[This is part 9 in an article series on Sin, Repentance, and Revival. See part one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

Since we often spend so much time showing that the rulers of the world are the primary workers of iniquity from biblical times to our present age, we should always be careful to make it clear that the existence of these human rulers is but the result of the wickedness of the people themselves whom they rule over. As much as we must maintain that state rulers are sinners too, it is also the sins of the people themselves that have set these authoritarians into place, whether directly through unashamed idolatry for presidents, or indirectly by chasing after the tax-funded benefits, welfare, income, pensions, retirements, or other dainties or legal privileges that these authoritarian benefactors dangle before men of appetite and addictions to ensnare those willing to take a bite out of their neighbors into bondage. It is the sins of the common man that enable paid and glorified sinners, like presidents and police officers, to be raised up above them, who then act as God’s form of judgment against the very wickedness of raising up rulers in the first place.

Lest someone charge that we are focused exclusively on the wickedness of the rulers themselves, which is still always the case, let us make it unmistakably clear that the sins of the masses—their idolatry of men, their covetousness of the benefits these tax‑thieves have to offer, or their simple failure to live as God’s anarchist Kingdom people—are at the root of their own bondage. As wicked as the rulers themselves always are, they also play a role—unbeknownst to them directly—in bringing evils upon an evil people who need to be judged by God for these wicked ways of chasing after human rulers. Though they are not self‑conscious of their use as divine judgment against the people (Isa 10:7) who they simply think they are dominating through their own might (Isa 10:13-14), and though no state ruler can ever serve God except by doing evil and thereby carrying out His purposes against the evil statists in the population who support them, the mere existence of a State—that evil institution men call “government”—is all the evidence one needs of a sinful population who has refused to be ruled by God alone. For human governments cannot exist without sinners, and wherever a repentant people are found in the future, there will be no human government at all.

Human rulers are not God’s perfect will 

Contrary to the widespread assessment by idolaters that human rulers are our blessed source of law, order, and freedom, that God gave us to assure justice and order in society, the people of the world today are slaves who have found themselves living under human rulers because of the sins inherent in raising up and supporting these wicked political systems of man. All men who live under human governments are captives who arrived at their shameful condition through their own sins. Though these statist sinners, in their reprobate minds, like to claim that God gave us human rulers, the fact is that men raise up systems of human government in their rebellion against God, and that these systems function as a tool for divine justice against these wicked men. The existence of human government does not provide the proof that “God gave us human government,” at least not in the sense in which statists mean it: as some sort of God-ordained justice-provider, rather than a God-ordained system of judgment against those sinners who outsource their justice and law to human rulers.

Neither is it the case that human rulers just mysteriously forced themselves upon men or somehow another came to dominate the people of the earth today. The only explanation for man’s political bondage is that he has rejected God as his only ruler and is now eating the fruit of his own wicked ways. It is specific sins of men that have brought about their bondage to other men who dominate them for a living and who claim to be their “public servants” and “representatives,” but who exercise authority over them. It has been for the sins of voting for new masters, accepting the benefits doled out by these authoritarian benefactors, and prostituting themselves out to the Egyptian systems of this world for bread, protection, safety, and security — as opposed to trusting in the Lord alone for all these things — that men have found themselves living in a corrupt and backward Egyptian society today. As much as we may rightly rail against the evils of human rulers themselves, it is ultimately the sins of men—namely their whoredom for human governments—that have landed them in the societal calamity they face today, where what semblance of peace, prosperity, and freedom that remains in spite of the evils of human government are on the decline because of them, and where men everywhere face the disaster that comes to any society that must endure the fall of these man-made political disorders. 

Though we may suggest the evils of statism are a part of God’s plan, serving as a divine wake-up call and rebuke upon the sins of men that ideally serve as a means of correcting their wicked political course, we must still be sure to not confuse the existence of a State with God’s perfect will. That God may make use of Babylonians and Egyptians as tools of judgment against statist sinners does not mean they have received His stamp of approval, that they are non-evil, or that they will not be judged too. It is precisely that human rulers are evil that they effectively “serve” God’s need to punish the wicked statists of the world, whose ideology demonstrates them to be people who do not want to be ruled by the Lord as their only King. 

As confusing as it may be for some that God uses state rulers to judge sinners and other wicked statist systems, while still not prescribing this as any sort of government for men to seek themselves, this how things play out in Scripture (2 Kings 18:9-12; Isaiah 10:5, 13:17-19; Jeremiah 25:9, 27:6, 32:28; Habakkuk 1:6-11). Though God meets sinners where they are and gives them the human rulers they beg for (1 Samuel 8:7-9), knowing exactly the evils it will mean for them (1 Samuel 8:11-17), we can still not conclude that human civil government is the divine ideal, which is found only in the godly anarchist society where the Lord rules as a people’s only King. It has never been God’s will that men get destroyed under state rulers of the world; this is what men do to themselves for failing to heed the warnings of the Lord and His prophet said. Indeed, it is this very sin that the Lord weeps for a hardheaded people, who will now reap all the evils they have sown in the form of being tread on by the men who they falsely thought existed to “protect and serve” them. 

Though human government is evil, yet God—the Sovereign of the Universe—is able to make use of it to serve His own purposes of bringing justice against a sinful people who walk the wicked path of statism. The evils that inevitably flow from every system of human civil government serve as divine judgment upon an evil people who idolized these men, coveted their neighbors’ property through their socialist welfare systems, or who otherwise failed to seek the anarchistic Kingdom of God as a literal, alternative political society, where men could live freely without the ever-looming threat of being robbed, kidnapped, or murdered by Pharaohs and their chariot-operators or horsemen, which hangs over the heads of all men who have gone into Egypt and up to Assyria in search of protection from their enemies or provisions of goods and services from the false gods of the world, only to find a boot on their necks. 

The fears of anarchy are true of statism 

Though the statist sinners of the world tell us of all the bad things that would supposedly happen in a free society under God’s sole and exclusive kingship and rule, these things are actually true of a statist society, which men must find out the hard way is the consequences and cost to be paid for the sinful idea of statism that God alone cannot be trusted to provide protection, peace, prosperity, justice, law, and order. The lawlessness, injustices, corruption, and legal plunder that will always be found in a statist society are a punishment from God for a people who would not keep His Law and live freely in a decentralized, anarchist society where people served each other freely and had the Lord as their only King. These perversions of justice and corruption of what is right that come under human rulers are divine justice against people who, in their sinful and worldly ways of thinking, assert that this would be the case in God’s anarchist society — as if it isn’t obvious enough yet that the chaos and disorder men heap against an anarchist society is clearly true of their statist disorder. Out of the fear of all the numerous conjectural bad guys that statists tell us would come upon us were it not for the protection of a government, military, and police force of our own, God hands these sinners over to the very fears. Those who turn to human government to save them from “bad guys” and fight a “war on terror” for them will find themselves living under a police state of legalized terrorists. 

“Her foes have become her masters; her enemies are at ease. For the LORD has brought her grief because of her many transgressions. Her children have gone away as captives before the enemy” (Lamentations 1:5). 

This is the cause and effect law of God in our world: turn away from God’s rule by trusting in men to save you, and find yourself dominated by the very thieves, bandits, murderers, scoundrels, criminals, cannibals, Satanists, and global child traffickers you thought you were avoiding through your sinful quest for human rulers. Men can either have liberty under God, or bondage under men. If men won’t live under God’s Law, they will live under the thousands of oppressive decrees of men. If men will not be ruled by God in a free and anarchist society, they will be ruled by false gods in a statist slave society. God blesses obedience to His commands with liberty, and curses statist rebels with the tyranny that inevitably arises from their own wicked deeds of setting up and furthering man-made systems of perverted law. As God says He does for a people who refuse to keep His Law that forbids men from raising up false gods to rule over them and for instead chasing after the thousands of so-called laws, statutes, and codes of men, “I gave them over to statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live” (Ezekiel 20:25).

That men are living in the bondage of human government today is no proof that God desires for men to live this way. It is only further evidence that God meets men where they’re at and lets them reap the consequences of their own evildoing. It is not that God approves of human government that men today live under them, but that men desired these wicked systems and God, in turn, “gave them up to their stubborn hearts to follow their own devices” (Psalm 81:12). God has shown men the way they must live if they want to be free from human rulers, but they rejected this counsel and whored themselves out to men to save them. “Though I wrote for them the great things of My law, they regarded them as something strange” (Hosea 8:12). The bondage to statists that men find themselves in today is but the divine punishment for the evils associated with the upbuilding of these systems. As the prophet makes clear, “Now He will remember their iniquity and punish their sins: They will return to Egypt” (Hosea 8:13). 

Statism as judgment against sin 

As much as we may often emphasize the sin and evil of ruling over other men as directly practiced by those who take employment in the worldly systems of human government, we must also be sure to submit that it is also the case that those sinners who fawn after these men as their heroes and protectors are wicked men too, who wholly deserve to find themselves destroyed for their idolatrous idea of having rulers, seen in their many popular slogans like “support our troops” and “back the blue.” As evil as state rulers are themselves, the same is also true of the wicked-hearted people who raise up rulers and find themselves tyrannized by these men as God’s form of divine justice against their own evildoing. It was for the sins associated with statism that the Biblical prophets pronounced judgment upon men.

“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. Yet He too is wise and brings disaster; He does not call back His words. He will rise up against the house of the wicked and against the allies of evildoers. But the Egyptians are men, not God; their horses are flesh, not spirit. When the LORD stretches out His hand, the helper will stumble, and the one he helps will fall; both will perish together.” (Isaiah 31:1-3). 

Though the statist idolaters of the population may not commit the evil deeds of human government first hand, like raping teenagers overseas and killing their family or executing their neighbors in the street for not obtaining a license plate with Pharaoh’s department of motor vehicles, the statists at the bottom of society — at once sinners and proud slaves — are “allies of evildoers.” They place their faith in the evil systems of human government and their militaries to save them, rather than trusting in the Lord alone. 

However, the rulers of the world are evil too. As evil as the people who raise them up are, only to find themselves under judgment at the hands of these men, the works of these men are wicked as well. After God is done using them to judge the wicked people who set them up, they themselves are judged for their own evildoings (Isa 10:12). State rulers are at once wicked, tools of divine judgment, and scheduled by God for destruction. God allows them—this is the sense in which they are “ordained” by Him—only as a concession to the wicked desires of men to have kings and rulers other than the Lord, who He knows will act as a judgment against them and who will thereby teach them a lesson in divine cause and effect, i.e., that the sin of statolatry leads to political bondage. Yet these human rulers, who God once used to judge idolaters, must also see divine justice for their own evildoings as well. Though statist systems once act as judgment against others for their own sins, in the end they are also judged for their sins of keeping men as their slaves, such as in the form of the Lord bringing the waves of the sea against the rulers and their armies and burying these men and their weapons of war on the seafloor. 

If we are serious about undoing our political bondage today and want to achieve anything more than fruitlessly railing against the consequences of our own sins, then we must begin by repenting of the sin of statism that regards human rulers as our saviors and start seeing them as nothing more than the rotten fruit of our own rebellion against God’s kingship, where the Lord alone rules in an anarchist society. Human rulers exist as the primary evidence of a population of unrepentant sinners, without which they could not exist. The political bondage that the people of the world have found themselves in today is no accident of history or the result of being overpowered by the men who own all the firearms or fighter jets, but is instead a just consequence from God for the idolatry, covetousness, and lack of faith in God and lack of fear of the Lord that is inseparable from all systems of human civil government.

Likewise, true salvation will only be found in appealing to God to deliver us from the hands of a political tyranny that is both the result of our own sin as well as the Lord seeing to it that this sin is punished by handing men over to the statist tyrants who they begged to have over them. As long as men believe salvation will be found in swapping out one Pharaoh for the other every few years, they are men who have yet to repent for the characteristically sinful act of mankind since the beginning of time: raising up human rulers as their “protectors,” rather than trusting in the Lord their God to save them from any and all enemies who may come against them. A truly repentant people turn away from their faith in Egypt and her kings, soldiers, and officers of law to save them and start to cry out to the Lord to deliver them from the wicked state rulers who they once sinfully regarded as their peace-, freedom-, and law-givers. A truly repentant people have seen that it was their own sins of thinking that human rulers were something other than men who plunder in the name of the law and who enslave in the name of order that wound them up in the bondage of Egypt.