[This is part 34 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 eight, thirty nine, forty, forty one, forty two, forty three]
Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris
If we are to ever expect men to turn from their wicked ways—to repent—then we will have to detail what exactly their wicked ways have been. It is that the popular teachers, influencers, pastors, priests, and theologians of mainstream Christianity have necessarily failed to describe or rebuke the wicked statist ways of men, whether purposefully or as blind men themselves, that the masses of professing Christians have never really repented from walking down the wicked path of the world, which is characterized by seeking the kingdoms of man rather than the Kingdom of God, i.e., by participating in the politics of Egypt and relying on her presidents, lawmakers, law enforcers, and soldiers for their peace, justice, order, and defense (only, of course, to find a corrupted version of these things as a judgment against these wicked pursuits). These false prophets have worked tirelessly throughout history to keep men from seeing that their revolt against God, who was to be our one and only King, Lawgiver, and Judge (Isaiah 33:22), has been nowhere more express than in their turn toward the false gods of human governments to be all these things for them instead (as seen in their creation of executive, legislative, and judicial branches of human government that are thinly disguised substitutes for God’s rule). In fact, they have deliberately worked to make men believe that there is no contradiction whatever in holding to a statist politics and professing Jesus Christ as one’s King. They have worked specifically to make men believe that they can legitimately seek the human kings and kingdoms of the world while still genuinely counting themselves as men who serve God, despite Scripture drawing a sharp dichotomy:
“Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living. As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD!” (Joshua 24:15).
In order to get men to turn away from the evil path they are currently on and get back on the godly road that they need to be on, it is necessary for us to describe exactly the means by which they have deviated from this narrow road to go down the wide, Babylonian road of destruction instead. As it stands, a vague call for men to “turn from your sin” is about the extent of calls for repentance in mainstream Christian circles, which not surprisingly has left men partaking in all the foremost sins that are abhorrent before God and have led to their bondage, namely their idolatry for human government and their covetous support for these socialist systems of defense, law, justice, welfare, and hundreds of other “public” goods and services that sinners believe their neighbors should be forced to fund with the sword. If men are ever to discover what true repentance looks like and actually turn away from their sins rather than merely professing the Lord’s name with their lips while doing contrary to His ways, they will have to acknowledge that their statist ideas and practices, i.e., their wicked ideological and physical pursuit of human governments, have been the chief manifestation of mankind’s rebellion against God since the dawn of time.
Rebellion and repentance
To further secure the ideas of sin and repentance as intrinsically related (respectively) to man’s adultery with human governments and his need to turn back from this great whoredom of his, let us make the point in relation to God’s original plan for man and the nature of His Kingdom versus the worldly institutions of political violence that marked man’s deviation from the godly path to go back into Egypt instead. God had always originally intended His people to live in a free, anarchistic society with the Lord alone as a people’s only King, with no authoritarian rulers above them who take a dominion over men which God reserved exclusively for himself. The divine political order as intended by God was always just God and His people, with no human kings necessary to stand between Him and those freemen who had His Law written on their hearts. God never once commanded men to erect a system of human civil government and anytime they did so it was shown to be a revolt against His anti-statist natural order.
Once we see that mankind’s pursuit of human rulers and their systems of government has been the foremost expression and example of their sin and rebellion against God’s anarchistic Kingdom order, we can then begin to define repentance as having everything to do with seeking another Kingdom entirely than the authoritarian institutions of the world that have always been usurpers of a rule that only rightly belongs to God. Once we show that God’s original plan for men was for them to live freely under His sole kingship, without any human kings above men or between them and God, and that God alone was to be the provider of the peace, protection, and prosperity that these human usurpers offer as their rival gospels, we can show that man’s rebellion against God was always marked by their pursuit of human rulers to provide for their protection and welfare instead, which consequently led to their bondage under these men as the divine punishment for forsaking the anarchistic and decentralized ways of the Lord’s Kingdom and feeding from the hands of Pharaohs instead.
The statist rebellion
On the numerous occasions that God instructed men to follow His ways rather than the ways of the people of the world, this counsel was always certainly one that called men away from the statist practices of the Babylonians and Egyptians of the world, whose “worldly” ways were always characterized by their support for human governments and their systems of political plunder.
“You must not follow the practices of the land of Egypt, where you used to live, and you must not follow the practices of the land of Canaan, into which I am bringing you. You must not walk in their customs” (Leviticus 18:3).
The ways of the people of the world are statist, and it was always these ways—raising up Pharaohs, electing human law makers, or fawning over law enforcement officers—that we were never to adopt when God calls His people away from the ways of worldly men. In each instance when scripture calls upon the listener of God’s voice to “not imitate the detestable ways of the nations” (Deuteronomy 18:9) around the world, it refers not merely to avoiding some mistaken religious ways of pagans who had some foolish and hard to understand infatuation with the mythical deities of a pantheon of gods, but people whose chief idolatry was bound up with their support for Pharaohs and the pagan-statist political systems of the world in general.
Despite all of the calls by God to avoid the statist ways of the people of the world, nevertheless they failed to heed this call, and the great rebellion of mankind against God has always been found in their willingness to mix in with the statists of the world. God called His people onto a much narrower path of making the Lord their only King, “but they mingled with the nations and adopted their customs” (Psalm 106:35). The Lord Jesus taught that a man cannot have two masters and must choose whether the Lord is His King or whether he will regard human kings as his gods and rulers, but they wouldn’t listen and went chasing after Caesars to be their gods instead. They refused to believe that making the Lord as your King necessitates abandoning the false gods who rule over the Egyptian-statist systems of the world.
“Fear the LORD and serve Him in sincerity and truth; cast aside the gods your fathers served beyond the Euphrates and in Egypt, and serve the LORD” (Joshua 24:14).
The ways of the Lord our God were always to serve God alone and follow His Law, not to chase after the false gods of human government and their lawmakers, whose systems God was always telling men to avoid when counseling them to not be like the people of the world.
“In the wilderness I said to their children: ‘Do not walk in the statutes of your fathers or keep their ordinances or defile yourselves with their idols. I am the LORD your God; walk in My statutes, keep My ordinances, and practice them” (Ezekiel 20:28-19)
This statist revolt of man, which was underway well before this explicit episode, finally came to a head when Israel sought a human king to fight their battles for them, which God clearly said represented the people’s rejection of the Lord as their King to be served by false gods instead (1 Samuel 8). Before anyone gets hung up on the terminology of “kings” and “monarchies” in an attempt to leave room for “presidents” and “constitutional republics,” we should be sure to point out that this statist revolt against God was an abandonment of God’s anarchistic order for the systems of man, period. As the Christian Anarchist, Kevin Craig, says in some of his comments on Samuel 8,
“Is the main point of [Samuel 8] the monarchy? Is it not rather the rejection of God’s government for man’s government? The Lord said to Samuel, ‘They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them’ (1 Samuel 8:7). Thus, very clearly, God saw Israel’s decision as primarily and essentially a rejection of His government…Whether Israel chose a monarchy, a republic, democracy, dictatorship, or any other form of civil government, it was an abandonment of God….Unless we see this chapter as the formal rejection of God’s law-order for another law-order, we miss the meaning of this central and revolutionary event.”
The essence of man’s ongoing rebellion against God has always been a political one where they have either sought rulership or power themselves or other men to rule over them in the place of God, whose ideal and intended political order for mankind was always for them to be free people under His exclusive and sole rule. God’s plan for men, before they rebelled against the divine natural order, was an anarchistic society absent of human rulers and authoritarians, where decentralized families tending to the dominion mandate would provide for their own needs on their own and serve each other freely and voluntarily. The rebellion of mankind has always been marked by a turn from anarchy under God to state rule under men.
Once we have set out that mankind’s turn away from God’s natural order has always been found chiefly in their turn toward the authoritarian systems of man, naturally it becomes possible show men what their sin has been and what true repentance must look like. Once we see that God’s intended “political” order was an anarchist one where people would be ruled by God alone and directly, without any need for human rulers to stand in between man and God, we can use this picture of this political rebellion to show men how to get back on the straight path again. Godly men are anti-statists who seek to be ruled by God alone and reject the human governments of the world; statism is the ideology and works of ungodly men who do not know the Lord and chase after human rulers in their lack of divine wisdom and faith in God. It was always the righteous path of serving each other freely and voluntarily and living as an anti-statist people who were to be set apart from the statists of the world who operate on force and violence that was to be the distinguishing feature of God’s people which made them different from the ungodly statists of the world, who are conversely distinguished by their wicked political pursuit of systems of human government and their heads of state, soldiers, and law officers who were in effect their lords and saviors who supplied their “peace,” “freedom,” and “law and order.” It was always this path—an anarchistic society under God’s sole rule—that men rebelled against when they turned after the ways of these men in a worldly quest “to be like all the other nations” (1 Samuel 8:20). As one article on repentance explains the deviation from the path of godly governance to statist governance,
“The Kingdom of God operated in a different way than the kingdoms of the world. Israel was to operate as that righteous government of God sustained by freewill offerings given in charity to public titular servants who did not exercise authority one over the other but served a network of free assemblies bound, not by contracts, covenants and constitutions, but by a system of love for neighbor as much as you love yourselves. This is why there were commandments not to kill, steal or even covet anything that is your neighbors. But Israel and many of the Jewish sects had perverted and abandoned the way of the Lord taught by Moses and were making the word of God to no effect, causing the nation to bear no fruit. Because of their sinful and covetous practices Jesus as the Christ was going to take the Kingdom of God from them and appoint it to another group, His ‘little flock.’”
Neither the authoritarian kingdoms of the world that rob everyone to fund their ostensible services, nor the so-called churches that have substituted ritualistic performances for actual service to one another, represent God’s Kingdom order, which is neither statist like the governments of men or slothful like the Sunday pew-sitters. The Kingdom of God is something altogether separate and different from them both. Unlike the kingdoms of man, it does not operate on the compulsory offerings of taxation to fund its welfare system or the authoritarian rule by men who claim to be the “representatives” of the people, but instead operates on the freewill offerings of those who are gathering freely in this cause under voluntarily appointed ministers who redistribute the charity of these people as the non-authoritarian “government” (or church) of this literal Kingdom. And unlike the so-called churches of the world, who want men to believe that their sermons and Bible studies represent the true Body of Christ, this government of God (i.e., the freely appointed ministers of the congregations taken together) is an actual body politic that works to provide welfare and aid to the people they serve in a daily ministration of charity that functions as a literal Kingdom, all without coveting the property of our neighbors in a vast, plunderous system of socialist welfare and socialist public services.
It has been these things—both the founding and furthering of systems of human civil government as well as the slothful pew-sitting of churchians—that have represented mankind’s deviation from the righteous path that God has called us to, whether (respectively) by outright outsourcing our personal responsibilities to serve each other directly and freely over to human rulers who do it by force, or achieving the same result anyway by simply failing to live like citizens of another literal Kingdom in substituting Sunday singalongs for the real work of serving one another in true worship and pure religion.
The refusal to learn
The problem we have always faced throughout history is that men have never wanted to actually listen to God or to those who He has sent to speak His truths. From the days of the Biblical prophets who wept over the stubbornness of the idolaters of their time to hear their warnings to the hardheaded statists of our present age, the earth has always been filled with men who refuse to listen to those who speak the truth and even men who downright hate the truth and believe in lies. They have never wanted to see that their quest for human rulers has been overtly sinful and evil and that the so-called “worship services” of modern Christians are traditions of men that make the word of God to no effect (Mark 7:13), which is why they have never been able to turn from these wicked or slothful works in repentance for having walked down the wrong path.
Despite all of the guaranteed evils of man-made political societies prevailing them as all the evidence that one needs to see that they have gone astray from God and are paying the price for it, men have never wanted to see the consequences for their wrong turn down the wicked road of the world that raises up men to rule over them and be their providers of a perverted version of law and justice and the “protectors” of their “freedom,” because they have never even seen their statist lust for human masters as a wrong turn at all: that all the people of the land would consequently find themselves under God’s judgment in the form of reaping all the evils they had sown in supporting and furthering inherently evil systems of human government that operate on force, plunder, murder, slavery, and war. In short, that the sins of statism (i.e., believing in rulers whatever or raising them up in practice) leads the people into the bondage of Egypt rather than the “land of the free.”
Though God has always called men to turn away from their idolatry for Pharaohs and their Egyptian-statist ways of prostituting themselves out to armies and police forces to be the providers of their supposed safety, security, defense, justice, and law, and has even allowed these men to corrupt all these things to be a rebuke unto these statist whores, nevertheless they have not wanted to listen and thus left God with no choice but to hand them over to Egyptian police state societies that they yearned to have standing over them.
“And I said to them: ‘Each of you must throw away the abominations before his eyes, and you must not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.’ / But they rebelled against Me and refused to listen. None of them cast away the abominations before their eyes, and they did not forsake the idols of Egypt. So I resolved to pour out My wrath upon them and vent My anger against them in the land of Egypt” (Ezekiel 20:7-8).
Although God has sent prophets in every generation to warn men of the consequences for their overtly wicked ways of partaking in the Egyptian-statist political systems or otherwise continuing about their slothful ways of sitting around in so-called churches rather than seeking the Kingdom of God in repentance, the masses of men throughout history have always been a bunch of hardheaded statist idolaters who have refused to listen to God’s words or ours calling them away from their Egyptian ways of thinking and acting that have wound them up in bondage. Such has been the history of men in the modern era as well as the story of the Israelites throughout Scripture.
“Israel is a nation devoid of counsel, with no understanding among them. If only they were wise, they would understand it; they would comprehend their fate” (Deuteronomy 32:28-29).
Though we warn men that statism is sin and that sin leads to bondage, they refuse to hear these words and fight against them at every chance they get—not because they are fighting against us either, as God made clear to Samuel in that critical moment of Scripture where men sought human kings to rule over them (1 Samuel 8:7-8), but because they are rejecting the instruction and rule of God himself. Statists are people who refuse to be verbally rebuked and corrected and instead respond at every point with some pathetic attempt to justify their Egyptian ideas and behaviors, namely that of believing in Pharaohs and their officers whatever or voting them into office. They are even people who refuse to be rebuked by the divine judgment of having to live in a political slave society that is actively and evidently disproving the sinful theory that human governments are necessary to peace, prosperity, law, order, and freedom, all which have been corrupted and twisted around as a means of ideally and divinely correcting their wicked behavior.
Sin and bondage
Though mankind has consistently failed to learn that statism is sin and that ideas and acts such as turning to human rulers and their armies for protection and freedom have represented their primary deviation from God’s anarchist order where He alone would watch over the people, secure their liberty, and save them from the plunderous systems of the world, nevertheless it has been on this statist political path that men have gone astray from the Lord and His Kingdom. Moreover, it has been this crooked statist road of adopting the Babylonian political ideology of the world and the Roman works of participating in these systems that have been precisely the perverse and iniquitous ways which led to mankind’s bondage under other men throughout history and up to our current time. Hence why God warned men to “be careful not to be ensnared by their ways” (Deuteronomy 12:30). Men who practice the sins of statism—from simply believing in rulers, supporting their campaigns for political office, or desiring to rule over men yourself—find themselves as slaves under these systems and bring about the destruction of their societies.
Despite men hitherto failing to learn anything from their enslavement to systems of human government (i.e., failing to see that it has come upon them due to their own sins), which they have instead seen as the source of their alleged “freedom” and “law and order,” nevertheless this was always the connection that scripture was attempting to make in the hopes that men would see where they had gone wrong, what has come upon them as a result of their wrong turn, and the urgent need to repent after realizing they have screwed up. Throughout scripture, the captivity under human rulers was always shown to be the result of man’s persistent failure to be ruled by God alone, keep His commands, and avoid or turn away from the idolatrous and covetous practices that are bound up with seeking protection and welfare from human rulers. In but one episode of Israel falling into the hands of men, we read about their exile into Assyria, which can serve as a fine example of the causal reality put into the social structure by God at creation and the persistent failure of men to learn it and heed it.
“Then the king of Assyria invaded the whole land, marched up to Samaria, and besieged it for three years. In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria and carried away the Israelites to Assyria, where he settled them in Halah, in Gozan by the Habor River, and in the cities of the Medes. All this happened because the people of Israel had sinned against the LORD their God, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They had worshiped other gods and walked in the customs of the nations that the LORD had driven out before the Israelites, as well as in the practices introduced by the kings of Israel. The Israelites secretly did things against the LORD their God that were not right…They did wicked things, provoking the LORD to anger. They served idols, although the LORD had told them, ‘You shall not do this thing.’ Yet through all His prophets and seers, the LORD warned Israel and Judah, saying, ‘Turn from your wicked ways and keep My commandments and statutes, according to the entire Law that I commanded your fathers and delivered to you through My servants the prophets.’ But they would not listen, and they stiffened their necks like their fathers, who did not believe the LORD their God. They rejected His statutes and the covenant He had made with their fathers, as well as the decrees He had given them. They pursued worthless idols and became worthless themselves, going after the surrounding nations that the LORD had commanded them not to imitate. They abandoned all the commandments of the LORD their God…They devoted themselves to doing evil in the sight of the LORD, provoking Him to anger. So the LORD was very angry with Israel, and He removed them from His presence. Only the tribe of Judah remained, and even Judah did not keep the commandments of the LORD their God, but lived according to the customs Israel had introduced. So the LORD rejected all the descendants of Israel. He afflicted them and delivered them into the hands of plunderers, until He had banished them from His presence. When the LORD had torn Israel away from the house of David, they made Jeroboam son of Nebat king, and Jeroboam led Israel away from following the LORD and caused them to commit a great sin. The Israelites persisted in all the sins that Jeroboam had committed and did not turn away from them. Finally, the LORD removed Israel from His presence, as He had declared through all His servants the prophets. So Israel was exiled from their homeland into Assyria, where they are to this day” (2 Kings 17:5-23).
The statist captivity that God sends upon men is done in the end of getting them to make the connection between their sin and bondage, so that they may remember the Lord their God who saves His people from the slavery of statism and thereby repent for the iniquities that have led them into Egypt rather than out of it. “All this happened because the people of Israel had sinned against the LORD their God, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.” God had always commanded men to have no other gods (rulers) before them and to not be like the statists of the world, who raised up authoritarian human kings, tax-funded militaries, and systems of man-made law to serve them instead of the Lord, but they have always gone astray from His ways and sought to be like the Egyptians anyway. “They had worshiped other gods and walked in the customs of the nations that the LORD had driven out before the Israelites, as well as in the practices introduced by the kings of Israel.” God has always sent out His anti-statist prophets to warn of the destruction that awaits all those who go down the road to Egypt rather than the way that the Lord commanded men to walk on, but they have always mocked them, persecuted them, or removed them from their presence and kicked them out of their false churches. “Through all His prophets and seers, the LORD warned Israel and Judah, saying, ‘Turn from your wicked ways and keep My commandments and statutes, according to the entire Law that I commanded your fathers and delivered to you through My servants the prophets.’ But they would not listen.” In the unceasing idolatry and whoredom of the statists of the world, who pursue systems of human government to serve them and save them instead of God, the Lord eventually concedes and gives men over to all the evil practices of robbery and murder that they have already partook in or begged to have over them. “So the LORD rejected all the descendants of Israel. He afflicted them and delivered them into the hands of plunderers.” If men refuse to see the sin inherent in their quest for human rulers but insist on having these men rule over them and their neighbors, then God eventually gets fed up and gives these statists over to all their wicked desires. “So Israel was exiled from their homeland into Assyria, where they are to this day.”
What we need today are men who are ready to repent and seek the Kingdom of God alone, realizing that going down the way of Egypt and Babylon and Rome has been a sinful path that has not just done them no good, but placed a yoke around their own necks. Yet where we stand is that most men who profess the Lord as their King have not seen that they are statist idolaters whose pursuit of human rulers and their systems of government is sinful and rebellious, much less that it is responsible for all the evils that have come upon their land today, from a police state to the systems of mass incarceration and tax plunder that they operate and enforce. We have before us the difficult task of even getting men to recognize that they are Egyptians and have been living in active and ongoing revolt against God’s anarchist order, and what is more, that they need to repent from these sinful ways.
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