[This is part 36 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, twenty nine, thirty, thirty one, thirty two, thirty three, thirty four, thirty five, thirty six]
Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris
I have explained on numerous occasions how God uses the evils of state rule, which men have really brought upon themselves, as a means of waking men up to the sin involved in their idolatrous and wicked statist pursuits and thereby turning from them. Let us show roughly how this plays out Biblically and what it needs to look like for the statist idolaters of our time, who have thus far failed to see that are captives in Egypt, much less that this bondage under human rulers has been a judgment for the sins that raised them up and that outsourced their personal responsibilities to love and care for their neighbors over to authoritarian rulers who do it by compulsion and violence.
Bondage and repentance
Since the majority of professing Christians today have never even seen their statism as sin, much less their need to repent of this iniquity that is bound up with their pursuit of human rulers and their violent methods of political organization, naturally they have not seen that they live in an Egyptian society and that this great evil of human rule has been a judgment from God against the sins of seeking human rulers and lawmakers. They have not only stubbornly refused to see their political whoredom with the kingdoms of man as sinful and rebellious, but they are also too hardheaded and stonehearted to realize they are under judgment in the form of having to live under its legal decrees and the inevitable tyrannies that flow from them.
Unfortunately, what is often necessary to lead men to repent of the idolatrous and covetous practices that are bound up with their statist ideology and deeds is for the evils that are inherent to the governments of man to become so harsh that it is no longer possible to deny what has come upon you: that you walked in the political ways of the world and are now reaping what you have sown. For men to ever wake up to both their bondage and the sin that led to it, usually it is necessary for the judgment that these governments dish-out to become even harsher than it was in the early days of its origins and expansion — for the divine justice that is present even at its creation, where the rulers begin erecting taxes and man-made legal decrees to tell everyone how to live, to finally turn into its full form and become a full-blown police state where the people’s property and lives are under surveillance by a technocratic regime that is bent on exterminating them from the earth. Though men could have always repented early and warded off the captivity that comes upon sinners who lust after human rulers, the stonehearded men of the world sadly prefer to become absolutely subjugated and overtly oppressed before they are willing to even come near to the idea that all this has come upon them for their own sins, which the inherent wickedness of these systems serves to punish. Sadly, men often opt to learn the hard way that statism is sin and that sin leads to bondage. They realize too late in the game what they have done to themselves. The Assyrians have already invaded, the Babylonians are already dragging them off to exile, or they and their neighbors are being packed into a boxcar for a 10-year sentence on a labor camp for voicing their opinions about their “leaders” or for making a joke.
As things often go, it will really only be after men see that statism is not only bondage, but that this bondage has come upon them for their own sins tied to raising up human rulers against God’s commands, that they will ever come to repent from these sins and be delivered from the bondage of Egypt, which they currently believe to be a “free country” founded by “Christian” men, instead of the real case that it is another Babylonian system raised upon by rebels who hate God and were seeking to be gods themselves. As it often happens, it is not until men have found themselves squarely in the middle of their captivity to the Babylonians that they realize what they have done and subsequently repent for their evil ways, not just through a mere vague weeping over some ill-defined sins but by acknowledging the specific ideas and deeds that led to their situation: they revolted against God’s rule by turning towards man’s rule and are now paying the price for these sins. As it usually goes for the foolish men of the world, it often takes the real judgment of coming under the boot of statists for men to truly realize their sins and repent, which were simply not as evident to them before when they were not yet being drug off to labor camps, prison camps, or lined up against the wall by the men who they once thought were their “heroes” and “freedom fighters” but who are now proving to be devilish men who enforce the decrees of Pharaohs and Caesars at the expense of their lives.
Though the idea of repentance today is an almost entirely diluted and meaningless one of turning from some vague sins that does not see the statist slave society as the result of the real and concrete sins of acting like a Egyptian whore for Pharaohs and their officers, the types of prayers and repentance seen in the Bible often occur in the midst of captivity and because of its ability to wake men up to the reality that they had gone astray from the Lord and His ways. This was the realization and prayers of the prophet Daniel in the midst of their exile in Babylon:
“And I prayed to the LORD my God and confessed, ‘O, Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant of loving devotion 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. We have not listened to Your servants the prophets, who spoke in Your name to our kings, leaders, fathers, and all the people of the land. To You, O Lord, belongs righteousness, but this day we are covered with shame—the men of Judah, the people of Jerusalem, and all Israel near and far, in all the countries to which You have driven us because of our unfaithfulness to You. I Lord, we are covered with shame—our kings, our leaders, and our fathers—because we have sinned against You. To the Lord our God belongs compassion and forgiveness, even though we have rebelled against Him and have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God to walk in His laws, which He set before us through His servants the prophets. All Israel has transgressed Your law and turned away, refusing to obey Your voice; so the oath and the curse written in the Law of Moses the servant of God has been poured out on us, because we have sinned against You. You have carried out the words spoken against us and against our rulers by bringing upon us a great disaster. For under all of heaven, nothing has ever been done like what has been done to Jerusalem. Just as it is written in the Law of Moses, all this disaster has come upon us, yet we have not sought the favor of the Lord our God by turning from our iniquities and giving attention to Your truth. Therefore the Lord has kept the calamity in store and brought it upon us. For the Lord our God is righteous in all He does; yet we have not obeyed His voice. Now, O Lord our God, who brought Your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand, and who made for Yourself a name renowned to this day, we have sinned; we have acted wickedly. O Lord, in keeping with all Your righteous acts, I pray that Your anger and wrath may turn away from Your city Jerusalem, Your holy mountain; for because of our sins and the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and Your people are a reproach to all around us. So now, our God, hear the prayers and petitions of Your servant. For Your sake, O Lord, cause Your face to shine upon Your desolate sanctuary. Incline Your ear, O my God, and hear; open Your eyes and see the desolation of the city that bears Your name. For we are not presenting our petitions before You because of our righteous acts, but because of Your great compassion. O Lord, listen! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, hear and act! For Your sake, O my God, do not delay, because Your city and Your people bear Your name’” (Daniel 9:4-19).
As we see in Daniel 9, there is a sense in which repentance entails weeping. As the prophet says, “we are covered in shame.” Indeed, the problem with the statists of the world today is that they are not shameful at all for the sins related to their statist ideas and practices; on the contrary, they are proud men who do not believe that they have done any wrong whatsoever in their whoredom with Babylon and her princes and kings. Hence why the statists in our time today are still proudly waving flags from their houses and fawning over their favorite presidents: they have no shame whatever in all their evildoings. As one prophet records these types of people,
“Are they ashamed of the abomination they have committed? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. So they will fall among the fallen; when I punish them, they will collapse, says the LORD” (Jeremiah 8:12).
Far from feeling bad about their wicked ideas and ways, statists are celebrating them! Far from feeling embarrassed about the bondage that has come upon them and seeing that they have rebelled against the Lord, they identify as “proud Americans” and show no signs whatever of being repentant for the sins that resulted in them being under the boot of tax agents and their law enforcers, whose evils are a judgment against their idolatrous chants of “back the blue” and “support our troops.” All you need to do is look at a statist to tell they’re proud of their worldly-political deviation from the anarchistic Kingdom of God rather than repentant or regretful. As the prophet says of these types of people,
“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 3:9).
Statists throughout history have always lived under the harsh judgment of having to eat the rotten fruit of their own wicked ways and live under the human rulers who they raised up in their sin, yet they have always failed to be rebuked or corrected by it. You can load them up in a train to the Gulag and they won’t realize that all this has happened because they have forgotten the Lord their Maker and forsaken His ways. As another prophet says,
“O LORD, do not Your eyes look for truth? You struck them, but they felt no pain. You finished them off, but they refused to accept discipline. They have made their faces harder than stone and refused to repent” (Jeremiah 5:3).
Despite living as tax cattle on one giant political slave plantation that’s covered with cameras and police officers who stalk men and harass them, despite having the greatest prison population in the whole world, despite all the evident perversions of law and corruptions of justice, or despite living under one of the most evil and powerful regimes that has ever existed, the people of the land still defend human government as supposedly given to us by God for social order rather than as judgment against their sin. Despite God allowing the rulers who men raised up in their sin to be a terror to the sinful deeds of raising them up, supporting them, and serving them, these people have made their faces harder than stone and refused to repent. You can point to all the great evils around men today, which are clearly causal to the existence and expansion of human rule in society, and they will shake their heads in disagreement that these deeds have been sinful and resulted in all the wickedness that abounds around them.
The result of diluting repentance
Though weeping alone is not what repentance is all about, as we have seen the statists of the world are not even shocked and sorrowful at the evils of human government that they have brought upon themselves; they are still proud and arrogant men who are fully convinced that their wicked ways are fine by God and that they have not at all deviated from His natural order. We should not then sound as if we are completely dismissing any notion of repentance as having something to do with feeling sorrowful. Again, it is certainly a problem that that statists don’t feel the least bit bad about having raised up an Egyptian plunder system around them and their neighbors. The main problem with the common confinement of repentance to the idea of one merely “feeling sorry for our sins” is that it never really entails a regret for the specific sins of idolatry and support for political violence that led to one’s captivity under human rulers. So long as this recognition is present, then such weeping is perfectly Biblical and even entirely the type of shame and apologetic disposition that we are looking for in men who we can call truly repentant. As in some episodes in the Bible, we have men saying,
“‘O my God, I am ashamed and embarrassed to lift up my face to You, my God, because our iniquities are higher than our heads, and our guilt has reached the heavens. From the days of our fathers to this day, our guilt has been great. Because of our iniquities, we and our kings and priests have been delivered into the hands of the kings of the earth and subjected to the sword and to captivity, to pillage and humiliation, as we are this day’” (Ezra 9:6-7).
Far from looking back at their statist ancestors today and realizing they were also unrepentant sinners who had raised up human governments and praised their militaries and police forces and presidents as their heroes and saviors, most people today proudly follow in the same footsteps of their fathers before them, repeating generation after generation another line of statist idolaters who seemingly can never break free from their lust to be ruled by men. Far from looking back and seeing that human governments have their origin in a revolt against God, the people today still look back to the men who raised up these systems as their “founding fathers” and still think these false gods were responsible for giving them liberty.
Connecting bondage and sin
Though many people today have gotten the sense that something isn’t right in their society and do not find it hard to complain about all the obvious corruption and evils around them, they have yet to do the most important thing of making the connection that their own sin has been at the root of their bondage. Indeed, many of them still think the solution rests in continuing in the very sins that have already landed them in Egypt in the first place, like voting for new Pharaohs or seeking to reform these ungodly systems of government. This is why mere complaining that things have gone wrong in your society is no proof that men have identified sin as the source of their bondage or that they are nearing repentance, which requires that men wake up to the realities of their bondage as the result of evil acts of theirs like seeking human rulers and man-made legislation to begin with. To merely observe that things have gone wrong in the world is no proof whatever that a man understands the causes or solutions to these problems. Ten different people may agree on the existence of a problem (e.g., price inflation), with ten different theories as to how it came about and what must be done to remedy it.
This same problem arises in the popular conception of repentance today as something that does not entail much more than some vague idea of feeling sorrowful over one’s vaguely conceived sins, without any idea of sin as certain violations of God’s Law like having other gods (rulers) than the Lord and without any concern for the most noteworthy and glaring effects of these sins: to go into bondage to human rulers. Though many men do get the sense that something is not right with their society today, they have still ultimately failed to see that all these things—the expansion of the surveillance state or the rising tax burdens or prices of goods—have came upon them because of the sins of the people that raised up rulers and sought protection, law, and welfare from men who would ensnare them in tax bondage in exchange for these corrupted services. Furthermore, they fail to see that repentance is the only solution to all the evils that have resulted from a statist society like this one. Though men evidently do not like the effects of their own sin—being dominated by men who ruin everything about the society around them—they apparently do not hate it enough to repent, because they still choose to continue in all the same Babylonian ways that brought about these conditions. Indeed, many of them even call for doubling-down in their sins. “This is the most important election of our lifetimes! Don’t sit it out!”
What we need today is not mere weeping or crying in so-called churches which do not even rebuke men for the statism that has caused them to become captives to men, but for men to look at the awful state of the world around them—a political slave society that is looking to put men under the ground and wipe them off the earth—and see that all these evils have been the result of their own sins of supporting these kingdoms of men and their rulers, and that they better turn from their wicked ways sooner than later if there is any hope of being spared from being completely ruined under these men.
The effects of sin exposing it
If we ever hope for men to repent of their statist idolatry, they must come to see the connection between this sin and their political bondage. For it is in the visible effects of sin that its causes and origins are best revealed. Though idolatry and covetousness is sinful as it stands, this truth becomes even more undeniable when Stalins, Maos, and Franklin D. Roosevelts are starving you out, making you pay for their extravagant welfare schemes, shipping you off to war to die overseas, or confining you in prison camps. It is in the effects of sin—becoming the slaves of men—that the sin itself is fully exposed. For this reason, showing men the effects of their sin is a way of showing them the sin itself. We need men today who are willing to see that they are dominated by state rulers because of their own statist ways. As Scripture often records such episodes of invasion and the casual reality behind it,
“Then the king of Assyria invaded the whole land, marched up to Samaria, and besieged it for three years. In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria and carried away the Israelites to Assyria, where he settled them in Halah, in Gozan by the Habor River, and in the cities of the Medes. All this happened because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They had worshiped other gods and walked in the customs of the nations that the Lord had driven out before the Israelites, as well as in the practices introduced by the kings of Israel” (2 Kings 7:5-8).
All that which has happened to us today—being ruled by a caste of baby-eating, satan-worshiping pedophiles who plunder us for all we’re worth and imprison us or murder us when we contest their rule—is because we have sinned against the Lord our God, who would deliver us from the hands and jackboots of the Egyptians if only men would trust in His salvation rather than backing the very blue tyrants who stand against us as a judgment for the sins of raising them up.
It is this very thing—an awakening to the bondage around us and its connection to sin—that will be necessary to lead men to true repentance. Any supposed awakening that does not include the awareness that your society is an Egyptian one rather than a “free country” will never lead to true repentance. Because true repentance comes about when men realize not only that they live under an inherently ungodly system of government, which alone is regularly too much to ask of men, but that they have done it to themselves in supporting these systems and feeding from their hands. The real awakening comes when you start to see the statist slave society as more so a judgment for sin, rather than just a non-consensual encroachment upon your liberty. The real awakening comes when you realize the Babylonian captivity has been just, rather than an unjust one that came against a people—a land of idolatrous, statist sinners who whored themselves out to human governments for protection and benefits—who supposedly do not deserve it. And moreover, when you begin to see repentance and seeking God’s Kingdom as the only solution, rather than imagining that violent revolution against the enslavers is going to get you out of Egypt or that reforming these intrinsically evil systems can fix them.
Repentance as a recognition of sin and bondage
Though we may weep and feel shame and regret for our sins, and may even say that it is a necessary part of true repentance, the sins that must be acknowledged are the idolatry and covetousness connected to the wicked ideas and practices of statism that have moreover been causal to our bondage under these men. We must see that it was for all the adultery with Egypts and prostitution with Babylons that we are being destroyed under these systems of men, that it has been for all the evils of seeking human rulers and trusting in their systems of government that people have been wiped off the face of the earth throughout history, and that it was for these things that the Biblical prophets could look back and say “our fathers sinned and are no more” (Lamentations 5:7). Though we may weep at our sins, it must never be in some vague sense that divorces our iniquity from the statist ideas and practices that have caused our people to go into bondage to men and their systems of tax plunder and human slavery, which God reluctantly allows as a judgment against men for these wicked works (Samuel 8:7-9). In order for men to truly repent, they must see that the precise way that they have abandoned the ways of the Lord has been to reject His law to be ruled by men instead, that demanding kings and armies has been their foremost sin and rebellion that marked their turn away from the Lord’s kingship. This was always the story of the history of men: God showed men the way that was straight and right—make the Lord alone your King and trust in Him for all things—but they always turned aside to the statist ways of the people of the world. God gave men everything they could ever need and told them to live under His Law and rule alone,
“But they were disobedient and rebelled against You; they flung Your law behind their backs. They killed Your prophets, who had admonished them to return to You. They committed terrible blasphemies. So You delivered them into the hands of enemies who oppressed them, and in their time of distress they cried out to You. From heaven You heard them, and in Your great compassion You gave them deliverers who saved them from the hands of their enemies. But as soon as they had rest, they again did evil in Your sight. So You abandoned them to the hands of their enemies, who had dominion over them. When they cried out to You again, You heard from heaven, and You delivered them many times in Your compassion. You admonished them to turn back to Your law, but they were arrogant and disobeyed Your commandments. They sinned against Your ordinances, by which a man will live if he practices them. They turned a stubborn shoulder; they stiffened their necks and would not obey. You were patient with them for many years, and Your Spirit admonished them through Your prophets. Yet they would not listen, so You gave them into the hands of the neighboring peoples” (Nehemiah 9:26-30).
When men raise up false gods to be their rulers and presidents and lawmakers, they fling God’s Law behind their backs and suffer under the judgment that ensues against men who evidently show demonstrate that they do not want to be ruled by God. When men turn away from God’s rule, which they do namely by turning toward men and their governments to rule over them, God sees to it that they will be dominated by these men as a divine punishment for their rejection of the divine, anarchistic natural order. When men hand over their liberty under God to men to provide their justice, law, and welfare for them, God hands them over to these men, who enslave them as justice for their refusal to be ruled by God alone. For the sins of running around repeating statist slogans like “support our troops” or “back the blue,” God makes sure that these men will act as the very enemies of their freedom and safety.
Though men loosely conceive of repentance today as turning from some unspecified sins, in a way that that leaves them walking in the very statist ways of the world that they need to be turning from, true repentance looks like men seeing that the political bondage around them has been the result of their own sins and thereby desiring to turn back from these sins and, Lord willing, have the divine judgment that is upon them turned around by God. Unlike the statist idolaters today who call their worldly statist societies “free countries” and believe that their Roman ways are consistent with their claims of serving God, true repentance will always have to entail men seeing that the very existence of human rulers (to say nothing of all their wicked schemes and evils) is proof that they are under judgment for their own sins of raising them up, and that it has been for these specific reasons—whoring themselves out to Babylons for justice and protection and bread—that they are being taken for a plunder and hung out to dry under these artificial, man-made social disorders. As men in the Bible had realized before,
“So here we are today as slaves in the land You gave our fathers to enjoy its fruit and goodness— here we are as slaves! Its abundant harvest goes to the kings You have set over us because of our sins. And they rule over our bodies and our livestock as they please. We are in great distress” (Nehemiah 9:36-37).
Having eyes to see Egypt
As we have said, we still have a long way to go toward bringing men to repentance considering that they do not even recognize they are slaves in Egypt, much less that they are sinners who brought the evils of statism upon themselves. They have been fed on so much propaganda from both the State and the churches that they believe they are living in a free society that has received the blessings of God for their obedience, rather than the real case that they are living precisely under the curses of disobedience that come upon all those who walk in the Egyptian ways of the world instead of the Lord. They think that “taxation is the price we pay for civilization,” rather than a judgment for sin that comes upon all those men who turn to human rulers to manage their social affairs rather than protect and serve their neighbors on their own. They think that the evil regime that calls itself the “United States” is the one system where God made an exception for violating His Law, rather than it being but another system in the lineage of the Babylons, Egypts, and Romes that came before it which were likewise raised up in rebellion against Him.
Although some men appear to be waking up to the political slavery around them, even this alone is not good enough. We must ask how it came to be and what must be done to get out of it. There is all the difference in the world between realizing you got played, and understanding why and how it happened and what must be done to change things. Many Americans are unimpressively in the first category, which we may suppose is better than the previous state of not realizing that things have gone wrong at all. They merely sit around and complain about the way things have gone, and many of them still suppose that the solution rests in returning to some earlier stage of the sins that led them there. “We need to get back to the Constitution…The government needs to start abiding by its own law.” As much as we may welcome the progress of men realizing there is something wrong, which they were completely blinded to before, this alone does not mean they are headed directly to the solution. Again, they may well assume that it was only some certain law or president that caused things to go downhill. “We need to repeal XYZ act and get an America First president.”
So long as men refuse to see the evils of state rule as the result of their sinful political ideology and works, and repentance as a means of liberation from this bondage, they will be incapable of doing anything about the political slave society (which many still fail to see it at all). Until men realize that the evils of human government are but the consequence of the sins that raised these systems up and supported them, they will not be able to do anything about them and will continue to avoid repenting and seeking the Kingdom of God as the only solution. So long as they merely complain about their circumstances but fail to see the Biblical cause and effect behind the bondage of Egypt they are in, they will remain under the yoke of Pharaohs and the boots of his footmen.
As we have said, complaining that things have gone wrong is no proof at all that men understand why these things have happened to them: that they have been cursed by God himself for rebelling against His rule, which has come in the form of being dominated by political rulers, whose evils act as divine judgment against the evil works of trusting in them instead of God. It is really in the solutions that we know the man, not his whining about the declining condition of his society. For, again, any man can whine and moan and still think that voting is going to save him and “his” country. Socialists complain about everything too and yet they think the problem is “capitalism” and that the solution is more socialism. We learn more about who a man is when he tells us his plan for social change than we do when we hear about the things he doesn’t like. For anyone who still thinks there is a political solution is in no position to complain at all. Only those who see repenting and seeking God’s Kingdom as the solution are in a position to lament the terrible state of society, because they are the only ones expressing a willingness to no longer actively contribute to it but to instead turn around in repentance and seek another Kingdom.
Yet one may wonder why it is that so few people are able to even see Egypt, much less that it has come about due to the statist iniquity of the people? Why are the majority of professing Christians still statists? Why do they still actively seek the kingdoms of men? One real problem among the masses of professing Christians today is that they simply have never been shown anything or woken up by God nor had any spiritual experience that shifted their thinking away from the (statist) thoughts and ideologies of the world, namely those which defend human government as necessary to “law and order.” Though God says that those who seek Him with all their hearts will find Him (Jeremiah 29:13), they have never sought this divine wisdom, which would have brought them to the truth of the anti-statist nature of God’s Kingdom. They still think like worldly people because they have not actually sought the wisdom of the Lord and the Lord has not made in them a new heart either. Hence why they think God is a statist idolater like them who approves of the wicked systems of human civil government, as well as why they are stunned to hear the Christian Anarchist take that States exists, at best, as divine judgment against those sinners who sought to be ruled by men. Even reading the Bible doesn’t work for them, because they have ultimately never had the scales pulled down from their eyes by the Lord himself. They are still people who can’t see or hear, hence why it does no good to even argue with them. They are not in need of more Bible verses even, but a legitimate spiritual awakening of their darkened souls and hardened hearts that still defend the kingdoms of the world as being fine by God, when they stand as the foremost enemies of the divine, natural, anarchist order the way God intended it.
Though tens of millions of professing Christians today, of course, would say they are men who have repented from their sins, we are saddened to report that they are really men who are still going about their same Babylonian and Roman ways as usual. They have not even seen that they are captives in Egypt, much less that their own sins led them there. They do not believe it to be sinful at all to support or serve human governments and even actively encourage other so-called Christians to vote or join the military. Notwithstanding their vague notions of being one of the Lord’s children who are walking in His ways, they are men who are still in need of repentance from the sins that seek other men to rule over you and your neighbors, which will require them to first see that they are captives in Egypt rather than freemen of a “free country,” as well as shedding a whole list of other delusions they picked up from the institutions of Babylon rather than the word and spirit of God. As long as men fail to see they are living in a political slave society, they will never see that their own sins led them there. Anyone who sees a society under human rule as a good thing and even a blessing will only continue thinking they are doing things right just the way they are doing them now.
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