JUDGMENT AGAINST JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES (Part 3)
The Excellence of the Christian Faith • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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-On Wednesdays I have been touting the excellencies of the Christian faith by contrasting Evangelical, biblical doctrines and beliefs (as represented by the Baptist faith) against false religions and cults. This gives us a theological foundation, it prepares us to defend our faith, and it trains us on how to share the gospel message with those who are outside of the faith.
-Before the long break from Wednesday nights that we had, I began to contrast our faith with that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They teach that their literature from the Watchtower Society alone gives the right interpretation of faith—the Watchtower Society is their authority for everything. This includes that the teachings in their literature is more authoritative than the Bible itself. In order to match the Bible with their errant beliefs, they came up with their own translation of the Bible that just so happens to fit their theology, even though there are numerous problems with it.
-We also notice that through their Watchtower teachings and perverted version of the Bible, they have come up with a completely different Jesus. Their Jesus was a created being who began his existence as the archangel Michael. Michael took on humanity and became Jesus. And then after his death he was raised to be Michael again. Clearly a different Jesus than the One given to us in Scripture as taught by the church for millennia—the Jesus who is God the Son, one member of the Trinity, fully God and fully man.
-But because they have their twisted Jesus, that then means that their idea about the gospel, salvation, and the afterlife is completely off kilter. This is true of most of the false religions and cults: when you have the wrong Jesus you have the wrong gospel; and when you have the wrong gospel, you don’t have salvation—you are lost.
-It’s hard to know where to begin, but let’s first look at:
5 For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,
6 who gave Himself as a ransom for all, the witness for this proper time.
-That seems pretty clear, you would think. But the Jehovah’s Witnesses first make the claim that these verses prove that Jesus cannot be God. According to their own literature, this is what they say about these verses:
[because Jesus is said to mediate between God and men it is clear that He cannot be viewed as God. After all,] since by definition a mediator is someone separate from those who need mediation, it would be a contradiction for Jesus to be one entity with either of the parties he is trying to reconcile. That would be a pretending to be something he is not.
-Of course, if you pause to read what they said, they have placed themselves in a conundrum. They are saying that a mediator has to be separate from whom they are mediating. Well, the verses say He is the mediator between God and men. If He cannot be God, that then means that He can’t be man either. Instead, we learn the wonderful truth that Jesus was able to mediate between God and men for the exact fact that He was both God and man. He represented God to man as God, and represented man to God as man. It is because He was both that He was able to mediate.
-And then how did He mediate—it says that He gave Himself as a ransom for all. Jesus gave the ransom. Now, here we come to their belief about Jesus’ part in salvation. They say that Jesus could not have been God because then the ransom price would have been higher than what God’s law required for breaking the law. Instead, the ransom payment had to be of corresponding value to the breaking. So what Jehovah’s Witnesses teach is that Jesus’ death merely atoned for Adam’s sin—or what we might call original sin. Jesus’ death merely balanced the scale of justice by taking care of Adam’s sin. As their own literature describes:
Since one man’s sin (that of Adam) had been responsible for causing the entire human family to be sinners, the shed blood of another perfect human (in effect, a second Adam), being of corresponding value, could balance the scales of justice.
-All Jesus’ death did, according to them, was take care of Adam’s sin. In their system of salvation, then, your own personal sin needs to be taken care of, and that is done by your good works. You have to live the way that the Watchtower says to live, do what the Watchtower tells you to do, and believe what the Watchtower tells you to believe. But even then it might not be enough. But this is refuted by passages such as:
14 Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil,
15 and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives.
16 For assuredly He does not give help to angels, but He gives help to the seed of Abraham.
17 Therefore, He had to be made like His brothers in all things, so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.
-Jesus, God the Son, took on humanity in order to save humans, defeat death for humans, and free them from their spiritual slavery. It says in v. 17 that through His being human and atoning death, He was the propitiation (the satisfaction for God’s wrath) FOR THE SINS OF THE PEOPLE. It doesn’t say just for the sins of Adam. It says that He died for the sins of the people. Because there are not enough good works to be done to cover the just punishment for our sin. We need our sin satisfied, or else it still lays heavy on us. Jesus Christ, the God-man, the mediator, is the redeemer from our own personal sins as well as the sin nature we inherited.
-So, what do they do with a passage like what we find in Acts:
30 and after he brought them out, he said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”
31 And they said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your house.”
32 And they spoke the word of the Lord to him together with all who were in his household.
-When faced with a clear message of grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, they claim that the needed works to cover your sin is just assumed in such a passage or it’s part of the undercurrent of the verse. So, in their own words, what they say about this passage is that:
If that man [the jailer] and his household truly believed, would they not act in harmony with their belief? Certainly.
-And elsewhere:
Faith must be demonstrated by consistent works.
-Now, no doubt, we believe that saving faith will lead to a life of works. But it is not the works that save. It is Christ who saves, received by faith. This is the consistent testimony of Scripture, such as:
15 so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life.
25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies,
-And the Bible contrasts salvation by grace versus salvation by works:
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not of yourselves, it is the gift of God;
9 not of works, so that no one may boast.
5 He saved us, not by works which we did in righteousness, but according to His mercy, through the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit,
-Now, because their view of Jesus is wrong, leading to their view of salvation that is wrong, it would only then make sense that their idea of the afterlife and eternity is also very wrong.
-Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe that humans have an immaterial part of their body. They think that when the Bible refers to the soul, it is merely talking about the life essence of a person—that power or force within you that gives you life; animates you. And because they do not think that you have a soul or spirit as we normally define it (no immaterial part of a person), then when someone dies there is nothing that continues on afterwards. There is no consciousness.
-It doesn’t matter if you were righteous or unrighteous or whatever, there is no continued existence after death. I guess I’ll try to summarize their beliefs and then tackle those beliefs with truths from Scripture. So, there is no soul or spirit, so there is no conscious afterlife. When someone dies, they are just dead. What that means for the unrighteous or unbelievers is that they just remain dead and unaware. I suppose it could called a form of annihilation...they just cease to exist. They face eternal destruction, not torment.
-On the other hand, for the believer or the righteous, there are two possible destinations. There are the 144,000 mentioned in Revelation that were super-duper faithful Christians, known as the Anointed, who will rule with Jesus in God’s Kingdom in heaven for eternity. That’s the upper echelon of the spiritual. However, most of the faithful won’t get there. Instead, at the resurrection, those faithful who did not make the cut for the 144,000 will get new bodies and live on a paradise on earth.
-There’s a lot to tackle here, but let me first tackle their belief that there is no immaterial part of humanity. The Bible refutes that idea in several places, but I’ll just name a few. First, we are told by Jesus:
28 “And do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
-Jesus obviously makes a distinction between the body and the soul—although joined they are separate. He indicates that it is possible to destroy the body without destroying the soul. That can only happen if there is such a thing as a soul or spirit—an immaterial part of a human. Or consider:
59 They went on stoning Stephen as he was calling out and saying, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!”
-As Stephen was being stoned to death, he called out for Jesus to receive his spirit. If he would just cease from existing, why would he do that? No, Stephen knew that when his body ceased to function, he would continue to exist with Jesus in heaven. And this leads to the truth that believers in Christ, when they die, they go to be with Jesus in heaven. This is a point that Paul makes in:
6 Therefore, being always of good courage, and knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord—
7 for we walk by faith, not by sight—
8 we are of good courage and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord.
-Paul makes it abundantly clear that when the body of a believer in Jesus Christ dies, you yourself do not become unconscious or cease to exist, but rather you consciously go to be with Jesus.
-But if the righteous are conscious after their death, it then only makes sense that the unrighteous are also conscious after their death. And we believe that for those whose sins are not forgiven through Jesus Christ, they end up in a place that we call hell—a place of unending, conscious punishment and torment where God’s justice against sin is meted out. We see this in Christ’s own words when He says:
42 and will throw them into the fiery furnace; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
-It is further described in:
9 Then another angel, a third one, followed them, saying with a loud voice, “If anyone worships the beast and his image, and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand,
10 and he also will drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His rage, and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.
11 “And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever; they have no rest day and night, those who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name.”
-So, the differences between Jehovah’s Witnesses and biblical Christianity is apparent and striking. They definitely teach a false gospel and a false Christ and are deceiving many people. It is estimated that there are over 9 million of them in the world. They are lost. They need the gospel. And we need to pray that they will see the light of truth...
