[This is part 5 in an article series on Sin, Repentance, and Revival. See part one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

In our continued look into Biblical words that express some idea or another of men being against God and His Kingdom, we arrive at a word that often gets translated as “evil” or “wicked” in the Old Testament. This is the Hebrew word רָשְׁע, which gets transliterated as rasha’ (Strong’s H7563). It is an adjective that, in the NASB, is often used to describe a “wicked man, guilty, wicked ones, wicked men, evil, evil man.” It is significant for having around 260 occurrences.

Wickedness and political evils 

It is in a statist society—that is, a society where an idolatrous people have raised up systems of human government—that we find a people who can be said to be thoroughly wicked: both among the small gang of rulers who call themselves “the government” and exalt themselves to positions of power as substitute gods, as well as the countless idolaters among the population who not only apologize for its existence but often enthusiastically praise its plunder agents as the source of their peace, freedom, public safety, prosperity, and therefore their salvation.

It was always in the context of a political plunder society that the Biblical prophets brought their warnings of the consequences of sin and coming judgment to a people who practiced these ways of the world. The Biblical prophets had come to preach to an idolatrous, statist people that the chief, judgment-inducing evils within their society were those inseparably tied to the statist order itself. Wherever human civil government exists, there exists theft, violence, murder, oppression, deceit, war, idolatry, imprisonment, corruption, exploitation, lawlessness, perversions of justice, and every form of evil imaginable. It is these beliefs and practices of a statist people—their sinful ideology that puts men into power and makes human into their false gods and saviors—that God hates and judges. It is all those people who support these worldly governments who can be called wicked.

Not surprisingly, it is in this context—the inherent evils that come along with human governments and the people who raise them up—where we can easily find the use of the word that gets rightly translated to wicked. In the context of the general things that are either absent in a statist society, such as finding one person who cares about justice (Jer 5:1), or the things that are entirely prevalent throughout it, such as people who have sworn by other gods (Jer 5:7) or who exist to rob the poor (Jer 5:28), the prophet Jeremiah declares that “among my people are wicked men” (Jeremiah 5:26). Every statist society is one of wicked men. If there were no wicked men in a land, and all people had sought the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, statism couldn’t exist. Human government is the wicked fruit of a wicked people, who rulers depend on to even arise and plunder. Human rulers can only exist in a land where men reject the rule of God, and thus all human rulers must help to train in men the idolatrous and adulterous hearts and minds needed to support their own existence.

Often, the statist context of these scriptures that use the Hebrew word that gets translated as “wicked” is very clear. In his prediction of the fall of Babylon empire, which served as a general warning to all man-made political systems as well as Babylon herself, the prophet Isaiah is given instruction to tell the people God’s warning:

“I will punish the world for its evil and the wicked [rasha’] for their iniquity. I will end the haughtiness of the arrogant and lay low the pride of the ruthless” (Isaiah 13:11).

The proud and arrogant men of the world are the self-exalted state rulers, who believe they rightfully rule over other men and who believe in their arrogance that they are exempt from God’s judgment as they embark upon their plunder scheme against men. To include “the world” with “the wicked” here is even more profound. “The world” in scripture refers not to the extent of the earth (though in this context we can say it probably does have something to do with the size and scope of the Babylonian statist system), although we can still infer that judgment shall come against all the kingdoms of the land. “The world” refers precisely to the institutions of the earth, namely the political institution of human civil government, against which the Kingdom of Heaven is contrasted. To say the Kingdom of God is not of this world is not to say that it isn’t earthly, but that it isn’t statist. Though we know that the Greek word for “world” (kosmos) is often referring to “the kingdoms of the world” (Matthew 4:8) and it not just a world that describes all things earthly, passages like that of Isaiah 13:11 may well provide a further prooftext for this case here that “worldly” should bring to mind statist. Here, one of the most significant statist institutions of the time—Babylon—is itself called “the world.” The standard Bible commentators picked up on this. The Benson Commentary notes that “The Babylonish empire…[here] is called the world.” Barnes’ Notes on the Bible explains that “By the ‘world’ here is evidently meant the Babylonian empire…in the same way [that ‘the world’ in] Acts 11:28 means the Roman empire.” When Jesus said His Kingdom is not of this world, He didn’t mean that it was not of this earth and not for men to seek today, but that it was not of the Babylonian institutions of the world and would not and could not be furthered through these wicked political practices.

The wicked rulers

Though the idolatrous masses who support the evils of human government must always be included in any analysis of these systems and their evils, we should still be sure to show that scripture also refer specifically to the rulers of statists societies as “the wicked” of the world. As much as we should always avoiding painting the evils of a statist society as something that applies only to the ruling elite, lest we deny that it is the sins of men that bring about their bondage, the other danger is that people will come to think that it has nothing to do with the rulers too. The point is that it is both the people and the rulers who constitute the wicked statist systems of the world. As much as human rulers are concession by God to the wicked people of the earth who must be judged for their sins of setting up princes and kings against God’s Law, the rulers themselves are still evil, too. Indeed, this is why they are so “good” at serving as tools of divine justice against a wicked people.

To be sure, we should demonstrate that “the wicked” of scripture are not just easily generalized in the same way that men treat sin, as some vague concept that doesn’t refer to anything specific or anyone in particular. “The wicked” are not just “all the sinners of the world” or all the private criminals or something like that. Unfortunately for statist idolaters, the men who scripture identifies as “wicked” is never so non-specific as they would like. The prophet Jeremiah uses this word for “wicked” (rasha’) precisely to refer to God’s judgment upon the rulers of the world (Jer 25:31). After listing a slew of kings (Jer 25:17-26) who he is to bring a word against, the prophet tells them to go ahead and drink the cup of God’s wrath (Jer 25:27), because God has a judgment planned for the people of the earth for all their evildoing.

Very often, we find that the people, ideas, and practices called wicked are fully bound-up with the statist society and all the things that one will always find in them. In reference to a people who are coming under judgment (Ezek 7:29), the prophet Ezekiel uses the Hebrew word for wicked in a way that leaves no doubt what their wickedness has been. “For the land is full of crimes of bloodshed, and the city is full of violence” (Ezekiel 7:23). The violence and bloodshed in a society is never just the work of average criminals, whose crimes are never so systematic, institutionalized, and legalized as to be regarded as the sole wicked people in a society. It is the work of “the mighty” (Ezek 7:24), i.e., the men who control the law-systems of the land and call themselves the “government” and who have legalized their crime and violence into a profession of regularized robbery and murder against the people in name of “the law.”

It is equally clear among other prophets that much of the mentions of “the wicked” (rasha’) are speaking directly of the rulers of the land. Like many prophets who often felt alone in their understanding of what was going on in the land, Habakkuk was grieved and burdened over having such eyes to see as he had. 

“How long, O LORD, must I call for help but You do not hear, or cry out to You, ‘Violence!’ but You do not save? Why do You make me see iniquity? Why do You tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me. Strife is ongoing, and conflict abounds. Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth. For the wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted” (Habakkuk 1:2-4). 

Again, it is never just a class of “criminals” in society that should be thought of as “the wicked” people of the land. These are not the people who have the power to cause the law to be paralyzed and justice to be perverted. As much as the state rulers may have the ideological support of the masses who deserve to live under such perversions of justice as a judgment against their sin of supporting these systems, the foremost perpetrators of violence and injustice in society—the people who directly dirty their hands with blood—are those who control these law systems: congressmen, judges, district attorneys, lawyers, police officers, sheriff’s deputies, presidents, soldiers, and other agents of the State who have direct control over these systems. They are the wicked men who perpetrate violence in society and who hem in the righteous. 

There are many other instances where the prophets invoke the word rasha’ to explain the wicked men of a statist society, both the predatory ruling elite who practice the public religion of socialism rather than the pure religion of Jesus Christ, as well as the people among themselves who have forsaken their duty to administer God’s Kingdom by forming a private, voluntary, decentralized network of charity that meets the needs of their people freely and out of personal responsibility, without exercising authority over other men like the rulers of the Babylonian world do, having instead outsourced these duties to human rulers who only pervert justice and plunder the poor with their socialist systems of law and welfare. 

“For among My people are wicked men; they watch like fowlers lying in wait; they set a trap to catch men. Like cages full of birds, so their houses are full of deceit. Therefore they have become powerful and rich. They have grown fat and sleek, and have excelled in the deeds of the wicked. They have not taken up the cause of the fatherless, that they might prosper; nor have they defended the rights of the needy” (Jeremiah 5:26-29). 

The imagery of trapping and catching men easily brings to men the predatory practices of human government and its agents, who live for the thrill and gain of finding men to rob, cage, enslave, and murder and who grow fat and sleek off operating a tax-farm full of millions of cattle who they drive from cradle to grave. Moreover, this passage gives the idea of these things being widespread throughout all of society. It is not just the rulers themselves who exploit the people, but the people who, through the socialist system of statism, expropriate each other’s property and partake in the covetous practices of seeking the tax-funded benefits of these systems, whether their welfare dainties or any other goods or services they have to offer to tempt men to plunder each other to go into bondage.

Lest we sound like only the rulers themselves are evil (who, to be sure, do kidnap, abuse, and sacrifice children to Satan), we should also be sure to submit that all statist societies depend upon sinners to exist and that these wicked plunder systems are always but an outgrowth of a sinful people who have violence, theft, and murder in their own hearts and who even partake in these systems’ plunder and seek out their dainties. The sins associated with human government, which is the chief manifestation of man’s sin, affect the whole society and bring everyone into corruption and injustice.

The evils of a statist people 

Often then the assessment of the prophets of a sinful and corrupt society was a general one that implicated not just the political plunder class but also the people as a whole on the bottom who, through praising the wicked rulers, voting them into power, and coveting the property of their neighbors to be provided by these benefactors, necessarily took part in and approved of their own enslavement. 

“The godly man has perished from the earth; there is no one upright among men. They all lie in wait for blood; they hunt one another with a net. Both hands are skilled at evil; the prince and the judge demand a bribe. When the powerful utters his evil desire, they all conspire together. The best of them is like a brier; the most upright is sharper than a hedge of thorns. The day for your watchmen has come, the day of your visitation. Now is the time of their confusion. Do not rely on a friend; do not trust in a companion. Seal the doors of your mouth from her who lies in your arms. For a son dishonors his father, a daughter rises against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A man’s enemies are the members of his own household” (Micah 7:2-6). 

Though the rulers themselves are necessarily the people who directly carry out the perversions of law and justice, this is only made possible by the people at large who provide the ideological support for these systems and who, therefore, spiritually, morally, and physically endorse the evils that flow from them and who stand as guilty parties to the sins of Babylon and who, for this reason, partake in her plagues. As wicked as they are alone, every gang of statist plunderers is supported by a sinful, statist people who, at bare minimum, apologize for their existence as a “necessary evil” and who quite often enthusiastically cheer them on in their wars, plunders, and executions of men on the side of the road who didn’t obey the officer’s orders fast enough. Every president has tens of millions of idolaters behind him and every one of Pharaoh’s horsemen and chariot-operators has the same amount of “back the blue” and “support the troops” idiots behind him.

It is never then that the injustices and evils of a statist society are found only among the ruling elite, but rather that one can “go up and down the streets of Jerusalem [and] search her squares” and still not “find a single person, anyone who acts justly, anyone who seeks the truth” (Jeremiah 5:1). Though the prophets did directly target the rulers too, the indictment they gave against the people was often a general one, showing that everyone from the top to the bottom of these corrupt and backwards societies was involved — the heads of state and their officers just as much as the man who stakes the president’s campaign sign in his lawn, the soldiers just as much as the one who puts an “army mom” sticker on the bumper of their car, the officers of the law as much as the idiot who flies a “thin blue line” flag from his house. When the prophets looked out upon a corrupt, perverted statist society like ours today, they saw not only a group of plunderers at the top who held everyone in involuntary subjection by force alone, but a people on the bottom whose sins like idolatry and covetousness made them complicit in their own enslavement. 

“There is no truth, no loving devotion, and no knowledge of God in the land! Cursing and lying, murder and stealing, and adultery are rampant; one act of bloodshed follows another” (Hosea 4:1-2).

The sins of a statist society are never just the acts of violence practiced directly by the men who control the system of human government, but the violence the masses of idolaters who support these perverse law systems and scream and cheer when they see one of Pharaoh’s officers putting his jackboot on their brother’s neck for backtalking him. The charges that identified a wicked people in a statist society were general and wide:  

“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” (Isaiah 59:4). 

Only ungodly men can be ruled. Godly men have the protection of the Lord their King against the statists of the world, who depend on sinners in order to have slaves. When God looks down upon a people of a statist society, He finds almost the complete absence of any godly men (that is, repentant anarchists who seek His Kingdom alone) who do not support these systems of government and who seek to actively live under the His sole and exclusive kingship.

“The LORD looks down from heaven upon the sons of men to see if any understand, if any seek God. All have turned away, they have together become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one” (Psalm 14:2-3). 

God searches in vain among a population of statist idolaters to find a man who is willing to right the way again and lead his people back to God’s anarchist society.

“I searched for a man among them to repair the wall and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, so that I should not destroy it. But I found no one” (Ezekiel 22:30). 

It is never just that a ruling elite gains control over a people who don’t want to be ruled, but that men have loved their bondage and begged for rulers over them. It is never just that there exists a tiny minority of men with boots and badges who dominate men who never wanted “legislators” and “law enforcers” to exist, but that all the idolaters of the population are complicit in this wickedness of statism.

“See how the faithful city has become a harlot! She once was full of justice; righteousness resided within her, but now only murderers! (Isaiah 1:21). 

It is never just that we are ruled by a small group of liars, but that most all the population of any statist society have bought into these lies and adopted the statist ideology that says human rulers are necessary to social order. It is never just that the ruling elite believe in lies while hiding in their palaces and high places standing over the people, but that “truth has stumbled in the public square” (Isaiah 59:14). The wickedness and evils of statism are population-wide whenever such false, artificial societies as these arise. They must always be. Because there is no human government without sinners to raise it up and support. Human governments cannot and do not exist on force alone. They depend on idolaters and covetous men — on sinners. As much as men complain about the effects of their own sin today, without any willingness to strike the root of their sin and repent, it is impossible to imagine that the system called the “United States” could have ever grown to its current size without idolatrous and covetous men. These men must always exist wherever there is a system of human government. And one will not struggle to find these flag-waving, benefit-taking people among the American population. They are everywhere.

Turning back to God’s anarchy

As wicked as state rulers are, they are empowered by the wickedness in the hearts of the people who stand behind them and raise them up. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Socialist systems—this is the nature of all human government—are empowered also by the men on the bottom whose sins support it. The wicked rulers and the wicked people work together to make the overall system possible. As Solzhenitsyn also relevantly wrote, “Evil people always support each other; that is their chief strength.” All this shows why the real means of combatting statism is not to launch a physical revolution against the ruling elite, who only exist due to the sins of the people who put them there, but to lead individuals to repentance for the wicked ideas that exist in their own hearts. This is why seeking to control a political system to change men can never accomplish what preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom of God can do for a society. We need regenerate hearts who want to seek God’s Kingdom in their own repentance, not supposedly “godly rulers” who crack everyone over the head with a police baton and “impose Christianity” on the people with the sword of the State.

The masses of any statist society can never be entirely separated as responsible parties to the wicked statist system. They are the ones who always and every time put those into place who run it. It is their sins that fuel the kingdoms of the world, without which these systems could not endure. All systems of human government are founded by sinners, whose sins only have led to their bondage and allowed men to rule over them. God made men to be a free people under His sole and exclusive Kingship, but they feared His anarchist society that required they trust in the Lord alone as their liberator and savior, imagined all sorts of conjectural images of the alleged lawlessness and injustices that would prevail in this divine order, and thereby squandered their liberty over to men who bring about all these evils upon them as a judgment for this sin.

“You have made men like the fish of the sea, like creeping things that have no ruler. The foe pulls all of them up with a hook; he catches them in his dragnet, and gathers them in his fishing net; so he rejoices gladly” (Habakkuk 1:14:15). 

Those men who argue that their needs wouldn’t be met by the Lord in a decentralized, anarchist society where the Lord is their only King, who then go on to evilly engage in the politics of the world under the demonic deception that this is the only way to have their needs met, are the type of men from the Bible who reasoned in their sin and worldliness that “it is futile to serve God. What have we gained by keeping His requirements and walking mournfully before the LORD of Hosts?” (Malachi 3:14). They are the people who reasoned that they must do evil so that good may come. Unsurprisingly, they are only reaping evil for the wickedness they have sown. The irony of the statist reasoning (or lack thereof) that says that human government is the only way to have law and justice is that it’s precisely the case that this sin guarantees lawlessness and injustice as a judgment from God for the refusal to believe that these things could be obtained only in His anarchist society. 

The wicked and the righteous

In our necessary deviation showing that rulers and their supporters are both complicit in the political plunder society, nevertheless it is not the case that everyone is actively involved in the wicked statist schemes of the world. Some of us—a small fraction of the population to be sure—are repenting. Despite all the perversions of law and justice supported by most men and perpetrated by those wicked men who these wicked people raise up into power, there always remains a repentant remnant in any Egyptian society who are turning from the statist ways of the world and seeking God’s anarchistic Kingdom. 

As muddled as these things often become in a statist world and as true as it is that the vast majority of men are open and unashamed supporters of the statist system who don’t even blush at their own sins, scripture makes a distinction between the righteous and the wicked. In one instance, God even speaks about a time when it would be easier to “distinguish between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not” (Malachi 3:18). This is already easy for those who know the Lord: all statists are ungodly men who don’t know the Lord at all and precisely prove themselves to be His enemies by furthering a worldly kingdom that He says His Kingdom is not. 

As much as it may benefit the unrepentant, statist idolaters of the world to try and blur the lines here or even harp on the passage how “there are none righteous” (which they often do), the idea of a wicked or a righteous man is not just some arbitrary designation that is disconnected from the acts and deeds of a man, such that some vague professions of being a servant of God makes it true. The prophet Ezekiel makes it clear that what defines a righteous man is one who does just and right (Ezek 18:5), which no statist can claim for themselves. 

“He does not eat at the mountain or look to the idols of the house of Israel….He does not oppress another, but restores the pledge to the debtor. He does not commit robbery, but gives his bread to the hungry and covers the naked with clothing. He does not engage in usury or take excess interest, but he withholds his hand from iniquity and executes true justice between men. He follows My statutes and faithfully keeps My ordinances” (Ezekiel 18:6-9). 

Conversely, the prophet describes wicked men as the violent men of the world who shed blood, which is applicable to all those men who support or serve human civil government, whether the men who cheer on soldiers or police from the sidelines or the men who do evils on the frontlines of Pharaoh’s plunder schemes in one of his uniforms.

“He oppresses the poor and needy; he commits robbery and does not restore a pledge. He lifts his eyes to idols; he commits abominations. He engages in usury and takes excess interest” (Ezekiel 18-12-13). 

Repenting from statism 

The latter person—again, this is the case with all those men who support or serve the violence and theft-based systems of human government—is what the prophets emphatically call “wicked men” (rasha’), as contrasted to righteous men who turn from these ways. These wicked men, that is those people who involved themselves in the plunder of human government as cheerleaders or men who swear oaths to serve them in boots and badges, need to repent to be right by God again, which entails not just a vague confession of some unspecified sins but to actually turn from their concrete acts of evildoing whereby they further the evil work of human government. This goes for the paper-pusher in its many bureaucracies to the badged thugs on the frontlines of this satanic system’s war against God, His Kingdom, and His people. Then and only then will God forgive and forget. 

“If the wicked man turns from all the sins he has committed, keeps all My statutes, and does what is just and right, he will surely live; he will not die. None of the transgressions he has committed will be held against him. Because of the righteousness he has practiced, he will live” (Ezekiel 18:21-22). 

God is not looking for false confessions of one’s sin and evildoing, like that given by the Pharaoh (Ex 9:27), who obviously didn’t truly mean it and went on immediately after to keep holding on to slaves (Ex 9:34-35). He is looking not just for vain, verbal professions of repentance, but for men to actually turn their lives around and stop robbing and coercing others. He is looking for a man who will “right his way” (Psalm 50:23) This is why Jesus taught that we know a man by his fruits. It means nothing that a man says he has repented while, e.g., standing there in a police uniform willing to do violence at the command of Pharaoh and his other high-ranking officers on behalf of the Egyptian plunder system. What’s relevant or not is a man’s deeds. Those who know and serve the Lord don’t just profess His name; they keep His commandments (Luke 6:46). A man standing around in a police uniform, or one of the idolaters in the public waving a thin blue line flag, is all the proof that we need that a man is unrepentant. All statists, whether directly joining the political plunder system or simply endorsing its existence, are either directly thieves and murderers or guilty by extension. 

The evils and sins of men are never just some non-specific “evils” that men must loosely repent from. In a return to the transliteration ra’, used for the Hebrew word that gets translated as evil, we see it used in direct connection to the idolatry of the people (Deut 4:25) and other acts related to the evildoing involved in raising up rulers (Samuel 8) or being a practicing ruler (Micah 3). It is the very evils that are bound-up with statism—both the wicked thought that human rulers should exist as well as the violent practices of the men who rule over these systems—that men need to repent from if they are to have their social calamities turn around, which have been a direct result of the evildoing bound-up with these systems and their supporting ideologies. Scripture shows that repentance reverses the curse of judgment that comes upon a people who take the evil path of political idolatry and violence. 

“When God saw their actions—that they had turned from their evil ways—He relented from the disaster He had threatened to bring upon them” (Jonah 3:10).