[This is part 22 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, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty one, twenty three, twenty four, twenty five, twenty six, twenty seven, twenty eight, twenty nine, thirty, thirty one, thirty two, thirty three, thirty four, thirty five]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

We have already written on a few occasions how the evils inherent to statism bring a people under judgment, how God uses this judgment to lead men to repentance and wake them up to the need to return to Him, and how men have always stubbornly refused to turn from their wicked ways even under the harsh reality and rebuke of political captivity and have even proudly believed that they can escape God’s justice. Briefly, we shall make these points again in connection to the idea of “rebellion,” which we are studying here for the moment. 

Statist evils as judgment for statist practices

As much as we may rightly consider the evils that prevail in our artificial political societies today, all which have been erected in man’s great revolt against God’s anarchist society, to be divine judgment for the sins related to this very act, we need not always think that God himself needs to intervene every time to assure that these systems result in judgment against a people. This is the way things are always headed for all those who rebel against God’s kingship and raise up systems of human government to their own destruction. This the cause and effect nature of statism that the Author of the Law, God the Anarchist, built into the social structure when He laid the earth’s foundations and set the heavens into place. God decreed from the beginning that it would never be possible for men to seek systems of human government without them proving to be an evil against such a people, who need to learn a lesson in divine causality on their twisted turn toward seeking the perverse political systems of man. God doesn’t actually need to put His hand upon a statist society to turn it upside down and backwards; these systems always turn out this way. God need not even get off His chair to make sure that the statist path proves to be a disastrous one for a people who have gone down it; He can just point and laugh and say “I told you so!” to a people who have decided they would neglect the word and warning of the Lord telling them not to turn back to the ways of the Egyptians ever again.

Thus, one way that God judges a people is simply to let them eat the fruit of their own ways — to let those who rebel against the divine anarchist society by raising up human governments walk headlong into a disaster of their own doing. Though He may at anytime build up or tear down and decide that He’s seen enough evils among a statist people, one method of bringing a people under judgment is simply to let the already-wicked statist systems run their course and prove to exist as a great terror to the wicked works of the men who wanted them to exist. Though God can rain down fire and plagues if He wishes, He can also simply allow statist rebels to destroy themselves in their own foolishness. He can simply allow wicked people to plant the weed seeds of statism and practice all the evils of raising up rulers and systems of man-made law, only to find out that wicked trees can only bear wicked fruit. And the corrupted law, perverted justice, and mass legal plunder is what such people reap for their own evildoings. Though God also sends Assyrian invaders or Babylonian kings to drag men off into exile, at which point the judgment has become severe, it is also the case that the inevitable evils and tyrannies that flow from the Egyptian statist systems of human government that men pursue in rebellion against God act as a judgment against men themselves, who can reap the effects of all their evil sowing at home and need not even experience it at the hands of foreigners. At any rate, it is all the guaranteed evils, violence, kidnapping, slavery, and murder conducted by all systems of human government, whether the domestic regime at home or a foreign one, that effectively serves to bring divine justice against a people who did not want to heed God’s words of warning that they should trust in the Lord alone as their King if they want things to go well with them. It is the tyranny that accompanies all statist political systems every time that we may say are the hand of God against a people to judge them for their own wickedness. 

Judgment for the sin of statism 

God’s method of dealing with a statist people has always been to either let them walk into their own traps and be judged by the very kings who they evilly sought (1 Samuel 8), or to accomplish this end by sending another group of wicked statists to plunder the other group of wicked statists who are the current targets for judgment. In the latter case, God has “raised up Chaldeans” (Habakkuk 1:6), Babylonian kings (Jeremiah 25:6), or Assyrian armies (Isaiah 10:5-6) to come against a people for practicing such similar political ways themselves, as a way of giving them a taste of their own medicine. 

All such judgment is meant to make men confess their sin and repent, to weep and cry out to the Lord again after realizing their error and evil of having gone down the statist path of the world. To be clear, such invasion, occupation, exile, plunder, enslavement, or whatever evils that come from these men which God uses to judge a people, has always been for trusting in something other than the Lord for their protection—namely in the political systems of men.

“‘Behold, I am bringing a distant nation against you, O house of Israel,’ declares the LORD. ‘It is an established nation, an ancient nation, a nation whose language you do not know and whose speech you do not understand. Their quivers are like open graves; they are all mighty men. They will devour your harvest and food; they will consume your sons and daughters; they will eat up your flocks and herds; they will feed on your vines and fig trees. With the sword they will destroy the fortified cities in which you trust’” (Jeremiah 5:16-17). 

God always used such judgment—whether at the hands of Assyrian invaders, Babylonians dragging men off into exile, or the evils of “their own” government—to teach men a lesson in the sin of statism and to help them make the connection between their own idolatry and their bondage. As God told the prophet to teach men, 

“When the people ask, ‘For what offense has the LORD our God done all these things to us?’ You are to tell them, ‘Just as you have forsaken Me and served foreign gods in your land, so will you serve foreigners in a land that is not your own’” (Jeremiah 5:19). 

Those who turn away from the Lord as their King and raise up false gods in political office will have to find out the hard way that the price to pay for this sin is for men to find themselves living as the slaves of human rulers, who God—a jealous God who calls men to have no others before Him—has sent against a people as punishment for this political rebellion of theirs.

God’s warning of judgment

As another example of man’s rebellion against God, it is common today for men to suggest that they or others haven’t known any better and that God, therefore, is unjust in bringing punishment against them. This is just another way of deflecting the blame of their own sin. They could have taken five minutes out of their lives to read the Book of Habakkuk and realize that they’re statist idolaters who have brought the Babylonians on themselves for their own Babylonian ways, but they refused. They could have looked at the world around them, realized that it was unjust and evil and stood as a judgment against them, but they wanted to keep calling evil “good” and acting like they have not veered off the divine path of God’s anarchist society, which they deemed to be “evil” and untrustworthy. They could have let the police state growing up around them be a rebuke on their own sin that led them to repentance, but they wanted to keep refusing correcting and apologizing for the existence of human government and continue believing that it could be “reformed” or made “Christian” with enough sinners running for political office.

The refusal of men to turn from the wicked political path they are on and begin to seek the Kingdom of God exclusively is ultimately their own fault, not a failing on God’s part to tell evil men what their fate would be if they wanted to experiment with the wages of sin. Though men habitually refuse to heed the words of the Lord, God always sent out prophets—in Biblical times and ours today—to warn men of the end-result of their own wicked ways. He has always told men that acting like an Egyptian or Roman—the basis for all human governments today—is going to turn you into a slave to these men and leave you crying out in a dungeon for God to deliver you, at a point where He may no longer be listening (Jeremiah 11:11).

For men to blame their own errors on God just shows how far they will go to remain stubborn in their own ways. God has never wanted men to perish and be destroyed and has never tricked men into falling into a trap or set them up, except when they deserved it. His entire written word is a warning against going down the statist ways of the world and lesson on how to avoid the bondage of Egypt in the first place and how to get out of it if you already screwed up. It is never a mystery why men end up living as captives to political rulers. It has always been for specific, concrete acts of sin—namely, idolatry and covetousness—that have wound a people up as the slaves of human masters. It was always for our own sake that God taught us to avoid these sins and repent from them. It has never been an unexplainable phenomenon nor secret why people end up to the bondage of Egypt: only sin leads to bondage. The judgment that comes upon people who go the political ways of the world has never been random or hidden from men, but was always the result of the statist practices of a people who always could have consulted God’s word. The Lord has never kept from men the cause and effect nature of their own sin and slavery under governments. “Surely the Lord GOD does nothing without revealing His plan to His servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7). That men have become captives under Egyptians and Romans today is not the fault of God failing to teach that this is the divine punishment He always metes out to statist rebels, but rather the result of statist rebels living in open defiance of His word. All the evils that have come upon men today are simply a result of their own evildoing, specifically that which is in connection to their statist idolatry. The evils of human government are simply a judgment upon the evils that support these systems and raise them up.

“You have plowed wickedness and reaped injustice; you have eaten the fruit of lies. Because you have trusted in your own way and in the multitude of your mighty men” (Hosea 10:13).

Though God has always warned men—in both spirit and word—what would come of them should they go down the road to Egypt, they have always decided themselves that it wasn’t worth it to trust in God’s anarchy and that they may well pursue their own evil ways. They are the rebels of the Bible who concluded that “it is hopeless. We will follow our own plans, and each of us will act according to the stubbornness of his evil heart” (Jeremiah 18:12). As much as men may kick, scream, complain, and even blame God or others for the evils that have come upon them, God’s judgments have always been but a just recompense for the rebellious ways of the people themselves, who refuse to listen to God.

“Hear, O earth! I am bringing disaster on this people, the fruit of their own schemes, because they have paid no attention to My word and have rejected My instruction” (Jeremiah 6:19).

Hardheadedness in judgment 

As much as God means for the judgment of statist evils to be a rebuke and correction to men, it is not surprising that those who are hardheaded and stonehearted enough to seek systems of human government to begin with are likewise just as stubborn to repent and hear the words of the Lord and His prophets even as judgment begins to bear down upon them more heavily — a judgment that often comes simply in the form of the wicked seed of human governments growing into the wicked fruit that they will always become, which we may still say is the Lord allowing such a people to reap the evils of their own sowing. 

Often then when God gave His prophets a message to bring to the people, it included a warning that they weren’t going to listen to this either. Just as they had rejected His word to begin with by pursuing the kingdoms of the world rather than the anarchistic Kingdom of God, so they will not hear these words even when it should be more obvious than ever that they had taken a wrong turn in going down the statist path of the world. In a return of the Hebrew word marah, which gets translated into rebellious here, we read, 

“Declare this in the house of Jacob and proclaim it in Judah: ‘Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes but do not see, who have ears but do not hear. Do you not fear Me?,’ declares the LORD. ‘Do you not tremble before Me, the One who set the sand as the boundary for the sea, an enduring barrier it cannot cross? The waves surge, but they cannot prevail. They roar but cannot cross it. But these people have stubborn and rebellious hearts. They have turned aside and gone away. They have not said in their hearts, ‘Let us fear the LORD our God, who gives the rains, both autumn and spring, in season, who keeps for us the appointed weeks of harvest’” (Jeremiah 5:20-24). 

Even as human governments grow more obviously terroristic and tyrannical—though they are always evil even at their origin—the statists of the world are often too hardheaded to realize that the evils that abound in their society have been the result of their own sins. In fact, the typical response of statists is to call for men to double-down on their sins and rally even more men into voting booths and call for expanding the budgets of their military and police forces to try and regain a “law and order” that never exists under these systems anyway and was only ever perverted by them. 

The statist’s refusal to repent 

Though the false converts of today see nothing wrong with professing the Lord’s name with their lips while thinking, acting, and living like Romans, it has always been the man-made political orders of the world, all which are based on violence and bloodshed, that have built barriers between men and God and which men have been too foolish to repent from supporting, even as these systems become increasingly evil and more obviously a curse and judgment against them for the wicked planting of the people themselves, rather than some “blessing” from God that men used to be able to submit with a straight face.

Though one would think that the evils of state rule today are an obvious judgment upon the wickedness of the ideology and practices of the people who support these systems, nevertheless men remain hardheaded even in their bondage and slavery to men, which God uses to wake people up to their sin and repent for their adulterous ways. As much as one would think that it would be more difficult and embarrassing than ever to maintain that the United States Government is somehow some sort of gift from God that stands as His prescribed and approved political system for dealing-out law and justice to people, nevertheless the false Christians of the world uphold this fallacy in their wicked hearts and reprobate minds and remain blinded to seeing the political plunder system for what it truly is. 

This is the point we are attempting to get at here: that men do not even learn their lesson when the yoke of bondage is directly around their necks or as they find themselves living on a vast, open-air tax-plantation or prison camp. The truly astounding thing to witness among men is seeing their ability to claim that the State, which is evidently a judgment from God against their own wickedness in raising them up and supporting them, is somehow a “blessing” from Him for their faithful obedience. It is a testament of man’s seemingly limitless ability to deceive himself that they can think that the inherently evil systems of human government, which God uses against them as judgment for their own support for such devilish systems of government, are actually His “ordained” system of law and order—that what obviously exists to plunder, enslave, incarcerate, and murder the masses of people who don’t perfectly comply with Pharaoh’s arbitrary legal decrees or move their bodies in the proper way when one of his officers is barking orders at them is somehow a system of “criminal justice.” 

How it is that men can endure the evils of statism, which always come upon them as divine judgment for their own evil ways, and still continue to pursue these wicked ways rather than learn their lesson and repent, is the greatest testament we have for the relentless stubbornness, hardheadedness, and refusal of men to put two and two together and realize their own sins have led to their subjugation under human rulers. The governments of men can erect a full-blown police state and men will still not realize that they are an occupied people, living in chains for their refusal to make the Lord their only King. Though it is no secret what has led to men becoming captives under human governments, it has always been one of the great mysteries of the world how the divine rebuke of getting beat down by Babylonians isn’t good enough to get men to turn from their Babylonian ways, save a handful of prophets who have always known what’s going on and could only weep in the middle of the disaster. God himself is impressed by it. The Book of Isaiah opens with God wondering how the judgment that has come against the people of Judah has not been enough to wake them up to their own evils, cause them to repent of these wicked practices, and turn back to the Lord. Indeed, it seems as if such a people were begging for more:  

“Alas, O sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a brood of evildoers, children who act corruptly! They have forsaken the LORD; they have despised the Holy One of Israel and turned their backs on Him. Why do you want more beatings? Why do you keep rebelling? Your head has a massive wound, and your whole heart is afflicted. From the sole of your foot to the top of your head, there is no soundness— only wounds and welts and festering sores neither cleansed nor bandaged nor soothed with oil. Your land is desolate; your cities are burned with fire. Foreigners devour your fields before you—a desolation demolished by strangers” (Isaiah 1:4-7). 

The people who have forsaken the Lord and despised God—even as their cities are burned with fire and tax-agents devour their fields—have been the statists of the world. The people who have refused to repent, even as they have found themselves living under the beatings of a police state and their systems of mass surveillance and mass incarceration, are the hardheaded idolaters of the world who call for the existence and expansion of human government and who seemingly never learn, even under the heavy judgment that is felt in the weight of these systems themselves, that their own sins—namely their rebellious support for systems of human rule—have led to their bondage to men and the oppression that is in their midst. Statists are rebels not only for raising up authoritarian governments in defiance of God’s Law, but also for failing to be rebuked by them when they turn out exactly as God always warned they would.