[This is part 29 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 eight, thirty, thirty one, thirty two, thirty three, thirty four, thirty five]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

One of the main purposes of this article series has been to show that people who claim to be repentant—namely, the statists of the world who take the Lord’s name in vain—are, in fact, unrepentant sinners who still need to turn from their wicked ways and make the Lord Jesus their only King. Yet to even bring people to the point of turning away from their idolatrous support for human government, we must first get them to see that this has always been one of mankind’s chief sins, from the Israelites seeking a human king to rule over them to the voters today who raise up presidents to be their gods. Men will simply not repent from that which they do not believe is sin, hence why they remain supporters of the inherently ungodly political systems of the world, which the false pastors and regime theologians either neglected to tell them were evil or led them to believe represented God’s political ideal. To lead men to repent of their belief in human government and their participation in its wicked works, we must then show that these things are—contrary to popular belief and official opinion—what sin is all about.

However, in the modern world of professing Christianity that has more or less stripped true Christianity of its meaning by allowing people of any political persuasion and every set of ideas to be counted among its ranks on the basis of a loose profession of faith, statism—the support of human civil government—has not been thought of as a sin at all. Christianity is often presented as a mere “religion” concerned only with one’s beliefs about God and how to get into heaven in the afterlife, rather than as a way of living on earth in obedience to the divine laws and commands of the Lord. Most so-called Christians today would be utterly baffled by the claim that supporting worldly governments that are built on coercion, theft, and bloodshed is sinful, because they have been taught that politics is entirely separate from religion or faith. It has never even crossed their minds that the Gospel of the Kingdom of God is a political campaign message of another, anarchistic Kingdom that is not of this world and which forbids all those who claim to believe in this gospel from being in support of the rival gospels of worldly kings and kingdoms that promise peace, prosperity, and salvation under their rule. In their minds, the essence of the Christian faith is just a loose belief in the existence of Jesus that leaves one free to do whatever they want after that. Hence the recently popular slogan, “Jesus is my Savior, and Trump is my president.” Jesus’s role in a man’s life is confined to some sort of “spiritual realm” of watching after our souls on account of a mere profession of faith, and it assumed that, for salvation on earth, men are needed to come into the fold and exist as kings and presidents who raise up and preside over armies that “fight for our freedom” in a way that God supposedly cannot. It has never even occurred to them that to trust in human rulers is to have other gods, lords, and saviors than Jesus the Christ, whose kingship they likewise have turned into nothing more than a slogan. Those who say “Christ is King” today while supporting human rulers and their authoritarian governments are thus entirely dumbfounded by the idea that statism is a sin and have never even considered this idolatry of theirs to be at the center of God’s great grievance with mankind. Therefore, they refuse outright to accept this correction once they are finally rebuked for being one of the statist rebels of the world, and fight against this truth at every step of the way. 

Leading men to repentance 

If we ever hope to see men turn away from their sinful ways, we must first establish that the sins of men have never been mere vague and generic offenses with no relation to the particular wicked thoughts and deeds of men, but that God’s complaint against the people of the earth—as seen especially in the books of the prophets who He sent to rebuke the idolaters of the world—has always concerned concrete, definable acts of sin that are not difficult to identify and address. God never just sent prophets out who vaguely told men to “repent of your sins” without telling them what their transgressions were, but always identified these sins of theirs to be very certain acts that all are more or less relatable to the statist systems of the world that are raised up on violence, plunder, and war.

The assertion that man’s support for human rulers has been his foremost rebellion against God seems amazing given that statism has been almost entirely wiped from the radar of sin by the false prophets of the institutional church for thousands of years, who have managed to hide this great error and rebellion of men from all those who come to them for knowledge about the Lord. Indeed, it will be part of the testimony of almost anyone who God has awakened to be astonished at the success of institutionalists to conceal God’s anarchist politics from the masses of professing Christians and self-called atheists, the latter who just assume that God must be the constitutionalist, Republican patriot that His false representatives present Him as.

Nevertheless, once examining the Biblical words for sin, transgression, rebellion, and other such terms, there is little difficulty in showing that the main sins and iniquity of men have always been those evils related to the belief in human rulers and the violent practices of those who participate in these systems as their supporters or servants. 

If we are to ever make more out of repentance than the loose confession of having been a sinner that results in no real change in one’s beliefs or actions, we first need a better understanding of sin than the popular notion that it is only some quality inherent in men rather than specific acts of rebellion that can be identified and defined, such as the idolatry of believing in human government, the covetousness of accepting its stolen benefits, or the slothfulness of refusing to seek the Kingdom of God. With a better conception that describes the specific acts that prove men to be rebels against God and His Kingdom, we can then show that the things that men must repent from are more than just some vague sense of being a sinner, but have everything to do with the specific acts of adopting the thinking and practices of the world, which are found especially in the philosophy of statism and participation in the politics of man’s kingdoms.

The best working definition of sin that most people use today is a violation of God’s Law or a breaking of the commandments, namely the Ten Commandments. On this account alone can we condemn the ideology and practices of statism, which respectively upholds the moral legitimacy of human rulers and puts them into power. Men break God’s Law every time they raise up or support systems of human civil government, which is to raise up false gods and endorse a system founded on theft, covetousness, and murder and has these violations as its very basis. 

The sin of statism 

To be sure that statism is sin, let us not just appear as if we are making random assertions out of our own rightness, but show that this wisdom and knowledge is that which screams out of the pages of scripture and comes down from the Holy Spirit as the recognizable truth to all those who hear the voice of the Lord and have God’s Law pressed upon their hearts. 

One of the more common Hebrew words that gets translated into “sin” in the Old Testament is חָטָא (Strong’s H2398). Its transliteration is chata’ (pronounced khaw-taw). Its literal meaning is “to miss the mark.” In a political context, we can think of the target as God’s anarchistic Kingdom that operates on freewill offerings and voluntary service, and “missing the mark” to be any social organization that comes up short of doing this, such as the violent, tax-based kingdoms of the world that lord authority over other men and impose their will upon them. Men “miss the mark” (i.e., fail to hit the nail of God’s Kingdom on the head) anytime they pursue the kingdoms of the world and partake in the politics of Babylon instead of working to administer God’s Kingdom order by rallying their neighbors to gather together for the true fellowship of serving one another in a private, decentralized, charitable network that does not operate by exercising authority, as do the kingdoms of the world. 

As we soon discover in our search to understand what God calls sin, evil, and rebellion against His Law and Kingdom, it is not difficult to link sin directly to the wicked works of raising up human rulers and supporting the violent practices of these men. One prophet uses this word chata’ right in the middle of describing a statist people who subsist by plundering others. 

“Woe to him who amasses what is not his and makes himself rich with many loans! How long will this go on?’ Will not your creditors suddenly arise and those who disturb you awaken? Then you will become their prey. Because you have plundered many nations, the remnant of the people will plunder you— because of your bloodshed against man and your violence against the land, the city, and all their dwellers. Woe to him who builds his house by unjust gain, to place his nest on high and escape the hand of disaster! You have plotted shame for your house by cutting off many peoples and forfeiting your life…Woe to him who builds a city with bloodshed and establishes a town by iniquity! (Habakkuk 2:6-12). 

The people of the world who amass what is not theirs are the human rulers of the world, whose tax-based systems of political plunder have them standing as a caste of parasitic non-producers who live at the expense of other men. The people who plunder the masses are the governments, central bankers, and other accomplices of these political institutions, who prey upon the people of the world for their property and their lives. The main men of bloodshed and violence in the land are the state rulers of the world, who raise up ungodly systems of authoritarian government that enact man-made legal decrees or executive orders and send out soldiers and police to enforce their commands at the barrel of a gun. It is the human rulers of the world, as well as those who support them, who the prophets are speaking of when condemning those who build their cities and towns with bloodshed and iniquity, i.e., who organize their artificial social orders on the basis of compulsory taxation and police violence.

Other prophets use this word to connect sin with violence (Ezekiel 28:16) too, furthering the case that statism—building systems of human government with coercion and extortion—is what sin is all about. Human civil governments exist because of sin, namely idolatry, covetousness, theft, and murder. This is not to say that they are needed or necessary because of sinners, but rather that sinners set these systems up and further them in their rebellion against God. States exist because people reject the rule of God and seek instead to be ruled by false gods. They exist because men have failed to build God’s literal Kingdom by gathering their people together to serve one another directly and freely, without outsourcing the weightier matters of justice, law, and mercy to human governments that lord their authority over others. Human governments exist because men hate God and their neighbors. If we are to ever do away with them, men must choose to be ruled by God again and give up their slothful pew-sitting that furthers the kingdoms of the world through inaction and apathy toward the needs of their brothers. They must repent of their statism and become anarchists (or, better yet, Godarchists) who have the Lord as their only King, in a free and decentralized society that maintains a network of charity without turning to the sword of the State. 

Idolatry and apathy 

This word for “sin” also makes an appearance in the first chapter of Isaiah, the first prophetic book of the Biblical canon. The prophet leads off by rebuking the entire population as a “sinful nation” (Isaiah 1:4), whose sins were unmistakably to substitute vain rituals and outwards displays of religiosity for the pure religion of actually serving each other freely, just as churchians do today when they attend so-called “worship services” on Sunday while failing to feed the sheep of their so-called congregations or do anything to criticize the statist culture around them and get their people out of bondage by living as citizens of another Kingdom. Aside from delivering this prophetic word directly to the rulers (Isaiah 1:10, 23), it came also against the apathy and false worship of the people themselves, who made worshiping God into rituals and ceremonies rather than actually serving each other with works of mercy and charity — just like all Catholics, Orthodox, or Protestant “churches” do today with their pretend displays of holiness and “worship” that are entirely disconnected from the true work of providing for one another in a way that keeps them free and unspotted from the world through maintaining a network of charity that keeps them from having to turn to the tables of Rome for their deceitful bread or protection that trick and trap those who take it into bondage. The condemnation was the same as it must be today against all the so-called Christians of the world who may appear on the surface to be godly through their attendance of so-called churches and their lip service to the Lord as their King, but who have not renounced their allegiance and support for the world and its systems and whose hands are, therefore, covered with blood (Isaiah 1:15) and whose false worship in these statist institutions, which don’t seek the Kingdom of God, is worthless before the Lord (Isaiah 1:13).

Men are never doing the will of the Lord simply because they attend a so-called church or profess the name of the Lord with their lips, but only when they actually listen to the words of God instructing them to live like a godly people again, casting away their old worldly ideology and practices of statism and beginning to seek the Kingdom of God in exclusion to all other political endeavors. God is not looking for men who vaguely say that they have “repented of my sins” while still living and thinking like Romans, but for men who have truly turned another way — namely, toward that righteous work of upbuilding the Kingdom of God by forming a charitable network of congregations where free men can serve each other directly, without turning to the authoritarian systems of the world for their welfare and protection. It is this work of organizing congregations of families who have repented of their statism and are seeking another way that God blesses, not slothfully sitting in a pew and imagining that listening to sermons by professional clergymen constitutes worship and service to others. As the book of Isaiah later explains, 

“Isn’t this the fast that I have chosen: to break the chains of wickedness, to untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and tear off every yoke? Isn’t it to share your bread with the hungry, to bring the poor and homeless into your home, to clothe the naked when you see him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will come quickly. Your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; you will cry out, and He will say, ‘Here I am’” (Isaiah 58:6-9).  

We need more than to simply turn away from the evil path or hate the deeds of the wicked statists of the world who walk down the political road of the world that leads to bondage. This is a bare minimum point of nearing repentance. We need to go one further and actually begin serving each other again as a free people, who do not commit the sins of turning to human rulers for protection, justice, and welfare, by maintaining these things ourselves out of personal responsibility and direct action. For the kingdoms of the world have been raised up not just on idolatry and covetousness, but on the slothfulness of men who failed to offer an alternative society to the authoritarian governments of the world, which is accomplished only through beginning to build a network of assistance for those who are ready to repent of their support for these worldly systems and join in the great cause of furthering God’s Kingdom.

Another word for sin 

Another closely related Hebrew word for sin is חַטָּאָה or chatta’ah (Strong’s H2403). With close to 300 occurrences, it is another major word for sin that must be analyzed in any study of Biblical words that relay some idea or another of transgressing the ways, laws, or commands of God. Perhaps most notably, the prophet Isaiah uses it precisely in connection with people seeking alliances with the statist systems of the world, their kings, and their militaries.

“‘Woe to the rebellious children,’ declares the LORD, ‘to those who carry out a plan that is not Mine, who form an alliance, but against My will, heaping up sin upon sin. They set out to go down to Egypt without asking My advice, to seek shelter under Pharaoh’s protection and take refuge in Egypt’s shade. But Pharaoh’s protection will become your shame, and the refuge of Egypt’s shade your disgrace” (Isaiah 30:1-3). 

Those who raise up presidents, congressmen, soldiers, or police to “serve” them, and who in general trust in systems of human government to provide their protection, justice, law, and welfare, are men who heap sin upon sin. They are rebels against God who are set out against His will and who, therefore, will find out the hard way the consequences of rebelling against the Lord as their King. Those who seek kings and armies to protect them are precisely the type of men who don’t know the Lord, which is why they are seeking salvation through human rulers and their horsemen.

“Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, who rely on horses, who trust in their abundance of chariots and in their multitude of horsemen. They do not look to the Holy One of Israel; they do not seek the LORD” (Isaiah 31:1). 

The word chatta’ah is once again used in reference to all the evils taking place among the Israelites—a people who God had removed from Egypt, instructed to not practice the ways of the people of the world, and told to make the Lord their only King, but who eventually fell back into the Egyptian ways of the world, sought the aid and alliances of worldly governments, and climactically raised up human kings to their own destruction. 

“For Jerusalem has stumbled and Judah has fallen because they spoke and acted against the LORD, defying His glorious presence. The expression on their faces testifies against them, and like Sodom they flaunt their sin; they do not conceal it. Woe to them, for they have brought disaster upon themselves” (Isaiah 3:8-9). 

As used in this context, sin is not just a rebellion against God but carries with it the connotations of one being in a position of pride. We see in practice that these things often go hand in hand. Men are rarely just idolaters in their mere support or approval for the existence of human government, but are commonly enthusiastic cheerleaders and apologists who wave the flags of their empires, praise the presidents as their saviors, root for their soldiers in war, and believe they are “the best country in the world” with “the most powerful military” that could never be stopped. We see also the pride involved in statism when we see just how much statists refuse to acknowledge how deeply invested in the lies they are. Hence why they never hear us in our rebukes of their idolatry: they are too proud to do so and their ears are closed-off to the truth. They are not even embarrassed for their idolatrous ways and even sport clothing of their favorite presidents on their bodies and head and smirk at anyone who looks at them. The expression on their faces testifies against them. 

Statist violence and sin

As we begin concluding our study on words related to turning from God (from sin, iniquity, transgression, rebellion, and revolt), we see that more or less all of them can be linked to man’s turn toward human rulers as their lords and saviors. Just after speaking of “the sin of Judah,” another prophet says, for instance, “Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind, who makes mere flesh his strength and turns his heart from the LORD” (Jeremiah 17:5). The main mark of a sinful people is always that they have gone after other gods to serve them rather than the Lord their God, i.e., that they became statists who trusted in kings, presidents, congressmen, and soldiers and police to “fight for our freedom” and “protect and serve” them instead of believing that the Lord would provide all their needs if only they would have trusted in Him instead. The primary way that men have always forsaken the Lord as their King is by trusting in human governments for their welfare and aid — by prostituting themselves out to the Pharaohs of the world to feed them and send out chariots and horsemen to allegedly keep them free and maintain “law and order.”

This idea is just as apparent in Ezekiel 16 too, which symbolizes Israel’s unfaithfulness by using a metaphor of adultery that is explicitly related to a people’s promiscuous flirtation with kings and armies. God’s charge against these statist whores is this:

“You prostituted yourself with your lustful neighbors, the Egyptians, and increased your promiscuity to provoke Me to anger” (Ezekiel 16:26).

And that, heaping sin upon sin, these people had played the harlot with even more lovers.

“Then you prostituted yourself with the Assyrians, because you were not yet satisfied. Even after that, you were still not satisfied. So you extended your promiscuity to Chaldea…but even with this you were not satisfied!” (Ezekiel 16:28-29).

It was all this statist whoredom, idolatry, and bloodshed practiced by these people that God says were the sins that weren’t even half as bad as those who had come before them (Ezekiel 16:51-52). 

For further proof that the things which God sees to be a great turning away from Him are connected to statism, the book of Ezekiel continues to mention sinful men (Ezekiel 18:24) in direct connection to “violence and bloodshed” (Ezekiel 18:10) and “oppressing the poor and needy,” “committing robbery,” and “lifting eyes to idols” (Ezekiel 18:12). God was not speaking of petty common criminals when condemning societies as full of ungodly men who had turned against His ways and practiced robbery, oppression, and bloodshed, but rather the statists of the world who have systematically spread their plunder across whole territories, who have institutionalized their violence into a regularized and daily practice against the populations of men who they rule over, who have legalized their crimes and predation into “law,” and who have managed over time to convince the population of sinners and idolaters into believe their evils are legitimate because they have been decreed by men who call themselves “the government.” 

The context of “transgressions and sin” in Ezekiel 33:10 also reveals these acts to be directly related to idolatry and bloodshed (Ezekiel 33:25), which are inherent to all the systems of human government in the world. A further description of the people who the prophet was preaching to here reveals them to be just like the false Christians of today, who outwardly appear to serve the Lord and profess His name with their lips alongside their support for the Roman political systems of the world, but who are not actually serious about repenting from their statist idolatry and seeking the Kingdom of God alone.

“My people come to you as usual, sit before you, and hear your words; but they do not put them into practice. Although they express love with their mouths, their hearts pursue dishonest gain” (Ezekiel 33:31).

Given that the issue in our world was never just one of self-proclaimed atheists openly supporting the State and rejecting God, but also of statists who claimed to know the Lord while sharing a god in the State with the pagans they considered themselves to be so different from, the Biblical prophets’ condemnation of the masses was always, in effect, a twofold rebuke against statist idolaters who whored themselves out to human rulers, and against those who professed the Lord’s name while practicing political works contrary to His ways. The problem throughout the history of the world has never just been that men openly and unashamedly rejected God while existing as effective Babylonians, though there is plenty of that too, but that the world has always been full of statist whores who added to their sins the claim of being a Christian. The masses of overt atheists who embrace statism has, in modern history, only really been a trend that was in full-effect in the latter half of the twentieth century. For centuries before that, and even up through this period of widespread “secularism” and “atheism” until the present age, the main problem limiting the advancement of God’s Kingdom has always been men who claim to be Christians on top of their love of the world and its statist systems. The main threat to liberty under God has always been fake Christians more than the completely lost atheist-statists of the world, who, for however lost they are, do not stand as the main people blocking the path of furthering God’s Kingdom and waking men up to getting back on this righteous road of leaving Egypt with our hearts, minds, and feet. It has always been fake Christians in the churches, seminaries, and other institutions of official religion that have been the primary source of shutting the Kingdom of God up in the faces of prospective seekers. It has always been false pastors and false prophets in so-called Christian circles that have worked to keep men who loosely sought to know the Lord drunk on the Babylonian wine instead, believing that statism could be mixed in with pure religion and that such a mixture is not only non-contradictory to the true faith, but should even be enthusiastically practiced in their flag-waving churches, which praise presidents, soldiers, and police as the saviors of their society. It has always been so-called Christians who have been the main enemies of God and His anarchistic Kingdom order.

Sin in the minor prophets 

If statists were hoping to continue to deny that their worldly political practices and ideology are really what sin and rebellion against God is all about, the minor prophets help to put a final nail in that coffin. Their commissions and ministries were essentially always centered around rebuking the wicked works inherent to these worldly systems of government, which have always been raised up and furthered outside of God’s Law, commands, and will. The prophet Micah was sent out “to declare to Jacob his transgression and to Israel his sin” (Micah 3:8). His denouncing of sin was given directly to the rulers themselves and is a decisive rebuke against the violence, plunder, predation, and even cannibalism and child trafficking and abuse that is always involved in systems of human government. It is hardly hyperbole or metaphor considering that we are ruled by actual cannibalistic pedophiles who sacrifice children to Satan in addition to the evils of upholding a political system of regularized and systematic plunder of God’s children on the statist plantation we live on. 

“Hear now, O leaders of Jacob, you rulers of the house of Israel. Should you not know justice? You hate good and love evil. You tear the skin from my people and strip the flesh from their bones. You eat the flesh of my people after stripping off their skin and breaking their bones. You chop them up like flesh for the cooking pot, like meat in a cauldron.’ Then they will cry out to the LORD, but He will not answer them. At that time He will hide His face from them because of the evil they have done” (Micah 3:1-4). 

The rest of this chapter does not look good either for anyone who may still sinfully attempt to contend that statism is not sin, which is what the false leaders and cronyist pastors of the institutional church have always been sent to do or effectively accomplished anyway by driving men into vain rituals rather than leading them to seek God’s Kingdom. Again, the prophetic rebuke of Micah comes directly against the ruling elite of the day, whose man-made political systems subsist on violence and plunder. 

“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). 

When we look at the rest of Micah’s ministry, who again was sent out to speak on “the transgression of Jacob and the sins of the house of Israel” (Micah 1:5), the case for a statist political setting as being the primary evidence of a sinful and ungodly people is unmistakable. Again, the statist plunderers of the world—from presidents and congressmen to local county governments and sheriffs deputies—are shown to be the people who the prophets are calling sinners. 

“Woe to those who devise iniquity and plot evil on their beds! At morning’s light they accomplish it because the power is in their hands. They covet fields and seize them; they take away houses. They deprive a man of his home, a fellow man of his inheritance” (Micah 2:1-2). 

The “sins” that were shown to be the cause of judgment in Micah 6:13 only continue to make the case that the chief sins of mankind have always been their advancement of the inherently evil systems of human civil government, whether they are among the founding generations who draft “constitutions” that supposedly legitimize them, or the idolaters of following generations who come to idolize these systems and the false gods who they affectionately regard as their “founding fathers” or “presidents.” The sins described here come in the direct context of a “city [that is] full of violence” (Micah 6:12) and of a people who followed after the laws and practices of human kings rather than the Lord (Micah 6:16). It was these sins—the plunder and murder bound-up with statism—that led to judgment.

“For the wealthy of the city are full of violence, and its residents speak lies; their tongues are deceitful in their mouths. Therefore I am striking you severely, to ruin you because of your sins” (Micah 6:12-13). 

Everywhere we look in the Scriptures, we find that the main people in the world who are called sinners are those people who have gone after worldly political systems—whether as their direct servants or their cheerleaders and apologists—to supposedly order their societies for them, only to find themselves enslaved to these system-makers and almost completely oblivious as to how it happened (hence the slaves thinking that the only issue today is that “we need to get back to the constitution” or “the way this country was supposed to be”). When God looks upon a land and declares that all that’s left are ungodly men, He is speaking not just of men who have fallen into some vague sins or unbelief, but of a people whose iniquity is characterized by having gone after the violent political systems of the world to serve them. 

“The godly man has perished from the earth; there is no one upright among men. They all lie in wait for blood; they hunt one another with a net. Both hands are skilled at evil; the prince and the judge demand a bribe. When the powerful utters his evil desire, they all conspire together. The best of them is like a brier; the most upright is sharper than a hedge of thorns” (Micah 7:2-4). 

This word chatta’ah also appears in Hosea 4:8, the context of which also shows the setting to be a statist one, where the characteristic mark of an ungodly people is their participation in, or support for, the practices of political violence. In short, it was always among a population of statists that prophets observed that the land was full of sinners.

“There is no truth, no loving devotion, and no knowledge of God in the land! Curses and lying, murder and stealing, and adultery are rampant; one act of bloodshed follows another” (Hosea 4:1-2).

Likewise, the punishable “sins” of Hosea 8:13 are clearly in the context of false converts claiming to know the Lord (Hosea 8:2) but setting up princes and kings to rule over them (Hosea 8:4), against God’s will or advice. 

The “numerous sins” of Amos 5:12 are also clearly connected to the evil works of statism that prevail in all these societies that the prophets denounce. The sinners here are shown to be the state rulers and their supporters of the world “who turn justice into wormwood and cast righteousness to the ground” (Amos 5:7). We also have men who “trample on the poor and exact from him a tax of grain” (Amos 5:11), as well as people who “oppress the righteous” and “deprive the poor of justice” (Amos 5:12). 

The sin of statism concluded 

I have been accused before of placing too much emphasis on the sins of ststism, or stated another way, statism as sin. This is curious given that, if anything, this sin is under-emphasized among professing Christians, who choose instead to cite some relatively insignificant things like cursing or smoking as definitive of the nature of sin. To be sure, however, I am not just seeking to place statism on an equal footing as other sins, which it has never even attained among a sizable minority of Christians, who neglect to recognize the support for human government as sin at all. Rather, I hesitatingly submit that the belief in human government, the participation in worldly politics, the acceptance of benefits paid by these systems, and the service given to them as politicians, soldiers, or police represents the foremost sins of mankind — that statism is not just a sin among sins (a status which it cannot even achieve among those who refuse to acknowledge it at all), but is really the embodiment of sin that stands as the main way that men prove themselves to be living contrary to the Lord and His Law. There is really no greater way that men turn away from the Lord as their King and the Kingdom of God than by turning toward other kings and kingdoms, unless we believe that the Kingship of the Lord is not of utmost importance and that there is some other way men could turn away from God than by turning to false gods to be their providers. The archetype sinner in our world is the statist, i.e., those men who support systems of human government, raise up false gods as their kings, lords, and saviors, or become these rulers themselves. Notwithstanding those reprobate idolaters on the American scene who see no conflict at all between their alleged Christian faith and their trust in presidents, soldiers, and police to protect and free their societies, these patriots are prototype sinners who exemplify what it means to be a sinner. Statists are the epitome of sin. The adherents of this political ideology are sin manifest in a man’s ideas. The primary sins displayed in men are found in the thinking and works of a man who is still walking in the political ways of the world and has not turned His heart and soul back to the Lord as His only King. Sin is not just some unspecific or vague traits embedded in men that cannot be done away with, but very certain acts of a man who chooses to continue in the ways of the world rather than repent and follow the ways and wisdom of the Lord. Men sin when they support and praise the systems of human governments of the world, which are based on violence. They show that they have turned away from the non-authoritarian order of God’s Kingdom that upholds a system of welfare based on charity, freewill offerings, and love of neighbor, and that they instead choose to further the governments of the devil in their ongoing rebellion against God. 

Repenting for the sin of statism 

Once we see that statism is not only sin but is the chief, outward expression of man’s rebellion against God’s kingship and His Law, manifested into a system of human government, it becomes obvious what repentance is really about: turning away from the idolatry and covetousness that is intrinsic to all systems of human civil government. The trouble has always been in the almost complete failure to acknowledge statism as sin, not in the over-emphasis of this notion, which can really never be affirmed enough given its nearly entirely neglected status among the vast majority of professing Christians. For if “repenting from sin” is merely some vague notion of feeling sorry for your human nature and believing in Jesus as merely the savior of your soul, then men are not compelled to turn away from the decidedly wicked works of statism and trust in the Lord to free them on earth. And it is no wonder that they haven’t under these vague notions, which may well be one of the greatest tricks pulled in the so-called churches today: telling people that they just need to “repent of their sins” without listing what these sins are, beyond some loose conception of being guilty for being a human. It is no surprise then that most so-called Christians today are still statist sinners: they have never realized that their statist beliefs and practices have been the main way that they have proven to be enemies of God and rebels against His anarchistic Kingdom. They have never been told that their belief in presidents, their voting and campaigning for congressmen, or their receiving of benefits and retirement packages paid at their neighbors’ expense, is really what sin is all about. They have never been shown that “he who despises his neighbor sins” (Proverbs 14:21) and that in no greater way does a man despise his neighbor than to raise up rulers over him and to appeal to these rulers to rob his neighbors to provide for his own welfare, protection, justice, the schooling of his children, or thousands of other benefits and so-called “public services.”