Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

Anyone who reads the Bible regularly may often find certain verses weighing on them more so than others at various times, only to eventually be succeeded by others. It is only natural for a man who lives in the word to be cycling in and out new scriptures that become the words by which he lives and finds guidance for his own personal life and to the world around him. At the moment, two or more in particular have been on my mind, and before they pass me by I wish to make some comments on them. 

I wanted to speak here on the power that just one man could have to turn his entire community upside down if he took up the Abolitionist cause in a town, community, or city around him, which are presently occupied predominately by men who are wholly consumed by the false ideologies of the world that make these backward political systems possible. By preaching the anarchist Gospel of God’s Kingdom in the streets, speaking to people passing by, flyering businesses, and doing everything in his might to spread this message and agitate his people from their sleep, he could seek out others to pursue God’s Kingdom alongside him and begin gathering souls who are ready to repent of the worldly ideology of statism and look toward divine liberation from the bondage of these systems that we acknowledge are of our own doing. By searching out the remnant in these places and finding those men who hear the Lord’s voice and are ready to do his word, he alone could head-up the efforts to get his people building God’s Kingdom and gathering together for each other’s mutual service and support again, a fellowship that is lost on those who are currently sitting in the pews of the so-called “churches” or who are left believing that man-made governments are going to save them in the day of disaster that they themselves will have brought upon men. The existence of the man-made governments of the world depends upon slothful and apathetic churchians and statists sitting in pews or throwing themselves into Egypt’s polling stations, and one man, bringing the ideology of Abolitionism to his people, can threaten to undo the lies and deceitful philosophies that have propped-up the kingdoms of this world. 

One of the first verses weighing on me is this: 

“Now a poor wise man was found in the city, and he saved the city by his wisdom” (Ecclesiastes 9:15). 

Statist idolaters

The masses of men in any statist society are always imbued with the statist philosophy of world, which is not only what empowers these systems at their origins, but also that which spreads like a sickness throughout these societies once such wicked systems of human government are put into place. It is always necessary for any State to inculcate in its people the needed ideology and sin of statism to prop itself up and further its rule, without which it could not exist. As much as human rulers depend upon a pre-existing sin in the people to be originally raised up, they must also train this sin in men even further once they are established, and even better if they can make enthusiastic patriots and ardent idolaters out of them who do far more to apologize for their human masters than existing as mere passive supporters.

It is no coincidence that American society is filled with idolaters who root for Caesars, stab his campaign signs in their lawns, and threaten those men who would burn his flags with violence: these human rulers could not even exist were it not for ungodly men who sought to have false gods ruling over them and who passionately sung their praises (worst of all, many of these people profess to follow the Lord). It is impossible to imagine a statist society without statists. Idolatrous sinners are always necessary for there to exist a system of human rule. That the United States is filled with flag-wavers, Caesar-praisers, and men who sing the nationalist anthems of the empire, are exactly what one would expect to find in a system like this. There is no way to imagine a statist society without sinners; they will always be found in one. If men repented of their statolatry and began to seek the Kingdom of God, the kingdoms of men would be abolished. They would be without sinners to rule over. Godly men cannot be ruled by men. Only ungodly men find themselves as subjects of men. If men do not want to be ruled, they must make the Lord their only God. 

It is thus in the interest of every ruler to keep men away from God, or at least to drive them into false ideas about the Lord or into the pacifying “churches” of the land if the already-faint notion can’t be fully contained. It is necessary to get them to conflate “God and country” when nothing could be more contradictory, to get them to think that God himself “supports the troops” or “blesses the USA.” It is necessary to strip “the gospel” of its political message of salvation under another King—one Jesus—and to butcher the anarchist textbook of scripture into virtually nothing, so that all the people who claim to be Christians will be a bunch of state worshipers whose “religion” is no threat to the empire and whose ideas are indistinguishable from any other statist in the world who doesn’t even claim to know the Lord — a goal that has more or less fully succeeded in America.

The dominance of the statist gospel 

The trouble we face today is that men have not known these ideas. They have not walked in the way of the Lord, but have instead gone the way of the world, against His counsel to not adopt the ways and customs of the Babylonian statist idolaters of the earth. Instead, they have become Romans just like them. Rather than knowing the anarchistic Gospel of God’s Kingdom, where salvation rests under the exclusive Kingship of Jesus Christ as opposed to Caesar and his government, they have been plagued by the satanic political ideas of statism, which says that human rulers are indispensable to law, order, liberty, peace, prosperity, and society itself. They have bought into the gospels of false gods, eg., that the next president will “Make America Great Again.” They have been almost wholly consumed by the ungodly statist philosophies of the world, as taught by the many false pastors and crony intellectuals who dominate the day under such systems, as one would expect them to. They have lived in the world and of the world and adopted one or more of its many political ideas, from constitutionalism, democracy, to outright communism. Any ideas that run contrary to the statist worldview that has been trained in them can thus barely be processed by their corrupted hearts and minds, and are typically written off as the lone and heretical ideas of some fringe lunatic who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, even though the word is coming straight from the Holy Spirit and the Word. Most men who profess to be Christians are absolutely stumped when they hear the true Gospel, which preaches a Kingdom not of this world. They have never heard it before from their false pastors who dilute the truth so as to make a defense of their own statist whoredoms, and their first knee-jerk reaction to it is to begin making as many defenses for their idolatrous philosophy as they can come up with, all which are the same fallacious and failed rebuttals of other idolaters like them.

What any statist society needs more than anything is wise men to come and save the city with their wisdom. Yet in any statist society, where the ideas of human government are naturally the dominant ideology, these men are rare and can hardly be found. When they do exist or show their faces, they often lack the ideological motivation to take this word to the people who are so desperately in need of it. They are often content to keep silent and choose to avoid the fight that will inevitably ensue if they took this message to the statists and churchians of the world, who sit in their pews but live in darkness, and who defend the rulers of the world but get destroyed by them. They may loosely possess the ideas that could save a city, but they lack the motivation and obligation to preach it, because they lack the ideological drive of Abolitionists whose hearts are set on this mission. When these rare souls do appear to preach a new word to the people, they are most often mocked and ridiculed and even persecuted for the word of truth they are bringing against an artificial social order that is built on lies and sustained by them. And many of them retreat back in the shadows, deciding that it is best to try and carve out a humble life for themselves in the woods rather than to take this word to the people who won’t listen anyway.

Who will listen? 

The problem we face today is not only the scarcity of remnant to preach the anarchist ways of God to the people, who hates that men have whored themselves out to the statist systems of the world, but that no one listens to us even when we do. We are the little guys without a voice and a platform, as the false pastors and false prophets of the world have attained, which is only a sign of them being elevated by thousands of people who likewise share in their ideas. We possess some necessary bits of God’s wisdom that for some reason they haven’t seen, yet without the seminary credentials to prove it, or the status to be respected among men. As the above verse went on,

“Wisdom is better than strength, but the wisdom of the poor man is despised, and his words are not heeded” (Ecclesiastes 9:16). 

This failure of the people to listen to the prophets of God, who have come to tell them that they are in bondage due to the sins and idolatries that they have yet to turn back from, was always what the Biblical prophets were up against too. The people would not listen and learn that they were under divine judgment for their own evil works, even as they were suffering the consequences of it. 

“This is a people plundered and looted, all trapped in caves or imprisoned in dungeons. They have become plunder with no one to rescue them, and loot with no one to say, ‘Send them back!’ Who among you will pay attention to this? Who will listen and obey hereafter? Who gave Jacob up for spoil, and Israel to the plunderers? Was it not the LORD, against whom we have sinned? They were unwilling to walk in His ways, and they would not obey His law. So He poured out on them His furious anger and the fierceness of battle. It enveloped them in flames, but they did not understand; it consumed them, but they did not take it to heart” (Isaiah 42:22-25). 

When we tell people that human civil government is not God’s way, and that all those who believe in it are idolaters and sinners who turn away from His Kingdom order and get destroyed as a result, they mock and scorn us, all while they’re proudly marching headlong into their own destruction. When we tell people that patriotism and statism are really what sin is all about, it is a foreign concept to them. When we tell them their “churches” are fake and that the real gathering is of men who are actually seeking God’s Kingdom together, they call us heretics. When we tell them their pastors are false because they don’t actually feed the sheep and work to get their people off the Babylonian dole by maintaining a daily ministration of welfare to their people, they say that we don’t know what we’re talking about and that their “church” is just fine and “my pastor preaches from the Bible.”

Besides that few men ever even take these arguments directly to the people, part of our problem has always been that men have hated the truth and didn’t want to hear it anyway. People who believe in human government hate the word of God and treat it as something strange.

“To whom can I give this warning? Who will listen to me? Look, their ears are closed, so they cannot hear. See, the word of the LORD has become offensive to them; they find no pleasure in it” (Jeremiah 6:10).

That’s why they’re in bondage and chains to begin with. Matters are no different when we seek to bring the wisdom of the Lord to these men in their captivity, which is why they remain in it. However, it is our duty to bring this word to them — to try and be the one wise man who saves a city with his wisdom. 

Winning over idolatrous minds again 

Our people are in bondage largely because they believe in lies. They think, in their sin, that human rulers are necessary to society. They defend the existence of human government on the basis that the goods and services it provides, which are funded at the expense of their neighbors whom they are called to love, are “necessary public goods.” They cannot conceive of another way of serving their neighbors than robbing them and forcing them to pay for various goods and services that they deem must be compulsory. They fight against any submission that the Lord has pointed us to another way and another literal Kingdom model: serving our people voluntary through a “government” order of servant-ministers who do not exercise authority one over the other, as the kingdoms of this world operate (Mark 10:42-45). In their worldly minds, the only way to serve others is through socialist systems of government, where every man becomes a tax slave in order to fund the welfare schemes of authoritarians.

A man equipped with the knowledge and Gospel of the Lord—that salvation rests in God’s Kingdom order rather than man’s—can help to turn a people’s ideas around who are living in darkness and consumed by worldly statist fallacies. He can spread a word—the Gospel of God’s Kingdom—that, in effect, saves them from the error of their own ways and refocuses their sights back on loving God and serving their neighbors freely again, so that they can live freely too. This Gospel can lead men to repent and seek God’s Kingdom, avoiding the plagues that God has planned for all those men who continue to walk in the ways of the Babylonian kingdoms of the world, which He eventually brings to an end.  

The other verse weighing on me, which is so closely related in my mind with the first one I mentioned, is this:

“A wise man scales the city of the mighty and pulls down the stronghold in which they trust” (Proverbs 21:22). 

Our people have trusted in false gods and false kingdoms to protect them and save them. They have placed their trust in presidents, congressmen, governors, senators, judges, district attorneys, police officers, soldiers, tax collectors, when they should have trusted in God alone. They need to be saved from their own delusions. Because all men reap what they sow, and the price to pay for trusting in men rather than God is a great one.

This is where we come in. A man possessing the word of God infiltrates the cities where the idolatries of men have empowered the existence of human rulers who in turn have worked to fill everyone with the statist ideology needed to keep themselves in power, and he obliterates their ungodly philosophies, destroys their economic and political fallacies, rebukes the sins inherent to human government, and exposes these people to be a bunch of Babylonian whores who have falsely trusted in human rulers to save them and will soon be brought to ruin for their errors.  

The false trust of statism 

The Hebrew word translated into “in which they trust” is mibtach, which is defined as “a refuge, security, assurance.” When not used in regard to the Lord, its connotations are, of course, that of a misplaced trust. Scripture does not tolerate dual allegiances; exclusive trust in God is alone worthy of His favor and is alone rewarding for a man to hold. “Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in Him” (Jeremiah 17:7). Scripture always shows the futility of trusting in men like presidents, military commanders, sheriffs, or police chiefs, and counsels men to trust in the Lord instead. “It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in man. It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in princes” (Psalm 118:8-9). Other verses make the contrast sharper and show just how mutually exclusive ideas such as “God and country” are, contrary to those who believe they can hold to both. “Put no more trust in man, who has only the breath in his nostrils. Of what account is he?” (Isaiah 2:22). Notwithstanding the millions of Christians who tell us that allegiance, citizenship, and faith can be shared between two kings and two kingdoms, and that we can seek salvation through worldly politics and through the Lord, scripture makes it clear that those who trust in God must turn away from statism: “Put not your trust in princes, in mortal man, who cannot save” (Psalm 146:3). Only curses befall the man who makes human rulers his trust, as all men who believe in human government, period. “Blessed is the man who has made the LORD his trust, who has not turned to the proud, nor to those who lapse into falsehood” (Psalm 40:4). Nothing but ruination awaits those men who raise up presidents to “save” them from “the greater evil,” who “support the troops” in the belief that they are needed to keep us “safe and free,” who call upon legislators to “pass laws” in their favor, and who “back the blue” in the belief that this will be their means of “public safety.” 

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

It is the governments of the world, and the artificial societies they create, where men take refuge in for security, national defense, or public safety. Though we know this simply from seeing that statism means precisely to trust in men (kings, soldiers, police) to be one’s defense or public safety, prophets like Jeremiah even directly make this connection between (misplaced) trust and statism in regards to Judah’s alliances. 

“How impulsive you are, constantly changing your ways! You will be disappointed by Egypt just as you were by Assyria. Moreover, you will leave that place with your hands on your head, for the LORD has rejected those you trust; you will not prosper by their help” (Jeremiah 2:36-37). 

Other prophets make this clear too in their reference to Egypt: 

“Egypt will never again be an object of trust for the house of Israel, but will remind them of their iniquity in turning to the Egyptians. Then they will know that I am the Lord GOD” (Ezekiel 29:16).

It is the trust that men have in human government that the prophets of God must tear down, throughout the statist lands of the world where this false ideology and misplaced faith has been a stronghold upon a people and is leading them to the slaughterhouse. 

Wisdom and Liberty 

Wisdom and salvation, or foolishness and bondage, are concepts that are often used together in Scripture. Perhaps the most well-known one actually comes from a minor prophet: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6). When a people don’t know that their statist idolatries will lead to their destruction, or won’t listen to those who bring this warning, they foolishly pursue such evils, thinking they can find salvation in the very systems that bring about their ruin. Another prophet specifically ties a lack of divine wisdom in as being the very thing that leads to a people’s enslavement to human rulers: “Therefore My people will go into exile for their lack of understanding” (Isaiah 5:13). This concept is carried over into the New Testament, which speaks of men who “refused the love of the truth that would have saved them” (2 Thessalonians 2:10).

Men are in bondage today to human government because they have hated truth, because they have had hard and stubborn hearts that rejected the rebukes of God and the words of His prophets, because they have chosen to chase after the lies of the world instead that tell them human government is necessary to their security. All throughout history, from the days of the prophets thousands of years ago to our present age, men have never wanted to listen to the words God has given us to deliver to them.

“Again and again the LORD, the God of their fathers, sent word to His people through His messengers because He had compassion on them and on His dwelling place. 16But they mocked the messengers of God, despising His words and scoffing at His prophets, until the wrath of the LORD against His people was stirred up beyond remedy” (2 Chronicles 36:15-16).

For this stubbornness, God sent these men into captivity to the statist rulers of the world, whose ways they were practicing themselves.

“So He brought up against them the king of the Chaldeans, who put their young men to the sword in the sanctuary, sparing neither young men nor young women, neither elderly nor infirm. God gave them all into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, who carried off everything to Babylon—all the articles of the house of God, both large and small, and the treasures of the house of the LORD and of the king and his officials. Then the Chaldeans set fire to the house of God and broke down the wall of Jerusalem. They burned down all the palaces and destroyed every article of value. Those who escaped the sword were carried by Nebuchadnezzar into exile in Babylon, and they became servants to him and his sons until the kingdom of Persia came to power” (2 Chronicles 36:17-20).

Hardheaded statists 

It is the statist lies of the world, which come from satan who is the god not only of the human governments and institutions of the world but also their supporting ideologies and ideas, that causes God to turn away from a people and which shows that they have turned from Him. When men buy into certain lies for so long, when they persistently show themselves to be hardheaded to the truth, and when they relentlessly idolize the systems of human government even after God has warned them, eventually God gives them over to a reprobate mind as His means of destroying them. 

“For this reason God will send them a powerful delusion so that they believe the lie, in order that judgment may come upon all who have disbelieved the truth and delighted in wickedness” (2 Thessalonians 2:11-12). 

This is what makes it so difficult for us to preach to men today. It is not just that they are lost in sin, haven’t had access to the truth, are ignorant, or didn’t have a Bible. After all, most of the people who we find ourselves fighting with profess to be Christians! There is no excuse at all for their idolatry for human government! They, if anyone, should be the people who know better!  No, it’s much worse than this. We are preaching the truth to men who God has given over to a reprobate mind. They aren’t even able to repent for statism anymore, because God himself has sealed-off these corrupted people to destroy themselves in all their idolatry. 

It isn’t that God never warned of the disaster that would result in a man’s faith in human kings and human government to save him and his people, but that they didn’t want to hear it, and are now reaping what they are owed for having corrupt and worthless minds that didn’t care about the wisdom of the Lord, who warned against these systems that they have placed their trust in. 

“So I will choose their punishment and I will bring terror upon them, because I called and no one answered, I spoke and no one listened. But they did evil in My sight and chose that in which I did not delight” (Isaiah 66:4). 

The statists who we are up against today, who are clinging to their idolatrous ways even as their systems prove to be a judgment upon them, are people who God has turned over to complete reprobation, such that they will keep idolizing their false gods and false governments even as they experience a social disorder and corruption of law and justice that God means for their correction. 

“They do not comprehend or discern, for He has shut their eyes so they cannot see and closed their minds so they cannot understand” (Isaiah 44:18). 

The statist separation from God

Whereas the original plan that God had for men was for them to live under His anarchy and sole and exclusive Kingship, the characteristic rebellion of man against God was made through his vain pursuit of human kings and human governments to be his salvation. Men came to think, against the wisdom of God, that they could find liberty and security and bread under Egypts, Romes, Americas, and all other systems of human government. It has been through statist political practices, whether voting for others to rule over them or seeking political office themselves, that men have turned away from God and likewise God has turned away from men. 

It is this type of wall of separation between men and God today—their erection of human government and its associated ideologies—that we are up against today and must seek to pierce as prophets of God. Though some ancient cities were fortified with physical walls, no less are the cities of today fortified with lies and spiritual confusion. Though we need not scale physical walls to enter the cities of our times, we nevertheless must fight through the spiritual blockades of mental slavery that men have built up around them. To try and penetrate the minds of men today, we must fight through walls of idolatry that they have built up around them, which keeps them from getting to the truth. 

In the same way that the sins of man have worked to turn God away from their social order by substituting false gods for His kingship, so men have closed themselves off to the truth and built walls between them and the prophets of God who they need to correct them. 

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

Every statist society — the contemporary American one no less than the scene the Biblical prophets preached upon — is one where the truth has failed and divine wisdom has fallen in the street. It is one where sinners and their ideas of state violence are the dominant ideologies in the land, which pervade all its institutions and every segment of these societies, from the homes of the people to the schools to their workplaces and in the culture itself more generally. A society of state idolaters, who have erected and furthered systems of human government in their sin, is a society of people who are working to bring about their own devastation and, possibly even, their own extinction from earth. These people are in urgent need of men to come along and speak the truth to them, that they might be saved from their wicked ways. 

Taking the Gospel to reprobates 

We are up against a bunch of hardheaded statists today who, in their idolatry for human government, will not hear the word of the Lord and turn back at our rebuke. The scene in modern America is the same one that the prophets preached against: a bunch of idolatrous men who refused to be corrected by the words of correction that they were giving to these people.

“Therefore you must say to them, ‘This is the nation that would not listen to the voice of the LORD their God and would not receive correction. Truth has perished; it has disappeared from their lips” (Jeremiah 7:28).  

The Biblical prophets were up against a statist people who whored themselves out to kings, princes, armies, and other mighty men who plundered the earth but were regarded as their heroes and saviors, just as they are today. These are the types of men we must reach once again, who for thousands of years have rejected God’s words of warning to those who walk down the wide, statist road of ruin. Though there may not be any physical walls to scale today, which may also be meant to just give us a picture of the strategy involved in approaching a lost people and the deliberate efforts involved in initiating such a plan, we still have people today whose minds are warped by the statist ideology of the world that make them a challenge to all people who want to wake them up from their stupor and lead them back to God and His ways. The prophets of the Bible were up against the same scene as the prophets of today, who God has sent out to rebuke statists and warn of the judgment that comes to all those who remain in their foolish ideas and ways. They were up against men who didn’t care about God’s ways and were plotting and scheming for man’s kingdoms rather than seeking God’s at their exclusion.

“None calleth for justice, nor any pleadeth for truth: they trust in vanity, and speak lies; they conceive mischief, and bring forth iniquity” (Isaiah 59:4). 

As we approach the world and its many delusional people today who believe in the government of the devil and even tell us it was from God because these wicked blasphemers wrote “In God We Trust” on their courthouses of extortion and police cars of plunder, we must be aware of the divine reprobation that has come upon these people as well as the idolatrous nature of their ideologies, which will not be broken merely by trying to reason these men out of a position that they were never reasoned into to begin with. These men will have to be confronted with the Gospel of God’s Kingdom and sharply rebuked for their idolatries. Going easy on them has not worked. They need to be told that they are sinners who are down to their last chance to repent, because the political systems of men where they have placed their trust are bound for disaster.

Statism has a stronghold on men. It is a false security that if they just trust in men to protect them, everything will keep going good in their Babylonian societies. It is a spiritual as much as a physical bondage, which leads them to believe their ways are right and that nothing could ever go wrong with prostituting oneself out to human rulers for one’s bread and protection. These are the things we need to tear down today: the false beliefs of the people that keep them as slaves in Babylon, who not only apologize for their slavery but love their bonds and even think they’re free. What we need to tear down today is the sinful ideology of statism that grips men with the belief that human civil government is a blessing to society, when we know it’s a curse from God upon all those men who practice these worldly ways of political violence. 

We carry out this Abolitionist mission through preaching the Gospel in the streets and bringing it to men everywhere we go, by destroying all the statist ideas that are consistently raised up against God’s Kingdom, by conducting spiritual warfare and pamphleteer warfare on the statist cities of the world where men have placed their trust for safety and security, and by working to overturn the worldly ideology that men have bought into in their sin. It is not guns and violence, but the preaching of the Gospel, that works to lead men out of their captivity to Egyptians, which has come upon our people because they have hated God and refused to heed His words. 

“For though we live in the flesh, we do not wage war according to the flesh. The weapons of our warfare are not the weapons of the flesh. Instead, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every presumption set up against the knowledge of God; and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:3-5). 

The anarchistic Gospel of God’s Kingdom — that salvation is found through Jesus Christ and His Kingdom that is not of this world — is the truth and must be spread around until men hear it and repent and begin to seek it. The gospels of false gods — that salvation rests through Caesar and his authoritarian systems of government — is a lie and must be attacked until they no longer have any power to draw sinners into their politics and trick them into placing their hopes in the kingdoms of man. The stronghold that has gripped men has been the statist gospel that salvation rests in presidents, legislatures, soldiers, police officers, and the political systems of man in general. We must tear it down with the word of God and show men where they must place their faith once again if they wish to be saved from the enslaving systems of human government: “Some trust in chariots and others in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God” (Psalm 20:7). 

Turning the world upside down

What is meant by “turning the world upside down,” which Jesus and His direct disciples were accused of doing, is actually to turn it right-side up again. In a statist society, the triangle is standing with the flat side down. The masses on the bottom are subject-citizens to a ruling elite of authoritarians at the top — the false benefactors of the world who rule their authority over the people and operate on forced contributions (taxes), as opposed to the freewill offerings of a people who organize their society around voluntary charity. The Abolitionist effort to seek God’s Kingdom flips this triangle on its head, pointy-side down. The Lord Jesus becomes the cornerstone, rather than the heads of State in the world’s kingdom model. The people become free souls under God, rather than slaves under human rulers. The “government,” so to speak, becomes the servant-ministers who distribute the charity of free families who voluntarily give their charity to the ministers, as opposed to the compulsory offerings under a system of taxation and state power. 

The role of the abolitionist, who in the early stages of abolition is a One Man Revolution taking on the world by himself, is to teach the people another way of organizing society, to point them to another Kingdom that is not of this world and its violent means of organizing men, and to show men how God intended us to live again in a land where it has been forgotten or never known: to live freely under God, without human rulers, and serving each other directly and out of personal responsibility instead of outsourcing these responsibilities to human rulers and going into bondage to their systems of legal charity. When a people will not take up their godly duties to protect, feed, and serve their neighbors directly and freely, but instead pass this responsibility off to governors, legislators, and police officers, they will find themselves in tax bondage to human rulers who will gladly fill the void of their sloth in order to rule over a people by doling out benefits to them and enslaving a people who are willing to covet their neighbors’ property through their socialist systems of welfare. As Ammon Hennacy, the mid-twentieth century Christian Anarchist, identifies the root cause,

“Why are we in this mess? Because we have sought security outside ourselves instead of accepting responsibility. Because we have left the matter to the politicians, accepting their bribes of pensions and subsidies, and their impossible promises of prosperity.” 

Most Christians upon realizing that the current world is backward and upside down settle with sitting around and doing nothing about it, or even worse, throwing themselves into the politics of the devil’s government under the delusion that they will be given some scraps and can change the world this way. They are content to just let people keeping chasing their delusions into destruction, or to believe there is some hope of salvation through worldly governments.

Both these options are futile and apathetic. Men of God take the Gospel directly to the people, call on them to repent and seek the Kingdom of God even when they don’t want to hear it, and become activists in this cause. They expose the State as a false idol that only destroys a people rather than protects them. They plots ways to overturn the narratives and popular ideas of those who work against the Kingdom of God and spread the ideologies of their worldly systems of government. They don’t sit around and let the statist idolatry of their neighbors bring them to ruin. A wise man scales the city and brings down the strongholds in which they trust. 

Getting men back to God

Men have hitherto made the false gods and false kingdoms of the world their stronghold, ie., the things they have trusted in for their security and safety. Yet we must warn them what is to come of all those people who do this, which amazingly is most everyone! 

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

We must call our people out of the Egyptian ways that they have trusted in, i.e., to abandon, renounce, and repent from the devilish statist ideology that tells them human rulers are “essential” to society. We must tell them statism is against God’s will, even though their false pastors tell them it is in perfect harmony with it. We must tell them that to seek human government is to be right in their own eyes and to eventually eat the fruit of their own ways. We must tell them that the very men and systems who they believe exist to “protect and serve” them are only here to plunder and enslave. We must warn them that state power backfires on all men who think they can safely set it up to protect themselves from their enemies, that the government they think they are setting up to punish others will one day be a terror unto them, or that “if any man’s money can be taken by a so-called government, without his own personal consent, all his other rights are taken with it; for with his money the government can, and will, hire soldiers to stand over him, compel him to submit to its arbitrary will, and kill him if he resists” (Lysander Spooner, “An Essay on the Trial by Jury,” 1852). 

If we truly want to serve God and love our neighbors, then we must begin to turn all statists, who are currently lost in sin, back to the Lord and get them to repent of their idolatry and faith in salvation through Egypt and her next Pharaoh, and to make the Lord their only trust and stronghold. We must teach them to say once again,

“The LORD is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer. My God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold” (Psalm 18:2)

Whereas men always run back to human rulers in times of trouble, which are often manufactured by these rulers precisely to get men to seek solutions in the very people who have caused their problems, we must begin teaching men that God is our stronghold in the day of trouble (Nahum 1:7), and that all our troubles originally came due to the statist departure from God as our King. 

In this quest to turn men back to the Lord and call others to seek His Kingdom, let us not despair at the immense evil, power, and supporting ideology for these systems that pervades the land. All the police power and military might of the Egyptian statist systems of the world are no match for the power inherent to the Gospel of God’s Kingdom that can threaten to turn a city upside down by undoing the false ideology that it rests on, and leading people back to the Lord’s way. “Wisdom makes the wise man stronger than ten rulers in a city” (Ecclesiastes 7:19). With God on our side, we should believe that we can take His word to the people and that it can start to change them. With the Lord working on and through us, we should believe that all the alleged power and might of the Babylonian systems of the world, all which are thought to be impenetrable forces that can keep out the Gospel of the Kingdom of God that points to another way, can be infiltrated with another word. If we really cared about this Gospel that we believe in, then we should have the faith of the men of the Bible, “With my God I can scale a wall” (Psalm 18:29). Praise God! Amen!

Prayer

Lord Jesus, You are the King of Kings. There are none like You. All the kings of the world are false gods. They have deceived men into buying into their gospels and believing that they can find peace and salvation under their rule. We ask today that You wake these people up, that You undo their reprobation, and take away the stronghold of statism that has gripped them for so long. We ask that you remove these wicked men from our paths if it be Your will that they be destroyed in their unrepentance. Bring statists to repent or wipe the earth clean of them. Lord, send forth laborers of Your Kingdom and help us to get building. Send remnant who are ready to evangelize Your word in the street and agitate this sleeping and dying culture to turn away from their idolatries that will mean their destruction, and to start laying bricks on Your kingdom rather than making bricks for Pharaohs. Help us to be effective as we send out Your word into the world. We are doing this for You alone. We are but Your vessels that seek to reach men. Help Your word to not come back empty and void, but to slap men awake when they hear it and realize their urgent need to repent and seek the Kingdom of God. Lord, protect our brothers and sisters who are beginning to preach this word from the violent statists who prey on the righteous and seek to catch us in their nets, and let them fall into the pits and traps that they set for us. Keep us safe as we work to bring a saving word to these people that have bought into lies and not known you, even though they say “Lord, Lord” with their lips. Protect us from the demonic rulers of the world who serve the government of the devil and seek to rip the flesh off the bones of Your people. Look after us as we take Your Gospel behind enemy lines. Get us moving too and help us to stop procrastinating. Give us all the equipment we need to start scaling walls and tearing down strongholds. Be with us, Lord. We’re nothing without You! If it were not for You we would have already been devoured by these men. Amen.