Are game engines just interpreters?

I was developing a 2D game engine in c++ and it went pretty well, until I got to the point of exporting the game. You see, I was using lua in a virtual machine (sandbox) for the scripting of the game; now I realized that my game engine is just a lua interpreter if I try to share the game I'll distribute the game files (sounds, images, etc..), my scripts and my "interpreter" .exe this means that if I share my game with someone they'll have access to the game logic instead of a stand-alone .exe. How do other engines compile scripts into a stand-alone executable i'm really confused on this mater.