Vol. 6, No. 8, 1989

Articles on Jehovah's Witnesses

David Henke

Last month I focused on the place of the pastor and church in the defense of God's people against false teaching. This month I want to focus on the responsibility of the family to protect its members from false teaching.

It is unwarranted to expect that sufficient protection is being provided by the church, or pastor. Whether a given church is doing a good job in this area, or not, there is still a great responsibility on the part of the head of a family to provide a Biblical foundation for spiritual discernment.

The proliferation of error is too great to expect any one church or Christian family to stay informed. The solution is a proper foundation in Biblical doctrine so that when counterfeits appear they will be discernable.

A proper foundation should include study of such doctrines as the Trinity, the deity and humanity of Christ, the personality and deity of the Holy Spirit, the bodily resurrection of Christ, salvation, the doctrine of scripture, the virgin birth, last things, man, the Church, angels, and what the Bible says about Satan (it is important to know your enemy).

It is also very important that every Christian and every church have on hand literature defining the errors of the major cults. This is the purpose of the Watchman Expositor and the tracts, tapes and study guides we publish. If this material were more widely available many families would not have experienced the heartache over a member being deceived into a cult.

To illustrate this need in recent weeks and months we have received a number of requests for help from individuals whose families are divided because of the influence of Jehovah's Witnesses. These requests always contain strong elements of desperation and frustration. Our hearts go out to them in their situation. We wish we could turn the clock back to a point before the Watchtower's influence began. Then we could have "inoculated" the individual against this spiritual disease.

It doesn't take much information to accomplish such an inoculation. However, once an individual is committed to a cult to the point of baptism the difficulty of breaking them away from their commitment multiplies.

Whether it is an inoculation beforehand or a "Witnessectomy" afterward the issues that work best are those that go to the heart of the Watchtower's claim to speak for God. Such issues are the many false prophecies they have made, their doctrinal changes, and scholastic dishonesty.

The reason such issues are effective is because the Witness is actually trusting that the Watchtower does speak for God. And since they believe God speaks to them through the Organization and its publications they are in fact placing their trust directly in men and only indirectly in God. Thus, they must be set free from their misplaced trust in order to be free to go directly to God for salvation and truth.

Jesus said that a man cannot serve two masters (Matt. 6:24). He will love one and hate the other, or vice versa. In the case of Jehovah's Witnesses they are serving the Watchtower's `truth' and hating the Biblical truth. They would never think this was the case but what does it say when the Watchtower condemns study of the Bible alone without Watchtower publications to guide the student.

The Watchtower said that some have said, "that it is sufficient to read the Bible exclusively, either alone or in small groups at home. But, strangely, through such `Bible reading,' they have reverted right back to the apostate doctrines that commentaries by Christendom's clergy were teaching 100 years ago...!" (8/15/81, pp. 28,29)

There are two fascinating things about that quote. First, they clearly say you cannot understand the Bible without their publications. And second, there is the left-handed admission that reading the Bible alone leads one to believe what "Christendom" teaches.

I wrote the majority of this article before the latest Watch­tower arrived. In it they say, "Religiously speaking, there is a lot of `counterfeit money' in circulation... Is it possible to be open-minded enough to accept good counsel and yet not be deceived by counterfeit advice?" (Watchtower, 09/01/89, page 4). In this Watchtower they say, in essence, be open minded enough to check out truth claims by comparing it with the Bible. That is an extremely hypocritical thing for them to say.

In the Watchtower of March 15, 1986, they rebuked Witnesses for listening to religious programming on radio and TV and then went on to say, "False religious propaganda from any source should be avoided like poison! Really, since our Lord has used `the faithful and discreet slave' to convey to us `sayings of everlasting life,' why should we ever want to look anywhere else?" (pages 19 and 20)

The bottom line is that open mindedness is always a one way street with the cults. So, according to their past advice if you are not a JW you should examine your faith to see if it is true. However, if you are a JW you should not examine your faith because God has given you the `faithful and discreet slave', the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses, to do that for you. Hypocrisy!!

My standard recommendation to Christians who are dealing with family members in the Watchtower involves two approaches. First, that they agree to a joint study of the Bible by itself, without any literature about the Bible to "guide" them. This allows the Holy Spirit to convict and convince without the opinions of men getting in the way.

The other approach is that the Christian begin a thorough program of study of the Watchtower's claims, doctrines, and history in order to expose the deception that is there.

However, it is far better to inoculate early.