The J W's Hate Truth
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The love of the truth
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| Charles Russell |
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 in Brooklyn, New York.
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| JW World Headquarters in Warwick, NJ |
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
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| Joseph Rutherford |
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 Warkwick, New Jersey.
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, at first, and now in New Jersey! 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.
|
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| A typical JW meeting place |
• 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.
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