Sunday, January 07, 2007

I have been reading

I have been reading that Jehovah’s Witnesses have been discussing their roots from the Adventists.  The article seemed to state that the Jehovah’s Witnesses “Discovered that there is no eternal punishment” as if this theory is valid.  C.T. Russell seemed to want to disprove the eternal punishment for sin.  This might be because the church that he attended talked only of sin and its punishment instead of focusing on the Grace which was provided by Jesus Christ by His Death and Resurrection.  Many mainstream churches were doing that, and Christianity is realizing that this method is wrong.  Russell was not satisfied with disproving Hell; he instigated the idea that Armageddon was coming as early as 1874, then when that didn’t happen, he predicted that it would happen in 1914, and then 1975, and there have been several prophecies since then which have also failed.  Each time there is a failure, they cover it up by making some kind of statement about it; that they didn’t really mean this or that.

Instead of telling about the Grace of God through the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, they have gone off on all these different tactics to just confuse people.  But this article talked as if the theories of the Jehovah’s Witnesses are still valid.  This is a stumbling block to those who have left due to reasons that they  differed with different elders, etc.  They need to be encouraged to search the Scriptures; they should be told about the fallacies of the New World Translation, and that they should get a different version of the Bible and find out what God really said in those questionable scriptures.  The focus needs to be on the positive, not the negatived.  Because the Mormons and the Christian Science groups have the same situations that the Jehovah’s Witnesses have, and that is that they shun, they don’t go to the doctor, they have all kinds of stilted reasonings.  It is mind control and social injustice, but the focus needs to be on the fact that they are adulterating the Word of God to the point where it is not recognizable as the Word of God; it has such horrible connotations because of the application that the elders put on it.