[This is part 32 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 three, thirty four, thirty five, thirty six, thirty seven]
Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris
We have already shown how vague conceptions of sin have allowed statist idolatry to proliferate throughout the professing Christian world, which would not be possible under a more definite understanding that cited the worldly works and ideology that raises up human rulers and defends their existence as being one of the main ways men revolt against God’s rule and the root-cause of their enslavement. We have also shown how such dilutions have been deliberately pushed by men seeking to lead others astray, or by those lost idolaters who otherwise needed a way to remain ideologically or physically involved in the kingdoms of the world while continuing to call themselves Christians. Here, we will attempt to show how a more concrete picture of sin—the scene of man’s political rebellion against the Kingdom of God—is essential to arriving at any true understanding of repentance, which must entail men turning away from their ungodly belief in human rulers and the pagan practices of voting them into office, as well as the even further positive works of seeking the Kingdom of God in this repentance.
Though many men today claim to have repented, they have mostly thought of repentance merely as a vague confession of “our sins” that leaves them more or less free to continue walking down the wicked political path of the world that trusts in human rulers to serve and save them. In thinking of sin as nothing more than some fault intrinsic to humanity and repentance as nothing more than some loose apology for being that way, men surmise that it is permissible to continue about their old Roman ways, since the rebellion of mankind under this vague conception of sin and repentance apparently has more to do with their own humanity than any specific wicked deeds and beliefs of theirs.
Yet the sins that men commit are far more specific than a general acknowledgment that “we’re all sinners” or a broad and undefined turning away from God that has nothing to do with mankind’s love of Egypt and Pharaohs, soldiers, and officers. Unfortunately, the “we’re all sinners” line is often used more as an excuse to remain in sin than repent from it! Once rebuke a statist for their idolatrous and sinful support for human government, and they will often reply that “we’re all sinners,” as if this alone provides and excuse to remain in their wicked ways.
A deeper conception of sin has much more to do with specific acts of rebellion and disloyalty to God than is acknowledged by most Christians today, namely the evil act of raising up human rulers and human governments, which few of them even consider to be sin and most still think of as fine by God. Despite scripture being explicit about seeking protection and peace in human kings and their armies as the very way that men sin and rebel against God, a rather unspecific call to “repent of your sins” remains the general idea of repentance among most Christians today; Jesus’s call for men to repent and seek the Kingdom of God and believe in this gospel eludes them (Mark 1:15).
Vague conceptions of sin leave men devoid of true repentance
Under the loose and unspecific conceptions of sin and repentance that dominates modern Christian thinking, it is no wonder that the masses of professing Christians have not actually turned away from their idolatry for human government, their erection of false gods in the voting booths of Babylon, or the covetous practices of receiving their benefits or supporting the so-called “public goods” of socialized law, socialized justice, and socialized policing that they provide, all which are funded through robbery and violence against their neighbors: no one has ever told them what the “sins” were that men need to be repenting from. Again, most people have only ever been hit with a vague call to “repent of your sins” that never identified any specifically wicked beliefs and deeds like approving of human rulers and raising them up into political office that resulted in them being convicted of the evil ideology and practices of statism that truly represent the major way that men have gone astray from the Lord. In a world where the “sins” of man are only vaguely defined and the wicked works of statism are certainly not counted among them or rebuked as representing the chief form of man’s deviation from God which they need to turn back from, men who call themselves Christians naturally kept about their Romans ways—supporting Caesars and their soldiers and law officers—believing that they were in good standing with God so long as they said they have “repented of my sins,” without this alleged repentance ever resulting in any change of their hearts and minds away from the statist ideology that supports the worldly governments of the devil or without it bringing any redirection in their footsteps away from walking on the Egyptian path of the world, where overt and unrepentant sinners vote for human masters to save them, enlist in their militaries or police forces to serve them, or run for their offices of power.
Sin as something more specific
The basic problem with the popular conception of repentance today, where men say they have repented of “my sins,” is that “your sin” is not the Biblical definition of sin. Sin is breaking the commands of Jesus. And most professing Christians do this every time they petition America’s false gods (i.e., civil rulers) for benefits or legislative solutions to their social disorders. True repentance is to turn away from the world and seek the Kingdom of God exclusively, as a separate “political” society that is altogether different, distinct, and apart from the authoritarian kingdoms of the world that hold sinners into bondage for their idolatry and refusal to seek God’s Kingdom instead. This is the narrow road that leads to eternal life. Statism is the wide way of sin that leads to destruction and death.
Yet what most professing Christians count as repentance today is just people saying they’re “sorry for my sins” and that they now “believe in Jesus.” But belief isn’t just mental assent or the acceptance of the biographical facts of Jesus’s earthly life. It is something that predicates action and leads to the true repentance of walking another way and seeking another Kingdom. The whole idea of believing on King Jesus is that the believer is no longer believing in the false christs who rule over the institutions of the world, but are instead seeking Jesus’ jurisdiction, knowing that faith without works is dead, and that to have faith is to actually trust that God would provide for those who sought His Kingdom in their abandonment of the alleged benefits and security that come from trusting in human kings and human governments.
For most Christians, a loose apology for their personal sins is about the extent of their idea of repentance. They do not actually feel guilty for the sins of statism that raised up human governments and thereby brought them and their people into political bondage as a judgment against these political sins. They do not even see that the Egyptian society they live under is an Egyptian one that has been raised up in sin and rebellion against God and stands as God’s form of divine justice against those wicked men who need to be cursed for this rebellion until they repent of their statist revolt. They think Egypt is a “free country” and their political practices are fine by God and even compatible with their claims on the other hand of believing in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, when these are in fact rival gospels that can’t be held together.
Under such vague conceptions of sin and repentance today, there are very few professing Christians who are actually weeping over the political captivity we are under, lamenting the whoredom of the statist idolaters of the world who have sold themselves out to the Egyptians to go into bondage, and yet fewer who are praying to God for restoration from this bondage as part of their repentance. Indeed, most of them are still Egyptian whores who are engaged in the very worldly political practices that God sees as sin and rebellion against Him and His Kingdom order. Most of the so-called Christians today are more concerned about their own idea of personal salvation and getting to heaven when they die. Few men in the history of what passes for Christianity have ever really cared that their people are living as slaves to worldly governments for the sins associated with founding these systems and supporting them once such evils have been put into motion. They have never cared to even identify it, much less acknowledge their role in it. They have never really cared to repent from the specific sins of adultery with human governments that led to their current captivity under the wicked rulers of the world who have stood as a curse upon their own wicked works, nor to preach a gospel that can save others from this bondage.
Avoiding a specific understanding of sin
There is little need to wonder why men have avoided identifying or addressing the sins of statism that have led to their political enslavement under the governments of the devil: they are still unrepentant Egyptians and Romans who refuse to repent for their prostitution with the kingdoms of the world through their political ideology and practices of raising up rulers. If men wish to claim they are Christians while living and thinking like Romans, the only option left is to come up with quasi-Biblical excuses for their continued support for these wicked men and their violent systems of government and human rule that are contrary to the non-authoritarian Kingdom of God and its servant-ministers who operate through voluntary charity. Hence the common objections like, “Joseph served Pharaoh.” Anyone who wishes to remain a statist while vainly professing Jesus Christ as their King must come up with endless excuses as to why their statolatry is not sin in need of repentance. For true repentance necessitates that men renounce the worldly ideology and practices of statism and seek the Kingdom of God alone. That the idolaters of the world are not prepared to do this helps to explain why the common conceptions of sin and repentance—not to mention the anti-statist essence of the gospel or salvation as deliverance from statists—have been diluted into more or less meaningless ideas today: a concrete and specific understanding of them would require men to abandon acts which they are not yet prepared to turn away from, such as voting false gods into political office or as well the mere belief that these offices should exist at all.
A better conception of sin and repentance
Though repentance often brings to mind a kind of emotional regret for the sinful human condition, or a general apology to God for vaguely defined sins, true repentance involves much more. It is more so about turning away from specific evils and errors that people have come to practice—whether as overt evildoers seeking to rob and murder others through their participation in worldly governments and their militaries or police forces, or as individuals living in spiritual darkness, wholly unaware that their statist political beliefs place them in opposition to God and His Kingdom. Repentance requires us to see that man’s pursuit of human government and offices of human rule has been his primary deviation from the anarchistic natural order of God and seeing that this political rebellion is therefore the crucial error that men must turn back from.
While modern ideas of repentance tend to emphasize a loose confession of unspecified “sins,” genuine repentance is better understood as a decisive turning away from concrete actions and beliefs that have always been characteristic of of what we may rightly call ungodly behavior — namely, the wicked works of putting one’s feet to the evil of serving human governments or the wicked ideology that supports these systems and attempt to provide a philosophical justification for these tax-based plunder systems that are rooted in a revolt against God and have the sinful base of coercion, violence, theft, and murder as their foundation.
Though it serves the interests of overt and unrepentant statist sinners to reduce essential Christian concepts to something vague and empty, so that they are able to go about their worldly lives as Roman rebels and Egyptian whores while still claiming repentance, acceptance of “the gospel,” and an alleged trust in the Lord for salvation, a deeper and more accurate understanding of sin and repentance is far more specific and definite than these idolaters would suggest. The ideology and practices of statism—both the mere belief in human civil government as well as the misdeeds of serving them—are very specific ways that men rebel against God and His anarchistic Kingdom order, which is not of this world and its systems.
Though it is easy to see why statist sinners obscure the conception of sin into something imprecise and indistinct that conveniently does not encompass their worldly ideology and works, Scripture does not leave us wondering about what it is that marks humanity’s departure from the wisdom, ways, instruction, and laws of the Lord. More than any other way, men turn their trust away from God by placing their trust in human governments for provision and protection. How else would it be that men rebel against the Lord—the King of a literal Kingdom after all—except by seeking other human kings to serve them on earth? This is why we see a statist rebellion as the very sin of the Israelites in 1 Samuel 8, whose sin was characterized by abandoning their faith in God’s ability to provide for them and instead turning to men to “protect and serve” — a sin which continues today among all the statists of the world whose announcement that they “back the blue” or “support the troops” shows exactly where their true faith and allegiance lies. The great rebellion of mankind has been their quest for human rulers rather than God as their King. It is not possible to have it both ways. Scripture paints a sharp dichotomy between serving God or false gods and their armies and police forces — a political decision that is truly definitive of the distinction between godly men and unrepentant sinners.
“Some trust in chariots and others in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God” (Psalm 20:7).
Moreover, we are given the consequential blessings or curses that follow from such a crucial decision between trusting in God or men to save us and serve us, as further reinforcement of the truth of this dichotomy and the need for every man to choose this day whom he will serve.
“Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind, who makes mere flesh his strength and turns his heart from the LORD” (Jeremiah 17:5).
All statists are men who have turned their hearts from the Lord and set their eyes on the false gods of worldly kingdoms to be their saviors, hence their unashamed veneration of soldiers and police officers as their heroes. All statists, therefore, need to repent for the sins inherent to their entire political philosophy that advocates state violence and not only champions it but works to further these systems of slavery against their fellow man.
Repentance requires an understanding of sin
What we see is that if we do not have a concrete conception of sin as specific acts of wickedness like trusting in men to save us, or at the very least have failed to include the political works and ideas of men as being foremost among these sins, then we will never be able to see what true repentance looks like or lead others to it. It will remain acceptable to make a vague repentance of unspecified sins while continuing as adulterers with the kingdoms of the world. It has been precisely under the dilution of all these important and foundational Christian concepts like sin, salvation, repentance, and the gospel that official Christianity has always been filled with Babylonian whores whose political prostitution with worldly kingdoms keeps them living as false converts rather than as God’s truly repentant Kingdom people. If it were seen that all of these concepts are necessarily defined in their relation to the statist ideology and practices of the world, whether the participation in these systems being definitive of man’s sin or the deliverance from human rule providing a picture of salvation, then it would be impossible for anyone to maintain that they can partake in the politics of the world without being an open and unashamed sinner, that they are repentant while being involved in these wicked practices, that they trust in the Lord to save them while voting for men to “save the country,” or that they have believed the Gospel of Jesus Christ while believing in the campaign promises of politicians to “Make America Great Again.” These things are contradictory to one another. Christianity and statism are mutually-exclusive. You’re either a Christian who seeks the Kingdom of God alone and holds the Lord as your one and only King, or a statist idolater who makes men their gods. A man cannot serve two masters. We are to call no man father except our father that is in heaven.
Only by clearly defining sin, or at least by including statism as the chief example of man’s rebellion against God, can we begin to approach a true repentance—an abandonment and renunciation of statism—that has more or less always been absent from official “Christianity,” which at least since the days of Constantine and his false conversion has always been perverted, corrupted, and twisted into a religion that was friends with the kingdoms of the world when it is in fact an anarchistic gospel that stands as their only viable enemy (hence why it had to be twisted and perverted by statists).
The sin of statism and the need to repent
So let us reiterate what the main rebellion and revolt against God has always looked like, in hopes that we may paint a clearer picture of repentance than what has always been presented to modern Christians, who have rarely come to recognize that mankind’s statist whoredom—their fawning over presidents, their prostitution with government armies, and the begging of Caesars for bread—has always been characteristic of their sin. It has always been the statism of a people—both their ideological belief in human rulers and the evil practice of establishing, supporting, and serving these systems—that has represented the chief sins of men throughout history. If we are unable to identify man’s political rebellion as the essence of their sins against God and His Kingdom, then we will never be able to understand what true repentance looks like. Men will continue to say they have “repented” while remaining involved in the same old sins that make them friends and of the world and thus enemies of God (James 4:4).
However, if we are able to recognize the statist whoredom of mankind as representative of their great rebellion against God, then it becomes very clear what true repentance looks like and what it doesn’t. Repentance has everything to do with turning away from the sins inherent to statism, both ideologically and in practice. It means turning away from the idolatry, theft, covetousness, violence, murder, injustice, corruption, war, and all the other evils that one must necessarily support so long as they believe these institutions should exist at all. If men have not turned from their statism, they have not repented. For turning from statism and pledging allegiance to God rather than men is a bare-minimum requirement to be counted among the repentant; the obligation to carry out the positive work of seeking the literal Kingdom of God and serving others is an even higher standard that men cannot be on about if they have not even turned away from walking in the wrong direction to arrive at this neutral point of wondering what they must do now that they have repented of their worldly statist pursuits.
Summary
As we see, true repentance can never be understood or practiced so long as sin remains vaguely defined, which helps to explain precisely how it has been possible for statist idolaters to make up the professing Christian masses throughout history and represent its image before men, all while they are actually false converts who are taking the Lord’s name in vain and tarnishing it before the lost people of the world who do not know any better but to take their word for it that Christianity is a statist doctrine, when the truth is that its gospel is an anarchist one that rejects human government.
After all, such a dilution of core Christian concepts into vague and meaningless ideas or doctrines that don’t convict anyone of their sinful existence as proud, flag-waving Romans who trust in the kingdoms of the world for their protection and bread has been a deliberate attempt by false prophets and false pastors in the institutional churches to keep those who might otherwise come nearer to the truth on their own readings of the Bible in the bondage of Egypt that they might otherwise be able to break free from if they knew the true anarchistic Gospel of the Kingdom of God and accepted and believed this gospel in exclusion to the gospels of human governments which, in a competing gospel, promise salvation under their rule. Official Christianity (i.e., the corrupted “statist” version put before the people of the world) has always been shaped and dominated by men who worked to obscure these truths and keep men away from the narrow road of seeking God’s Kingdom exclusively. The official narratives, teachings, and interpretations have always been controlled by men who made others believe they could serve two kingdoms at the same time without being counted out as one of God’s kingdom-seekers. True Christianity, which preaches another Kingdom altogether, has always been kept under wraps and buried by institutionalist gatekeepers who have sought to widen the road to salvation so as to keep men hell-bound on the broad political path of the world, which assures their eventual desolation at the hands of the wicked rulers who they foolishly believed they could trust in to secure their liberty and prosperity, but who in the end only prove only to bring an Egyptian police state society upon them as a curse for this sin of expecting them to provide “law and order” and “justice” to them.
As we have argued, one of the easiest ways this corruption of Christianity’s anarchistic gospel has been achieved and sustained for centuries has been by reducing core Christian concepts like sin, repentance, salvation, and the gospel into loosely defined ideas that do not require men to abandon their faith in human government, despite this faith and trust in human rulers and their violence being man’s foremost sin. Sin and repentance have been reduced to a vague confession of some undefined evildoing that allows men to imagine themselves repentant while continuing in the very political and ideological allegiances that mark them as rebels against God’s anti-statist Kingdom. Faith has been turned into a loose notion of “believing in God” that allows men to remain Egyptians in practice who continue to trust in Pharaohs and their soldiers for protection and liberty while claiming loyalty to God. Salvation has been unquestionably conceived of as nothing more than a heavenly escape into the afterlife rather than a present trust in God to protect and deliver us on earth from the bondage of Egypt as He has done before, which allows men to confine His salvation to a “spiritual realm” which supposedly leaves them in need of earthly saviors—human rulers—for their “law and order” down here below. And “the gospel” itself has been reduced to the simple belief that Jesus rose from the dead, rather than the political message the Lord himself proclaimed of another Kingdom that His followers must seek, which likewise allows men to persist as statists who believe in the promises of false gods to “save America” while still calling themselves Christians who “believe the gospel.”
Notwithstanding the many vague conceptions of sin, repentance, and salvation that are typical among modern Christians today, which have either purposefully or consequently left the door wide open for men to continue on as Egyptian-statists rather than repentant and godly anarchists, the nature of man’s rebellion against God has always been expressed in his turning away from God’s rule to place his trust in the kingdoms of the world for provision, protection, and order. This was most evident in Israel’s demand for a king, which showed this political rebellion to be a revolt against God’s rule (1 Samuel 8:7-8). The statist political revolt of man is shown everywhere throughout scripture to be the work of faithless men who have ignored the many Biblical calls to “take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes” to secure them (Psalm 118:8-9) and to “put not your trust in princes” at all (Psalm 146:3). All of God’s rebukes against men in the Bible are more or less centered around their statist rebellion. It always came against people who were seeking worldly political alliances rather than trusting in God alone to protect them (Isaiah 30:1-3). The divine rebuke against statist rebels of the world was always against those who “go down to Egypt for help” (Isaiah 31:1).
What is needed in our time is to call-out the statism of men for the sin that it always has been, rather than allowing this to exist among people who claim to have repented. If we see sin as specific acts of rebellion against God’s Kingdom, namely those political acts of seeking protection and aid through systems of human civil government, it then becomes impossible to think that anyone can be a Christian while remaining a statist. It becomes immediately evident that one will have to repent of their statism, i.e., abandon their faith in human governments and rulers to save them, if they wish to be among one of Christ’s followers, as the two beliefs are antagonistic to one another.
In other words, when we give a concrete meaning to sin as specific and definable acts of rebellion against God’s Kingdom which are characterized in man’s wicked political involvement in the kingdoms of the world, as opposed to the vague conceptions that never rebuke the statist idolaters around them and even call them to march down the aisles of these false churches in their uniforms for everyone to praise as the heroes and freedom-fighters of society, then repentance likewise becomes concrete. If man’s rejection of God’s rule is found in his faith in human rule, then repentance can be seen as a decisive turn away from these systems and their supporting ideologies, which have always been precisely what it means to be “of the world.” Short of any specific, definite, or concrete conception of sin that views statism as the foremost evil ideas and practices of the men who we consider as the rebels against God and His Kingdom, repentance will always just be lip service that amounts to no real turning away from sin. Professing Christians will remain nothing more than Romans in practice who say “Lord, Lord” with their lips while thinking, acting, and living contrary to His ways. Only when men come to see that their great sin and rebellion against God is found in their support for the kingdoms of the world can they even approach true repentance, which entails turning away from all these very evils and seeking to be citizens of the Kingdom of God alone, by gathering with their neighbors for mutual service in a network of charity that is based on voluntary service and freewill offerings rather than outsourcing their godly duties to authoritarian benefactors who operate on compulsory offerings and exercising authority over other men, which Jesus said was not the way of His Kingdom.
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