Sunday, January 31
Truth is not in him. —John 8:44.
Satan’s lies add grief and suffering to mankind. Parents who are grieving the death of a child may be told that God has taken the child, perhaps to be an angel in heaven. Does this satanic lie lessen their pain or add to it? The false teaching of hellfire has been used to justify torture, including the burning at the stake of those who opposed church teachings. According to a book on the Spanish Inquisition, some of those responsible for this cruelty may have believed that they were only giving heretics “a taste of what perpetual hellfire would be like” so that they would repent before dying and be saved from hellfire. In a number of lands, people feel compelled to pay homage to their dead ancestors, to honor them, or to seek a blessing from them. Others want to appease their ancestors in order to avoid some form of punishment. Sadly, beliefs based on satanic lies do not bring genuine comfort. Instead, they cause needless anxiety or even fear. w19.04 14 ¶1; 16 ¶10
The falsity of the immortal soul and hellfire quickly become evident to any honest Bible researcher. True, the demons promote their deceptions through various tricks, like tabloid stories of people who have seemingly died and had a glimpse of the great beyond and who were then revived to tell their return-from-the dead tale. Or the demons may project familiar voices from the invisible or even sculpt ghostly ectoplasmic images before their entranced victims. But those who know the Bible are protected from those demonic tricks.
The most dangerous lies are the ones you willingly embrace as the truth. Those lies come from the same satanic source but are much harder to dislodge from the mind because they are taught by a trusted authority, the same authority that exposes numerous lies and falsehoods believed by the world. The most convincing lies are backed by physical “proofs.” Of course, I am speaking about 1914 and the insidious lie that Jesus returned then and has been ruling the world for the past 107 years.
There has never been a more clever deception as that which is the very heart of the Watchtower. The seven times calculation seems so brilliant until one really starts to examine the underlying assumptions. For example, in my response to Rolf Furuli, which, by the way, he never even responded to my email, the foundation of the Watchtower’s calculus is dismantled. For nearly 20 years not a single JW has been able to defend the Watchtower’s sacred truth. Not a single one. Why is that?
But there is so much more to 1914 than mere chronology. After all, Charles Russell used the seven times, along with arcane pyramidology, to determine 1914 many years before. And sure enough, war erupted in Europe. And as the war dragged on the Spanish Influenza swept the globe. Now there was a pandemic! It surely seemed as if the horsemen of the Apocalypse had dashed from the gate. I was convinced. That is, until I came to a deeper understanding of the truth.
Now I realize I was a victim, not so much of the Watchtower. I was a victim of a very convincing demonic deception. Paul warned of this very thing when he wrote to the Thessalonians about an operation of Satan that God would allow. The apostle revealed that the Devil would operate through a human agency, a so-called man of lawlessness. “But the lawless one’s presence is by the operation of Satan with every powerful work and lying signs and wonders and every unrighteous deception for those who are perishing, as a retribution because they did not accept the love of the truth in order that they might be saved. That is why God lets a deluding influence mislead them so that they may come to believe the lie, in order that they all may be judged because they did not believe the truth but took pleasure in unrighteousness.” — 2 Thess. 2:9-12
The operation of Satan was in effect from the very beginning with the hypnotizing chronology. Then when The Year arrived the Deceiver touched off the Great War. It only took a couple of bullets from an assassin’s pistol to accomplish since in the run-up to that fateful year Satan had set up Europe into two opposing blocs with mutual defense agreements, much like NATO now. What a powerful demonic work! The pandemic likely came as a natural result of millions of troops wallowing in filthy, bloody trenches, and then going home as carriers of the virus. During the war the demons persecuted the Bible Students, even sending the leaders of the Watchtower to prison. What a convincing lying sign!
After the Second World War the old sage of Bethel, one Fredrick Franz, wrote volumes cleverly interpreting virtually all prophecy to 1914. Since then the Governing Body has been tasked with maintaining the wall of lies, as if plastering coat-after-coat of whitewash on a shabbily built wall. Everything the Watchtower writes in support of Satan’s operation has become “every unrighteous deception.”
My task has been, not to disabuse Jehovah’s Witnesses from the Watchtower’s deluding influence, which is not possible anyway, but rather, to notify the plasterers that their whitewashing project is doomed to failure. I have done as Jehovah has commanded: “Tell those plastering with whitewash that it will fall.”
All that remains is for the Son of man to arrive like a thief in the night and unleash the storm. Then I expect to pose the follow-up question: “A torrential downpour will come, hailstones will fall, and powerful windstorms will break it down. And when the wall falls you will be asked, ‘Where is your coating of plaster?’”
Just as has been my experience over this past quarter of a century, I do not anticipate any response.
