[This is part 28 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 two, twenty three, twenty four, twenty five, twenty six, twenty seven, twenty nine, thirty, thirty one, thirty two, thirty three, thirty four, thirty five]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

As we have seen so far, there are multiple Hebrew words that express various aspects of turning away from God’s prescribed path or otherwise rebelling against Him in some way, which we often summarize simply as “sin.” Yet in each of these words, which carry with them some slightly different idea or emphasis on this broader concept of living opposed to God’s prescribed order, we can see how such thoughts, ideas, or acts that these words describe are easily connected to the statist ideology and deeds of men, whose “evil,” “wickedness,” “rebellious,” or “sinful” acts otherwise are centered around their lust for human rulers and their prostitution with the kingdoms of the world and their the kings, armies, and officers of law.  

Let us review another word that expresses the idea of men erring or going astray from the godly path given to us by God. This is the Hebrew word תָּעָה, which gets transliterated as ta’ah (Strong’s H8582). It is a verb that is defined as “to err, wander, go astray, stagger.” With around 50 occurrences in the Hebrew Bible, with the most notable passages coming from the Psalms, Proverbs, and the prophets, it is a significant enough word to cover here in our study of the various ideas and concepts that express mankind’s turn from the godly path. One lexicon explains further that it “conveys the notion of leaving the right path—whether a literal roadway, a covenantal obligation, or sound judgment—and moving into error, confusion, or loss.” The definition here is similar to a word we have already looked at which gets transliterated into shagah (Strong’s H7686), also used to express the idea of men erring or going astray. As we saw, one sense that scripture uses the word shagah to express the idea of men erring or being led astray is in relation to the false prophets of the world, who either don’t rebuke sin or even positively encourage men to remain in their wicked thoughts and actions, namely those connected to raising up systems of human government. 

The statist deviation of men 

The main way that men stray from the righteous path is through their statist pursuit of worldly politics, where they wander into the voting booths of Babylon and pray to the false gods of human governments to save them and their social disorders that are already crumbling due to the weight of these very sins. It is in the statist political ideology and actions of men that we find the primary example of people living in rebellion to God. The characteristic mark of a people who have erred from the ways of the Lord is that they are staggering around drunk on the worldly ideology of statism, believing that human rulers are the only means of finding protection from their enemies and that having a society of law, justice, defense, security, or prosperity depends upon the authoritarian governments of man. It is in the statist ideas of mankind that we find a people who have drifted away from the anarchist politics of God’s Kingdom, and in the resulting acts of this statist ideology, like voting for men to rule over them, that we find a people who have wandered away from the godly path. It is by chasing after the man-made kingdoms of the world that men leave the straight and narrow road of God’s natural, anarchist order to walk instead on the wide, statist road to destruction that leads them and their people to bondage under these human rulers who they sinfully trusted in to save them.

It is no coincidence that man’s political whoredom, whether their voting for human rulers or their fawning over Pharaohs or their soldiers and officers, is so widespread today. This idolatry is the primary reflection of a people who have turned from the godly path and forgotten the Lord as their King. The ideology and actions of statists represent the chief ideas and works of a people who have taken their eyes off the Lord and turned aside to Babylonian errors. The pursuit of man-made political systems, in both thought and action, is the natural fruit of those who turn away from the way of the Lord and instead follow the ways of the world, where they raise up Pharaohs and Caesars into political office, partake in the covetous practices of their socialist schemes, or simply believe that such systems should exist at all.

Statists are people who fail to keep God’s Law upon the temptation of getting involved in the Egyptian ideology and practices of the world. They are people who fall into the traps laid before them by the rulers of the world, who work to get men to take the deceitful bread from their Roman welfare tables that brings all those who touch it into political bondage. They are a people who cannot say, along with more devout men, that “the wicked have laid a snare for me, Yet I have not gone astray from Your precepts” (Psalm 119:110). Rather, the whole position that statists are in is precisely that the wicked have laid a snare for them (i.e., the rulers of the world have been tempted them with incomes, retirements, benefits, and false promises of peace and prosperity if only they will become Babylonians), and they have taken the bait and placed their trust in the systems of men.  

The statist drunkards  

In one instance of this word ta’ah, we see a metaphor used to describe the statist idolaters of the world who are drunk on the Babylonian wine, i.e., men who are intoxicated with the sinful ideology of statism which says that human civil government is (supposedly) necessary for law, justice, defense, and social order in general and that without its violence there would (supposedly) be lawlessness, injustice, chaos, and disorder. It is the wicked political philosophy of statism, which the ungodly people of the world are drunk on, that makes men “muddled in their vision” and causes them to “stumble in their judgments” (Isaiah 28:7), such that they chose to walk on the evil political path of the world rather than the righteous road of God’s divine anarchy. 

This ideology of statism is something that men have picked up from the world in their errant ways of putting aside God’s wisdom, counsel, and instruction to adopt instead the ideas of men and the practices of the ungodly people around them, which they unquestionably accepted as the truth. The statist political philosophy has not come from God, however, but from confused men who are walking in the darkness of the world and who have never sought the wisdom of the Lord to set them straight again. Men did not hear it from God that they should pursue systems of human civil government; God, in fact, always made it clear that this was sinful and evil to seek human kings and that all such attempts were a rejection of His rule (1 Samuel 8). Rather, statists adopted this worldly politics out of their own wisdom, out of demonic deception, or by listening to the teachings of the false pastors and statists around them rather than the teachings of the Lord, who taught explicitly that His servants do not exercise authority one over the other as do the people of the world.

If men do not specifically seek to walk in the ways of the Lord and to learn from the God who commanded men to be separate and apart from the kingdoms of the world in both their ideas and practices, then they will inevitably fall into the political ways of the world and find themselves in bondage to its rulers. The result of rejecting God is never just some lost and aimless wandering through the world that never leads men to disaster, but rather always results in men making substitute gods in the State and going astray down the path of Egypt. The outcome of rejecting God’s rule is to go under man’s rule and to adopt the statist ideology as one’s guiding political principle. Men have fallen into the worldly ideology of statism today primarily because they have not sought out the teachings of the Lord as the only effective means of combatting this idolatrous philosophy of theirs which justifies the existence of authoritarian rulers. For failing to learn from the Lord and for instead taking their teachings from the philosophers of the world and others fools around them who are in the same boat, men have been consumed by the evil ideology of statism and led to pursue the wicked statist ways of the Egyptians, Romans, and Americans around them, who have provided them with their ways of thinking. With adulterous hearts and lustful minds that chase after human rulers and their officers of law, statists are men who have fallen under a “spirit of prostitution that leads them astray” and have “played the harlot against their God” (Hosea 4:12). Whereas God wants men to look to the Lord as their only King and Savior, the statist sinners of the world whore themselves out to presidents, congressmen, soldiers, and police officers, who they make into their protectors and saviors. Whereas God calls upon men to obey His Law and not turn aside to false gods to save them, the statists of the world are people who “reject the Law of the Lord, fail to keep His statutes, and are led astray by lies” (Amos 2:4). They are the type of people who God says “wandered away from Me after their idols” (Ezekiel 44:10). 

Statists erring from the Lord

As we have already argued by suggesting that sin is not just a vague concept but deals with specific acts of rebellion against God, the idea of a people “erring” is likewise not just a generic mistake of men but an actual spiritual delusion men come under to fall into the (political) ways of the world. It is never that men just err from God in some loose sense of denying His existence and then go on about their lives afterward without bringing any sort of social calamity upon themselves, but that the consistent error of ungodly men, and the clearest expression of mankind’s rebellion against God, is seeking protection and help through the political systems of the world that lead to their enslavement. As seen often in the prophets, the charges that God brings against a people are necessarily always ones related to the statist society that men have raised up and supported in their sin and their lack of knowledge of the Lord as their King. The divine complaint was never that men had gone astray in some loose sense of the term, but that they had specifically gone after the violent and plunderous systems of human civil government in this forsaking of the Lord and contented themselves with the corrupt and backward social order that these societies created. 

“Hear the word of the LORD, ye children of Israel: for the LORD hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood” (Hosea 4:1-2). 

It is on the statist path of plunder, war, and violence in general that men have gone astray from the ways of the Lord and fallen into error. In no other way than the return to Egypt for their bread and the lust for Babylonians for their protection is the rebellion of man against God more manifest. It is on this political road of the world that man’s greatest error is on full display. It is in this way that men wander away from God’s natural order of a free society without any other archists than the Lord.

Causing men to err 

As much as we may place the final blame for man’s erring on the individuals who ultimately reject the wisdom of the Lord on their own, our world is still filled with millions of false prophets who work to assure that men remain unable to see their way out of their own bondage by keeping them from ever making a connection between their sin and their shackles — and preferably not seeing the chains around their ankles at all, or at least calling them “the price we pay for civilization” if they do start to notice them.

Clearly, though, these men who corrupt the truth in the institutions of the world, from the so-called churches and Bible colleges to the universities and the agencies of government, have some influence upon the ideas of men, or else they wouldn’t be needed and wouldn’t be standing as gatekeepers providing the official interpretations of scripture and the limits to what a man is allowed think about God. Their supposedly authoritative positions, whether intellectual or physical, are able to sway some men to the statist political ideas of the world and keep them away from seeking God’s anarchistic Kingdom at their exclusion, or at least reinforce the errors already held by individuals who can now have some “pastor,” “priest,” “theologian,” or “church father” to cite in support of his beliefs. And so these men have always been around to lead men astray down the road to Egypt and prevent them both spiritually and physically from leaving their slavery. Thus we read in the Bible of the many false prophets who work to lead the people astray (Micah 3:5). The men who operate the so-called churches of the world are positioned precisely to catch men into their ideological traps and make them believe that human government is our “God-given” institution for law and justice in society, rather than a curse by God against sinful people who pursue such systems of human government and need to be judged for their wickedness. It has always been the role of priests, false pastors, seminary professors, and other institutionalists to keep men from discovering God the anarchist, so that they could never see their way out of the Egyptian bondage they had found themselves in due to their erroneous ways of thinking and behaving. They achieve this either by positively preaching the blessings and glories of statism in their sermons or lectures, which is highly common in these so-called churches donning the flags of human governments out front, or by otherwise making men believe that their so-called churches are actually practicing pure religion by gathering for mere singalongs, sermons, and other dead traditions of men that don’t actually love their neighbors by serving them and keeping them from accepting the benefits and services of Caesars and becoming slaves to the authoritarian welfare systems of men.  

These statist lies as preached by the false prophets and phony pastors of the world are, to be sure, more of an aid to the sin that is already within those men who would buy into these lies. The sheep of the Lord who hear His voice don’t fall for these lies at all, and all those who fall for them have only allowed themselves to be deceived by refusing to heed the words of the Lord instead. Nevertheless, the propaganda of these supposedly learned and powerful men have always been a strong influence in tearing men away from the godly path and getting them to think and act like Babylonians instead. 

As much as the political rulers and thought leaders of the world work to trick others into adopting their religio-political ways of thinking, they too are men who are drunk on the Babylonian wine and have turned away from the ways of the Lord. They are men who contrive evil and have, therefore, gone astray from the Lord (Proverbs 14:22). As one prophet records,

“The princes of Zoan have become fools; the princes of Memphis are deceived. The cornerstones of her tribes have led Egypt astray. The LORD has poured into her a spirit of confusion. Egypt has been led astray in all she does, as a drunkard staggers through his own vomit” (Isaiah 19:13-14). 

Divine reprobation

There is yet another way to think of the type or source of delusion men are under when they have turned away from the wisdom of the Lord to walk down the statist path of the world. As much as we may also think of statist idolatry—that is, the belief in human government whatever—to be the result of propaganda at the hands of false prophets, politicians, and philosophers who tempt men into this sinful ideology, we may at the same time see that God gives men over to a reprobate mind for their persistent wickedness, such that their eyes have been closed off to the truth by the hand of the Almighty himself. We see this word used in this way in the Book of Job. “They grope in the darkness without light; He makes them stagger like drunkards” (Job 12:25).

This would help explain why men’s hearts are so hardened to the truth today and why it’s seemingly impossible to point them back to the anarchistic ways of God’s Kingdom and lead them to repent of their idolatry for human government. If you have ever wondered why all the false Christians who support the governments of the world never hear us when we rebuke them for their sin and try to lead them back to the Lord’s ways, consider that God himself has turned these men into reprobates and allowed them to continue headlong into their own destruction—to continue in their own errors so that their sins bring about their ruin, in the same way that God shut off Pharaoh’s heart to repentance so that he couldn’t avoid the plagues that were due to him. If men deny God and refuse to seek His anarchist Kingdom for long enough, repeatedly demonstrating that they prefer to walk in the statist ways of the world instead, then God may personally shut off their own minds and hearts from turning back to His ways, so that their statist course will be the death of them. Thus, the prophets can say things like, “Why, O LORD, do You make us stray from Your ways and harden our hearts from fearing You?” (Isaiah 63:17). It isn’t necessarily that God is to blame for originally causing men to stray from His ways and subsequently finding themselves subjugated by other men, but more so that men have always pursued ways that were contrary to God’s and as a result had their minds sealed-off to coming to the truth and prevented from being able to turn back from the destructive ways they were already pursuing in their own wickedness. God never wishes that any should perish but that all should repent and be saved and come to the knowledge of the Lord, yet if men want to relentlessly whore themselves out to Egypt for the alleged protection and welfare from their Pharaohs and soldiers, then God reluctantly concedes and allows these unashamed sinners to suffer the consequences of their own sins, even trapping them in all their errors and hardening their hearts along the way, until one day they meet their Maker in a labor camp and finally realize what they have done to themselves, wake up to their own contribution to the captivity they have found themselves under, and repent.

It is never God who leads men down the statist path. Indeed, His whole word is a freedom manual meant to keep men from going astray from the divine anarchist society. Rather, statism is always what men pursue on their own in their express rebellion against God’s anarchist Kingdom order and in their revolt against the words of God warning them not to go this way. If men would have listened to the words of the Lord and heeded His lessons, they would have never found themselves making bricks for Pharaohs and living under the threat of being thrown in one of his dungeons or executed on the side of the road for some bogus charge of violating one of his arbitrary legal decrees. The evils of the statist society are a judgment against the wicked works of statists, but the wicked works were carried out by the men themselves and not by God. It has always been that men rejected the ways of the Lord that they found themselves under the yoke of bondage, not that God mislead men there. At any rate, the statist idolaters today who support human governments do so because they never sought the wisdom and help of the Lord. They strayed from God’s Law because they never asked God to keep them upright and make their paths straight. God turns from people only when they first turn from Him in their prostitution with the governments of the world, in order to let them reap the evils they have sown. “You reject all who stray from Your statutes” (Psalm 119:118). A statist society is one of errant men who have turned their backs on the Lord and who find out that the Lord will turn His back on them too and abandon them to eat the wicked fruit of their own planting.

Yet God never leads men on the statist path and teaches men to become statists; they do this on their own and in their sin. God’s role of giving men over to a reprobate mind is a more passive one of simply allowing these preexisting idolaters to chase after their own delusions until they are destroyed for it. The statist ideology, to be sure, is a satanic deception and great spiritual evil that comes over men and leads them to defend the government of the devil as (supposedly) indispensable to social order and civilization itself. The statists of the world, who hold to the sinful ideology that human rulers are necessary for society, have fallen into the fallacies of the world that are taught and spread by ungodly men. It is not the Holy Spirit, but rather a spirit of evil, that men come to seek salvation in human kingdoms and their presidents, lawmakers, and officers. Thus the prophets can say of this type of adultery with human governments among statists that “the spirit of whoredoms hath caused them to err, and they have gone a whoring from under their God” (Hosea 4:12). The principal way that men go astray from the Lord is to chase after human kings, presidents, lawmakers, authoritarian judges, soldiers, police officers, and hundreds of other tax-funded roles that men are given under the rule of the inherently socialist systems of human government. 

Let all statists today acknowledge that they have strayed from the Lord, are under judgment for this error of theirs, and begin praying for God to turn their hearts and minds back to the narrow road that leads to life. Let them learn to pray like the men of the Bible, “With all my heart I have sought You; do not let me stray from Your commandments” (Psalm 119:10). Because they may be so lost in the false political ideas they have adopted—namely, their belief that systems of human government should even exist—due to God himself having turned their hardened hearts off to the truth. 

Going astray ideologically

There can never be a statist whom we could call a man of true faith in God, for the belief in the necessity of human rulers is the very mark of someone who has turned from the Lord and placed his trust in false gods instead, believing them to be necessary for the ordering of society. All systems of human government arise among ungodly and faithless men who do not trust in the Lord God to order their society for them, such that they set up these systems themselves or find themselves dominated by them in their failure to seek God’s Kingdom as the only alternative. Those who know the Lord as their King do not find themselves in need of presidents, congressmen, soldiers, or police officers to supposedly order their society for them, but find these things in the Lord alone. It is a lack of trust in God’s protection and provision that leads people to seek these things from the State, and it is in pursuing the protection and bread of these false gods of human government (i.e., the Pharaohs and human lawmakers of the world) that God says a people turn from Him and walk another path. As God referred to the Israelites wandering through the wilderness, who lacked faith in God to provide for them and longed to go back to Egypt to be fed and secured, 

“For forty years I was angry with that generation, and I said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they have not known My ways’” (Psalm 95:10). 

It is not only the outward or physical acts of statism, such as taking bread from the Egyptians or serving as one of their soldiers, that prove a people to be faithless in God’s eyes, but also the inward or ideological wickedness of the heart and minds of those who simply believe they need human rulers to save them and who think that it is worth it to trust in Egypt because Pharaoh provides onions and leeks, or to pledge allegiance to Rome because Caesar has bread, or to place one’s faith and fidelity in the United States because she doles out food stamps or provides many different socialist services like policing, housing, or schooling. Thus the psalmists speak of a “stubborn and rebellious generation, whose heart was not loyal, whose spirit was not faithful to God” (Psalm 78:8). We also read of men who “err in [their] mind” (Isaiah 29:24), who err simply by thinking that human civil governments are necessary and needed for the operation of social order. In this sense, men do not even need to act on their ideology, such as going to the voting booth to raise up false gods into political office, for God to see that they have gone astray. God knows the heart, and such men who hold to the ideology of statism have already erred in their minds. Of course, what a man believes will eventually show up in how he lives and acts. The belief in human government will lead men to support and sustain these systems, whether through enthusiastic patriotism, working for the system itself, or simply apologizing for its existence—all which allow them to continue in operation. Yet even apart from these actions, the mere belief in human government is itself idolatry and sin — an error of the mind, which has gone astray from the Lord’s teachings and wandered down the mental paths of Babylonian fantasies and other statist imaginations.

We see further how statism is an error of the mind in the stubbornness of men to repent as they are rebuked for this sin, which they deny as being such. Not only do statists refuse to heed the Lord’s call to get off the road to Egypt, they also resist the correction of those godly men who attempt to teach them that their belief in human government and their adultery with the ballot boxes of Babylon is sin and that they must repent and seek the Kingdom of God. It is not just that statists are standing in a sinful ideological position, but that, in living in such an error, they also become people who refuse correction. Such is the position of all men who buy into lies: they remain in a state of refusing correction and repentance. As much as statism is originally an error that leads men down the path of the world, so do these idolaters set themselves up to exist in a state of unrepentance and refusal to be corrected. What the statists need more than anything is to heed the rebukes that come against them by men of God, not only to personally get right with the Lord but also to avoid the ruinous fate at the end of the road they are currently walking on. This is why we get such scriptures that teach men to have this type of humility, where “whoever heeds instruction is on the path to life, but he who ignores reproof goes astray” (Proverbs 10:17). The ideological statist masses are the hardheaded people of Scripture who have not only ignored God’s words to begin with in their adoption of this worldly political philosophy, but who continue to reject any loving correction that comes against them, whether that which is found in God’s word, those words of warning as spoken by His prophets, or that which is experienced in the very judgments that have come against them in the form of government tyranny. 

Straying from God’s word 

As with the other concepts expressing some idea or another of sin and rebellion against God, we see that we would not be saying enough if we were to understand “wandering” or “going astray” from God as merely some neglect of men to hear His word in some general or vague sense that makes no explicit reference to certain, concrete acts that may be called sinful — namely the wicked acts of whoring oneself out to Egypts and their Pharaohs and officers for supposed social order and benefits.  We are not speaking here simply of a failure to read one’s Bible, as much as taking God’s word seriously could correct men from having gone off course, but more so of the specific error of embarking upon the twisted path of statism and pursuing the political kingdoms of the world.

God’s word specifically counsels men to not go down the road to Egypt, where sinners who operate systems of human government entice men with benefits and incomes to yield to them (Proverbs 1:10) and join them in a collectivist system (Proverbs 1:14) of political plunder (Proverbs 1:13) that uses violence to maintain itself (Proverbs 1:11). When we speak of erring from the word of God then, we are not merely speaking of something like a failure of men to diligently read their Bibles every day, as some sort of faithful reader of Scripture who reads for the sake of reading. Rather, to go astray or wander from the wisdom or counsel of the Lord refers specifically to the ideas and acts of raising up human rulers into political office to tax your neighbors to provide so-called public services, or to join forces with these men yourself and become a politician or police officer who is paid at the expense of your neighbor. When we speak of men going astray from God and adopting errors, we are not speaking merely on some generically wrong course that men go down which doesn’t really have any consequences for walking on it, but instead very specific sins that lead men into bondage to other men. The lessons that men were to learn from the word of God were to keep them from the very specific errors of statism that lead men into captivity to the rulers of the world, such as raising up the inherently socialist systems of human government to use violence against others to get what they want. The lessons of scripture were to teach men of the judgments that await those who turn from the Lord’s ways and go down the political path of the world instead. When men will not drink the water of their own wells (Proverbs 5:15), but decide to rob their neighbors to provide benefits and services to everyone in a vast system of socialist plunder, they will find themselves living in tax bondage to fund these authoritarian governments, which only fail to provide for the people in the end (Proverbs 5:3-6). 

Though we may say that the self-called atheists of the world have rejected God in some vague sense, it is never just that they have rejected God in their belief, but that this rejection always manifests in going after human rulers and other gods to serve them. We see this in the fact that the majority of these types of people are rabid statists who flock to human rulers to serve them and save them instead of God, who they have discarded and disregarded as their King. Thus the wandering from God which we speak of is never merely just some lack of belief in God, but is seen namely in man’s turn toward the statist systems of the world. A man’s wandering from the way of the Lord is characterized by joining forces with the kingdoms of men, all which fund their ungodly operations by maintaining an authoritarian system of government where everyone robs and extorts their neighbors in a vast system of generational debt and entitlements. It is the pursuit of statist systems, whether ideologically or in practice, that God looks down upon a people and sees that they have erred from the straight, narrow, and righteous way. It is in a man’s worldly political philosophy, which leads him to support systems of human government, that God sees a people who have brought destruction and judgment upon themselves. 

“For a man’s ways are before the eyes of the LORD, and the LORD examines all his paths. The iniquities of a wicked man entrap him; the cords of his sin entangle him. He dies for lack of discipline, led astray by his own great folly” (Proverbs 5:21-23). 

If men continue on the wicked statist path of the world, they will be destroyed for their sins. For all men who go astray from the Lord, as they do every time they seek salvation in Egypts, Romes, and Americas, are on the wide road of destruction and have shown God that they choose to remain in their errors rather than correct them. Statism, in all its many forms, is a rejection of God’s kingship and represents the primary way that men transfer their faith, fear, trust, and allegiance from God to men. All the millions of men who have walked in this same error throughout history have met the same fate: the eventual downfall or total destruction of their social order at the hands of God. If men do not get off the Egyptian road and abandon the errors of the many men throughout history who practiced the same sins as our people today, then they will join them in coming under a more complete and total judgment than the one we are currently under. The time is now to repent of statism and seek the Kingdom of God alone.