[This is part 17 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, sixteen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty one, twenty two, twenty three, twenty four]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

In the previous article, we built further upon the argument that statism (i.e., the pursuit of human government) is the chief way that men turn from the narrow way of God’s anarchist Kingdom and take a detour onto the crooked road of worldly political systems. Before we can even begin to think about repentance, not to mention revival, we must first establish that the road of statism is the primary way that men rebel against God and His Kingdom. To return to the narrow path that Jesus said few would find, men must first recognize how it is that they have strayed from the righteous path and wandered down an evil one instead.

Sadly, most professing Christians today cannot even see that the statist road has been a sinful one, much less that they must repent from walking on it and turn away from the voting booths and welfare benefits of Babylon that trap them into bondage. As it stands today, most people who call themselves Christians in America are largely statist idolaters who believe that Egypt is a “free country” and that her Pharaohs, soldiers, and police officers are the God-ordained keepers of our supposed “peace,” “freedom,” “law,” and “order.” They cannot even recognize that the political order they live under is an ungodly one and instead argue that it’s a God-approved system of government. They imagine that human civil government is compatible with godly civil government when, in fact, the man-made kingdoms of the world stand as the primary enemy of God’s Kingdom and are two wholly separate kingdom-models that are furthered at the expense of one another. If man’s kingdoms expand, God’s Kingdom declines, and if God’s Kingdom is furthered, then man’s kingdoms are thereby abolished. The two can never coexist together. It’s one or the other and men have chosen the systems of the world. They do not even see their statist beliefs and practices are wicked and evil, and even consider it their “civic duty” to participate in the politics of Babylon or even run for a seat in one of its many offices if they are feeling bold enough. 

Most modern Christians today see their faith as a mere “religion” of personal beliefs and professions faith rather than the Gospel of another literal Kingdom that we are to be actively seeking. It hardly even occurs to them that the way men walk, whether they are seeking to enter the narrow gate of God’s Kingdom or going down the evil path of bloodshed and violence that are inherent to man’s political systems, reveals the fruit by which they can be known. They imagine that they are walking on the straight path simply because of loose and unserious professions of faith that do not actually manifest in the good fruit of seeking God’s Kingdom, and even worse, they often bear the evil fruit of chasing after the kingdoms of men. In fact, “works” is largely a dirty word among Christians today. They believe they are “saved” merely because they say they follow Jesus, even though they not only fail to do what He says but act contrary to His commands and pledge their allegiance to the State. In the world of modern Christianity, where all that supposedly matters is man’s mere claim to being a Christian, biblical truths such as the Lord “repaying each person according to what he has done” (Matthew 16:27) are highly unpopular among them. Many would rather believe that their works—wicked or not—make no difference in how God sees them. They imagine that they can remain in the sins of participating in the kingdoms of the world and still inherent the Kingdom of God, even though the Bible says that not everyone will.

How far we remain from an awakening 

Most so-called Christians today cannot even see that statism—raising up and furthering systems of human government, both ideologically and physically—has been a deviation from the righteous path of seeking God’s Kingdom, much less that they must repent from this sinful course of theirs. They see it as “God’s will” that they be dominated by human kings, even when the Lord their King said such a thing was a judgment against them (1 Sam 8).  

Yet this is what we seek to establish here. Men must first see how they have strayed from the righteous path if they are ever to get off the road to Egyptian bondage and back on the road of the Lord. Only after showing that the crooked and twisted path men have taken is the statist road of the world and its politics, where men have set up systems of human government as their source of protection, law, and justice, can we then show men that repentance must mean turning from this perverted path and back toward the straight and narrow gate of seeking God’s Kingdom alone. The great whoredom of man has been his adultery with the kingdoms of the world that he has prostituted himself out to for benefits, incomes, retirements, protection, and other goods and services that are funded through robbing their neighbors in a system of socialist welfare that brings the people into bondage for this sin of being willing to indirectly rob their neighbors. A man cannot consider himself repentant so long as he remains on the statist path. All truly repentant men turn from the statist path, i.e., the worldly political practice of organizing society based on violence, and instead turn down God’s anarchist road as their means of showing God they have turned from their evils.

As anyone who has sought to lead men back to the truth knows, preaching the true Gospel of the Kingdom of God—repent today and abandon your faith in the kingdoms of the world—is no easy sell among the lot of professing Christians today. They are largely reprobate statists who have been given over by God to all the evils and idolatries they relentlessly pursued, such that the truth remains concealed from their deceived minds, darkened eyes, and hearts of stone. The current beliefs of so-called Christians today are rather discouraging for those who know that God’s Kingdom is an anarchist one that is not of this world and who want to gather with others to seek this Kingdom to the abolition of the kingdoms of man. Most professing Christians are either whoring themselves out to the kingdoms of men still or otherwise don’t believe it is their duty to seek the literal Kingdom of God and agitate others to join them in this cause. Many of them believe that furthering the kingdoms of the world is a righteous work and even argue that anyone who doesn’t vote isn’t fulfilling their “Christian duty.” In other words, most so-called Christians effectively argue that we have an obligation to sin and that repentance would not be blessed.

The rampant statism and idolatry among professing Christians today, who proudly embrace all the very evils we are all supposed to be turning from, shows just how far we are still from men coming around to seeking the Kingdom of God, which will necessarily entail repentance from the statist politics and socialist philosophy of the world that stands behind these systems. The majority of so-called Christians today believe that the Roman-statist society, represents God’s political ideal, when it stands precisely as an enemy of His Kingdom model! They wholeheartedly embrace the Romes and Americas of the world and count themselves as dual citizens” of the kingdoms of man and the Kingdom of God, when they are precisely the men who work against God’s Kingdom. When will men ever come to seek the Kingdom of God if they cannot even see that they are in bondage to men, much less that the captivity is one of their own doing? 

Acknowledging the sin of statism 

If men are to ever come out of Egypt and avoid sharing in the plagues that come against all statist societies, they will have to come to see that the idolatry and covetousness inherent to these systems is sin and that they must repent from these ideas and practices. At this point in time, the majority of professing Christians refuse to confess the iniquity of setting up and furthering the kingdoms of the world, which they have been led to believe represent God’s political order. They do not even see that statism—man’s pursuit of human rulers to be their gods—is what sin and rebellion against God has always been about. They do not even know that the mere existence of human rulers and their inevitable evils are proof of divine judgment against their evil ideology and wicked works. And nor do they believe that they need to repent of these sins to turn back their captivity under these governments of men. Rather than seeing that the existence of human government is the very proof that they have gone down the wicked path of the world and are paying the price for their own sin, they think that God ordained Egypts and Romes to provide their law and order for them and that the real Christian political goal is in reforming Babylons, rather than repenting of these evils and seeking God’s Kingdom only. 

Though men today imagine that revivals are just around the corner or that mass professions of faith are definitive of people truly turning around their wicked ways, we see just how far we are from repentance still that men do not even believe that their statism—their mere belief in human government, much less the practice of setting up rulers—is sinful, when it is indeed the chief rebellion of man against the Kingdom of God. 

Yet what God needs from a people is to admit that their paths have been crooked and turn back to Him to make them straight, to admit that their love of Egypt and Rome was a deviation from the straight path of God’s anarchistic Kingdom order and that they walked on it when they were still lost in the world and its ideology. God is willing to forgive the sin of statism and indeed the Lord Jesus Christ has come to reconcile men to God again, but men must repent of their active and ongoing idolatry for human rulers. 

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). 

Unlike the hardheaded men today who claim to be Christians but who whore themselves out to systems of human government to save them and who don’t believe that chasing after the political systems of the world is turning from God, the men of the Bible were much more willing to make the connection between sin and bondage and admit that they had gone wrong and went astray from the Lord and had been workers of iniquity instead. Recalling such episodes as seeking salvation in human rulers and foreign alliances when God alone was to be your King, the psalmists can invoke the word for iniquity to confess that “we have sinned like our fathers; we have done wrong [avah] and acted wickedly” (Psalm 106:6). Men of God do not just complain that things have gone wrong in their society, nor are they surprised by the way things have turned out. Rather, they are able to easily trace their social calamities — the perversions of justice, the law as an instrument of plunder, the system of mass-incarceration and surveillance — as the result of an accumulation of specific sins, such as the idolatry and covetousness that had worked to empower systems of human government that any man of God knows must turn out this way every time. 

The statists of the world cannot accept responsibility for being complicit in their own slavery. They refuse to see that the evils of statism are but the wicked fruit of a wicked tree that they helped plant and that the injustices and destruction of social order that arises under these systems is but the judgment of God coming against them for their own sins. They lack the humility of one who has seen that their sins are responsible for their bondage and that they are, in fact, in bondage so long as there exists human rulers above them. Instead, they believe that they have done nothing wrong and that there’s no reason they should be under judgment for having pursued the kingdoms of the world, insofar as they even see that these things are judgment, which for the most part they think are a blessing from above. Hence foolish slogans like “God bless America.” Rather than weep over their own sin and judgment, they act like victims or delve further into their political rebellion against God and seek to reverse their judgment by voting for the myth of “righteous rulers” instead of repenting for their sins. 

Though the reprobate statists of the world are still too hardheaded to realize that the governments they rally behind are of the devil, too blind to see that they are a judgment against their wicked works, and too stubborn to admit that they have played a part in their own servitude under these systems, the worldly statist ideology which says that human rule is just and legitimate is a sinful one that perverts God’s anarchist order into a Babylonian one. Statism is always and everywhere a substitute of man-gods for the Lord as one’s God. The idea that worldly kingdoms can be made “Christian” if only “godly rulers” (contradiction) were in power twists the teachings of the Lord, who commands that His followers do not exercise authority on over the other, as the rulers of the world lord their authority over other men (Mark 10:42-45). The idea that men should have dominion over other men bends the Dominion Mandate of God, where men take dominion over the earth, into a worldly political doctrine that excuses ruling over your fellow man. 

Statism is the crooked road of the world that veers far off-course from the straight and narrow road of God’s anarchist Kingdom that we are called to walk on. It is the road into Egypt, not out of it. Seeking protection, law, justice, and order from kings, presidents, congressmen, soldiers, and police officers has always been the great adultery of mankind, where men cheated on God with the State and its Pharaohs, soldiers, and officers of the “law” so-called. It is no surprise that all these things are prevalent in American society: this is a people who have turned from God as their King, which always leads to men turning down the bent road of making men into their gods. 

Repenting for the iniquity of statism

The reason we attempt here to lay out statism as the primary sin and rebellion of mankind is that it might lead men to repent from the main way that they have turned their backs on God. For most professing Christians not only cannot identify this sin, but actively partake in it. Statists today refuse to confess that they have been living in rebellion to God by whoring themselves out to the kingdoms of the world, because they have never understood this political adultery to be what sin is all about. If they would ever humble themselves and arrive at a point of acknowledging the sin of statism, perhaps upon seeing how harsh their bondage has become as a judgment for this sin, then it would start to look like the repentance of the prophets, rather than their continued pride and idolatry for these systems. 

“Let us lie down in our shame; let our disgrace cover us. We have sinned against the LORD our God, both we and our fathers; from our even to this day we have not obeyed the voice of the LORD our God” (Jeremiah 3:25). 

Statists are the primary ungodly people of the world who lust after rulers and power themselves. They are the people who the prophets can say, “Their deeds do not permit them to return to their God, for a spirit of prostitution is within them, and they do not know the LORD” (Hosea 5:4). They are the whores of scripture and history who have found themselves dominated by men for their idolatries. They are in bondage today because they begged to have rulers over them rather than to make the Lord their King. God always says how He will give statist whores over to other evil statist systems that will punish them for these same political practices of theirs. 

In other passages where we have “guilt” as a translation for the word typically used for iniquity, God is precisely waiting for people to repent of their statist whoredoms in order for Him to relent of the disaster that He brings up such a people as a judgment for their sin. 

“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 5:14-15). 

God intends the evil consequences of statism (i.e., the act of seeking human rulers and their institutions as your saviors) to be a harsh enough rebuke upon people to lead them to repentance for these sins and thereby correct their path. God is looking for a people who, upon recognizing they are in bondage, will return to the Lord in repentance and admit that all this evil has come upon them because they turned away from the Lord and went whoring after false gods. As Daniel prayed, after seeing the desolation that would come upon Jerusalem as spoken by prophets before him, 

“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” (Daniel 9:4-5). 

An admission that “we have acted wicked” and rebelled, in connection with the political evils that have come upon us today, is a level of humility unseen in the statists of the world today who still have no explanation for why everything has gone wrong, including the false converts of the world who claim the Lord’s name but walk like Egyptians. The best they can come up with, in their sin, is that they have not elected the “right” rulers or had enough “godly rulers”; the fundamental sin of raising up human rulers, period, escapes them entirely. In their pride, they blame everyone but themselves for their bondage (e.g., “the democrats”), when it was one of their own doing. In their reprobation, they continue in the same sinful statist practices as before, raising up rulers and running for Babylonian political office themselves, never getting anywhere and only making their bondage worse. They tell us we must vote in “Christian rulers” to save and reform Babylon, which is only to remain in sin and further the kingdoms of the world. The irony is that God would actually undo the bondage they are lamenting if only they would repent, yet the position of all statists is effectively that it isn’t worth it to repent today and that we must instead go on sinning if we are to find salvation.

“But if they will confess their iniquity and that of their fathers in the unfaithfulness that they practiced against Me, by which they have also walked in hostility toward Me—and I acted with hostility toward them and brought them into the land of their enemies—and if their uncircumcised hearts will be humbled and they will make amends for their iniquity, then I will remember My covenant with Jacob and My covenant with Isaac and My covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land” (Leviticus 26:40-42). 

In another instance of the Hebrew word ‘avon being translated as iniquity, we see a clear example that the great sins of men have always been their pursuit of wicked statist systems that lead to their separation from God. As the prophet says, 

“Surely the arm of the LORD is not too short to save, nor His ear too dull to hear. 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. 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” (Isaiah 59:1-15). 

It is by turning toward systems of human government, all which are based in violence and theft, that a people sin against God and therefore find themselves under judgment in the form of having to live under these wicked systems they have put into place and supported. It is by pursuing the inherently perverted justice and lawlessness of human government that men are judged by having to live under these systems, whose natural evils act as justice against their injustices of believing they should even exist. Those who serve man-made government, as soldiers, police officers, or their cheerleaders on the sidelines, are people whose hands are stained with blood, whose feet run to evil, and who make sure there is no peace in the land and that everyone remains a captive of Egyptians rather than a free soul under God. 

When will statists repent? 

As it often goes, men must endure increasingly harsh judgment at the hands of their enemies whom they have regarded as their law-givers and saviors before they are willing to see what they have done to themselves and turn back to the Lord in repentance.

What remains to be seen today is for men to confess their iniquities before the Lord, for men to see all the evils that have come upon them have been but a result of their own sin, and to “repent and plead with [God] in the land of their captors, saying, ‘We have sinned and done wrong [avah]; we have acted wickedly’” (2 Chronicles 6:37). What we still await today is for men to come to their senses and both realize and confess that the statist path has been a wicked and sinful one that wound them up in the bondage of Egypt, and to begin praying to the Lord in repentance to deliver them from the captivity and curse of human government.

God is waiting for a generation, or even a small movement of people, who are dedicated to repenting from the sin of statism and seeking His Kingdom alone. It is this type of thing, and not the continuous pursuit of worldly politics, that God will bless. Yet few men are willing to walk on this road and most continue to walk on the Egyptian road instead and deny that their statist beliefs and practices are the very things they’ve been needing to turn from. Few men believe that God would actually bless those who seek His Kingdom and trust that all things would be added to those who do. This is why they continue to trust in the State to save them: they don’t believe that God would do so in an anarchist society where they renounced their false gods and went under His providential care instead. They have been fooled into believing that God’s anarchy is chaos, lawlessness, and disorder, but not the statist society, which one would think it would be increasingly difficult to defend today as lawful, just, and orderly.

The need for man’s repentance 

God is willing to have it either way men want to have it. They can walk the Egyptian road and reap all the evils they have sown in doing it, and God will assure the wickedness of these systems is a judgment against them; or they can repent of their Egyptian ideology and practices and start thinking about being divinely delivered from their bondage. Just as God judges sins like idolatry by handing people over to the evils that inevitably result from the human systems of government that they begged for in their sin, so God is merciful and would liberate men from this bondage if only they would make straight the path of salvation for their people by agitating others to seek the Kingdom of God and to begin actually building a network of assistance for men to come into who repent from these systems.

Notwithstanding the popular church teaching that salvation is a merely heavenly one where men are “saved” on account of some vague profession of their belief in God without having to lift a finger to keep His commands, such salvation — that is, divine liberation from the bondage of state rulers and their governments — is contingent upon man’s repentance from walking down the wicked path of sin that has been the statist road of the world. After listing all the curses that will come upon a people who walk in God’s ways, He always reminds us that such evils would be reversed if only men would “confess their iniquity and that of their fathers in the unfaithfulness that they practiced against Me, by which they have also walked in hostility toward Me—and I acted with hostility toward them and brought them into the land of their enemies—and if their uncircumcised hearts will be humbled and they will make amends for their iniquity” (Leviticus 26:40-41). 

The problem today is that men have not wanted to own-up to their complicity in their bondage and turn back from the specific sins of statism, which they do not see as sin at all. It is no wonder why we have not been delivered from the curse of bondage that is human government: men have hitherto refused to repent from this evil. Yet God awaits a people who are ready to see these things, decisively turn from them, and start seeking God’s Kingdom rather than complain about the judgment that has justly come upon them from above. As one commentary says, “God’s pardon will…follow upon confession of sin and genuine repentance. [But] they must recognize not only that they have sinned, but that their sufferings have been a punishment for those sins at God’s hand.”

What is needed today is a mass confession for the sins of statism and a repentance for these sins, which will entail the positive work of seeking God’s literal Kingdom. Repentance from the Egyptian-statist ideology and practices of men precede any salvation from the bondage of Egypt. There is no salvation coming for a people who continue to believe that Egypts, Romes, Americas, or other worldly-statist systems are going to save them. There is no hope for a people who believe “the troops fight for our freedom,” that “the police protect and serve us,” and that we must place our faith in human government to uphold justice, law, and order in society. These are unrepentant men. Indeed, in one of the many connections of sin and bondage in the prophets, it is clear that what men need to repent from is precisely their statist belief that systems of human government and their militaries will save them! It is a repentance from the statist idolatry that prevails all throughout our land today that God counts as turning back to Him. 

“Return, O Israel, to the LORD your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity. Take with you words and return to the LORD; say to him, ‘Take away all iniquity; accept what is good, and we will pay with bulls the vows of our lips. Assyria shall not save us; we will not ride on horses’” (Hosea 14:1-3). 

The iniquity of mankind has been their belief in salvation through human government, which is the perverse and twisted thinking of anyone who believes in these systems at all. What men need to get back to is the basic Biblical lesson against trusting in human rulers as their saviors. What men need to learn again is how to place their faith in the Lord alone to keep them safe and free, which they have steered away from in the abomination of raising up human rulers. “Put not your trust in princes, in mortal man, who cannot save” (Psalm 146:3). What God awaits today is men who get back to the most basic, yet most denied and rejected, lessons of scripture to place their sole and exclusive faith in the Lord their King to protect and save them. It is these teachings, which are lost on all statists, that men must adhere to once again if they are to be counted as children of God. “Some trust in chariots and others in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God” (Psalm 20:7).