Call to Commitment

The love of the truth

How important is truth? How important is it to love truth? I cannot think of anything that is more important. The opposite of truth is falsehood and falsehood invalidates every good thing. Joy, peace, humility, righteousness, and all the other virtues in the world, have their counterfeits. Even love, if it lacks truth, becomes a false love and is probably the most deceptive of the whole spectrum of lies.

Love is of vital importance in Christianity to the degree that the person, who does not walk in love, according to the Apostle John, “does not know God, for God is love” (1 Jn.4:8). The Apostle Paul ranks love above all gifts and virtues: “Now abide these three, faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Co.13:13). Because this is so and because the father of lies understands its power, he comes under the guise of love and today millions of people are deceived… in the name of love.

Paul calls truth the girdle of the armor of God (Eph.6:14) It ties the whole armor together and without it, everything falls apart. Truth stands by itself and because of the virtue of its very name, it cannot deceive. Truth reigns eternal. Christ proclaimed, “I am the truth” and therefore everyone, who comes to Christ, must face truth: “He who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God” (Jn.3:21).  

Very carefully consider the following warning of Paul to the Thessalonians and you will see that God values and loves truth more than He loves men! “That lawless one will be revealed… the one whose coming is in accord with the activity of Satan, with all power and signs and false wonders, and with all the deception of wickedness for those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. For this reason God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they will believe what is false, in order that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth…” (2 Thes.2:3-12).

Here is a warning to the church from the XIX Century through the writings of the much respected bishop J. C. Ryle. He comments on Paul’s rebuke of the elder apostle, Peter: “See how he acts here! He withstands Peter to the face. He publicly rebukes him. He runs the risk of all the consequences that might follow… Above all, he writes it down for a perpetual memorial, that it never might be forgotten, - that, wherever the Gospel is preached throughout the world, this public rebuke of an erring Apostle might be known and read of all men…He dreaded false doctrine. He would teach us that we ought to contend for the truth jealously, and to fear the loss of truth more than the loss of peace… Many people will put up with anything in religion, if they may only have a quiet life. They have a morbid dread of what they call 'controversy.'”

The proper stance of men of God, as we see it in Bishop Ryle, was, because of love for the church, to warn it of a departure from historic truth. For that reason they may be very critical of the present state of the church and fear its fall into apostasy, but never deny its historic roots. That is a very different stance from that, which was the common ground taken by the founders of all three cults that we are studying. These arrogant charlatans saw nothing of value in the history of the church and turned away from its most vital doctrines. They felt that God had raised them up to reveal new truth never before seen. They, in fact, hated the established church and hated the truth, which was upheld by all the evangelical elements. This was surely the view of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons, William Miller and Ellen White, the leaders of the Adventist movement, and Charles Russell, the founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Charles Taze Russell

Charles Russell, born on February 16, 1851, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, was the founder of the Bible Student movement, from which the Jehovah’s Witnesses emerged. In his early years, his family was Presbyterian, but at age 13, he left the Presbyterians to become a Congregationalist. In those days, he was a proponent of hell-fire and scrawled Bible texts, dealing with that subject, on fence posts. At age 16, he began to question his faith and look into various other religions for enlightenment. He found none. Russell married in 1879 and the couple divorced in 1908, having separated in 1897.

Charles Russell attended the meetings of Adventists in 1870 and then associated with a group influenced by the Millerite Adventists. They came to the conclusion that many of the most important doctrines of the established churches were unscriptural, including the trinity, hellfire and the immortality of the soul.   

He presented his peculiar views to church leaders and was rejected. He had been in the clothing business with his father and now he sold his five stores for $300,000 (current value $6,644,000!) and invested in his own “ministry”. He founded Zion’s Watch Tower Tract Society, later changed to Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society and eventually established it on its present site in Brooklyn, New York.

He claimed that it was his duty to draw together all those, who “were seeking the truth of God’s word.” He wrote that the "clear unfolding of truth" within his teachings was due to "the simple fact that God's due time has come; and if I did not speak, and no other agent could be found, the very stones would cry out." Later, under the sweetness of success, he went so far as to accept the assertion that he was the personified “faithful and wise servant” spoken of in Matthew 24:45.

Newspapers began to publish his written sermons with a readership of 15 million in the U.S. and Canada and they were distributed worldwide in as many as 4,000 newspapers. His works became the third most circulated writings on earth, exceeding a circulation of all the writings of the priests and preachers in North America combined! His production of an eight-hour film in four parts, The Photo-drama of Creation, was the first ever to synchronize moving film and sound.

During legal separation proceedings in 1906, Mrs. Russell’s attorney alleged that her husband had had “improper intimacy” with a “foster daughter”. He also had enemies among his associates who accused him of dictatorial leadership and unethical business practices.   

The Jehovah Witnesses

J.F. Rutherford (1869-1942)

Following Russell’s death in 1916, Joseph Rutherford became the president of The Watchtower Society. There was a great deal of controversy among the members at that time and the followers splintered into various groups. Those who remained loyal to Rutherford now call themselves, Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Today the cult has 8.2 million members, and is ruled by a hierarchy of elders in Brooklyn, New York. They establish all the doctrinal positions based on their interpretations of the Bible. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have published their own version of the Bible, called the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures.

As is the case with the Mormons and the Adventists, the JW’s doctrines have been evolving over the years, which makes it more difficult to pinpoint them exactly. As in the case of the other cults, these doctrinal adjustments are aided by “flashes of light” and “invisible angelic visitations”. These kinds of extra-scriptural manifestations always are needed by unstable groups and people in an attempt to authenticate very questionable conclusions. Russell’s successors, Joseph Rutherford and Nathan Knorr, have changed a number of beliefs held by Russell and other viewpoints continue to be changed behind closed doors by the Governing Body.

They obviously cannot hold any kind of claim to eternal truth, held consistently over the centuries by God’s people through the authority of the Bible. Earlier Watchtower literature claimed their predictions to be “indisputable”, “absolutely and unqualifiedly correct and bearing “the stamp of approval of Almighty God”, but now the Governing Body has determined them to be fallible and not divinely inspired. How unstable are the devil’s lies! How gullible are the members, who hold to a belief that God’s kingdom rule on earth is determined in a large office building in Brooklyn! All members must submit to their rule and determinations.

The JW’s go farther astray in their views than the Adventists, especially in their denial of the godhead, and therefore I would consider them the less dangerous of the two cults. I say this because, the closer the counterfeit is to the authentic, the harder it is to detect its falseness. Of course, the fact that 8.2 million people have been led into their damnable trap, shows the Jehovah’s Witnesses to be a mighty tool of Satan in the destruction of the souls of men.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that the church departed from the faith in the first century. In other words, upon the death of the apostles, the major doctrines that have been held since that time, are all put into question. They believe that they are the one group that has arisen to restore the apostolic faith. We will now outline these doctrinal positions, as we did those of the Seventh-day Adventists, and you will find some similarities due to the early association of the two movements. Here, then, is a brief summary of some of their most important, particular beliefs:

• Differing from the Adventists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses are nontrinitarian. Jehovah is the proper name of God and the chief aim and duty of this sect is to bear witness to that name. God will not hear prayer by addressing any other name. This is a very important doctrine, as far as they are concerned, and is needed to establish their identity and justify their reason to exist. God, then, is one in number and personality, and His name is Jehovah. This is an attempt to make God to be someone conceivable in a humanly limited mind.

• Since they deny the trinity, therefore they also must deny the divinity of Christ. Their Christ is something less than the eternal Son of God. He is called “a god”, defined as a powerful one. Jesus is Michael, the archangel, and he was the first creation of God. The archangel became a perfect man and nothing more. Jesus did not die on a cross, but on a stake. Jesus did not resurrect physically from the grave. They reason that in order for the sacrifice of Christ to be real, his body would have to remain in the grave. So what the disciples saw was a kind of spirit body.

• Because of their denial of the trinity, therefore their holy spirit is not personal; he is not alive, but is an active force, something akin to radar or radio waves.

• According to the JWs, there are only 144,000, who are born-again, saved and in heaven. The best that the rest can do is hope for a paradise on earth. They say that through the knowledge of the scriptures, they come to believe in Jesus Christ and are on the way to salvation. Everyone must show his faith by his works. It is a mistake for him to believe that he has salvation now or any kind of assurance that he has eternal life. In conclusion, he must show himself worthy of salvation. There is only salvation through their church, which is the only channel of God’s truth.

• Borrowed from the Adventists, the JWs believe that the soul is unconscious after death and unconsciously awaits the resurrection.

• There is no eternal punishment for the unsaved. Hell is the grave. Gehenna, the Lake of Fire, is the place of total annihilation. They believe that eternal punishment would be contrary to the nature of God, which is love.

• Christ began his invisible rule over the earth in 1914 and 1914 also marks the establishment of the Kingdom of God in heaven. It was the end of the Time of the Gentiles.  

We are barely scratching the surface of the full spectrum of Watchtower doctrinal insanity. What I state here should be enough evidence to prove that this is a belief system designed in hell. This is an organization that destroys an individual relationship with God and disallows any deviation from the decisions made at Watchtower headquarters. It is spiritual slavery at its very worst.

If you would like to read or review the other two studies on the cults, here are the two links on this blog:

Mormons...
http://calltocommitment.blogspot.com.es/2015/06/the-god-of-mormonism.html#more

Adventists:
http://calltocommitment.blogspot.com.es/2015/07/roots-of-seventh-day-adventism_20.html