[This is part 16 in an article series on Sin, Repentance, Salvation, and Revival. See part one. two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty one, twenty two, twenty three, twenty four]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

In our growing study of words that express some concept or another of what we generally call sin today, we have already looked at a couple of Hebrew words that convey the idea of something being bent, crooked, or twisted, and we have shown how the use of these words is necessarily connected to the statist systems of the world. As we saw in a previous article, the similar Hebrew words that get transliterated as `avon or `avah have a meaning of something being “bent, crooked, or perverse.” 

As far as the sinful actions of men are concerned, there is nothing more bent and crooked than the statist ideology of the world and the evil practice of putting human rulers into authoritarian offices. When the Scripture says that “God made men upright, but they have sought out many inventions” (Ecclesiastes 7:29), nowhere else is this more true than in the sinful erection and advancement of systems of human civil government and this wicked political attempt by men to create an artificial social order and perpetuate many schemes against the people. It is in the pursuit of human government—that is, in socialist systems of law, justice, defense, and welfare—that men abandon the politics of Jesus Christ and the pure religion of serving one another without exercising authority over them (Mark 10:42-45). It is in the pursuit of the kingdoms of the world that men abort the divine mission of seeking the Kingdom of God, forsake the Lord to serve men as their kings and lawmakers, and abandon their very godly purpose on earth to instead further the work of the government of the devil. Nowhere is a people’s turn from the straight path more exemplified than in their turn down the statist path of setting up human rulers into political office or in believing that they should even exist. It is in men’s statism, i.e., in their sinful belief in human government, that they show themselves to be ungodly men who choose the perverted and twisted road of human government over the righteous path of seeking God’s anarchist Kingdom. 

Statists as perverters of God’s Law

Continuing our study of various Hebrew words expressing one concept or another of men rebelling against God, we come upon another minor one—there are only 5 occurrences in the Old Testament—that is directly related to the concept above of something being bent or twisted. Here we have the Hebrew word עָקַשׁ (Strong’s H6140), which is a verb that gets transliterated into aquash (pronounced ah-KASH). It means “to be perverse, to twist, to make crooked.” Strong’s definition adds “to knot or distort.”

The primary way that men pervert, twist, or otherwise distort God’s natural, anarchist order is by raising up political systems of man-made law, all which are formed and furthered against God’s Law and which consequently only go on to pervert and corrupt law, justice, and order as a matter of course. Not surprisingly, the prophets used this word against the state rulers themselves, who operate legalized plunder schemes and further their political orders with violence. 

“Now hear this, O leaders of the house of Jacob and rulers of the house of Israel, who despise justice and pervert all that is right, who build Zion with bloodshed and Jerusalem with iniquity” (Micah 3:9-10). 

The way that is right is the narrow gate of God’s anarchist Kingdom — a decentralized society where men live freely in the absence of human archists, who are always non-existent among a people who walk the righteous path of serving each other freely instead of outsourcing their personal responsibilities to human rulers or accepting the benefits and free bread which they dangle before covetous men to entangle and ensnare into bondage those men who cannot resist their sinful appetite for their neighbor’s property that such socialist systems as these entail. Unlike the violent, man-made kingdoms of the world that are formed and furthered on the blood of our neighbors, the Kingdom of God is a free society of people who gather together for each other’s mutual service through the voluntary means of freewill offerings, without turning to benefactors (i.e., human rulers) who exercise authority over other men and who make slaves out of those who feast at their tables. It is a anarchist society with an absence of violent systems of human civil government, where people live under the Lord as their only King and do not pray to the fathers of the world for their deceitful bread, false protection, corrupt law, or perverted justice. It is a people who follow the Way prescribed by Jesus Christ and all of Scripture, rather than the statist ways of the world’s that are proscribed by it.

The prophet Isaiah also uses this word aquash in the same way in Isaiah 59, which gets translated into “crooked” here. 

“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” (Isaiah 59:8). 

It should be obvious enough in this passage alone that making things crooked is clearly an act in connection to men turning away from peace and justice, which is done every time they outsource their law and justice to human rulers. For all the statist idolaters who will necessarily fight against this conclusion in order to remain in their sin, let us show that the context of making something crooked is one that is undoubtedly taking place in a statist society. God always stands ready to save a people from the political bondage of their own doing, but men always continue on the crooked road of statism and thereby separate themselves from God and consequently from His saving arm. 

“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…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” (Isaiah 59:2-7). 

Though statists today think that God should turn back to them when their very ideology and worldly practices demonstrate themselves to be a people who have turned from Him, scripture has it that people must turn back to God first by walking down the straight and narrow road again. It is not merely one’s words that impress God, but precisely in turning around one’s deeds and no longer walking in the path of the wicked men of the world who operate political plunder systems. Hence why the books of Proverbs and Psalms begin the way they do. For it is the acts and deeds of people themselves that originally turn God away from them and lead Him to shut His eyes to the fate of a people who wanted to be ruled by men instead (2 Chronicles 30:9; Jeremiah 32:33; Ezekiel 39:23-24; Hosea 5:6). It is the sinful, wicked, and iniquitous turn toward the inherently violent and bloodthirsty systems of human government that men show God they have rejected Him to seek the false and never-forthcoming salvation of men. It is for the plunder and evil involved with human government that God hands a rebellious people over to their own destruction at the hands of these men who they falsely believed were the people who “fight for our freedom” and “protect and serve” their communities, which are all Babylonian political structures that are at enmity with the Kingdom of God, which is not of this world and its systems. 

Man’s turn from the straight path 

Men turn away from what is straight—this is the idea of acts of iniquity here—when they turn down the crooked road of statism and pursue systems of human government to rule over them, which they task with upholding all the duties (law, justice, charity, etc) that they were supposed to be upholding out of personal responsibility and love for their neighbors. The iniquity of the people of the world today is that they have gone after the sinful, statist endeavor of raising up human rulers, who only ever provide a perverted form of justice to them as a judgment against their sin. 

It is through man’s lust after human rulers that they make crooked the road that leads to life and thus keep themselves from being saved from the kingdoms of the world that God would deliver them from under if they repented of their prostitution with the Egypts, Babylons, and Romes that they can seemingly never stop whoring themselves out to for protection and bread. It is through man’s turn down the statist path, which they do on the mere belief that human rulers should exist, that they turn away from the narrow road of God’s Kingdom, which is narrow both in reality of it being an upright path that few men are willing to walk on and a narrow ideology that few will adopt due to their wicked and unregenerate hearts telling them that law and justice are perverted in God’s anarchy instead of their political systems. It is in man’s pursuit of systems of human government that they twist the straight path of God’s Kingdom and end up getting destroyed under these authoritarian systems for these very sins. It is in raising up human rulers and making men into their gods that God’s anarchist order gets bent and that men decline the salvation of the Lord, who brings those who repent and trust in God alone to save them again out of the political bondage they have found themselves living under due to their own sin.

When we see just how perverse the minds of men are today—they think Babylonian political systems can be made to imitate God’s Kingdom order for instance—we see how necessary it is to establish what the straight path looks like and how it is that men have twisted it and distorted it. If men do not realize that statism is the wide road of destruction that they have gone down in their sin, they will never repent from the iniquity inherent to this evil political pursuit of theirs and will continue to make excuses as to why it is not the evil path. Yet statism surely is the way that men go astray from God’s Kingdom order. It is through turning to human rulers and their systems of alleged “law and order” that the straight and narrow path is turned into a crooked one. It is in sinfully raising up human rulers to provide so-called “public goods” and other socialist benefits, rather than maintaining these weightier matters ourselves, that the Godarchist order—that society where human rulers are abolished and a people’s only God and Ruler is the Lord our God—gets bent and twisted and subverted by men who are looking to be their own gods and build a system behind God’s back.

Finding God’s blessings 

We see how far men have to go still to arrive at a free and peaceful society under the Lord’s sole and exclusive kingship in the fact that they cannot even see that the existence of human rulers and taxation proves them to be captives living in the bondage of Egypt, much less that they did it to themselves.

However, if men ever hope to be saved by God from the bondage of Egypt that they brought upon themselves, they will first have to repent of their Egyptian-statist ways, turn from the crooked path of human government, and begin to seek the Kingdom of God in repentance. “Whoever walks blamelessly will be saved, But he who is perverse in his ways will suddenly fall” (Proverbs 28:18). As much a statist idolaters like to imagine they are in good standing with the Lord simply because they vainly profess His name with their lips, the fact is that blessings await only those who repent from the statist path that raises up false gods against the commandments of God and who decidedly turn back down the straight road of seeking God’s Kingdom alone. “Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the Law of the LORD” (Psalm 119:1). Though statists imagine that they have God’s favor simply because they say they are Christians and believe that they are “saved” without actually turning from their evil ways, scripture has it that one’s wicked deeds are everything and that God is only looking upon those who are seeking the straight path again. “For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and His ears are inclined to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil” (1 Peter 3:12). Though plunderous men like police officers believe they are “saved” because they profess the Lord’s name, though do not do as He says, Scripture shows that God is only looking to bless those who decidedly turn away from their evils and back to the narrow ways of the Lord. 

“He who walks righteously and speaks with sincerity, who refuses gain from extortion, whose hand never takes a bribe, who stops his ears against murderous plots and shuts his eyes tightly against evil—he will dwell on the heights; the mountain fortress will be his refuge; his food will be provided and his water assured” (Isaiah 33:15-16). 

Though statist idolaters today tell us that they don’t really need to do any works to be in good standing with the Lord, and need only to claim they are one of His, scripture calls us to “be doers of the word and not hearers only” (James 1:22). And men are not doers of the word of God unless they are actively repenting of their statism and seeking to further God’s literal Kingdom by serving their neighbors again in a network of charity made up of decentralized congregations who are coming together to feed and care for each other again in an abolitionist society that replaces the violent kingdoms of man with the pure religion of mutual service and love. 

Notwithstanding the tens of millions of statists who claim to know the Lord, God sees all such men who turn aside to presidents, armies, and police forces to provide their peace, freedom, or law and order as Egyptian whores who trust in men to save them and who, therefore, show that they don’t even desire the divine deliverance that could come to those who repented of their Babylonian ways.  

All statists—that is, all people who believe in human government whatsoever—are Babylonian whores who seek security and peace in human rulers and their regimes. No statist is a man of God who is devoted to seeking His Kingdom alone. All statists are people who have “played the harlot with many lovers” (Jeremiah 3:1). In their quest for various princes, kings, presidents, and armies to serve and save them, they are the people who have “defiled the land with your prostitution and wickedness” (Jeremiah 3:2). It is through the pursuit of human government that perverse men deviate from the righteous path of God’s anarchist Kingdom to partake in the iniquities of the kingdoms of the world.

If men ever wish to have their societies turned around by the hand of God, they will have to first repent of their adulterous practices of seeking protection and aid in human government. God will not turn His face to a people who have turned their backs on him by raising up human rulers to be their gods and kings instead. Though the men who raise up human governments believe their evils are exempt from God’s judgment, the wicked works of statists will always be exposed before God. “He who walks in integrity walks securely, but he who perverts his ways will be found out” (Proverbs 10:9). 

The whoredom of statism 

By looking at the words aquash and avah, we see that such words used to express the idea of something bent, crooked, or distorted clearly apply to the worldly political path that men go down. Those who walk down the statist path by whoring themselves out to human rulers for their protection and their bread are the people from the scriptures who “have perverted [avah] their ways and forgotten the LORD their God” (Jeremiah 3:21). All those who set up human rulers are people who, like Israel in the Bible, have forgotten their Maker. Statists are a people who the Lord says “proceed from evil to evil, and they do not take Me into account” (Jeremiah 9:3). Such systems of human rule are only possible in a society of ungodly men who rejected the rule of God to become subject-citizens in the kingdoms of false gods. Human government is only possible when men turn away from seeking God’s Kingdom to become workers of iniquity in socialist kingdoms of the world, which make men into their slaves for this sin. Rather than make the Lord their only King, statists are harlots who go after the many men who occupy or seek to control systems of human rule, each election cycle seeking to raise up a new god as their lover and each day fawning after the officers of these systems. Both the human rulers of the world who hatch endless plots to rob, snatch, and murder men, as well as those who support them from the sidelines, are people “who wear themselves out committing iniquity [avah]” (Jeremiah 9:5).

If the statists of our time who claim to know the Lord yet who walk in the ways of the world ever hope to be saved from the political bondage that enslaves them, they must first recognize not only that they are slaves but that this slavery is one of their own doing — that, far from being servants of the Lord, they have been Egyptian whores who prostituted themselves out to the kings and armies of the world for protection and bread and who therefore stand as one of His enemies. This is a tall order considering that, as it stands, most professing Christians in America today believe that Egypts and Romes—this is the lineage of the “United States” that they tell us came from God—represent God’s ideal political order and that her troops and officers have secured their “freedom,” “peace,” “prosperity,” “law,” and “order” — none of which are the case.

Unfortunately for anyone who wants to avoid the catastrophe that awaits a society of people who walk down the crooked statist path of the world, the realization that Egypt will be their ruin, rather than their salvation, will likely come only once the judgment of statism, which is already highly evident against us today, worsens and the mounting evils that are inherent to these perverted political systems comes so heavily against men that they finally cry out to God to save them again. At this point, when God is fully fed up with these Egyptian whores who have thus far proven themselves to be hardheaded to the truth, they better hope He will hear them (1 Samuel 8:18).