freedom and security in another literal Kingdom, along the same lines statists promise but one that actually delivers on it. This means that anyone who believes in human government, which is always accompanied by the belief that these man-made systems are necessary to peace, security, law, and justice, is buying to another theory of salvation and has not just missed the Gospel of Jesus, but has bought into a rival gospel that is at war with Jesus’s proclamations of peace and liberty under His rule. To accept “the gospel,” so-called, is to reject the gospel of Caesars.
Salvation from statism
The promises of “law and order” or “peace and freedom” made by statists are clearly gospels that promise salvation, and we can see how these promises are clearly at enmity with the Gospel of the Kingdom of God once we understand it also as a gospel in this sense and not merely some religious promise of heavenly soul salvation. Gospels are political campaign promises. The gospels of human rulers are that they will “make America great again,” that their militaries “give us freedom,” or that everyone will be fed and clothed under their watch. The Gospel of Jesus is one of salvation from the worldly kingdoms of false christs. It is to be saved from the false kingdoms of man and their false gospels, who promise peace but bring war, who promise security but build up a police state, who promise great riches and wealth for poor people but bring famines upon them, who promise to uphold law and order but only pervert justice and law and bring the very lawlessness they say would exist without them in God’s anarchist society. The gospel promise of Jesus is that He will actually do for us what politicians falsely promise to do for us — if we seek His Kingdom and repent from the world. That politicians fail in their promises show just how much their promises are false gospels. That men recognize this but still don’t seek another Kingdom where Jesus alone is the King shows just how much they fail to understand “the Gospel” of Christ as an anti-statist one that builds another Kingdom which abolishes human archism.
To accept the Gospel of Jesus Christ means to oppose every other salvation plan, namely those proposed by state rulers in their positions as false gods, false lords, and false saviors. It is not like “the gospel” is just a message of saying that some other figure or human is a path to heaven. No one really thinks this way anyway. No one replies to the Gospel of Jesus by saying, “Well, I think my neighbor, John Doe, is my savior who gets me to heaven.” The main way that men reject the Gospel of Christ, which is not a mere heavenly or religious concept, is by seeking salvation through human government on earth. For the very salvation that Jesus provides—the essence of His gospel—is to be liberated from the rule of men when we come under His Kingship and repent from the world and seek a new political kingdom that is not of it.
Notwithstanding the colloquial understanding of politics today as the participation in the doings of the worldly kingdoms, the Gospel of the Kingdom of God is political in its essence. All gospels are political for that matter. They all speak of salvation in one kingdom or another: whether the kingdoms of man or the Kingdom of Christ. However, it is not political in the sense that the majority of people who say this want us to think: that it means we must engage in the politics of the world, vote for presidents and congressmen, pass legislation that favors “Christendom” or something like that, or get politicians to take the Lord’s name in vain. Jesus did not come to give us a better version of Roman politics, but to lead us to a Kingdom that abolishes the kingdoms of man entirely, by finding everything that men currently believe is found in a statist society in God’s Kingdom order.
If we treat “the gospel” as merely some “religious” message or formula as is done in mainstream Christianity today (“believe in Jesus so you can get to heaven when you die”), stripped of any type of message about salvation under a different King and Kingdom, then this message is reduced to a man’s escape plan into the afterlife and nothing more. It is no wonder, under this heavenly and spiritual conception of a gospel, why it is that men think human governments are needed to come in and in the gap. The question is now wide open: Who will provide earthly salvation if not the Lord? Who will save us here and now? Who will protect us, feed us, order society, and defeat our enemies? It seems as if we must go the way of the Israelites under Samuel and beg for a king to fight our battles for us, since it isn’t good enough to trust in the Lord alone as one who protects His people. Hence why most Christians today, living under centuries of mainstream Christian corruption that the early Christians didn’t suffer under, fall for the false gospels of human rulers and their kingdoms without even sensing any conflict between the two. For the Kingdom of God and the salvation of the Lord is an entirely heavenly, otherworldly, and future concept to them. “Being saved” has been reduced to possessing a ticket to heaven that was secured by mental assent to a few doctrines about the life and death of Jesus, rather than what it meant for the kingdoms of the world that He came and died. The idea of being saved from statists is more or less entirely absent from Christians today, who rest their assurance in “I know where I’m going when I die,” all while remaining proud statists and flag-waving citizens who pledge allegiance to the worldly kingdoms Jesus came to abolish. Since the idea of the gospel to almost every professing Christians today is only about being saved from hell or freed from sin, they never cared about the idea of being liberated from statist bondage on earth, despite this scene of political captivity that has come upon us as a judgment against our sin and the consequent need to seek God’s Kingdom making up an entirely greater portion of scripture than anything about heaven or what happens to us when we die.
Jesus’s gospel saves on earth
Under this watered-down view of the Kingdom of God as a purely heavenly and afterlife Kingdom, professing Christians have been able to commit a great, Christ-negating evil of buying into the false gospels of false gods. If Jesus is just a hyper-spiritual soul-saver whose gospel was only one of a path to heaven, then human rulers appear to be the necessary saviors in the earthly realm to fight the “bad guys” for us and “keep the country safe and free.” No wonder the State tolerates and even supports and welcomes the modern, adulterated version of Christianity: it no longer proclaims a gospel message that tears down human kings as false gods. In fact, it preaches the statist gospel in the absence of understanding its own as the gospel of another Kingdom, cheering for “our president” and “our troops” to save the day and deliver us to freedom.
In this false dichotomy of a Kingdom of God that saves into heaven versus the kingdoms of men that “save” on earth, professing Christians have all too easily fallen for the false gospels of worldly governments that promise “national defense,” “law and order,” welfare, and every other benefit under the sun in exchange for going under their rule and pledging an allegiance, submission, and loyalty to their systems that should be given to Jesus Christ’s. This forsaking of God’s Kingdom is only possible because men no longer recognize “the gospel” as the Gospel of the Kingdom of God that Jesus declared was already “at hand” when He walked the earth. In their minds, the most saving that Jesus ever does is check their ticket to heaven after they die and see if they “believed the gospel,” leaving our entire earthly and present life ungoverned by God to the point that men accepted the rival gospels of false gods who insist that statist political systems are necessary for salvation (safety, prosperity, and justice) in this world.
What we would see if the salvation of the Lord Jesus is not relegated to a heavenly afterlife is that statism is not without its own gospel and that to buy into statism is to buy into another gospel. States promise the exact same things God promises (peace, security, defense, prosperity, justice, law, order, welfare), albeit to be provided by the bayonet rather than providentially to those who seek the ways of the Lord. This is because statism is another theory of salvation than the Lord’s. It is not that the State takes care of the earthly-political realm while Jesus takes care of the heavenly-spiritual realm, but that all those who trust in the State are abandoning the salvation of the Lord to place their faith in false gods instead. Jesus’s gospel was one of another Kingdom that is to replace all the things that men, in their sin, believe human rulers are needed to provide. It has left no room for men to come in and provide these things on earth, a fallacy that has only been possible under this lack of political understanding of gospel messages. There is not a two-kingdoms dichotomy of a heavenly kingdom for our souls and an earthly kingdom that is statist and looks after our physical salvation. The Kingdom of God is an earthly one that does all the things men claim statists are needed for, and it does so at their exclusion. The statist kingdoms of the world are kingdoms that are at enmity with the Kingdom of God. This is why must choose their gospel and kingdom and never be caught between both. For the gospel of Jesus and the gospel of Caesar are both messages about the saving-power of God/gods on earth.
The anarchist Gospel of Jesus Christ
When the understanding of “the gospel” is not limited to an otherworldly notion of being “saved” into heaven when we die, it can then be seen how impossible it is for men to justify their quest for man’s worldly kingdoms as their earthly saviors without buying into another gospel (ie., the promises of salvation through the State rather than the Lord). If Jesus doesn’t save on earth and liberate men into another Kingdom-model that functions differently than the authoritarian systems of the world, then men are able to think that they must trust in the later to do all the things for them that Jesus supposedly fails to do. Jesus then becomes merely some “religious” savior who saves us from sin, and is more or less downgraded against the Caesars and Pharaohs of the world who are assumed to provide a much more powerful and visible salvation on earth.
The whole view of a religious-Jesus and a political-Caesar is a perversion of the truth, though. All of God’s Word is a civics textbook prescribing anarchist political science. It is not just a “religious” book or how to get to heaven, leaving us in need of worldly/human saviors who secure our liberty on earth. Gospels are political messages regarding salvation into another political jurisdiction and community. The Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven redeems man from the dominion of man, which has been a usurpation of a Dominion Mandate that never instructed men to rule over other men. The Gospel of Jesus Christ restores to men the right to be free souls under God, obligated to no one but their families and property. When the false prophets of the world tell you that we need to vote on men who are going to make things better and save us from the other guy who would have made it worse, they are preaching another gospel than that of the Lord — because gospels are political concepts dealing with promises of salvation by ruling kings. By stating that human government is necessary to law and order and security, statists are effectively saying that salvation rests in man and their political systems, rather than in Jesus to save us.
The very essence of the Gospel of the Jesus Christ is an anarchist one that it stands opposed to the worldly systems of human civil government where men rule over other men. In the same way the gospels of Caesars and other statists promise salvation through their systems and reign, the gospel of Jesus likewise was the announcement of another King and Kingdom where no men rule over each other as the people of the world operate their governments (Mark 10:42-45), but where all men live freely under the direct rule of God alone. This gospel is not one of reforming man’s kingdoms to appear more Christ-like, but rather represents their abolition and replacement by another King and Kingdom.
How men get ruled by men
Those statists who tell us that human rulers are needed for protection, defense, and freedom are people who, by accepting this very notion, deny the Gospel of Jesus Christ that offers the same thing under His anti-statist Kingdom. It is the rejection of this gospel that has led men to being ruled by men. They have come to believe in the false gospels of worldly presidents, governors, and congressmen, which assert that human government is necessary to their salvation, because they have not known the salvation of the Lord, who precisely saves His people from the hands of these men and anyone else who would come against us.
Aside from demonstrating that they don’t know the gospel of Jesus, those statists who tell us that we must engage in worldly politics or else get dominated by our enemies also prove that they have no understanding of the most basic causes and effects of scripture, where sins like idolatry for human government and slothfulness to seek God’s Kingdom lead to bondage, and where repentance and turning another way leads to blessings and liberation from Egyptian bondage. Those who say that “we must get involved in the kingdoms of the world or else they will be handed over to ungodly men” do not understand that the only reason they are ruled by socialists in the first place is because they have already hated God by setting up systems of human government that have now become a judgment to them.
We are ruled by human kings because men have bought into the gospels of these false kingdoms on man in their erroneous downgrading of the Gospel of Jesus to being an otherworldly concept of salvation in the afterlife. Those who say that we must vote and trust in presidents in the meantime or in the “earthly realm” to provide for our needs and protect us from our enemies merely confess that they do not actually know the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God that He preached as being “at hand” while on earth. If men began seeking God’s Kingdom, believing that Jesus would save them from their enemies, they wouldn’t have to worry about the politics of worldly kingdoms. Political bondage and getting dominated by men and other tyrants is exclusively the problem of those who fail to make the Lord their King and serve their neighbors directly, passing off their responsibilities to human rulers. The salvation of the Lord includes salvation from statism, but men have not believed it and have trusted in statists as their saviors instead, finding themselves in bondage for this grave error.
The Kingdom of God is not merely a heavenly or spiritualized one that leaves us in need of human kingdoms to fill in the gap. God has His own kingdom. Men administrate the kingdom of the world and Satan when they involve themselves in American politics or raise up its rulers to solve their social and economic problems. The gospel of Jesus doesn’t allow for statism. It asks you to seek and be a part of a different kingdom entirely, to repent and turn away from the kingdoms of the world, their kings and presidents, and their gospel-promises of peace and prosperity under their rule.
The Gospel of Jesus and the gospel of statism
With the Gospel of the Kingdom of God reduced to the more or less meaningless shorthand of “the gospel” that is thought of as little more than “Jesus died for our sins so that we get to go to heaven when we die,” we see that Christianity itself is turned into a nearly meaningless “religion” where God has apparently just called men to “worship” Him in church buildings with ritual singalongs, rather than giving them a proclamation of another King and Kingdom than the ones provided by Caesars and Rome. The core political ideas of Christianity have been hollowed out for the vain traditions of men that have nothing to do with worshiping and serving God. There is no longer a conception of Christians living as a Kingdom-people, of the “church” as an actual body politic and community of men joined together under a different King (Jesus) than the Caesars, Pharaohs, Prime Ministers, and Presidents of the world. Indeed, we see that the majority of Christians have dispensed with the essence of the true faith altogether and converted to the religion of statism and its gospels.
Notwithstanding its sloganized and spiritualized conception today, “the Gospel” (of the Kingdom of God) is, like all gospels, a political message about salvation under a certain King and Kingdom, in this case Jesus Christ, the Savior of mankind. It is not just about believing that this Jesus rose from the dead and being taken into heaven on that belief. Jesus himself preached this Gospel of God’s Kingdom, and it wasn’t just about believing in the facts of His own life, death, burial, and resurrection, but the promises of a new life in a new Kingdom that operated entirely different from the violent and plunderous kingdoms of the world that men have hitherto trusted in for their salvation, having been deceived by their false gospels and fallen under the devilish temptation to become a statist who claims socialist law, socialist justice, and socialist militaries are needed to keep us safe and free. Jesus preached another way of doing things than the violent methods of the kingdoms of this world, which is to be accomplished at the exclusion of making use of these worldly means.
This non-political gospel, where Jesus is not actually a savior or king or lord at all, is the perfect idea of a gospel from the perspective of the Caesars and Pharaohs of the world because it never competes with their claims of the same. It is a sanitized gospel that makes room for the gospel of statism, which has surely been a deliberate distortion by the rulers themselves of core political concepts in Christianity that work to clear the way for the advancement of their kingdoms that grow at the expense of God’s and vice versa. The statists have worked with the institutionalists in the false church to make the gospel a spiritual-only idea of heaven, so as to reinforce the statist gospel of the State as man’s earthly savior.
The apathetic and statist response to a diluted gospel
Without a political conception of what a gospel even is, much less what the Gospel of the Kingdom of God entails and demands, people usually fall into one of two errors or a mix of both: they become downright disengaged and apathetic under the belief that Christianity is merely a superstitious religious of rituals and private spiritual beliefs that has nothing do with another Kingdom and its politics, or they dive head-first into the outright idolatry and overt sin of participating in worldly politics under the idea that God hasn’t supplied a political Kingdom for us. If Jesus’s gospel is not seen as a political one and is thought to be merely an otherworldly salvation that cannot save down here below in the earthly plane, then men either wait on heaven or decide that it is necessary to get involved in worldly politics. All those professing Christians who call upon “godly men” to vote and run for office confess that they don’t know the true Gospel of God’s Kingdom; those who sit around and do nothing but wait on their trip to heaven when they die confess the same.
Both the apathetic Christians, who may even rightly avoid worldly politics yet never seek the Kingdom of God in its place, and the falsely dominion-minded men who believes that God’s Kingdom is advanced through man’s worldly political systems, are in the same boat together, despite often seeing each other as enemies. Both show that they don’t understand the very essence of Christianity and the gospel message that was Jesus’s arrival to earth, which was the gospel announcement of salvation unto another Kingdom that we are called to seek. Anyone who says “we don’t do politics, we just stick to the gospel” or “the role of the church is just to preach the gospel” has no idea what a gospel even is, much less the Gospel of Jesus Christ as contrasted to the Gospels of Rome, Egypt, America, etc. And those who, on the other hand, believe that “Christians must be engaged in politics” (meaning the politics of worldly kingdoms) are no better and also demonstrate a failure to understand the Gospel of Jesus that calls men to the politics of another Kingdom.
We are not called as Christians to be either heavenly-minded and apolitical or worldly-minded and engage in the politics of man’s kingdoms. This is a false dichotomy that keeps escapists and overt statists bickering with each other, when both are failing to heed the gospel-call to advance the Kingdom of God. We are called to the politics of another Kingdom, which rebukes both the apathetic escapists who long for heaven and the misguided dominionists who believe that becoming active for God entails voting for false gods. When the Kingdom of God is not been seen as another political jurisdiction apart from the world and its systems, an error that is due in part to the lack of understanding of the nature of the gospel of Jesus, Christians are left thinking that they should either have nothing to do with politics in any sense of the term, or that they can or should be involved in the world’s politics. Both these positions are wrong. We are to be involved in politics: the politics of furthering the Kingdom of God. We aren’t to be sitting around doing nothing or heading to the polls or donating to the campaigns of politicians, but rather hitting the streets and evangelizing men about the Kingdom of God and calling them to join us in this network of free souls who live under another King.
Those idle Christians who sit around content with waiting on their heavenly afterlife have missed the Kingdom of God—a real, visible, “political” community on earth operating radically different from its worldly-statist systems—just as completely as the “dominionists” who think they’re responding to this apathy by confusing their worldly-political activism with advancing God’s cause. The heavenly-minded men may not get involved in worldly politics (though they most often do too), but nor do they get involved in the politics of God’s Kingdom. The dominionists simply mistake their motion for action and think they are being “salt and light” by “taking our faith to the public square,” when they are only failing as well to further the Kingdom of God as a kingdom apart from the world. The heavenly-minded men confine Christianity to being merely a religion that has nothing to do with politics of any kingdom, and the false-dominionists think they are taking their religion to the politics of the world when they are only adopting another religion in the State. Both have sorely missed the essence of the Gospel of God’s Kingdom. Since gospels are inherently political declarations, there is no such thing as “we just stick to the gospel and avoid politics” or “Christians must invade human government.” The Gospel is the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, and every form of apathy or worldly politics stands in direct conflict with it. The Gospel is politics. There is no distinction between some religious-gospel and non-religious politics. The gospel is a political message of God’s Kingdom, and any message of a statist kingdom is another religion than Christianity.
As much as heavenly-minded escapists and worldly-minded statists think they are enemies of each other, with the former criticizing the other for engaging in worldly politics while failing to seek God’s Kingdom themselves and the latter criticizing the other for sitting around while only diving into the opposite error of participating in the government of the devil, apathy and worldly activism are just two sides of the same statist coin. One furthers man’s kingdoms by failing to build God’s, and the other accomplishes this end by thinking that God’s Kingdom-work is furthered through human government. The watered-down, heavenly-minded “gospel” that never challenges Caesar by becoming active for the Kingdom of God is just as useless as the one that crowns these false gods by thinking the only issue is that human civil government needs to be run by “Christians.” Both of these people (eg., your average dispensationalist and postmillennialist) achieve the same end of furthering man’s kingdoms, because neither seek to produce a visible Kingdom-community that stands as a challenge to the kingdoms of the world. It is of little difference that one outright refuses to further it or that the other does so through human government. The result is the same: man’s kingdoms are either filling in the vacuum of a slothful people, or growing through active participation in the world’s politics. The devil’s government is furthered whether men are sitting in pews and looking at the sky or whether they are huddling in these buildings and sending off their mail-in ballots for “righteous rulers.” The devil doesn’t care either way. Do nothing or get involved in statist politics and kid yourself that you’re doing something. Either way, God’s Kingdom is forgotten.
Those who say that religion isn’t political, or that the religion of Christ should be intermixed with the politics of the world, are most likely subconsciously looking to excuse their apathy and idolatry (respectively). They are looking for a reason to excuse their statist politics on the one hand from contradicting their professed Christian faith on the other. Arbitrary distinctions as these allow men to say they believe in “the gospel,” all while preaching another gospel of salvation through man’s kingdoms. And since they want to keep it this way rather than repent, they dilute the political essence of Christian concepts to mere “religious” ones. The problem here is that there is no such thing as “the Gospel.” That phrase is shortened from “The Gospel of the Kingdom of God.” Gospels have been around forever. Jesus and Caesar both have one. Every ruler has one. What men must decide is whether they believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ and go on to seek His Kingdom with the full faith that all other things will be added to those who do this, or whether they will trust in the gospels of Caesars and Pharaohs and think that peace, freedom, and prosperity is found in, eg., the “United States.”
The false gods and false gospels of Caesars
Everywhere we turn in the “religion” of Christianity, the political nature of the scriptures is unavoidable. Even the most basic-seeming and most popular Bible verses like John 3:16—the only begotten son—were radical and subversive statements once you realize the Caesars were called “sons of God” too. The title Caesar itself was one of divinity. Julius Caesar was the Divus Julius or “the divine Julius.” The emperor Augustus Caesar was Divi filius, a Latin phrase for “son of a god’ or “son of the divine [Julius].” He was called a lord, savior, and bringer of peace, showing just how much these terms applied to Jesus were rival claims of a rival Kingdom, not merely a non-political or non-earthly title that had nothing to do with our earthly existence.
The problem, again, is that the idea of a “gospel” today is stripped of all its political meaning and thought merely to be some “religious” term that has nothing to do with salvation unto another Kingdom, when the real case is that Jesus’s gospel was a direct challenge to the gospels of Rome, in this life and on this earth. As one article explains,
“When the Gospel of Mark opens with: ‘The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God’ (Mark 1:1), it wasn’t just religious language. It was a counterclaim. A direct confrontation with imperial theology.”
Jesus’s gospel wasn’t just some “believe in this story or go to hell” message, a dilution that makes a good target for non-believers to tear down. Rather, it is a gospel that stands opposed to the gospels of human rulers and that confronts men with the need to choose which gospel they will accept and which kingdom they will seek. Do you believe that the next American president is going to “make America great again,” “build back better,” or provide the “change we can believe in”? Or do you believe that liberty and prosperity is only found in the Kingdom of God? Will you keep placing your faith in false gods and praying to them through their voting booths to save you? Or will you trust that salvation rests in the Lord Jesus Christ for those who turn another way and seek the politics of His Kingdom?
We see just how antagonistic the Gospel of Jesus is to the gospels of human rulers when we see how Roman emperors were regarded in history. For instance, in the Priene Inscription, Augustus Caesar was referred to as a god whose arrival was (just like Jesus’s) seen as the good news (gospel) to the world of Rome. This stone inscription stated that the very birth of the god Augustus was a gospel and that he had been sent as a savior to benefit mankind. As one translation reads,
“Since Providence, which has ordered all things and is deeply interested in our life, has set in most perfect order by giving us Augustus, whom she filled with virtue that he might benefit humankind, sending him as a savior, both for us and for our descendants, that he might end war and arrange all things, and since he, Caesar, by his appearance (excelled even our anticipations), surpassing all previous benefactors, and not even leaving to posterity any hope of surpassing what he has done, and since the birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning of the good tidings [εὐαγγέλιον] for the world that came by reason of him.”
The Koine Greek term used here for “good tidings” was evangelon or “gospel,” showing that such a term and concept was in use at the time. The use of “gospel” here, as applied to Roman rulers, is exactly how we should understand all gospels, including the Gospel of Jesus, which was certainly not a lesser gospel than the false promises made by human kings and emperors and was, in fact, a real and true one that delivers on the promise. Jesus’s arrival was also a message of another Kingdom, in the same way the Caesars were said to herald a new kingdom that would bring peace and security—that is salvation—to all those who would pledge their allegiance to this king.
Though the claims of human rulers are false by comparison to that of the Lord, nevertheless they are gospels and—even more significantly—men have widely believed in these gospels of human rulers over the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, hence why they have engaged in the politics of the world and failed to repent from their statism. At any rate, the gospel of human rulers is an attempt to fool people into a worldly political promise under their rule, which is to say, keep them from the gospel of the one true Lord. As one article explains,
“[The use of the term “gospel” toward Augustus] signified the good news (gospel) that the reigning emperor had brought an end to war and had ushered in peace for all those who submitted to him. Thus, the Priene inscription was proclaiming the known ruler of the Roman world as the one able to guarantee his subjects’ freedom from destruction. On his good will depended the future of his subjects.”
The reign of Augustus was said to be bringing an era of peace, known as the Pax Romana or Pax Augusta. Of course, we know that these are the people who “cry peace, peace, when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14). We know that their empires collapse and fall apart and destroy everyone in the end. But they do make promises of peace, however false, which succeed in fooling the masses into buying into their gospels. They tell people that war will only come to an end by trusting in them. A modern-day version of this claim is that without the United States and its rulers and military, Americans would have been conquered by Nazi Germany and would not have known peace without these state-saviors. Statists tell people that crime and lawlessness would be rampant without their lawmakers and law enforcers, because their gospels are gospels that stand against the anarchist gospel of Jesus, which promises peace and freedom in a society without human government.
The statist’s competition with God’s Kingdom
It is no surprise that human rulers promise the very same blessings the Lord offers to those who seek His Kingdom: peace, freedom, security, provision, justice, and salvation itself. They must proclaim a rival gospel in order to deter men from believing in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, whose Kingdom-order stands opposed to the statist kingdoms of the world. If men actually knew the political nature of the Christian gospel, the gospels of man’s kingdoms would hold no sway over them and would be utterly rejected as the false gospels of false gods, false lords, false kings, and false saviors. Since the true anarchistic Gospel of the Kingdom of God has been hidden from people by false pastors and simply out of man’s own lack of knowing the Lord, tens of millions of professing Christians are able to buy into the lie that we would have none of these blessings without man-saviors — without presidents, legislators, magistrates, soldiers, and police. And they make these assertions without ever even realizing they have exchanged the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the false gospel of human government. This is why statism is so profoundly at the forefront of the hearts and minds who have bought into it: salvation through human government is their gospel, and they repeat it just as passionately as we do the true Gospel of a salvation found only in the Kingdom of God. This is why statists are animated by speaking of all the things that we supposedly wouldn’t have without human rulers. “Without the State we would have no peace, no freedom, no safety, no law, no justice, no happiness, no society, and the kids would all be starving and we’d be overrun by gangs and all speaking German.” They have fallen for the temptation of the devil that Jesus Christ rejected in their equation of the State as being a blessing to humanity: everything will be given unto you if you just bow down and worship me.
In all ways, human rulers and their kingdoms stand decidedly opposed to the Lord and His Kingdom. They have rival gospels and rival kings and rival saviors. The Provincial Dedication of Rome also acknowledged these titles and these concepts, writing, “To our lord, Augustus Caesar, savior of the inhabited world.” And men, in their sin, repeat the statist gospel on behalf of their false gods, telling everyone how blessed we are because of them (“the troops keep us free”) and how disorderly it would be without them (“anarchy would take over”). The State and its rulers have always proclaimed gospels precisely as their means of providing a counter-promise to the gospel of God’s Kingdom, just as much as things work in the other way in the Gospel of Jesus: as a counterclaim to the gospels of Rome and of Caesars. As one article in a book Policing the Roman Empire notes, “The rhetoric of security and stability was powerful among all levels of imperial society” and “the emperor [was] a symbol of peace and order.” The same is true today for American presidents, who promise to “make America great again” and restore liberty and hope to the land, expel the foreigners, create jobs, etc. That is, all human rulers have gospel-promises that are rival promises to the salvation that comes through the Kingdom of Christ. Those who believe that presidents are going to “save the country,” that “the troops fight for our freedom,” or that “the police keep us safe tonight,” have bought into the false gospel of state rulers who—not coincidentally in their direct competition with God’s Kingdom—are in competition with King Jesus and have raised their kingdoms up against His. Conversely, Jesus has promises of peace, security, and liberty that rival the false gospels of human rulers for those who repent from these systems and seek the Kingdom of God — on earth as in heaven, and “at hand” as opposed to “one day.”
The incompatibility of the gospel of Christ and the gospels of men
Once it is seen that gospels are by their very nature political messages or promises made by rulers of peace, prosperity, and salvation in their kingdoms and that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is exactly the same kind of message (a promise of earthly liberation), then we can see just how conflicting Christianity and statism really are, which is rather obscured when the former is thought of merely as a religion of various theological doctrines that men are to follow to get to heaven when they die. With the gospel of Christ as a political message of another Kingdom, the Roman, Egyptian, American, and every other political system of the world, can be seen as irreconcilable with the true Christian faith. When we move beyond the diluted “gospel” that strips it of the political message of salvation under another King and Kingdom, we can then see how utterly impossible and contradictory it is for someone to claim to believe this gospel of Jesus while simultaneously believing that it is worldly presidents who are going to “make America great again.” The Gospel of Jesus is the good news that Christ is already King and blesses all those who seek His Kingdom. It is incompatible with the worldly ideology of statism. We cannot accept that those who elect human rulers to civil office and seek to advance man-made kingdoms truly “believe the Gospel” of Jesus and are actually Christians. To be a Christian means to accept an anti-statist gospel of salvation in a Kingdom that is not of this world. Clearly, statists are driven by another gospel altogether of salvation arriving through the State and its false gods. They are not ideologically driven for God’s Kingdom.
Since “gospels” and the salvation they preach are political concepts of finding liberty and prosperity under a certain kingdom or king, whether the kings and kingdoms of the world or the King of Kings and His Kingdom that is not of the world, it is easy to see how both Christianity and statism are gospel messages of salvation that are necessarily in conflict to one another and thus require that men choose between one. When men buy into such campaign slogans and promises to “Make America Great Again” or “Build Back Better” and vote for these men in the belief that they will achieve these things, they are (unwittingly or not) buying into false gospels, ie., promises of salvation made by ruler-gods.
There is a reason why presidential campaign slogans are most often of this nature of some promise of results or salvation (ie., protection, freedom, law and order, economic prosperity, peace) through worldly politics: because they are gospels, too, albeit gospels that are opposed to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Thus we see the promise of “Protection and Prosperity” of William McKinley in 1896 or his “four more years of the full dinner pail” in 1900, the “Assure Continued Prosperity” of Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, the Republican Party flier on behalf of the 1928 U.S. presidential campaign of Herbert Hoover promising a “chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” the promises of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the depths of the Great Depression in 1932 that “Happy Days are Here Again” and “we are turning the corner,” the post-war promises of “Peace and Prosperity” in Eisenhower’s 1956 campaign, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 question “Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?,” George W. Bush using “Reformer with Results” in the 2000 presidential primaries and “A Safer World and a More Hopeful America” in 2004, the “Change We Can Believe In” of Barack Obama in 2008, the “reform, prosperity, and peace” motto of John McCain in 2008 and also his “changes coming,” Ron Paul’s “Restore America Now” slogan in 2012, or the “Great American Comeback” of Ron Desantis in 2024. And, of course, we’ve had the “Build Back Better” and “Make America Great Again” of recent years.
All these are substitutes for the salvation, restoration, redemption, and liberation and deliverance from poverty and disorder that rests in Jesus Christ and His Kingdom, which is a literal Kingdom that we are to be seeking on earth today by evangelizing our neighbors to repent of their subject citizenship to worldly kingdoms and join us in administering a new one, according to the non-authoritarian ways of Christ who commanded us to serve one another in a network of ten-family-congregations that all work together to serve and love their neighbors by giving their charity to ministers who link these congregations together and serve as the government of God who do not exercise authority over others and operate on taxation that allows men to covet their neighbors’ property for benefits.
When it is seen that the gospel of Jesus is the gospel of salvation unto another Kingdom and not just some otherworldly salvation, it becomes impossible to think that statism—the belief that human rulers are “necessary” for “national defense,” “public safety,” freedom, peace, law and order, and a million other things—could ever be compatible with the essence of what it means to profess oneself as a Christian: which is to believe necessarily that salvation exists under a King and Kingdom other than the worldly presidents and their violent and plunderous political systems. You simply cannot be a statist and say that you “believe in the Gospel,” because this Gospel is the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. To be a statist is precisely to believe in the gospel of false gods and false kingdoms. And there is no such thing as being a statist without buying into another gospel. To be a statist is precisely to believe that men (presidents, soldiers, police, legislators) are your gods, lords, and saviors. Statism is precisely the claim that human rulers are needed for peace, security, prosperity, welfare, public health, etc., and that the gospel of Jesus, who likewise promises these things, is false.
Man’s rejection of the Gospel of Christ
When it’s seen that “the gospel” that men throw around as a mere “religious” concept that has no political meaning to them is actually a profoundly radical message of salvation under another King (Jesus) and Kingdom, it becomes easy to why it is that most people fight against this message: it requires that they repent of worldly politics and statist ideology and seek God’s Kingdom in exclusion to all others, and most men are idolaters who just don’t want to give up their gods and abandon the false religion of statism. All their lives, their whole worldview and person has been animated by the false gospels of the world. They have been voters and general statist ideologues who believe that “the troops keep us free,” “the police keep us safe,” “this next president is going to fix the country,” or “my congressman is going to fix the country by passing a new law.” They have wardrobes of American flag sweaters and shirts. They have bumper stickers of their president-saviors. They have been sitting in “churches” for decades without seeing how their statism contradicts their claims of knowing the Lord. To accept the (anarchist) Gospel of Jesus Christ means they would have to abandon their statism, and they aren’t ready to do this. Furthermore, they would have to admit that they have been wrong for decades and own up to having believed in lies. So the only choices left are to either water down this gospel to almost nothing so they can maintain their vain professions of faith, or abandon Christianity entirely. Obviously, churchians and other nominal Christians opt for the former and work to create a safe “Christianity” that doesn’t have a gospel that brings them into conflict with the world, but indeed allows them to remain friends with it, and thus enemies of God.
But there is another reason people reject the anarchistic Gospel of the Kingdom of God that preaches another Kingdom that is not like the authoritarian kingdoms of the world: it is the greatest endeavor that humanity could ever adopt, and so naturally such a serious endeavor as seeking another Kingdom is rejected by slothful men who would have actually change their ways, become ideologically driven for another Kingdom, and actually become activists in its cause. They would have to revive their dead faith, leave behind the slothful church pews, and start laboring on building another Kingdom.
If the Gospel of the Kingdom of God wasn’t something that threatens to turn all the things they love about the world upside down as well as the world itself, but was just some safe idea that didn’t require that they move a muscle to take up its cause, then people wouldn’t fight against it so much. They could keep sitting around in Egypt and shrug their shoulders at the world. But they realize that this Gospel comes with obligations to preach it and to seek another way of political life than the statist kingdoms we have known so far, which requires us to put in work (another bad-word in modern Christianity).
Moreover, those who fail to grasp the political nature of the Gospel they claim to believe in probably also subconsciously realize that if they actually took up the proclamation of this gospel of another Kingdom, they might find themselves persecuted like the apostles and prophets before them and even murdered for seeking another Kingdom that frees men from the tax-farms of false gods. And so they play it safe and sit back in their Babylonian recliners and wait for heaven to come down to them or for the next president to save them.
But since this Gospel of the Kingdom of God is the only real threat to the man-made kingdoms that it has come to abolish, people expectedly fight against it, realizing that it is indeed a challenge to the gospels of their false gods and false idols that they have praised and worshiped in their sin. To actually accept the Gospel of Jesus Christ of another Kingdom would mean that men must repent of all their old worldly ideology that has wound them up in the bondage of Egypt. In short, to accept the anarcho-political nature of the Gospel would mean that men would have to repent of their sin and their worldly lust for human rulers, which they evidently aren’t ready to do.
It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the majority of Christians hate to hear the true Gospel of another Kingdom that requires them to abandon all notions of worldly citizenship and maintaining an identity in worldly governments: it is the only real truth on earth. We should except nothing less than that the only real true thing on earth and for men—that Jesus has come to save us from the kingdoms of the world that we have been enslaved to due to our sin—would be fought against by people who hear it and gate-kept by the false prophets who claim to preach it in their pulpits. Of course, the most true and righteous path that men could take is going to be rejected by them, because it’s the one thing on earth that’s really worth fighting for. The only path forward for humanity—seeking the Kingdom of God and being ruled by the Lord alone—is naturally going to be a struggle, because there is no greater thing that could animate a man and no greater purpose he could adopt than to abolish the kingdoms of man in his mind and seek the Lord as his means of liberation from the evil man-made institutions that call themselves the “government.”
In order to keep their worldly-statist politics from contradicting their claims of being converts to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, men have had no choice but to either stop professing the Lord’s name altogether or to dilute His gospel of another Kingdom down into a mere religious conception that is entirely detached from its anarchist political implications. This is how we have hundreds of millions of professing Christians today who think their claims to Christianity have nothing to do with politics and/or that they may participate in the politics of the world without contradicting themselves. It is easy to say you “believe the gospel” when it is not thought that this profession must radically change the beliefs and actions of a man toward a new Kingdom that is not of this world and its political systems. And so we have hundreds of millions of people who claim to be Christians but who still believe in human government. An adulterated gospel that has had its anti-statist teeth extracted by institutionalist surgeons is a safe one to latch onto, since it doesn’t require of anyone that they repent from their statism. It allows them to claim to be one of Christ’s without having to do as He has said. And so men have turned it into nothing more than “the gospel” so that it doesn’t have any greater (political) implications than this seemingly mere-religious phrase. Statists have removed the political gut-punch of the anarchist gospel of Jesus Christ and His Kingdom so that they don’t actually have to become changed men who change their worldly ways and allegiances. The rulers themselves, in cahoots with the false church, have worked to dumb it down to nothing, too. A purely heavenly-Jesus who has no real jurisdiction on earth and doesn’t save anyone on it who seeks His Kingdom is not a threat to the worldly powers, and the sanitized version works to keep it this way. When the Kingdom of God is presented as nothing more than a heavenly kingdom where Jesus saves our souls into the afterlife, it appears possible to hold the idea that human governors are our earthly saviors — as if God has no saving power on earth. This is how people come up with such absurd ideas as “Jesus is my savior and Trump is my president.” The lordship and salvation of Jesus Christ is mostly a secondary, backburner issue to them whereas human lords and saviors are at the forefront. This sentiment is regularly seen on “Veterans Day” and other such statist holidays, where idolaters say such things as “the American military has done absolutely everything for me but save my soul, which Jesus did for me.” The vain mention of Jesus here is merely obligatory; these men regard soldiers and police as their true saviors.
If professing Christians pursued God’s word to its radical conclusions, they would stop even claiming to be Christians. Because they would find an anarchist political theology and choose their statist ideology over it. The only reason most men continue to claim the Lord today is because they have felt that their first love—the statist ideology of the world—could be reconciled with it. If ever they realized it couldn’t be, they would sooner abandon their claims to Christ than accept a conclusion that would oppose their idolatrous political ideas. Because they never sought to know the Lord to begin with and accept whatever implications that are naturally drawn from pursuing Him and didn’t get their statism from the Bible to begin with. They always sought to reconcile their preexisting statist politics by God, and only claim to be Christians because they think it is possible and non-contradictory to profess God and remain a statist. Let all the false converts who claim to be Christians while holding to the statist politics of the world find out that the two cannot be reconciled, and they’ll sooner say “screw it, I’m a statist, not a Christian” than to humbly embrace anarchism. The only reason they’re getting away with it for now is that there have not been enough abolitionist Christian Anarchists to expose them as frauds. Let it come to a head and for everyone to see that they must “choose ye this day whom you will serve,” and the false converts will come out as Baal-worshiping statists and admit that they don’t believe the Lord can do what they think Caesar can do for them, and that they only ever took His name in vain.
The effects of a diluted understanding of gospels
If the salvation of the gospel of Jesus becomes an entirely purely spiritualized, heavenly, and neo-Platonic escape of the soul in the afterlife that rejects the material and physical world, then the door is left wide open to either neglect earthly life as futile or to engage in worldly politics under this idea that the Lord’s salvation is confined to an other-worldly realm. Yet this is the mindset of many Christians today, where everything material is almost considered synonymous with worldly and where the spiritual or otherworldly has been preferred instead. The idea of material, earthly blessings has become offensive to them, because their only idea of “the gospel” is an otherworldly one where the Lord “saves” us into heaven but not from our enemies and their impoverishing systems down below.
A lot of the idolatry and sloth we see in modern Christianity today stems from the entirely spiritualized and heavenly understanding of salvation that prevails in our times. When it isn’t seen that peace, freedom, safety, order, health, etc., are all terms describing Biblical salvation, then men are not going to see that they are buying into a false gospel by trusting in these promises by worldly politicians of being able to deliver these things through their armies, police forces, welfare offices, legislation, and other public policies. Without any real meaning to words like gospel, salvation, or worship in modern Christian thought, men fail to see that statism is a rival gospel, another theory of salvation, another religion, another theocratic order than the Lord’s, another set of false gods, false lords, and false saviors. They do not realize that all their little statist slogans (“the president is going to make America great again,” “the troops fight for our freedom,” “the police are the reason we sleep safely at night”) are to accept the Gospel according to Caesar — not the Gospel of Jesus Christ, who offers the same things in His Kingdom order. They don’t realize that their gospel—salvation through the State—is precisely the opposite of the Gospel of Jesus Christ of salvation from the State. When “the gospel” is nothing more than a cool word to throw around, divorced from any idea of a promise of liberty and prosperity under a king and their kingdom, then men think they can buy into the promises of state rulers without necessarily abandoning the Lord and His Kingdom in the process. Participating in the politics of the world, they can say, is their politics; their “faith in Jesus” is their religion.
The two main outcomes we have seen from a Gospel message of Jesus that has been stripped of its political essence is that men either (1) feel no obligation to do anything in this “earthly realm” to seek the Kingdom of God, or they (2) seek salvation through human government in their lack of vision that the Kingdom of God is a wholly separate Kingdom that operates apart from the kingdoms of the world. Both of these people may have a different eschatological vision than each other. The former relegating the salvation of the Lord to an afterlife or distant future, and the latter having some type of earthly conception of the Kingdom. But both of them, without a political understanding of gospels and the gospel message of Jesus more specifically, fail to seek the Kingdom of God as it should be sought: one forsaking it altogether, and the other thinking it is accomplished through the kingdoms of the world.
Both of these ideas—the slothfulness to seek God’s Kingdom by the heavenly-minded and the outright idolatry of participating in man’s kingdoms by those who falsely think they have brought the gospel down to earth—ultimately further the devil’s worldly system of government. Those who say “Jesus is coming soon so politics don’t matter” in their sanitized view of the gospel, and those who think that His commission to us was to work through the kingdoms of the world, both show that they don’t understand the true Gospel of the Kingdom of God.
Persecution and the gospel
All these corrupted concepts in modern Christianity have worked not only to make it acceptable for its nominal form to exist in a statist order, but even turned it into an institution that works to supply pseudo-theological support for a worldly political order that is opposed to God (hence the dominant interpretation of Romans 13 being used to justify all the evils of statism over the centuries). Christians today like to imagine themselves as people who could be martyred or persecuted for their “faith,” but they really don’t even have a faith worth being killed over, since their idea of “the gospel” is not even the gospel of another Kingdom that works to tear down the Romes and Americas whose competing gospels are raised up against it. State rulers were never much worried that men held to some superstitious-seeming belief in a savior who was going to take them to heaven when they die. This was never what the State wanted to claim for itself anyway. The rivalry with the State was never that they wanted men to believe in human government as the pathway to a heavenly afterlife. What state rulers have always sought is the kingdom jurisdiction over the physical lives of subject citizens who will bow to their rule and believe in their gospels of earthly salvation under their kingdoms for everyone who shuts up, pays their taxes, takes their benefits, and turns out at a Fourth of July parade every once in a while to wave a flag and tell everyone else how bad society would be if it weren’t for the troops, the police, and the president. What does get men persecuted is the belief that Jesus is actually their King in the sense that Caesar wants to be and that Caesar is not needed anymore in their minds. What does get men persecuted is actually seeking another Kingdom that threatens to “steal” citizens and tax-slaves away from bankrupt political bureaucracies that depend on working cattle to keep their human farms going. What does get men thrown in furnaces, lion’s dens, and hung up on crosses is preaching the gospel of another Kingdom and pursuing it.
With Christianity softened into a mere religion rather than the Gospel of another Kingdom, and turned into nothing more than “go to church on Sunday and worship the Lord,” the state rulers of the world didn’t need to abolish Christianity or persecute its professed adherents. All they needed to do was adulterate and weaken everything they believed and thin their concepts into nothing. This was accomplished easily by stripping the political element from things like the gospel and salvation, which were anti-statist messages that challenged the very foundations of the promises of statism. This sanitized gospel that has nothing to do with another Kingdom has only worked to further the expansion of statism on earth. It has caused the majority of professing Christians to fall into apathy and despair and sit back thinking that it isn’t their purpose to seek another Kingdom down here below where Jesus is our King and Savior. On the other hand, those who have been slightly more activist minded have only dove into the other error of believing that they should be raising up presidents, politicians, and other false gods to further the work of “Christianity” on earth.
Salvation from human government
Far from the popular idea of just being saved into heaven when we die, the Gospel of the Kingdom of God speaks of a Kingdom that is to be advanced on earth, as a direct challenge to the man-made kingdoms of the world that have been raised up against it. There is no such thing as a “spiritual” Kingdom that doesn’t overturn worldly kingdoms and abolish them; this is what the Kingdom of God is all about. If the gospel you know and preach doesn’t get you accused of “filling [the land] with your teachings” (Acts 5:28), “throwing our city into turmoil” (Acts 16:20), “turning the world upside down” (Acts 17:6), “saying there is another king named Jesus” (Acts 17:7), “stirring up dissension” (Acts 24:5), or “subverting our nation” (Luke 23:2), then you’re probably preaching Rome’s gospel rather than the Gospel of God’s Kingdom. The gospel of Jesus is an anti-statist one that liberates men from Egypt and calls them to believe that true freedom can only be found under a King who does not rule as the authoritarian false lords of the world do.
The true Gospel of Jesus Christ is not just an afterlife or otherworldly salvation, but a real salvation on earth that is found in another political jurisdiction than the one claimed by the kingdoms of man. This means that not only is salvation not found in man’s kingdoms, but that the Lord’s salvation is very much about being saved from these kingdoms. Salvation in the Bible was always precisely about God liberating people from statists. “And Moses said to the people, ‘Do not be afraid. Stand still, and see the salvation of the LORD, which He will accomplish for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall see again no more forever’” (Exodus 14:13). The Lord drowns Pharaohs, soldiers, and police officers in seas when a people are His and want to walk in His ways, which precisely entails their repentance from trusting in Egypt and its officers as their means of salvation. It is only under a failure to understand the political essence of salvation—God saving His people from statists—that men could do the completely opposite thing of the Gospel message of Jesus—a conquering King who has come to replace the kingdoms of the world and provide another way of doing government—and trust in the State to “save” them and thereby unwittingly buy into a false gospel, ie., a false message of salvation delivered by politicians. Whereas Jesus’s gospel is deliverance from politicians, the statist gospel is liberation through them. The two gospels could not be any more at odds with one another. Will you repent and believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
Leaving Egypt Ministries 