[This is part 2 in an article series on Sin, Repentance, and Revival. See part one, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

Though I will eventually show in further detail what true repentance looks like in light of a more specific definition of sin that identifies concrete acts like idolatry for human government and covetousness for the benefits provided by these false benefactors that take from one’s neighbors in order to give to another as the things that truly represent man’s great sins against God and the reason for their bondage today under these men, let us briefly look at some of the errors that will follow from this loose and vague conception of sin and its related ideas that are prevalent in modern Christianity, particularly in regards to the idea of repentance.

A snapshot of repentance 

After observing the statolatry of modern “Christians” today, who claim the Lord’s name while existing as Babylonian whores who commit adultery with the kingdoms of the world and fawn over their Caesars and Pharaohs and prostitute themselves out to their militaries and police forces, it is not hard to see the disaster that has come about by reducing all of the core concepts of Christianity into nothing more than vague, undefined notions of “sin.” Turning fundamentally political concepts like the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, which sets God’s anarchistic Kingdom decisively against the statist kingdoms of man, has stripped it of all its power and turned it into nothing more than a sloganized idea of “the gospel” that allows unrepentant statists to claim they have “believed” in it all while they still turn aside form the Lord and place their faith in the gospels of false gods who promise peace, prosperity, protection, and salvation under their kingdoms.

The result of such a great and thorough perversion, distortion, and dilution of Christian ideas that are political in their essence—from sins like idolatry, God’s physical deliverance from the bondage of Egypt, and the gospel promise He gave us of salvation unto another Kingdom—has been predictable: if the statist whoredom of men is not sin, then men inevitably fall into all the very sins they are called to turn away from, all while claiming repentance even as they live in active and ongoing rebellion against God and His Kingdom through their participation in adulterous practices like voting, running for office, praising human rulers as keeping them safe and free, or otherwise working to advance the kingdoms of this world, ideologically or physically. Not only do professing Christians today not see statism and its accompanying ideas, practices, and evils as sins from which they need to repent, but most of them actively advocate engaging in these sins and even instruct others that it’s their “civic duty” as a “Christian” to get involved in the politics of the devil’s government. This evildoing, they tell us, is how we are to be “salt and light” in a dark world.

The natural progression of apostasy and reprobation that is born out of a failure to see that sin is a violation of God’s Law, and that erecting human governments is the chief expression of this sin against our Lord who forbids men from having other gods (rulers) before Him, is not only for men to fail to see that they need to repent from their statist idolatry, but to actively participate in all the evils that God calls sin. When sin is only loosely defined, every other error in what passes for Christianity today (repentance, salvation, the gospel) is only compounded from there. If it is not sin to raise up ruler-gods and support human governments, all which are based on theft and murder and will always be so long as they exist, then repentance likewise has nothing to do with turning away from these ideologies and practices. If it’s not a sin and even permissible in God’s eyes to raise up human rulers and engage in the politics of man’s kingdoms, then one can reason that there is nothing wrong with continuing to be a Babylonian whore while calling yourself a Christian. In fact, as we have argued, the conclusion of this thinking is that men have a duty to sin! — that it is their responsibility, as Christians, to further the human governments of the world, which are of the devil.

Contrary to what modern Christians (so-called) teach us today, who cannot identify statism as sin to the point of actively advocating for it, turning back to the Lord looks much more serious than some mere verbal professions and loose claim that one has “repented from my sins” that has no connection to specific sins that landed them in Egypt. Unlike the preaching today that tells men to “repent of your sins” without telling them what these sins are, Biblical repentance involves turning away from particular sins in concrete ways, as one’s only hope for being divinely delivered from their captivity to the Egyptians who they currently praise as their saviors. It is not just some abstract admission that “we’re all sinners” that concludes with some equally vague notion that we need to “repent of our sins,” but a more specific notion of identifying what these sins are and expelling them from our being. Rather than some ill-conceived idea that we need to repent of some vague and unspecified sins, biblical repentance looks more like men acknowledging that their own idolatry and wicked works like trusting in human rulers led to their Egyptian bondage and that they now intend to turn back to the Lord as their only God in repentance. Biblical repentance was never just men whining and complaining about the effects of their own evildoing, which is what we see today among men who fight against the consequences of their sin but have still not identified its root. Biblical repentance looks like men confessing to the Lord their own complicity in the drought, famine, sword, and plague that came upon them as a judgment and curse for trusting in men to save them. If they did ask for salvation anyway, it was done while acknowledging that their own evils had brought the boots down on their necks.

“Although our iniquities testify against us, O LORD, act for the sake of Your name. Indeed, our rebellions are many; we have sinned against You” (Jeremiah 14:7). 

God is never just looking for a people who unthinkingly and without any introspection announce that they “repent” for some unidentified “sins” that they were told they needed to confess and turn from by some pulpit pimp in a suit who calls himself a “pastor” but who does not actually lead the sheep to safety, but for a people who, upon seeing the evil effects of the statist disorder around them, would put two and two together and realize that their idolatry and lust for human rulers and human saviors has been the reason for falling under the bondage, captivity, or exile to Egyptians, Babylonians, or some other wicked statists who serve as judgment upon the wicked works of statism, which acts as both the consequence of sin and the correction that might wake them up to their erroneous ways that they previously failed to identify and squash in the days preceding the divine justice that came against them. Of course, if people repented up front the judgment against them would have never come to such dire circumstances as famines and labor camps; our Lord is as quick to show compassion and mercy upon a repentant people as He is willing to judge them for their sins. Since men are typically hardheaded fools who hate the truth, who resist rebukes to turn away from their sins, and who often prefer to mock and kill God’s prophets rather than heed their warnings and receive their correction, history often has it then that man’s dreadful condition — his physical bondage to human rulers, whether on the tax-plantations for free-range slaves or in one of their 6×8 prison cells or dungeons that God’s people had found themselves in — must grow even worse than at present before he will realize what he has done and repent for the certain sins that led to his deplorable situation. It has often taken exile—being physically marched out of your land as a captive to some other regime—to bring men to their senses.

“When they sin against You—for there is no one who does not sin—and You become angry with them and deliver them to an enemy who takes them as captives to his own land, whether far or near, and when they come to their senses in the land to which they were taken, and they repent and plead with You in the land of their captors, saying, ‘We have sinned and done wrong; we have acted wickedly,’ and when they return to You with all their heart and soul in the land of the enemies who took them captive, and when they pray to You in the direction of the land that You gave to their fathers, the city You have chosen, and the house I have built for Your Name, then may You hear from heaven, Your dwelling place, their prayer and petition, and may You uphold their cause. May You forgive Your people who have sinned against You and all the transgressions they have committed against You, and may You grant them compassion in the eyes of their captors to show them mercy” (1 Kings 8:46-50). 

If God was merely waiting for men who profess His name with their lips—an act that God says does not impress Him—and merely say they are repentant men who walk in His ways all while their deeds remain wicked, then we would have already been saved from the slavery of human government today. There are hundreds of millions of these men who take the Lord’s name in vain (i.e., who claim to be Christians but who hold the political ideology of a Roman) — which is worse than being a statist who, rather consistently, doesn’t claim it at all.

What God is waiting for is a people who actually repent from the sins of idolatry and covetousness that are inseparable from one’s support for human government, and to cry out to Him in prayer for deliverance from these men after realizing what they have done to themselves. God is waiting for men to stop whoring themselves out to human rulers for their protection, their law, their justice, their bread, which is to say their salvation, and to observe a people who will realize, in this political judgment which they are under, that the sin of statism has been causal to their bondage and to repent of these sins. 

“When Ephraim saw his sickness and Judah his wound, then Ephraim turned to Assyria and sent to the great king. But he cannot cure you or heal your wound. For I am like a lion to Ephraim and like a young lion to the house of Judah. I, even I, will tear them to pieces and then go away. I will carry them off where no one can rescue them. Then I will return to My place until they admit their guilt and seek My face; in their affliction they will earnestly seek Me” (Hosea 5:13-15). 

Repentance is never just a vague confession of “our sins.” Repentance looks like men acknowledging that their specific political sins, e.g., their idolatry for human government and their heads of state and officers of law, have led to their tax bondage and physical slavery on a finely-tuned political plantation that has them under the thumb of satanic pedophiles who rob them to fund a police state and surveillance apparatus to their own demise — something which all the captives in America and around the world currently refuse to do today. Repentance looks like men seeing their shackles and realizing what they have done to bring themselves to this point. Repentance looks like men looking into the mirror in an Egyptian statist society and questioning their ideas and actions that wound them up as a captive to demonic plunderers who kidnap children, sacrifice them to Satan, and eat them with their buddies on an island somewhere. 

“Let us examine and test our ways, and turn back to the LORD. Let us lift up our hearts and hands to God in heaven: ‘We have sinned and rebelled; You have not forgiven’” (Lamentations 3:40-42). 

Sometimes, we may even appeal to the Lord in the place of people who won’t do it themselves and haven’t yet seen their own sins have destroyed them and brought them under the boot of men. Nehemiah even confessed the sins on behalf of the Jews in Jerusalem, who were in a terrible state just after coming off the exile in Babylon.

“I confess the sins that we Israelites have committed against You. Both I and my father’s house have sinned. We have behaved corruptly against You and have not kept the commandments, statutes, and ordinances that You gave Your servant Moses” (Nehemiah 1:6-7). 

A true confession of sin is the acknowledgment that your own idolatry, adultery, and lust for human rulers and their armies have brought you and your people into bondage — that your failure to trust in the Lord as your only King, to the exclusion of all other human rulers, has delivered you and your people into captivity under the very men you believed were needed to save you from your enemies and who you once sinfully believed were indispensable to law, order, and justice in society, and who are now only proving to pervert and corrupt law and justice as a judgment upon your former, unrepentant belief that all these things would be the case in an anarchist society, which is the way you saw the world before the scales had fallen from your eyes. Repentance is not found in verbal professions alone, especially when they are meaningless ones that bring to mind no concrete acts of injustice against the Lord and His Law, but rather in a conscious and specific turning away from the kingdoms of this world to seek the Kingdom of God instead and become a doer of the word who has turned from the wicked and wide road of statism and its evil deeds. True repentance begins when men stop begging the false gods of false kingdoms to save them and turn back to the Lord as their only Savior instead — a God who scripture constantly reminds us is one who removes His repentant people from Egyptian bondage when they turn from their wicked and worldly political ways.  

The sins that lead to bondage 

For the most part, the professing Christian masses today are still hardheaded and proud in their bondage. Not only do they rarely see their chains—much less that they slapped them on themselves—but they largely think that the political order they live under today is a “free society” that represents man’s best effort in the history of the world to form a proper government. They think that the statist system where the devil’s government plunders them for all they’re worth was given to them as a blessing from God, rather than a curse upon their own sin, without which it could not exist. They add to their sins the evil claim that the inherently satanic kingdoms of the world can boast of having received a stamp of approval from God himself — that this Egyptian-Roman system we live under can be said to be a “Christian country.”

All the idolatry for human government today among professing Christians comes back to having no clear conception of man’s sin and the specific things that scripture calls evil, wicked, rebellion, and a rejection of God — the climax of which was found in the Israelites seeking a human king to rule over them (1 Samuel 8). When a people’s allegiance to worldly governments goes unquestioned because it’s no longer recognized for the sin that it surely is, they begin to see political bondage as normal, if they even see it as bondage at all. They fail to realize that the mere existence of human government is the proof that they are under judgment for sins from which they have never truly repented. As long as professing Christians remain deceived by the worldly statist ideology that has led them into captivity to men, which they make out to be the proper politics of Christ, their repentance remains only a word on their lips, disconnected from any real turning of their hearts, minds, and souls back to the Lord as their only King and to His gospel as the only political promise they adhere to and believe in. 

It is also unsurprising that a people whose sins have led to their own bondage have come to fight against its consequences rather than strike the root of their own iniquity: statists are rebels to begin with and expectedly rebel against their judgment when the chickens come home to roost, fighting against the outcome and effects of their own evildoing just as much as they fought against God’s Kingdom in the first place in their sinful erection of human rulers and their idolatrous support for human governments, whose evils have only served as divine judgment upon their sin. Though God means for the harsh punishment of statist evils—that is the pervasive terrorism, injustices, lawlessness, and corruption that always accompany human governments—to serve as a severe wake up call to men that they have sinned against the Lord by raising up and supporting human rulers, these men are often so lost in their sin that they turn toward rebelling against its effects rather than looking to their own complicity in their bondage as things grow worse in their explainably backwards societies. They begin imagining revolutions against the tyrants, who were raised up only through their own evildoing. They begin thinking that they shouldn’t have to endure the consequences of their own sin, that they should be just as free now to forsake the Lord as they thought they should be when they originally abandoned Him and turned toward human rulers as their new lords and saviors. They begin painting the evils of statism as autonomous tyrannies and themselves as victims of these men. They begin claiming that things didn’t have to go this way, that disaster could be averted if only they double-down in their sins and swarm the Roman polling stations even harder next time.

Our complicity in our bondage 

If men began an inward inspection of their own hearts, minds, and ideas — namely their sinful statist ideology that says that human governments are necessary to social order — they would find that they are only eating the fruit of their own ways and that all the evils that have come upon them have been due to their own sin. They would agree with the men of the Bible who knew that the evils that God allowed to come upon them were dealt justly — that taxation is not theft so much as it is divine justice against a people who would not act justly and seek the Kingdom of God on their own and set the Lord’s table to keep their people from going into bondage to worldly rulers upon eating their free bread and going after their dainties.

If men were truly entering a state of repentance, they would realize that the political evils they have before them today are a judgment upon their own sin rather than something they don’t deserve, which is effectively the claim that God has not been just in dealing out this judgment upon an idolatrous, covetous, and slothful people like them. They would be able to tell the Lord, “You are just in all that has befallen us, because You have acted faithfully, while we have acted wickedly” (Nehemiah 9:33). Instead of complaining about the corruption and slavery that has come upon them, they would see, with the Biblical prophets, that they brought it on themselves and that God cannot be blamed. Their prayer would look more like those of the prophet Daniel in Babylonian exile, who knew that judgment had come for their own evils.

“And I prayed to the LORD my God and confessed, ‘O, Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant of loving devotiond to those who love Him and keep His commandments, we have sinned and done wrong. We have acted wickedly and rebelled. We have turned away from Your commandments and ordinances. We have not listened to Your servants the prophets, who spoke in Your name to our kings, leaders, fathers, and all the people of the land. To You, O Lord, belongs righteousness, but this day we are covered with shame—the men of Judah, the people of Jerusalem, and all Israel near and far, in all the countries to which You have driven us because of our unfaithfulness to You. O LORD, we are covered with shame—our kings, our leaders, and our fathers—because we have sinned against You. To the Lord our God belong compassion and forgiveness, even though we have rebelled against Him and have not obeyed the voice of the LORD our God to walk in His laws, which He set before us through His servants the prophets. All Israel has transgressed Your law and turned away, refusing to obey Your voice; so the oath and the curse written in the Law of Moses the servant of God has been poured out on us, because we have sinned against You. You have carried out the words spoken against us and against our rulers by bringing upon us a great disaster. For under all of heaven, nothing has ever been done like what has been done to Jerusalem. Just as it is written in the Law of Moses, all this disaster has come upon us, yet we have not sought the favor of the LORD our God by turning from our iniquities and giving attention to Your truth. Therefore the LORD has kept the calamity in store and brought it upon us. For the LORD our God is righteous in all He does; yet we have not obeyed His voice. Now, O Lord our God, who brought Your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand, and who made for Yourself a name renowned to this day, we have sinned; we have acted wickedly. O Lord, in keeping with all Your righteous acts, I pray that Your anger and wrath may turn away from Your city Jerusalem, Your holy mountain; for because of our sins and the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and Your people are a reproach to all around us” (Daniel 9:4-16).

Though most people treat the existence and evils of human government as if they are random, arose against us by force and successful plundering alone, and dominate men who are purely victims of their aggression, the fact is that men go into bondage due to their own sin and that human governments and their accompanying evils are a judgment against idolatry, covetousness of the benefits of human rulers, and/or the failure to seek the Kingdom of God as an alternative to the kingdoms of the world.

There is no repentance in people who are simply angry that things turned out the way they did; this is just more of the same rebellion as always that fails to link sin and its consequences together and learn a lesson from it. True repentance is found in weeping over the sin that led to bondage, not putting on camouflage clothing and pretending that you are going to shoot your way out of Egypt. True repentance begins when men finally recognize that their chains were made not by tyrants alone, but by their own willingness to trade God’s anarchy for the false security offered under human governments and their armies, legal systems, and code enforcers. True repentance happens when men realize that they have thrown the yoke around their own necks, when they see in the reflection of their chains their own sad faces, and when they finally see that the Egypt bondage they have wound-up in has been one of their own doing.