[This is part 37 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 eight, thirty nine, forty, forty one, forty two, forty three]
Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris
Though sin is the main factor in keeping men subdued by statism, whether the spiritual bondage of this enslaving ideology that keeps men thinking like worldly fools or the physical bondage of state rule that results from this wicked ideology, a general defeatist outlook to human life on earth is another way that men have given up their liberty under God to statists who plunder them for all they’re worth. This is the notion that nothing can be done about the existence of the human governments of the world and that some law of the universe apparently has it that men must be ruled by other men. The problem here is that this denies the divine causal law that God put into the social structure when He created it: that only sin leads to bondage, that only men who make men their gods find themselves living as slaves to human governments, and that a people who make God their only ruler cannot be ruled by men.
By treating human governments as a permanent feature of life on earth, men effectively deny that this bondage came upon them as a result of sin and that God is active in dishing out blessings and curses to the obedient and disobedient, respectively. Hence why they believe that they may continue in all their sins—namely the wicked works of raising up human rulers—without reaping all the evils they have sown in doing so. All that is happening here is that men are playing a little psychological trick on themselves. To make state rule out to be inevitable and unavoidable is just another way that men absolve themselves of having any role in bringing about their own bondage. By acting as if human governments are natural, rather than the result of the works of evil men who set them up in their rebellion against God, men are able to deny their own responsibility in their bondage in their minds and continue refusing to repent for the sins which led to their enslavement. By telling themselves that state rule is just as sure as the seasons, they are able to imagine that they had nothing to do with their own subjection under human rulers. The great political evils of their land can be written off as laws of nature, when in fact they are sent by God upon a people for the exact evils of pursuing human systems of government.
This general defeatist attitude—the idea that nothing can be done about the ruling elite and that the earth itself is cursed—is unsurprising to find in a people who do not want to confess that their sins have led to their bondage. This whole idea that “this is just the way things are” should be expected among people who need to make excuses for their own ungodly ideas and ways that are not right. Rather than turn back from their wicked ways, which would indeed change the outcome of the world they live in, they act as if all the evils they live under today are just inevitable. To think of the evil statist systems of the world as unavoidable is a way for men to keep from changing themselves and repenting from the sins which resulted in their enslavement. To act as if society itself cannot exist without human domination systems is a way for men to avoid admitting that all the manifest evils that have come upon them today—from the tax bondage, the police state, to the widespread corruptions of law and justice—are the result of their own evildoing, such as outsourcing their personal responsibilities to love and serve their neighbors over to human rulers who do it by force and violence.
Besides this direct idea that human governments are supposedly inevitable, we have the closely related idea that God supposedly does not bless righteousness or tear down the wicked in the long run. The whole earth is just assumed to be irredeemably corrupt, such that it would not even be worth it for men to change their ways, i.e., to repent and begin seeking the Kingdom of God as a separate society. It is easy then to see how the idea that the State is inevitable, coupled with the idea that the earth is not really under God’s Law and watch, has been able to subdue men into complacency and inaction. Why should men even repent of statism and seek the Kingdom of God if it is supposedly not a possible end to achieve? Why not just continue in your same old Egyptian ways as before and just wait out your demise under these ungodly systems of men? This is just the thinking men arrive at when they operate under these ideas. If human governments are inevitable rather than divine judgment for sin, then men have the perfect excuse for not repenting and seeking the Kingdom of God and His righteousness: that it would not be worth it to do so and that repentance would not change anything about the wicked social order they live under, because this political bondage is apparently not the result of sin but a natural feature of human life on earth. One of the most common forms of this is the familiar coupling of “death and taxes,” which is a phrase that could only be popular in a society of ungodly men who don’t believe in the Lord to deliver them from their political enslavement upon their repentance from the sins that are bound up with supporting these systems of man. Instead of seeing their tax bondage as a result of their own sin, which would require them to grapple with their own contribution to these evils and arrive at the necessity of repenting from their current ideas and action, they just say these things are inevitable, which allows them to continue in their same wicked ways as before of raising up rulers over their neighbors and taking their benefits, all while further denying the sin involved in it all.
In addition to the overt and unrepentant idolaters who refuse to turn from the sins of statist ideology that directly puts political plunderers into power, we also have the apathetic men who may or may not partially recognize the sins of statism that lead to bondage but who are so subdued by the belief that the rule of men is inevitable and that there isn’t much we can do about it that they refuse to seek the Kingdom of God. Besides the people who directly contribute to their own enslavement then through the positive evil of participating in the politics of human government, we have also the slothful and apathetic men who may see the evils around us and even somewhat understand their causal relation to the idolatry and sins of the people, but who nevertheless fall into a position of apathy and resignation, thinking that there is no way out of the bondage of Egypt even if we changed our ways. Yet the Egyptian captivity we are living under has only been the result of sin; men who avoid these wicked practices can indeed live freely under God.
Sin and Bondage
Notwithstanding the claims of all the statist idolaters of the world who treat political slavery as inevitable as a way of avoiding confronting the fact that they directly contributed to their own bondage, whether through the overt sins of participating in these systems or simply the failure to live like God’s Kingdom people who are set apart from the kingdoms of the world, the bondage of statism is not inevitable. It is the consequence for the sins of idolatry and covetousness that puts these men into place and feeds from their hands in exchange to become one of their tax-subjects. The State does not exist just as sure as the sun rises in the morning. Its existence has come about due to very specific sins like praising presidents, trusting in soldiers for your freedom or police for your public safety, or generally turning to human governments for law and order and other benefits. It is due to sin that men become the slaves of men, not some in-built law of nature. To think otherwise is to make God into an unjust God who sent bondage upon an undeserving people who repented of their sins. This is not the case. Anywhere there are people ruled by men, there are unrepentant sinners whose wicked ways caused them to become captives to Babylonians instead. Anywhere there are systems of human government, all which function as a means of serving up divine justice against the people who erected them, there are men who hold to the ungodly and worldly ideology that supports rulers and who practice the misdeeds of raising them up. God does not send statists upon a people who make the Lord alone their God; political bondage is exclusively a judgment upon a rebellious people who whore themselves out to Egypts and Babylons to be their protectors and providers instead of the Lord. A people who made the Lord their only God could live freely under the divine protection of the Lord.
The problem with assuming that the State is inevitable and unavoidable is that it strips God from the picture, not only by failing to see that government slavery is God’s form of judgment against wicked statists, but also by failing to see that God would deliver men from this slavery should they repent of the sins that led to it and begin to seek His Kingdom alone. This defeatist attitude that assumes it wouldn’t even be worth it to repent treats the causal universe as a random one, rather than one that is in God’s hands. It fails to see that bondage is a result of sin and that liberation is a result of repentance and turning back to God. It makes man’s actions irrelevant to outcomes and acts as if state rule comes upon both godly and ungodly people, when the fact is that our people are slaves to men today precisely and only because they evilly trusted in human rulers to be their saviors, which set a fire inside God to bring the hammer down against this idolatrous people who turned to princes and kings to save them instead of placing their sole and exclusive trust in the Lord to do so.
Repentance and salvation
Once we see that all things are in God’s hands and abandon this worldly view that treats statism as a permanent feature of social life, then we can begin to actually trust in God to bless obedience and start to see that repentance can lead to liberation. Just as quickly as men have gone into the bondage of Egypt due to the sins of acting like Egyptians themselves who trust in Pharaohs and their officers to secure their society for them, so can God deliver them out of this bondage and free them from the boot that they once backed in their sin. Just as much as statism is a divine judgment for the sins of statism, so liberation from state rule is God’s salvation for the repentant captives who cry out to the Lord again and turn from their wicked Egyptian ways.
Though the standard, diluted conception of salvation today is one that makes everything out to be a purely otherworldly idea of escaping to heaven in the afterlife upon a loose profession of faith that does not result in men repenting of their Egyptian-statist political ideas or works while on earth, divine liberation from state rule has always been what God’s salvation is all about. Biblical examples of divine liberation were always God freeing repentant men from the plunder and pillage of kings, congressmen, soldiers, and police officers, who were only able to rule over ungodly men whose sins permit them to arise.
Inevitability and propaganda
Training men to believe that statism is inevitable, or even worse that it is God’s ideal social order, has been nothing but a propaganda device for keeping men in political bondage, one that has been employed by false prophets and false pastors everywhere, whether by diluting the concept of salvation into a purely heavenly one that leaves men free to pursue salvation on earth through human rulers or by positively teaching men that human civil governments were given to us by God rather than raised up by sinners in their revolt against God’s anarchist order. No one who believes in the Lord as their savior should fall for the lie that human governments cannot be abolished or that there is no means of getting free from their rule so long as we remain on this earth. Just as men have become the slaves of state rulers for their sins of seeking after these systems, so they can repent from this statolatry and covetousness, cry out to the Lord to hear them once again, and find divine deliverance from their captivity. The idea that state rule is inevitable and irreversible is but the devilish propaganda of statists who want to make men forget the Lord their God and believe that they may well act like Egyptians while in Egypt and seek to reform her evil systems and elect new Pharaohs into office, which are the very sins that God will never bless and which will only ever keep them under the sword. Those men who believe in God—the Lord who delivers His people out of Egypt before and allows them to cross the sea on dry land—are not apathetic about their bondage or the assurances of freedom, prosperity, and other blessings that await the law who will repent and seek the Lord’s ways again. They know that it is worth it to serve God and that to labor for Him is not to labor in vain. They know that faith without works is dead and that the only people who are even alive are men who thirst for a free society under the Lord’s exclusive rule.
Though all men who continue about their statist ways are men who have forsaken the Lord and have in turn been forgotten by God and left to reap all the wickedness they have sown, scripture never has it that the bondage that results from sin is a permanent one that cannot be undone through repentance. Rather, men can always turn back from the Lord, if only they will acknowledge their evildoing and change their ways — something that is apparently too much to ask for from any statist idolater whose very ideology proves them to be stubborn men who refuse to turn back to the ways of the Lord. In all the Biblical episodes of judgment there are stories of redemption, liberation, or restoration to go along with them. In all the instances where men had gone into bondage to Egyptians, Babylonians, or some other statist rulers who God sent upon men for their sins, there were instances of a repentant people being delivered from these systems that once brought the boot down on them to show them that their wicked works would, in fact, result in their enslavement. Though men like to treat statism as inevitable today, and though they fail to see that it comes only as divine justice against specific acts of evil as practiced by the people who are made to live under tyrants, scripture always has it that God will repent of the disasters He brings upon men when they turn from the evil ways that led to it — that God will remember a people who remember Him.
“But if they will confess their iniquity and that of their fathers in the unfaithfulness that they practiced against Me, by which they have also walked in hostility toward Me—and I acted with hostility toward them and brought them into the land of their enemies—and if their uncircumcised hearts will be humbled and they will make amends for their iniquity, then I will remember My covenant with Jacob and My covenant with Isaac and My covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land” (Leviticus 26:40-42).
Should men get to the point of realizing they are under the Babylonian boot because of their own prostitution with kings, armies, and police officers, who they regarded as the men who delivered their false and perverted version of peace, freedom, and law order, and thereby repent of this iniquity and tell the Lord they are ready to serve Him alone again, then who knows, maybe God will relent of the disaster that He has planned for all those who walk down the statist path of the world and instead decided to liberate men of their enslavement under human governments. If men will soften their calloused hearts and admit their their stiff-necked, statist ways have been the main ways that they have rebelled against God’s rule that they now intend to turn back to, perhaps God will turn back the judgment that is against our land today in the form of state rulers preying upon men to take them for their property and their lives on this this giant tax-plantation that lost sinners call a “free country,” “civilization,” and “law and order.”
The warnings of judgment and God’s mercy
Though the ungodly people of the world like to call God a tyrant for all the episodes of utter devastation that He has brought against statists like them throughout scripture and history, which were really only cases of these wicked people reaping the evils they had sown, Biblical narratives of divine judgment coming against an evil people were always preceded by God sending out prophets to both call upon people to repent of their idolatrous ways and warn of the disaster that awaits those who refuse to heed this word of rebuke. God never just up and destroys a people without warning. In all the instances in scripture where our long-suffering God finally got fed up with all the idolatrous people of the world who trusted in Pharaohs, soldiers, and police officers to protect, serve, and save them (as they still do to this today), such episodes were always preceded by God sending out prophets to warn men of the greater judgment that is coming to all those men who will not turn turn back from their wicked ways even after hearing this word and having to live under all the evident judgment that is already around them. As further proof of His mercy and compassion upon even the wicked statists of the world, it is only after prolonged unwillingness to repent that God completely and even suddenly turns a society upside down like a plate. No one who has ever had their whole society wrecked over night by God could ever claim that there were no warnings, as the writing was always on the wall in these societies for anyone who was willing to hear the words of the Lord or those preaching it. Indeed, the case is just the opposite: all those people who have been destroyed under the statist systems that were erected by their own sinful acts could only ever admit that they flat-out rejected the words of God’s prophets calling them to turn from their evils and seek the Kingdom of God. It is not as if God’s prophets are absent from the American scene today, which is facing a similar judgment as all those people in the scripture who fell under the hands of statists who plundered and consumed them as God’s means of teaching men a lesson in the sins of statism. On the contrary, many have heard this word and instead have fought against it in every way. It is not that God doesn’t send prophets, which work to legitimately absolve Him from blame once the Day of the Lord finally hits like a meteor, but that the people have always persecuted and killed His prophets.
Though men like to treat the statist society as inevitable as a way of avoiding acknowledging their complicity in their bondage and subsequently repenting for the sins which led to it, the word of the Lord never has it that a people cannot repent to avoid judgment, but rather always makes it clear that turning from their evils holds all the potential in the world to cause God to renege on His plans to bring devastation to a people who choose to continue in their evils otherwise. In probably every case in scripture and history where the day of the Lord finally struck like a bomb and the Babylonians began their mass plunder and genocide against a people for having acted like Babylonian statists themselves who praised men as their kings and saviors, God had first sent out a warning of the judgment that would surely come to a people if they fail to repent of their evildoing, which necessarily gave them a chance to do so.
Though men today tell us that there is no use in turning back from our wicked ways and that men are inevitably doomed to living under human governments while here on earth, scripture has it that repentance, i.e., abandoning one’s prostitution with Egypt and her kings and soldiers, can change God’s plans.
“Now therefore, tell the men of Judah and the residents of Jerusalem that this is what the LORD says: ‘Behold, I am planning a disaster for you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, each of you, from your evil ways, and correct your ways and deeds” (Jeremiah 18:11).
God would not tell people to turn from their evils and correct their ways if it did not mean He would change His plans of bringing evils against them as judgment for this own sins. These were warnings that could hold off utter abandonment of men into the hands of evil statists if they heeded the call. They were not just suggested behavior changes by some arbitrary God who wanted men to follow His arbitrary will, but calls to repent from the genuine evils of practicing political robbery and murder that deserve to be punished by an almighty God who cannot tolerate the unrighteous works of men ruling over other men. God did not tell men to turn from their evils while He planned to trick them and still send a Babylonian boot to come crush their skulls and enslave them on a labor camp. These were warnings that would allow men to avoid the very real consequences of walking in the statist ways of the world. Moreover, God does not assure that States will dominate and enslave men because He is tyrannical. It is precisely that bondage is the effect of these sins that God calls men to seek the righteous path and not walk on the evil one. If God wanted men to be enslaved by men, He would have never given us His anti-statist word that calls men away from the sins which lead to their slavery. He would have totally abandoned humanity to keep walking down the dark political path of the world and repeatedly winding up as slaves in Egypt, which is something they continue to do anyway in their neglect for His teachings. Instead, God has sent Jesus the Christ that men might repent of their wicked ways and be saved from the consequent bondage of chasing after men and their systems of government. He gave them His only begotten son that they may follow instead, so that they may walk in the light and be liberated by this Gospel, which saves men from the political slavery that results from their sin. It is never that God does not care about men that they wind up as slaves in Egypt, but that men have not cared about God enough to trust in the only One that can lead them out of Egypt on dry land.
The need to turn from evil
There is a sort of irony in the idea that human government is inevitable and that it is not worth it to repent of supporting them. For there is one sense that the slavery of state rule is inevitable: it is inevitable so long as men continue in the sins of statism and refuse to repent. It is not that the divine judgment against man, which comes in the form of the inherent evils of human government manifesting on a society-wide scale, are inevitable per se and cannot be turned back no matter what men do, but that they are inevitable only insofar as men refuse to repent and choose to continue in them. Social disaster is the guaranteed result for a people who pursue the statist ideas and works and world. The evils of statism are inevitable for those who sinfully set up human rulers and believe in their systems of authoritarian government. The existence of human government and their inevitable evils are always a consequence of evildoing, not some unavoidable law of nature or “just the way things are.” The evils of statism as an actual system of human rule are a curse for the evils of statism as an ideology that supports human rulers. They are not what results for a people who do good and seek the Kingdom of God, but are rather a form of divine punishment that comes upon men who do evil and seek the kingdoms of man. Indeed, blessings await those who seek the Kingdom of God. Only an ungodly, statist people get plundered by statist rulers (Matthew 6:33). Only people who hold to the ungodly ideology that supports human governments get robbed, caged, and murdered by these men who they set up in their sin; godly men, who make the Lord alone their King, do not suffer these injustices.
Though modern Christianity has it backwards and tells men that they don’t need to repent because they are already saved by the Lord, scripture suggests instead that men need to turn from their evils if they wish to be saved. Though men think they should be saved despite refusing to repent for their statism and place their faith back in the Lord for salvation, scripture has it that men need to turn from their evils as part of this profession of faith, which has much more to do with actual pledges of allegiance to God rather than the mere belief that it has been understood to mean today.
“Wash the evil from your heart, O Jerusalem, so that you may be saved. How long will you harbor wicked thoughts within you” (Jeremiah 4:14).
As unpopular as this idea of repentance and salvation is in modern Christianity, which has made the Biblical passage of “call on the name of the Lord and you will be saved” into a simplified doctrine of easy-believism that doesn’t require men to turn from specific wicked ways of theirs, the message in the prophets runs in the other direction: that men must repent from their evildoing and trust in the Lord as their savior in order to be literally and physically saved from the political bondage that has been a consequence of our sins. In contrast to modern Christians, who rarely believe they must repent of their wicked participation in the governments of the world because they assume the Lord has already “saved” them and approves of them just as they are (with their old hearts and their same faithlessness as before), scripture is more or less a relentless call for men to change their ways so that God may favor them and bless them with liberty. Though modern Christians say they don’t need to turn from their evil ideas and ways because they believe the Lord is already with them, scripture says, “wash and cleanse yourselves. Remove your evil deeds from My sight. Stop doing evil!” (Isaiah 1:16).
Frankly, God is not going to save a people from the bondage of Egypt who will not repent of their Egyptian ways. These people can continue to be plundered by the Egyptians if they so choose. Why should God look favorably upon a people who whore themselves out to human governments to save them? Why should God respond to people who do not even cry out to Him in captivity for salvation but continue instead to pray to false gods to deliver them? Why should God bless men who trust in presidents and legislators for peace and order? Why should we think God will free a people from political bondage who do not even want to be free or who think that human rulers will provide it for them? If God saved men who do not even want to be saved from their captivity and who still trust in their captors to provide them with law and order, then then we should have been liberated from the bondage of Egypt already. That we are still slaves of state rulers today—this has always been God’s method of judging statist sinners—is alone proof that we are still being cursed by God for the disobedience of raising up rulers and their systems of lawmaking and law enforcement, rather than blessed by God for the obedience of keeping His law forbidding men to have other gods than the Lord.
Trusting in the Lord to relent
Those who argue that it is not worth it to turn from our Egyptian ways of supporting the governments of man and trusting in them to order our society for us are men who have no faith in the Lord to intervene in the social affairs of men and deliver them from the political bondage that they are currently under due to their own sin. Human governments in general were raised up in a lack of faith in God to provide for men and are furthered in a lack of faith in Lord to save them. These are men who deny the divine social laws and assume that we will live under the governments of men no matter what we think or believe or regardless of how we act and behave, which ironically has the effect of leading them to continue practicing the very wicked ways that have decidedly led to their bondage. Under the thinking that changing themselves would not result in a change in their social order from a statist slave society to a free society under God, men ironically continue on in the same old statist ways that have actually been the only reason they have wound up as slaves to begin with!
The thinking of godly men should be a great departure from this worldly thinking that evildoing will not be cursed and well-doing will not be blessed. Even if we cannot be sure that God will spare us from a day of utter devastation upon repenting from walking down the evil path, which we may well be too far down to avoid the inevitable effects of the collapsing political systems of the world that function as God’s means of bringing down justice against the people who wickedly set them up, scripture still has it that we ought to do so anyway and pray to God to be merciful toward us despite having walked in the way of the world and being deserving of all the political evils that come against a people who pursue the iniquities involved with the ideology and works of statism. The Biblical hope was always that it is better to repent from doing evil and trust in God to spare us than to continue in these evils and imagine that we could avoid disaster. As the words of the prophets record, “Who knows? God may turn and relent; He may turn from His fierce anger, so that we will not perish” (Jonah 3:9).
The general apathy men show toward the statist bondage around them is also evident in their personal choices. They often assume they might as well continue in the habits that have harmed them, since so much damage has already been done. They reason that there is no point in abandoning their destructive behavior now because they are already so far down the road to destruction. Yet the biblical hope should lead to a far different perspective. Though the ultimate results of deliverance from bondage belong to God, the duty to repent of these sins belongs to us. Cutting off further alcohol consumption may not undo the damage already done, but continued consumption will certainly not bring it to an end. This is largely where we are today. Though men have already raised up human governments in their sin and brought all sorts of evils upon themselves, such that a massive day of reckoning still awaits them, even greater judgment awaits those who do not reverse course immediately and who continue to walk in the Egyptian ways of the world.
Repentance and salvation
Though modern Christians today think that God’s mercy and deliverance from the bondage of Egypt is in no way contingent upon their repentance, which has the ironic effect of leading them to believe they can continue in all their Egyptian ways and still be in God’s good graces, scripture often shows that God wants to see men change their ways—to turn from their adultery with the kingdoms of the world—if they are to be spared from the day of judgment that He has planned for all the statists of the world who deviate from the divine anarchist order by chasing after the statist systems of man instead.
Though modern Christians believe they should be automatically saved—the true meaning of which is to be delivered from the bondage of human governments—without turning from their lust for human rulers and their allegiance to the governments of man, in many parts of scripture we see that repentance of evildoing must necessarily come before God’s willingness to turn back the judgment against a people that has come upon them in the form of being dominated by human rulers who rob and murder them to maintain their systems of political rule. “But if that nation I warned turns from its evil, then I will relent of the disaster I had planned to bring” (Jeremiah 18:8). The causal laws of God are an “if-this, then-that” law similar to the observations made by “secular” economists who chalk these social laws up to being something discovered by men or attributed to “natural law,” rather than being the laws that God put there to keep men from being statists without paying the price for it. If men will repent of their statist ideas and practices, then God will deliver them. If men will seek the righteous path and turn from the kingdoms of the world, then God will grant them Liberty.
Contrary to the popular thinking of Christians today that repentance is not worth pursuing, that they need not turn from their prostitution with human governments in order to be liberated from the captivity brought on by their own sins, or that nothing will change regardless of what men do, the judgment God has planned for those who remain disloyal and unfaithful to God and His Kingdom is never so inevitable or unavoidable that it cannot be averted by men changing their ways and making the Lord their only King again and placing their faith in Him for their salvation. It is only under the thinking that the divine judgment of state rule—this is the way God punishes statist sinners—is permanent and inevitable that men believe that repentance would not be blessed, i.e., that God would not reward those who turn back from their Egyptian ways with an exodus. What we find in scripture is that even the planned judgments of God, such as sending Babylonians to drag men off into exile or Egyptians to keep them in bondage, are not inevitable or irreversible; they are in the cards only so long as men continue acting like Babylonian whores who chase after human rulers and their armies and police forces for their protection and salvation. The guaranteed evils that follow from a statist people are divinely secured only insofar as men refuse to change their ways. We see in many places of scripture that when men were willing to repent, “the LORD relented from the calamity He had threatened to bring on His people” (Exodus 32:14). As much as the statist ways of man are detestable before the Lord and deserve to be punished with complete devastation of their artificial social orders that have been built on violence, plunder, and slavery, such evil ideas and works of men are not so much that they cannot be forgiven by the Lord and subsequently spared from further judgment. As God said through His prophets,
“At any time I might announce that a nation or kingdom will be uprooted, torn down, and destroyed. But if that nation I warned turns from its evil, then I will relent of the disaster I had planned to bring” (Jeremiah 18:7-8).
Regardless of whether or not God will have mercy on a statist people like the Americans today, who may well need to be destroyed for all their statist idolatry and vain use of God’s name on top it, continuing down this statist road will most certainly not undo the judgment. The only hope then is to turn from our wicked ways and leave things in God’s hands, praying that He will be as merciful to this people as He has many times before if they should change their ways. “Hate evil and love good; establish justice in the gate. Perhaps the LORD, the God of Hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph” (Amos 5:15).
Bondage and repentance
Though God uses the judgment of statist evils to awaken men to the sins involved in advancing the governments of man, as we see today, such judgments are often not severe enough to turn them away from those evils. Shamefully, they instead lead many to believe that the source of their problems is a lack of enthusiasm for pursuing the kingdoms of the world. Hence such common calls for Christians to “get out and vote” and such common complaints that we are ruled by evil men because men have failed to do evil and raise up a new president or congressman. Even under the heavy judgment of having to live under tyrants for the sin of believing in their thrones, men remain statist idolaters who take issue only with a particular tyrant rather than with the throne itself. They imagine that they deviated from the ideal political order of God only when the people elected democrats and communists to political office, rather than in the statist rebellion against God’s anarchy as such. They fail to see that their belief in human government as such is fundamentally sinful and that the wicked philosophy and practices of statism inevitably produce the evils that have followed from erecting these systems in the past. They fail to see that they are ruled by socialists because they have been socialists themselves.
It remains to be seen how far God’s judgment must go against the idolatrous people of America today before they will wake up to their sins, confess them before the Lord, and begin seeking the anti-statist Kingdom of God in repentance. You would think that the judgment against our people today, which has come in the form of the now-undeniable political evils that pervade our society, would be enough to lead men to repent today. You would think that taxation, inflation, mass incarceration, and the police state would be enough to make them look around and see that they have sinned and are being dominated by men precisely because of their idolatrous and covetous practice of turning to socialist institutions for law, justice, defense, and welfare. Instead, these men are so reprobate that they still “back the blue,” “support the troops,” praising the very men who hold them in subjection and consistently failing to see that these men and all their evils are instruments of divine justice against their own wickedness. The statists of the world consistently fail to make the connection between the bondage they are under and their own sin. Even this is granting too much. More often than not, they fail to even recognize they are in bondage, thinking instead that their Egyptian society is a “free country.” Yet when they do realize that something is not right and that they are being plundered by state rulers today, they still fail to see that they have done it to themselves and that all these things are exactly what results from raising up human rulers every time, not something that was just an anomaly or a deviation from “the way the founders’ intended it.” Even when it finally becomes more difficult than ever to avoid seeing that the political systems of men are obviously wicked, men choose instead to blame others for all their problems and submit that they do not deserve any of the evils that have come upon them, despite all the evils they have sown that led to this situation. Rather than seeing that the corruptions and injustices in society are the inevitable result of outsourcing their personal responsibilities of justice and welfare to human rulers, they imagine that something merely went wrong somewhere along the way. Rather than recognizing that these conditions necessarily followed from their wicked works of handing over their godly duties of maintaining law and welfare to human rulers, they blame certain presidents or legislators for the outcome, who supposedly mark the turning point of their once-righteous systems of political plunder. Instead of seeing that they are only reaping the whirlwind of the wicked fruit they originally sowed by trusting in men to order society for them, they conclude that their problems arose from a lack of sin. They believe that if only more “Christians” had voted, it would not have had to be this way. If only more “Christians” had run for political office, we would not be ruled by evil men today. Rather than awakening to the evils around them and repenting of their own evildoing, the poor and plundered masses insist that the solution to their problems lies in still greater rebellion and adultery with the kingdoms of the world. They imagine that their problems, all which have their origins in sin, will be solved by voting more enthusiastically than before, by expanding police forces and their budgets, or by securing even more legislative victories that supposedly apathetic Christians before them failed to chase.
One problem we live under today is that men still cling to all the fallacious notions of their government having legitimate origins which only become corrupt over time. Instead of seeing that it was sinful and rebellious to erect governments in the first place and that they were always wicked at their inception, they imagine either that things went wrong somewhere later on down the line, that things didn’t have to stray from the “founders’ intentions,” or that things are only beginning to become corrupt. They don’t see human rule as such as proof that they are already being punished by God for wanting human rulers at all. It is only when, say, some Hindus, Muslims, or Jews take office that they begin to claim they are an occupied people. Yet never for the domestic rulers, who they believe represent “the people,” do they realize they are captives in Egypt.
What is often required to lead people to true repentance—to get men to abandon the Babylonian politics of the world—then is for them to realize that they have already long been under divine judgment in having to live under these systems of man at all, and that far from seeking to reform them or return them to some supposedly more “limited” phase of their existence, they better turn back to God sooner rather than later if they are to avoid the greater calamity that awaits all those who continue down this wicked statist path. What men need to see today is that we are already being brought to ruin for the wicked works of statism by God himself, who sees to it that our own evildoing brings us shame and disaster, such that the evils today provide us with no argument for avoiding repentance. On the contrary, as the Biblical prophets saw, the current bondage we are living under provides us with an even more urgent and needed cause for abandoning our wicked ways and repenting from these worldly political ideologies and practices if we hope to avoid the genocides and famines that await all those idolaters who believe that they do not need to repent.
“Come, let us return to the LORD. For He has torn us to pieces, but He will heal us; He has wounded us, but He will bind up our wounds” (Hosea 6:1).
Though men today often believe that everything is just “the way it is” and that statism is an inevitable feature of life on earth, to the point that it does not make sense to them to repent of their support for these systems, numerous Biblical examples show that God is willing to turn back from the judgments He sends against a statist people upon their repentance for these wicked works.
“So rend your hearts and not your garments, and return to the LORD your God. For He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in loving devotion. And He relents from sending disaster” (Joel 2:13).
Though men most often adopt the deterministic idea that state rule is an unavoidable feature of life on earth, scripture shows us that neither slavery or liberty are inevitable but that both depend upon the righteous or wicked ways of men, respectively. God will give it to men either way they want it. They can have liberty under God if they trust in His provision in an anarchistic society, or they can squander their liberty and have slavery under men if they want to whore themselves out to the governments of the world for protection and “public services.” God will have it either way, though to be sure He weeps at the sight of men going after the false gods of the world and responds by assuring that they rob and enslave those who go down this road to Egypt. But it was never inevitable that men would come to be the slaves of men or that they should automatically live freely under God. The former is a divine judgment against the sins of statism, and the latter is the fruit of repenting from the slothfulness to seek the Kingdom of God and actually looking to serve your neighbors directly and freely because you love them and do not want to see them under the yoke of state rule. Both political bondage and liberty under God are a consequence of certain, willful acts of men like evildoing or seeking the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, which either result in slavery or liberty. If men trusted in the Lord alone as their ruler, then He would provide for them and secure them from all their enemies. If men want to act like Egyptians who make Pharaohs their rulers and legislators their lawgivers, then God reluctantly concedes and hands these men over to be plundered by these false gods who they trusted in for their salvation. “For He wounds, but He also binds; He strikes, but His hands also heal” (Job 5:18).
Repentance and liberation
Though the popular Christian thinking today is that men do not need to change their ways at all—that they do not need to repent of their statist idolatry—for God to look upon them favorably, scripture consistently records the idea that God is waiting on people to turn back from their evils in order for God to turn back from judging them — that repentance from iniquitous works needs to happen before God will relent of the judgment He has planned for all the statist people of the world.
“Let the wicked man forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the LORD, that He may have compassion, and to our God, for He will freely pardon” (Isaiah 55:7).
Though modern Christians believe they may continue in all their adultery with Babylonians because they profess a loose “faith” in the Lord that does not include any real fidelity or allegiance to the Kingdom of God alone, which they believe will still find them favor in the eyes of the Lord, Biblical causality mostly runs in the opposite direction: that God will withhold the disaster He has planned for a statist people only if they repent. As one well-known scripture says,
“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, forgive their sin, and heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14).
The statists of the world have not humbled themselves before the Lord, prayed for God to turn back the judgment against them, or repented for their wicked ways. On the contrary, they have not even acknowledged that their Egyptian ways are wicked or even seen that they are living in bondage due to sin. The statists of the world have never asked God to “create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me” (Psalm 51:10), which is why they still pursue human systems of government rather than the Kingdom of God and refuse to repent of these evil beliefs and acts of theirs. Unless men turn away from their statist ideology and practices, their statist land is not going to automatically be healed; this is not the law of God. Restoration of society to the divine, natural, anarchistic order of God will require true repentance and a new heart that will allow men to pledge allegiance to the Kingdom of God alone and learn to live as free men rather than as slaves to men, which will require them to learn how to love their neighbors rather than covet their property to fund the many socialist goods and services that they currently outsource to human governments. As long as men continue to walk like Egyptians, raising up Pharaohs and fawning over their police officers, God will assure that they continue to be plundered by these false gods who they trusted in for their salvation. The mere existence of a State is proof that a people are being judged by God for the sins that raised them up. For a blessed and liberated people, who trusted in the Lord alone as their savior, do not have to live under human rulers at all, who are exclusively a judgment against a people who would not make the Lord their God and who went chasing after false gods instead.
Once we see that the bondage of state rule has come upon us a divine judgment for the sins associated with the statist ideology and practices of the people, and not just as some natural law that makes human governments inevitable or necessary, then we can see that repentance—turning back to the anarchistic ways of God’s Kingdom—is the path to liberation from these tyrants and that God is only interested in freeing a people who make the Lord alone their God. Just as sin is the path to political slavery, so repentance from these sins can lead to deliverance.
Those who do not trust in the Lord to liberate them from the bondage of Egypt today hold to the same ways of thinking that got them into this bondage in the first place: that God would not serve them if they placed their faith in the Lord alone to keep them safe, free, clothed and fed in an anarchist society under God’s rule. Out of the same lack of faith in God that landed them in Egypt in the first place, now they fail to trust in God to deliver them out of this political slave society of theirs, which again has really only been the result of their sin and not some natural law built into the social structure.
It is never that God would not or cannot turn back the statist captivity that has come upon men today, but that men have hitherto refused to repent for the sins that led to their political bondage. As the prophets write,
“For the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel, has said: “By repentance and rest you would be saved; your strength would lie in quiet confidence—but you were not willing” (Isaiah 30:15).
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