Can It Be? (Testimony of a former Jehovah's Witness)

CE ^ | April 3, 2010 | Mary Kochan

[NYer]

This is my 16^th Easter.

For the first 38 years of my life I did not celebrate Easter because I was one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, a pseudo- Christian group with a very strange economy of salvation. It is not easy to describe life in a cult like Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is very dark. Even their light is darkness.

Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe in the Trinity, so they do not believe in the deity of Christ. They believe that Jesus was Michael the Archangel before he came to earth, and that after he was resurrected, he went back to being Michael the Archangel — but with the name “Jesus.” They do believe Jesus died (but not on a cross) to save mankind from sin and death by atoning for the disobedience of Adam. Jesus had to be a perfect man, to match Adam in every respect, and thus he takes Adam’s place as our father. I know this is weird — not to mention the whole ontological problem of how he is an angel, then a human, and then an angel again — but I’m telling you about it because I want you to know that I had an idea that I could call myself a Christian and believe Jesus died for me, without conceiving of Jesus as God.

Most of you reading this are like my grandchildren who have heard all their lives that Jesus died for you and that Jesus is God the Son –- true God from true God. It has never dawned on you, because it was always the light that you lived in.

But it dawned on me.

In 1993, after a long and harrowing period of life disruption, searching for the peace and transformative power that I read about in the New Testament, I had an encounter with Christ.

Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray—
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

I did not know then that he was Deity, but I knew that he was not who the Jehovah’s Witnesses said he was. I knew that I would have to leave the religion that I had grown up in and known all my life. I would have to walk away from every relationship of my adult life. I went to a church.

Now to you, that might seem like the most natural thing in the world for me to do. You want to know about Jesus, you go to a church. But for me it was terrifying. I had always been told that churches housed demons. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not even like to turn their cars around in a church parking lot. But that visit to a church set me on the road to learning the truth about Jesus. It became pretty clear, pretty quickly that Christians worshiped Jesus. The fundamental fact of my religious upbringing had been that you only worshiped God (Jehovah), who is Jesus’ father. To worship anything or anyone else was to be guilty of idolatry. But there was a tractor beam on my heart. I had to figure out who Jesus really was.

Having left what I recognized to be a religion of error, I was very leery about falling into error or being misled once again. But I knew that I had to open my mind to the witness and the arguments of Christians around me in order to untwist the distorted way I had learned to read scripture.

A humorous skit put on one time at a meeting of ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses illustrated what I was facing. It featured a “Christian” trying to “help” a recently-exited Witness. When the ex-JW expressed confusion about Christian doctrine, the Christian said, “Oh, it’s easy. Just believe everything the opposite.”

“What are you talking about?” the baffled ex-JW asked.

“Well, you didn’t used to believe in the Trinity, and now you do. You didn’t used to believe in the deity of Christ, and now you do. You didn’t used to believe in the immortal soul, and now you do. You didn’t used to believe in going to heaven, and now you do. You didn’t used to believe in celebrating Christmas, and now you do. See, everything is the opposite. It’s easy.”

The appreciative laughter with which this was greeted gave testament to the fact that it is not easy! And the more you care, really care, about the truth, the harder your struggle is. If you have always lived in the truth, you can’t imagine how hard it is.

For a while I lived in a partial shadow. I was in love with Jesus, but still didn’t know what to make of all the Christian adoration of Him? How could I explain this phenomenon if he were not God?

I found some relief by latching onto the biblical image of the Church as the Bride of Christ. After all, what would be more natural than for a bride to be focused on her bridegroom? Of course Christians sang love songs to Jesus! It was the Jehovah’s Witnesses who were strange — like a bride who ignored her groom and tried to give all her affection to her father-in-law instead.

Meanwhile, I was participating in Christian prayer and worship to the best of my limited understanding. I also asked questions, and I studied… and studied and studied. Finally I was turned on to reading the Early Church Fathers. It started to became clear to me that this teaching — that Jesus was Divine, was God in the flesh — was really Christian teaching from the beginning, was the apostolic witness.

There was just one problem left in my mind: If Jesus was God, then that man on the Cross was God.

It would mean that God had died.

It would mean that God had died… for me.

For all time, there will be no more astounding, no more elevating, no more humbling proposal to a human soul than this.

And can it be that I should gain
an interest in the Savior’s blood!
Died he for me — who caused his pain –
For me who him to death pursued?
Amazing love! How can it be
that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

He left his Father’s throne above
(so free, so infinite his grace!),
emptied himself of all but love,
and bled for Adam’s helpless race.
’Tis mercy all, immense and free,
for O my God, it found out me!

Amazing love! How can it be
that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

The sun had come up in my life.

[The lyrics are from the hymn, "And Can it Be (Amazing Love)", by Charles Wesley. Enjoy the lovely rendition here.]

[TypeZoNegative]

Ask your daughter if she feels comfortable about the JW heiarchy allowing convicted child molesters to do door to door ministries on unsuspecting homeowners. She’ll be baffled.

[TypeZoNegative]

Actually, they believe that a select group of 7 million JWs make up the 144K that go to heaven. The rest of them live forever on the earth.

[TypeZoNegative]

You forgot definitions 3-8 from that same dictionary.

3.the object of such devotion. 4.a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc. 5.Sociology. a group having a sacred ideology and a set of rites centering around their sacred symbols. 6.a religion or sect considered to be false, unorthodox, or extremist, with members often living outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader. 7.the members of such a religion or sect. 8.any system for treating human sickness that originated by a person usually claiming to have sole insight into the nature of disease, and that employs methods regarded as unorthodox or unscientific.

6 and to a lesser extent 8 describe JW beliefs.

[plinyelder]

6.a religion or sect considered to be false, unorthodox, or extremist, with members often living outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader. 7.the members of such a religion or sect. 8.any system for treating human sickness that originated by a person usually claiming to have sole insight into the nature of disease, and that employs methods regarded as unorthodox or unscientific. 6 and to a lesser extent 8 describe JW beliefs
====================

"a religion or sect considered to be false, unorthodox, or extremist, with members often living outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader."

There is a problem here, actually a few problems: Who does the considering here?
You,The Rev. Al Sharpton .. The Pope, Who?

"under the direction of a charismatic leader"
Again, this would fit in nicely with the Catholics and the Pope

On your number eight: "... treating human sickness...employs methods regarded as unorthodox or unscientific" .. Other than the abstaining from the use of blood .. What other unorthodox or unscientific medical practices do the JW's engage in?

[plinyelder]

..with members often living outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader.
===============

If outside of conventional society is a Bad thing, would you please explain why? Actually .. Please just explain WHAT that means!?
Every JW that I know of ..live in homes and go to normal jobs just like you and I do.
They shop in the same markets and go to the same banks.

If they have compounds anywhere .. I'm not aware of any?

(Hey .. I can do red too) LOL

[TruthConquers]

I remember ‘studying’ with JW’s long ago, being raised an atheist, I didn’t know better.

Anyway, they believed that the 144,000 were special chosen from among their ‘church’, and at that time, the 144,000 ‘spots’ had been ‘taken’. This was late 1970’s early 1980’s. They also believed that when those 144,000 had died, the millennium age would come.

I was lucky I didn’t become a JW. I had known about an early prophecy of theirs, and asked for the ‘study book’ from that time. I found their prediction, and then knew that they weren’t true.

It much later that God convicted my heart and I accepted Christ.

[plinyelder]

We have a pastor here who calls them the “Jehovah’s False Witnesses.”
=============

Is that a part of his comedic routine or .. as I suspect .. He teaches derision as a defense against people who mean no harm.

[plinyelder]

So .. as in the days of Noah .. well, you get the idea.

[plinyelder]

Here my friend is a lesson in the history of the cross and it isn't even from the JW's!

The Cross

[plinyelder]

The evidence for its pagan origin is so convincing that The Catholic Encyclopedia admits that "the sign of the cross, represented in its simplest form by a crossing of two lines at right angles, greatly antedates, in both East and the West, the introduction of Christianity. It goes back to a very remote period of human civilization." It then continues and refers to the Tau cross of the pagan Egyptians, "In later times the Egyptian Christians (Copts), attracted by its form, and perhaps by its symbolism, adopted it as the emblem of the cross."

[plinyelder]

"Ask your daughter if she feels comfortable about the JW heiarchy allowing convicted child molesters to do door to door ministries on unsuspecting homeowners. She’ll be baffled."
=============

Since we are getting nasty here .. can I assume that you are not Catholic either?

[Quix]

If your assertion is that Dr Kennedy or Dr Martin deliberately organized their churches to bilk people out of money and to heavy handedly control their lives in a power-freaque tyrannical scheme . . .

then I won’t think much of your awareness of them, at all.

[Quix]

Yea for the faithfulness of the Hound of Heaven.

[Quix]

Some of my greatest destructiveness to others was in the midst of the most earnest efforts to do good instead of harm.

[investigateworld]

Seems Catholics, Protestants, Jews and others have developed great hospitals and Universities.

What have the JW's ever done?

(Though they do clean up after themselves after conventions.)

[toothfairy86]

I work with a woman who is JW. She is the receptionist in our dental office. When she was first hired, she started preaching to the patients in the waiting room. The boss quickly put a stop to that! A few days ago, her young daughter was going to a friend’s house for a few hours. I heard her on the phone, sternly warning her daughter not to eat anything with bunnies one it. LOL!

[Agamemnon]

I helped D. James Kennedy open his very first 'church' .. way back in the late 60's....

"Helped?" Did you, really? In what way exactly? Or were you just "there" at the time, perhaps?

IF that were such a bad thing then Dr Kennedy would have never been able to build his "Palace"....

What an odd way for anyone who claims to have known him to refer to Coral Ridge and to Dr. Kennedy in this way.

Dr. Kennedy was a family friend of ours for the better part of 35 years and all the way up to and until the time of his death I never once heard him refer to Coral Ridge as "his Palace."

Some regular "Kingdom Hall" attendee or JW "church" member might see the ranch-style prefab his group meets in as a drywalled "palace" of some sort or other, I suppose.

I'd rather doubt you were ever as personally close to Dr. Kennedy, as it appears that you are trying to represent, else you would know better the nature of both his spirit and his character than to have ever expressed yourself as you have chosen to do here.

Effective ministries will always have their "hangers-on," and maybe even a closet JW or two. And some will post to a forum like this occasionally using pseudonyms like "plinyelder."

[Agamemnon]

**BUMP**

FReegards!

[investigateworld]

Nail met hammer ;^0

[Sporaticus]

>By your comment you must not have respect for God

Yes you are holier and sit atop a much higher horse than I.
Why do you write like this?
Do you consider yourself an apologist?
Certainly my comment was not personal and actually written to ‘nobody’. Good day Holy One!