[This is part 38 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, thirty seven, thirty nine, forty, forty one, forty two, forty three]
In the previous article, we argued that we do not live in an impersonal universe where men are free to pursue the evils of political plunder without facing the consequences of bondage, nor one where freedom and prosperity cannot be found by men who live in harmony with God’s laws and make the Lord their only King. Rather, the social world operates under God’s laws and is actively overseen by Him. Both slavery and liberty result from very specific acts (either sin or repentance from sin, respectively) which bring about either bondage under human rule, or liberty under God’s exclusive kingship.
It would be incomplete to speak of sin and bondage without also emphasizing repentance and liberation, lest we make God into merely one who punished the iniquities of man but fails to save them from the effects of their evildoing, which is to go into bondage to Egyptians and Babylonians for adopting their statist ideas, practices, customs, laws, and culture. As much as we must contend that the sins of statism will always result in a people’s enslavement to the human governments that trusted in to save them from their enemies, and even that God himself assures that such evils will always result from mankind’s political rebellion against His rule, we must also submit that God can liberate men who repent of these sins of idolatry and covetousness and begin trusting in the Lord alone as their savior again.
The sovereignty of God
We can be all the more confident in the hope for repentance when we see that God has not only set His Laws into motion when He created the earth and mankind on it, but that He actively sees to it that the social laws are enforced and that neither the artificial socialist orders of man can succeed indefinitely or that the cries of repentant men who are turning away from the statist ways of the world will go unheard. We must believe, as the scripture says, that “the eyes of the LORD are upon the righteous, and his ears are open unto their cry” (Psalm 34:15). Though God personally sees to it that corruption and evils await those who walk down the wicked statist road of the world, He would see to that people who seek the narrow way of His Kingdom in repentance for the walking down the dark, statist road of the world will find salvation from the political tyranny that once came against them as a judgment for their sin. “The righteous cry, and the LORD hears, and delivers them out of all their troubles” (Psalms 34:17). To think that the same things come upon those who do evil and those who do good is simply not Biblical. “For the arms of the wicked shall be broken: but the LORD upholdeth the righteous” (Psalms 37:17).
That God is sovereign over the earth and the people thereon gives us all the hope needed that turning from our wicked ways would not go without producing actual results, in the same way that pursing the evil political path of erecting human governments has not gone without its consequences. Just as God curses the disobedient works of statists by sending political captivity upon an idolatrous people who seek rulers and violent systems of government to provide for them, so He would bless those who obey His commands and turn away from these wicked political works and seek the anarchistic Kingdom of God instead. God not only put the moral and economic law into the social structure which forbids men from partaking in statist practices without paying a price for it; He is also actively taking note of its violators and reviewing their transgressions. This is seen in the prophets when God instructs them to “get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before Me” (Jonah 1:2). It is never just that the sins of statism result in bondage naturally, although we may also conceive of the casual laws of God as inbuilt into the social structure since creation, but also that God himself sees and notes the iniquities of these people and plans to visit such men who their wicked practices. It is never only that man’s wicked political pursuits have caused him to go into bondage, but also that such “sins are piled up to heaven” (Revelation 18:5).
Trusting in the Lord’s salvation
One problem we face today is that men do not believe that God is active in blessing and cursing. They do not believe that they will face divine judgment for the wicked pursuit of man-made systems of government, whether by coming up against the causal laws of God or the direct hand of God himself. Moreover, they have not believed that God would literally and physically save them from political bondage if they repented from the ideas and practices that led to their captivity under Egyptian system of human rule. In thinking there are no consequences for their sins, nor blessings that await righteous behavior, men do not think that they will pay a price for pursuing the statist ways of the world, or that there is any good reason to turn from them. The problem has never been that God would not liberate us from the bondage of Egypt if only we would turn from our Egyptian ways, but that men have always failed to trust in God and have rejected His promises of divine deliverance for those who will turn their ways back to the Lord.
We see just how much both liberty and bondage are a matter of true faith or the lack thereof, respectively. If men do not place their faith in the Lord then they will never seek to live by God’s ways and will always instead erect systems of human government to provide them with the things (protection, law, justice) that God supposedly cannot. If men are ever to be liberated from the political slavery that they live under today, which has come upon them solely do to the sins of idolatry that invited God’s judgment upon them, they must believe that returning to the Lord as their Savior is their only hope for divine deliverance from the bondage of Egypt, which again has been exclusively the result of their sinful lust for human rulers and their insatiable appetite for the benefits they provide by robbing our neighbors to maintain a socialist system of public goods, which has only ensnared the people into tax slavery to pay for it all and trapped them under a police state that rules over them as a judgment against these wicked works of theirs. If men are to ever be freed from the statist slave society that they have brought upon themselves through their own idolatry and covetousness, they will have to believe that repentance is a necessary and that God has no plans to remove a people from the bondage of Egypt who will not turn from their Egyptian ways and abandon their prostitution with the kings, militaries, and police forces of the world. If men are ever to be taken out of Egypt by the God who has divinely redeemed men before from a slavery of their own doing, they will have to repent of their rebellious political ways and turn back to the Lord as their only God and trust in His salvation.
Faith and bondage
The reason the people of the world still live as slaves to human governments today is not that God has forgotten about men or has not plan to redeem them from their political enslavement, but that men have never really had the faith in God necessary to be freed from the bondage of Egypt and have chosen instead to remain in their Egyptian ways of raising up Pharaohs and looking to his legislators and law-enforcers to order their societies for them. They have thought of faith as a mere belief in the existence of God, rather than as repentant faith that actually leads them to turning their allegiance back to God alone and trusting in His divine plan for liberation and security rather than in the false promises of Pharaohs and police officers for protection.
It has always been due to a lack of true faith that tens of millions of professing Christians still trust in human governments to save them. The only explanation for men turning to human governments for security and order, whether they profess to be Christians or do not take the Lord’s name in vain, is that they do not have a true faith that trusts fully in the Lord alone to be their savior and liberator, which leads them to seek it from presidents, soldiers, legislators, and law-enforcers instead. The ideology and practices of statism have always had their origins in a lack of faith in God. When men do not trust that the Lord would secure their liberty and security in a free society under His exclusive rule, they will inevitably seek it in human rulers. The political ideology of statism, which argues that human rulers are necessary to social order, is the characteristic mark of men who have no faith in God. For a godly people do not fear what would happen to them with Pharaohs and Caesars ruling over them; they trust in the Lord to provide for them no matter how many soldiers are encamped around them and no matter how dark the valley of the shadow of death becomes.
It is a lack of faith in God to provide for those who trust in Him that explains both man’s original pursuit of human rulers and their ongoing refusal to repent from trusting in these governments to provide their “law and order” for them. Just as a lack of faith in God led men to seek human kings to fight their battles for them, believing that God would not do this, so a lack of faith keeps them from turning from these ways. The unwillingness of men to repent from their sinful belief in human rulers and their wicked practices of putting these men into power has always been rooted in both the lack of faith in God to provide for them in a free society of people who trust in the Lord alone, as well as the lack of belief that God punishes sin and a statist people will always be cursed with bondage. If men do not believe that God would save them if they placed their faith in the Lord to be their deliverer, or that they will be a cursed people who live under the Babylonian boot so long as they continue to behave this way, then they will not see any reason to repent of these sins. If men do not believe that the blessings of liberty can follow repentance, just as they do not believe that the curses of bondage follow disobedience, they are not likely to turn from their Babylonian ways. They will think that there is no good in turning from their statist practices nor any evil to come for remaining in them. They will reason that one may as well keep walking like an Egyptian while in Egypt, even though this is the opposite of what it means to be in the world (i.e., living in statist territory) but not of it (i.e., living as a citizen of these statist systems). Because, they reason, that God supposedly doesn’t curse these worldly practices or save His faithful people who turn their hearts and minds away from the things of the world — namely the statist ideology and political practices that support human rulers and their authoritarian systems of government.
The “faith and works” dichotomy has gone a long way in muddying the waters and making men see righteous action as existing in conflict with some pure idea of faith that does not result in works. The excessive “faith alone” preaching has had the tendency to make pew-sitters think that they may continue about their same old wicked ways as before and that God wants them to remain just where they are mentally and physically, living under the strong delusion that God wants them to partake in the politics of human governments or that joining their police forces and armies are permissible so long as they “believe in God.”
Notwithstanding the seemingly popular idea that mere belief in God has made it to where men no longer need to turn from their whoredom with the statist systems of the world, the fact is that faith, repentance, and works can never really be separated this way. Those who will not repent of the statist idolatry demonstrate that they do not have true faith. For true faith leads men to repent from their faith in men and their systems of government to save them. It leads them to return their trust in the Lord as their only savior. Faith is not just some mere mental assent to the existence of God; it produces the fruit of men seeking another Kingdom that is not of this world and its political systems. Thus we see scriptures that tell us to “produce fruit worthy of repentance” (Matthew 3:8). The New Living Translation, which often puts things in a very straightforward way, makes things even easier to understand here. “Prove by the way you live that you have repented of your sins and turned to God” (Matthew 3:8, NLT). Men who still live like statists and raise up human rulers to be their masters precisely demonstrate that they do not have true faith in God and have not repented of their sins. They show that they are faithless men who do not trust in the Lord as their savior. There is a reason Jesus taught that we know men by their fruit. Men who profess the Lord’s name with their lips but continue to support the Roman systems of the world with their minds and feet show that they merely take the Lord’s name in vain and have no faith that led them to true repentance.
Repentance and the Kingdom of God
Since repentance and the fruit that follows from it are evidence of true faith, we should see that we must do more than to simply claim we “believe in God” if we are to truly be men who have faith in the Lord as our King. Faith is more than a feeling or belief. True faith goes hand in hand with repentance and pledging allegiance to another Kingdom that is not of this world and its systems of government. To be counted among the faithful we must do more than simply claim the name of the Lord with our lips. We must actively and adamantly seek to further the Kingdom of God in our repentance from walking the wicked path of pursuing the kingdoms of the world, which has been characteristic of man’s sin and rebellion against God. And we must do this with the faith that God will blessed those who seek His ways, that all things will be added unto those who follow the ways of the Lord’s Kingdom (Matthew 6:33). Though modern Christians seemingly have an aversion to righteousness, which only naturally leads them to endorse the wicked works of seeking human governments, scripture has it the other way around: “For thou, LORD, wilt bless the righteous; with favor wilt thou compass him as with a shield” (Psalm 5:12).
Despite the common conception of faith as nothing more than some mental assent to the existence of God or religion as holding to some set of theological doctrines instead of actually serving others, the idea of faith cannot be separated from trusting that God would secure and provide for those who return to the anti-statist ways of His Kingdom and begin serving their neighbors freely and voluntarily in repentance for the statist ways of the world that operate on compulsion, force, and human rule. Truly faithful men do not remain in the apathetic belief that it is not worth turning from our wicked political ways to pursue the decentralized, anarchistic Kingdom of God. Instead, they believe that repentance—changing the our hearts and minds away from the statist ways of the world—can also bring changed outcomes to the social order around us from its presently backward state to the upright condition intended by God in the beginning of His creation, before men deviated from His natural order by raising up human rulers and their governments. Anyone with true faith in the Lord must believe that turning away from the statist practices of the world—this is what trust repentance is all about—may undo the bondage of human rule that came upon them due to their rebellious political ways that they formerly held to when they were still walking in the darkness of the world and had not yet known the Light. Anyone who doubts that the repentance which accompanies any true faith in the Lord could turn back the curse of state bondage that we are under today would have to contend with the many examples in scripture where people had turned from the wicked path they were currently on and caused God to respond by relenting from the disaster He planned to bring upon them otherwise. Unless we are to doubt the Lord God’s promises to bless those who seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, or fail to heed His warnings of the curses of bondage that come upon the disobedient, then we must see that men repenting from their worldly political ways and pursuing the Kingdom of God instead is a necessary part in being liberated from the bondage of Egypt that God alone can grant. Just as the sin of believing in human governments and seeking to further their kingdoms was the way into the bondage of Egypt, so is repentance from these rebellious political ways the way out of it.
If men are truly faithful and repentant, they must do a lot more than simply sit around and say they believe in God. They must actively seek the Kingdom of God as the necessary fruit of their faith and repentance. That so few professing Christians do this today only shows that they are outside of the true faith. Most professing Christians today remain either active idolaters of the kingdoms of the world or apathetic pew-sitters who decide that there is no use in trying to do anything about the world around them, because they do not have a faith that has led them to produce the real fruit of furthering the Kingdom of God. They have not only failed to turn away from their evils, but have also failed to turn toward the good. True repentance, however, entails more than merely turning away from the wrong path, which alone is too much to ask of all the Babylonian voters and patriots who call themselves Christians today; it entails turning toward the good. Men must not only turn away from their wicked support for human governments to find the divine blessings that come only to those who seek the righteous path, but must also take up the positive work of seeking the Kingdom of God as part of their repentance. As we have written before, repentance is not just a mental change from the statist ideology of the world, which to be sure is a necessary requisite to even arrive at a point of pursuing true repentance. It also entails men actually beginning to seek the Kingdom of God by looking to gather other repentant sheep into congregations of mutual service. As much as men must free themselves of the mental slavery of statism that trusts in human rulers to save them and turn their faith back to the Lord as their savior, this faith should also produce a repentance that leads them to seek another Kingdom altogether.
When we submit that repentance will play a necessary role in God liberating us from the bondage of Egypt, we must go one step further and submit that it is not enough simply to turn away from the statist philosophy of the world in order to turn back the judgment of political captivity that men live under today. To merely become ideological Christian Anarchists, which to be sure is a first step in repenting from the statist ideology of the world, is still not good enough if we are to ever get out a political captivity that did not just arise out of the idolatry of the people but also out of their failure to further a Kingdom that would abolish it. In addition to this basic repentance from the statist ideology that men picked up from the world when they were minded in its ways, men must begin to seek the literal Kingdom of God as the only alternative to the violent political systems of the world that have had their origins in both the overt idolatry of our people and their slothfulness to gather together for direct service to one another in a free society under God. In addition to turning from the sins of idolatry, covetousness, and sloth that led men to outsource their personal responsibilities to human rulers, they must begin to take up the positive work of agitating others toward this cause and seek to form actual congregations of mutual service where they begin to provide for their neighbors directly and freely out of personal responsibility. Only when men begin freely serving their neighbors again and trusting in God’s provision—the very things they failed to do when they trusted in the State to provide for them instead—will the governments of men be abolished and made obsolete. A repentant people must learn to practice the pure religion of direct service to others that keeps men unspotted from the world and its systems of social welfare.
What is lacking today even among most Christian Anarchists is the Abolitionist spirit to get out there and agitate the masses and actually begin gathering to seek the literal Kingdom of God. They have gotten the theory, theology, and ideology right, but they just don’t care enough to actually hit the ground running and call upon others to seek this Kingdom with them and make it their life mission to do so. They are content sitting around and remaining mere theoreticians rather than strategists. They are even comfortable sitting around in pews and dabbling in all the regular old slothful activities of your stock false convert who drops in the so-called churches to perform some Sunday rituals with some dead sheep, in order to feel better about not taking up the real work of seeking another Kingdom that abolishes the kingdoms of the world. They are often even weak enough to compromise with the kingdoms of the world for incrementalist gains that lead them to keep voting or seeking legislative victories that they believe might lead them closer to the Promised Land, though which are never forthcoming. They do this because they lack the Abolitionist ideology that seeks immediate abolition of slavery and does do with an unstoppable ideological motivation to work toward that end. Even among the people who have repented of statist ideology then, which we have said is a requisite step of repentance, there are still many of men who have not gone all the way to actually begin seeking the Kingdom of God as a positive duty of man.
Getting active for God’s Kingdom
Once we see that it was not only overt idolatry—whether the mere belief in human rulers or actively supporting them—that led to raising up systems of human government, but also the slothfulness of failing to seek the literal Kingdom of God as an alternative to the authoritarian systems of men, we see just how much more men really need to do to be counted among the faithful. Seeing that our bondage under human governments arose not just due to the evil works of pursuing the politics of the world, but grew also out of the slothfulness of the people to seek the Kingdom of God, should lead to see the necessity to take action in undoing this bondage. A people who openly and enthusiastically support the kingdoms of the world will most definitely find themselves the slaves of men, but so will those who do not think they must take up the positive work of seeking the Kingdom of God. For this reason we must submit that all those who have not sought to call others to repent and gather together for mutual service together in decentralized Kingdom congregations are as guilty of going into Babylonian captivity as those idolaters who overtly praised these men and raised them up into office. This is why the “we just want to be left alone” attitude of many men is insufficient for liberty. The governments of man were not just raised up by enthusiastic bootlickers who acted as its cheerleaders and served as vehement apologists for the State and soldiers in its cause, but also by the slothfulness of those men who failed to actually provide for their people on their own out of a love for their neighbors—whether because they were too busy chasing after the kingdoms of the world, because their repentance did not move beyond a mere turning away from the evil course of worldly politics, or both.
It is no surprise then that people today do not think they need to do much of anything at all to be left alone by the statists who have come to dominate them in their slothfulness to seek another Way. Just as apathetic as they were before as the oppressive Babylonian systems they currently live under were raised up around them, which they they they had no real part in supporting or enabling, so they think they have no real responsibilities in doing away with it by seeking the alternative that is found only in the Kingdom of God as a network of assistance that provides men with the welfare and charity needed to keep them off the Roman dole. Just as they did not act while Egypt grew up around them and spread its branches to all areas and facets of human life, so they don’t really think they should do anything now for it to go away. “Just leave me alone,” they say, though they don’t actually care about their neighbors and work to see them free. Thus we have men who still think that they don’t really need to do anything to right the ship and steer things back to the right course. They think that all our troubles should go away without any effort on their part.
The apathy is real even among many Christians who may see that the governments of the world are evil and should be abolished, yet who do not believe they need to do anything toward this end. They may see that governments are evil—a first step in awakening to be sure—but they do nothing to further the cause of seeking God’s Kingdom as the only alternative that can eventually make human government obsolete and non-existent. Others may not like the way things have gone, but still refuse to turn away from the sinful works that caused all of their problems. They complain about the evils and corruptions of human government but continue to vote for new presidents and seek legislative victories that they believe will heal their lands, when it was always God who promises to heal a people who will trust in Him alone. “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14).
This apathy becomes even worse under the widespread treatment of “works” as a dirty word by Christians, who often assume it has been negated by “faith alone,” in a way that absolves them from any real responsibility to actually love and serve their neighbors again. They think they’re already saved and one of the Lord’s children merely because they professed His name, even though they were never doers of the word who loved the Lord by keeping His commandments or had a faith that really meant their exclusive fidelity and allegiance to the Lord as their savior. These people think that all the evils they are under should just go away without lifting a finger to that end. They think the tyrants should just disappear and leave them alone, even though they have come to dominate the people because they are filling a void left by slothful men who didn’t want to serve their neighbors on their own or who overtly outsourced these duties to human governments, who they believed to be the necessary providers of law, justice, and welfare. They do not think that any of the troubles that are only catching up with them today have been the result of their own idolatry, covetousness, and slothfulness that is inseparable from their support for human governments or their failure to seek God’s Kingdom apart from it. And nor do they think they need to repent from the sins that led them here and turn back another way again. In other words, many people think they can keep doing the same things that allowed for the Roman-American system to grow up around them and still have it go away! Yet this would make God one who allows men to get away with evil, who allows men to sinfully pursue human rulers without coming under judgment. For men to think that no real change in their way of thinking or acting is required to get rid of a system that was raised up under their current thinking and behavior just goes to show how deep their rebellion has truly been. Not only have they revolted against God by setting these systems up, but they also resist repentance for these sins, which is the only way to turn things around again.
There is perhaps another, more practical reason that we must not only turn from our wicked ways but also actively seek the literal Kingdom of God as part of our repentance. The Egyptian police-state society we live under today was not built overnight. It took a long time for Pharaohs and their chariot-operators and horsemen to build systems of political plunder that were powerful enough to bring all of the people under their boot. It took decades and even centuries of people either supporting these systems or doing nothing as they rose for them to reach this point. Even the first quarter of the twenty-first century has seen a rather unprecedented rise in state power that the American State had not quite obtained in the century before it, and one might even argue that the first part of this decade has seen an enormous expansion of the surveillance apparatus that was not fully in place before Operation Covid-19. Likewise, undoing this system of slavery will require a lot of work on our part that frankly few men have in them to begin. As much as men must turn from their idolatrous support for these governments, they must also build the alternative that is found only in furthering the Kingdom of God and preaching this gospel to men in a way that leads them to gather in its cause.
God as active throughout history
One difficulty in getting men to gather with us to seek the Kingdom of God is not only that they are comfortable supporting the kingdoms of the world, but also that many other mental factors and quasi-Biblical ideas have kept them from seeking to enter through the narrow gate of God’s Kingdom that could lead them off the Egyptian plantation they are currently living on. In addition to the already slothful attitudes of most professing Christians who do not think that repenting from their statist ways must play a part in any divine liberation from the bondage of Egypt, there is the common belief that there is no hope of seeking the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven and no real duty to begin gathering in this cause because we are up against the end of the world and God has supposedly wanted men to live under these statist systems. They believe that the bondage of Egypt—the statist slave society we live under today—is this way for eschatological reasons and will not change until mankind’s days on earth are over. Men supposedly could not have avoided living under the Roman systems of the world even if they repented from acting like Romans. The governments of men are assumed to be unavoidable in history and an inherent part of human society on earth.
That human government is not inevitable, but rather a result of the sins of man, is the primary reason for our assertion that God remains sovereign over the social affairs of men and that the Lord himself blessed or curses the righteous or wicked works of man, respectively — that men can either act wickedly and find themselves under the divine judgment of state rule or they can seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and find themselves divinely protected and liberated from the Egyptian bondage that God sends only upon a statist people. When we see that our earth operates under the causal laws of God instead of some deterministic or unavoidable path that cannot be changed, we can then begin to see that we must act differently if they want to change the society around us. It was not without reason that we ended up in the bondage of Egypt today. It was through specific sins like idolatry and covetousness, where rebellious men raised up human rulers and sought provision from their hands, that caused them to live under the political systems of the world that function as God’s form of judgment against statist sinners. It is for no other reason than sin that men are in political bondage today — whether this was the overt sin of setting up kings behind God’s back, or the simple failure to seek the Kingdom of God as an alternative to these governments of man.
Turning back to God to turn back the captivity
Contrary to the apathetic thinking of the subdued masses, whose deterministic and worldly ways of reasoning has led them to believe that the political ways of the world were unavoidable or even represent God’s ideal social order, there is nothing permanent or inevitable about the statist bondage we live under today. The political captivity that men have gone under today is solely the result of sins such as idolatry for human government, covetousness for their benefits that are funded by robbing our neighbors to fund their socialist systems of law and welfare, and the simple failure to seek God’s Kingdom and love and serve our neighbors on our own. It is through these things only that human governments have arisen to dominate men. God neither commanded men to raise up systems of human civil government or gave it to them as their source of social order, whether during creation or at any time thereafter. In every instance where men sought to form and further systems of human rule—from Cain’s city-state, to Nimrod’s Babylon, or the Israelites’ request for Samuel to give them a king—it was shown to be a rebellion against God that would thereby result in a curse against them in the form of tax bondage, conscription, and general slavery. In every instance when God was sending the sword against the Israelites in the Bible, it was shown to be for their rejection of God’s words, commands, and duties that led them to fall into an idolatry and faith in human rulers and their armies to save them. One cannot find an example of God sending Babylonians or Egyptians to plunder and enslave the Israelites that was not a judgment for their very specific sins of idolatry and evil. The connection between sin and bondage was always present in every episode of the people of the Bible going into captivity to men or being drug into exile in a foreign land. To think otherwise would make the laws of God arbitrary and confusing, such that men may well act however they would like, since God may send the sword against the righteous just as much as the wicked. This does not mean that some righteous men will not find themselves trapped in bondage due to the sins of their neighbors. There is always a remnant that finds themselves wondering how the wicked have been exalted while they themselves have been made poor and oppressed by these plunderers (e.g., Jeremiah 12). Our contention here is that, generally speaking, the judgment of statism only comes upon an idolatrous and covetous people as a whole, although even the slothful men who haven’t began serving their neighbors are also guilty of the sins that allowed for statism to grow up around them. Should the masses turn from their wicked ways, God would turn away the bondage that He sent upon them for their former ways.
Though many men do not like to hear that God judges sin and prefer to paint God as a tyrant rather than understand His causal laws and repent, there is actually a positive message here that should give men every reason to be hopeful about turning from their evil ways. That the evils of statism, which serve as a divine curse upon the sins of man, are only the result of the iniquity attached to pursuing such systems of human rule, it is clear that repenting from these wicked ways could turn back the captivity that God has sent upon men for the specific wicked practices of making men our protectors and providers rather than trusting in the Lord for these things. Though the statists of today who call themselves Christians essentially refuse to repent of their political sins or do not believe that there could be any blessings in doing so, scripture shows us many examples of God relenting of the disaster He planned to bring upon a people upon their repentance from their wicked ways.
“Therefore, O house of Israel, I will judge you, each according to his ways, declares the Lord GOD. Repent and turn from all your transgressions, so that your iniquity will not become your downfall. Cast away from yourselves all the transgressions you have committed, and fashion for yourselves a new heart and a new spirit. Why should you die, O house of Israel? For I take no pleasure in anyone’s death, declares the Lord GOD. So repent and live!” (Ezekiel 18:30-32).
Though we are under divine judgment today in the very form of having to live under these political plunder systems, the evils of statism should be seen more so as God’s form of justice against the sinners who set them up and furthered themselves rather than as some natural law of the universe that says they are inevitable or permanent features of human life on earth. The bondage that human rulers always bring down on men is a divine rebuke against the sins that raised these systems up, not something that can never be done away with or which unjustly came upon godly men who played no part in their existence. All of the governments of men were set up and advanced by sinners whose Babylonian ideas and deeds led them to believe that human governments were necessary and that men must be appointed to rule over them. There is no such thing as state rulers dominating godly men; this curse is exclusively a judgment against a sinful and ungodly people. Everywhere there is a State one will find idolatrous and covetous men whose sins permitted these systems to exist. Hence the everyday sightings of government flags or political lawn signs as well as the common phrases like “support our troops” or “back the blue” that can be found in all corners of American society. These are the people whose sins have led to their bondage. It is impossible to imagine a statist society without an ungodly people who have trusted in men to serve them. Not only do godly men not set up human governments and bring all their consequential evils upon themselves, but God does not judge a people who have placed their faith in the Lord alone; this judgment comes only upon those men who have turned toward Pharaohs, armies, lawmakers, and law enforcers to save them. Though we may also conceive of the evils of human government as the people themselves reaping all the evils they have sown in chasing after the kingdoms of man and finding themselves fighting against the social-economic law implanted in the social structure by God, we should also see them as the active curses of God, who has not only designed the social laws to work against the ambitions of statists who imagine they can erect centralized systems of socialist governments that manage whole economies and decree their fantasies into existence by waving their pens or shaking their fists, but who also actively works to assure that the judgment of political evils comes down upon the heads of statist idolaters who set up the wicked systems of political violence.
Once we see that the bondage of statism is more so an active judgment of God against the statolatry of the people, without which would not have led to their enslavement, we can see that repentance may actually bring about social change and liberation from Egypt. That God uses States and their evils to keep statists in political bondage is actually good news for the people of the world today, especially as contrasted to the idea that human civil government is a permanent feature of life on earth from which no man can escape. It means that just as easily as God sent the curse upon the disobedient statists of the world who turned to men as their protectors and providers, He could also deliver the repentant captives from their bondage and bless them with liberty. Just as sure as the sin of organizing one’s society along the violent political means of the world has resulted in their bondage at the hands of God, so their subjection could be overturned through repentance. Only idolatrous and covetous people get dominated by human rulers as a curse upon their sin. A people who repent from their statist ways may find liberty through a faith in the Lord that leads to true repentance.
Do we ever get out of slavery?
The issue that mankind has always faced toward his subjection is not so much that it cannot be undone by the God who sent the bondage upon a statist people for their sins, but that men have not believed that God would actually do this for people who turn from their wicked political ways. We have always had men who assume that state rule is inevitable, which is more or less negated by their simultaneous belief that they must participate in it, which is the only reason it has come upon them. Instead of repentant men who turn from the evils of the world and trust in God to provide the results, we have always had men who continue to dabble in the evils of the world and assume that this is the only way to slightly make things better for themselves. The irony here is that these are the same men who refuse to repent from the sins which guarantee their judgment.
The ungodly worldview of an earthly existence where human government cannot be abolished takes away from the causal reality implanted in the social structure by God, where men receive blessings and curses due to obedience and rebelliousness, respectively. It treats God’s creation as an inevitably disastrous one that cannot be avoided, despite all the explanations of cause and effect in scripture that point to such judgments coming only to those men who do evil. It treats the universe as an impersonal one that is not overseen by the Creator himself, who assures that evil-doing is punished and that blessings come to those who seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.
Inevitability and unrepentance
The interesting effect of assuming that state rule is inevitable, or otherwise that repentance could not lead to divine liberation from its domination, is for men to continue in all the sins that brought it about and furthered its rule into an undeniably pervasive and destructive one. This deterministic view, which strips God’s sovereignty out of the picture, has had the ironic effect of keeping men from repenting for these sins and thus keeping them in bondage too. The belief that God would not deliver the repentant captives from Egypt keeps men believing that they should stay behind and “at least” attempt to raise up a “lesser evil” Pharaoh work to get his lawmakers to approximate God’s Law in their next legislative session. The sins of incrementalism here become perpetuity in practice and keep men from ever turning away from the voting booths of Babylon, assuming that men in bondage may as well partake in all the sins that led to it.
It is easy to see how incapacitating the view of the alleged inevitably of government slavery has been upon the minds and works of the people, who have judged that there is no use in devoting themselves exclusively to the Lord, who they assume would apparently not bless their faith and allegiance to His rule. Why repent and turn back to God’s ways if there is no reward for it? Why turn away from the voting booths of Babylon or stop lining up at her welfare offices or military recruiting stations if it doesn’t pay to do so? Why do anything at all if the world is coming to an end?
By showing that the social laws of the world were put there by God and are under His watch, we can refute both the statist schemes that make human rule out to be inevitable, as well as the pacifying worldview pushed by these same men who work to make men believe that the Lord could not remove their yoke from around our necks if only we showed we were ready to serve God alone against and come out of the Egyptian-statist ways of the world. This is why we have sought to make it clear that state rule and its resulting evils are an effect of sin, not some natural law of history. The political slavery that has come upon a people whose idolatry has led them to raise up rulers has been the consequences of sin, not an inevitable and unavoidable fate of mankind that cannot be turned back through repentance and faith in the Lord. To think otherwise is to deny that statism and its accompanying evils have been God’s judgment against the workers of iniquity who raise up authoritarian governments and seek to rule over their neighbors, not something that arose through its own might or which exists outside the watch of God’s eye, who eventually judges these systems too for their own evils.
Sin and the inevitability of state rule
The reason that men live under political systems today that trace their roots back to Babylon, Egypt, and Rome is not that God has permanently cursed the earth and made it beyond redemption, but that men have rebelled against God’s Law and consequently found themselves living under the wicked and plunderous governments of man. It is not that the evils of human government are inevitable per se, or that warning of the disaster that awaits all those who continue down this path is mere pessimistic prophesying by men who do not think that restoration is possible should these people turn back to the Lord. Rather, the political evils we live under today—the taxation, mass incarceration, police state, war, or worldwide psychological operations—are inevitable only so long as men continue down the wicked statist path of the world. Political evils are a punishment from God for the sins of idolatry and covetousness and the refusal to be ruled by God otherwise. They do not come upon people who seek God’s Kingdom by gathering to serve each other as citizens of Heaven and who look to literally feed their neighbors and provide for them in a regularized network of charity that keeps their people from seeking bread from Caesar and becoming a slave. Only sinners find themselves being ruled by Egyptians. Only men who beg for bread and security from Babylonians find themselves as captives to human rulers. Only statist whores who fawn over Pharaohs and their officers as their supposed liberators and heroes find themselves living on tax plantations where they are made to give up trillions of dollars of their property to fund these plunder systems that they mistakenly thought existed to secure their liberty or maintain “law and order.”
There is nothing random, unexplainable, or even unjust about men finding themselves dominated by other men who rob and murder them to find their systems of so-called government: these systems of slavery exist as so long as men live like statist whores and only as long as they continue to do so. They have not come upon a just and righteous people who walk in the ways of the Lord, but upon a wicked people who have walked into the ways of the world. As soon as men repent of their adultery with the kingdoms of the world, they would be abolished, save their service elsewhere in correcting some other statist prostitutes who have not yet learned their lesson in the divine punishment that God brings down upon the political harlotry of men. This was the law of God all along: men can either prostitute themselves out to princes, kings, presidents, congressmen, soldiers, and police officers, and find themselves living in an Egyptian police state society as divine judgment for their own sins; or they can make the Lord their God and be divinely protected from having to be dominated by the statists whom God sends upon the sinners of the world who reject His rule.
The one eschatological view that has long been missing from Christian thinking virtually throughout its entire existence has been that most of the ups and downs of human history have been cyclical — that there have been periods where men have repented and have been given an exodus from their Egyptian captors, and where men have sinned and gone back into the bondage of Egypt. As we know, the latter episodes of statist idolatry and subsequent slavery have dominated the historical record of mankind, who for the most part have sadly preferred live as slaves under human governments rather than freemen under the Lord.
Yet we should not get caught in the thinking that Egypt and her plagues are irreversible, lest we deny that the causal reality and play of God’s Law order is not in effect. The evils of statism are a result of man’s sins. Men go into bondage for sin alone and come out of it through repentance alone. Notwithstanding the statist lie that their rule cannot be undone, God’s use for it does not extend beyond judging the sins that have set it up. It is only in its role of acting as a gang of terrorists against the sinners who set up that the governments of men are “ordained” by God and its rulers can be said to be His “servants.”
Those who repent of sins such as voting and taking the property of their neighbors as distributed through these socialist systems of government, and who furthermore seek the Kingdom of God as part of their repentance, can be divinely liberated from their enslavement under human governments. As much as modern Christians reject this message under the thinking that God’s grace allows them to do as they please, or their view that faith without works is not dead, men will have to turn back to God’s ways if they want to reverse the corrupt and crooked course they are currently on, which again is the only reason they are living in Egypt today.
Turning our minds back to the Lord
When we understand repentance as turning one’s minds and actions back to the ways of the Lord, we see just how important repentance is to changing the society around us, which as we have argued is not the result of random actions but rather the specific sins of the people that have led to them to be judged by God. For the basic philosophical idea that thoughts precede actions means that the mere belief in human government will lead either to apathy or outright participation in the wicked political systems of the world, which are furthered by both idolatrous voters or slothful pew-sitters. If men do not repent of the mental slavery that believes in human rulers, they will only continue to participate in their election rituals that raise them up or otherwise continue on as men whose actions or inactions allow for the advancement of the kingdoms of the world rather than the Kingdom of God. The kingdoms of men are content with either flag-waving patriots, apathetic pew-sitters, or both, whichever they can produce and train into men to keep them seeking man’s kingdoms or otherwise failing to seek God’s. They can expand through both the enthusiastic idolatry of the people or the apathy of men who do not believe it is their duty to seek the Kingdom of God and serve their neighbors directly on their own out of personal responsibility. To be sure, it has always been a mix of both that allowed for the rise of human governments. Those men who sit in the pews of churches on Sunday morning, who may have even turned away from actively participating in worldly politics but who also refused to begin serving their neighbors as God’s Kingdom people, have done just as much to permit the evil governments of man to exist as the active idolaters who wave Caesar’s flag from their porches, who are not in short supply in these churches either. This means that even if men turn away from their idolatry in repentance but do not actively seek God’s Kingdom as part of it, the kingdoms of the world will still be able to exist as they fill the void of serving those who men fail to serve on their own.
The problem we have always faced is two-fold. Not only is it like pulling teeth to get men to even turn away from their statism, but we have the added difficulty of getting them to seek God’s Kingdom. As much as the latter can never be done while men participate in the former, it will also not automatically be done merely by turning away from it. People could always theoretically abandon statism in their minds and run for the hills and escape from their duties to their neighbors. They could always just becomes monks or ascetics who adopt the monastic life and fail to evangelize others in the cause of seeking God’s Kingdom. They could always just go off and hunker-down on their own, perhaps not participating in the politics of worldly kingdoms anymore but also refusing to actually serve their neighbors as a substitute for their rule. Indeed they do it all the time. Turning away from evil alone is thus not true repentance, nor repentance which leads to the abolition of human government. Men must also turn toward the good. They must seek to serve others and liberate them from bondage by assuring that they are fed freely and directly rather than through the compulsory offerings of taxation that forcibly distribute our neighbors’ property and bring everyone into bondage.
Again, few men today believe that repentance would actually bring about any social change, which is why they remain Egyptian whores rather than men who have turned their sights back to the Lord. The statists of the world, many who call themselves Christians, effectively argue that repentance will not suffice to remove the yoke of bondage. They dismiss the only real means of actually changing the world—calling upon individuals to repent and reorient their thoughts and actions back to the Lord and His Kingdom—and argue instead that that men must continue to partake in the sins of Babylon if they are to be spared from the evils that would supposedly come upon us if we turned away from voting and trusted in the Lord alone to save us.
The problem with so many Christians today is that they not only believe that participating in the politics of Babylon makes them activists for God’s Kingdom, when in reality it only makes them evil people who work to advance the governments of the devil, but they also think that repentance from worldly politics is apathetic, when in fact it is the only means of beginning to turn toward the good. Men cannot seek God’s Kingdom until they repent from holding to the statist ideology of the world and participating in the politics of the governments of man. Yet millions of false converts tell us that repentance is actually slothful and that evildoing is being active for God! Statists are in every way the people of the Bible who call evil good and good evil. For they reject the good work of repenting and seeking God’s Kingdom as “turning away from our Christian duties” and regard the evil work of voting for human rulers as being a doer of God’s word.
There is little need to wonder why so many professing Christians today remain caught up in carrying out the work of the devil and advancing the evil governments of the world instead of turning away from evil and seeking God’s Kingdom. If men do not believe that repenting and seeking the Kingdom of God will be blessed, they will naturally work to advance their idea of a godly society through systems of human government, which only continue to exist as divine judgment against this very sin. Again, the irony is strong. When men dismiss repentance and the possibility of the good fruit that can come from sowing seeds for God’s Kingdom rather than the governments of the world, they forsake the one true path of arriving at a free and prosperous society for maintaining their wicked works of furthering human governments, despite these systems never bringing them and their people to the ends they supposedly seek through them.
Repentance as an Old Testament idea?
There is another strain of thinking in modern Christianity that keeps men from believing they do not need to repent: that the advent of Jesus Christ left men free from a need to repent in order to avoid the judgment that comes upon all those who continue in the wicked path of the world. They think of His sacrifice as something that supposedly has freed them from any real need to repent, which they somehow regard as earning forgiveness or negating His death on the cross. These men will have to grapple with Jesus’s own words, saying that “unless you repent, you too will all perish” (Luke 13:3). The New Testament does not do away with repentance, and if anything presents it as an even more urgent matter than before! “Although God overlooked the ignorance of earlier times, He now commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30). There is even less of an excuse than there was before God became man to not repent from idolatry for human governments.
Though it is unpopular among modern Christians to think that God withholding divine judgment against people is contingent upon their repentance from the wicked statist practices they remain in, we see this Old Testament idea follow seamlessly into the New Testament. Though professing Christians tell us today that they do not really need to repent of their Egyptian ways to ward off their captivity and that God has already forgiven them in a way that supposedly allows them to remain in their sins and still avoid disaster, the whole of scripture is a call for men to turn away from these evils. “Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded” (James 4:8). The idea that men must repent to avoid the inevitable effects of sin—going into bondage to human rulers—is not just some Old Testament idea that is no longer relevant upon the advent of Jesus Christ. In fact, the New Testament even suggests that repentance is something that precedes God’s mercy upon the sinful ways of men and the judgments that follow. “Repent, then, and turn back, so that your sins may be wiped away” (Acts 3:19).
Unfortunately at this time, stubbornness remains preferable to repentance among those who profess to trust in the salvation of the Lord, just as in the days when the Biblical prophets walked the earth and called men to change their ways and found themselves up against scoffer, mockers, and men who reported them to the governments who they were still trusting in to save them. Though only repentance and beginning to seek God’s Kingdom will get us out of Egypt, men still refuse this narrow path and continue walking on the wide road of statist destruction instead. It is on us to agitate them to this higher calling and to evangelize men with the Gospel of God’s Kingdom that calls them to seek a Kingdom that is not of this world and that abolishes the kingdoms of the world as it is expanded.
God’s mercy to the repentant
In all our emphasis on the political bondage that comes upon men due to the sins related to their whoredom with these systems, we can never leave out the other side of the coin of God saving the men who turn from these sins from the enslaving consequences that follow from them. Though we must always emphasize the judgment that comes upon those who do evil, we can never leave God’s mercy out of the picture. Just as sure as God will remember the evildoing of men and pay them a visit for their idolatry for human government, so He will remember our iniquities no more (Psalm 32:5; Isaiah 43:25, 44:22; Micah 7:19; Acts 2:38, 3:19, 10:43; Hebrews 8:12, 10:17; 1 John 1:7-9).
The time is now to repent of our statist idolatry and return to the Lord and seek His Kingdom alone. This is the fruit of true faith. For the kingdoms of the world there is nothing left but judgment and disaster. We must place our hope back in the Lord that if we turned from our wickedness, He would be with us and deliver us from the hands of the statists who He has sent upon us purely as a judgment against the sins that are tied to supporting the governments of man. Even if there is no guarantee that God will free us from the wicked statist systems we live under today if we repent from supporting them, which would neglect God’s compassion and mercy to emphasize only His judgments, we should see that we are certainly guaranteed to remain slaves in Babylon so long as we do not. It has been for the unrepentant ways of men, who refuse to turn back from their statist ideology and practices, that we remain in captivity today and nothing else.
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