A Fascinating Reminder of the 1914 False Prophecy from the WatchTower Bible & Tract Society

I used to spend a lot of time on the subject of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. It was the second major group I tackled and studied. I still have a huge number of their old, old books, shelves of them, actually. I also have a whole set of what are called "bound volumes," yearly compilations of all of the Watchtower and Awake! magazines. Of course, much of this is now available digitally on the Watchtower Library CD Rom (which isn't easy to get hold of, but not impossible). Anyway, I just checked the dark corner of one of my shelves and pulled out the bound volume for the Watchtowers of 1984. On the cover of the May 15, 1984 publication (repeated on page 4) is a picture of a group of elderly people, all looking upward. The title give is "1914: The Generation That Will Not Pass Away." You will look in vain for such confident promises in today's Watchtower publications, as they have effectively buried the 1914 prophecy, but it was front and center for many decades. In fact, on page 5 of this same publication we read, "If Jesus used 'generation' in that sense and we apply it to 1914, then the babies of that generation are now 70 years old or older. And others alive in 1914 are in their 80's or 90's, a few even having reached a hundred.

There are still many millions of that generation alive. Some of them 'will by no means pass away until all things occur.'---Luke 21:32." Well, I was sent this graphic a few days ago. It contains that same cover picture (I double checked it in my own printed edition), but identifies each and every person in the picture by name, and gives the date when they all passed away.

A tremendous testimony to the status of the Watchtower Society as a false prophet---just like Harold Camping already is (1994), and will be proven yet again in about three weeks. False prophets come, false prophets go, but Christ continues to build His church, not by the popularity of His teachings, but by the changing of the heart

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; because many false prophets have gone out into this world. 1 John 4:1

And Jesus, speaking about the end days before His return, “For false Christs and false prophets, will arise and will show great signs and wonders so as to mislead, if possible, even the elect.”
Matthew 24:24

...this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. Matthew 24:34 — the generation that “sees all these things,” v. 33

True believers are to be on the alert...be ready...be faithful in our Lord’s work, Matthew 25:42-46.

In my opinion their understanding of the scripture is no more different then your typical Arminianist whether they be Catholic, Anabaptist, or your typical fundamentalist Christian, like the southern Baptist or Church of Christ. They come to the scripture with a set of presupposed believes, and when some one shows up at the door preaching those believes they fall into that crowd like they were walking down the street and fell into a man hole. Also when these students of the JW or any of the other many different Arminianist sects go off to their theological schools they already carry those presupposed beliefs with them to those schools, so they really don't learn too much other then how to polish their false errors of believes.

In my opinion many of them have good rational minds it is just that when they are out there looking for the truth they don't go any further then they have too to find the truth. The first set of theological believes that they come across, that sound good and rational ends up being their theological believes for most of the rest of their lives. My gut feeling why this happens is because they starved for attention and fellowship that they will never admit they could be wrong. My uncle is a former retired Seventh Day Adventist and even though he means well I don't think you could rationally convince him of some of his theological errors because in so doing you would cause him to see his whole world that he has wrapped himself around as being wrong and out of touch with reality, they would rather continue to tell themselves lies then to continue on in some other culture that they have condemned all their lives. I'm sure you can look at your past on FR and look at the former debates on Free Will and Total Depravity. Most Every one wants to believe in Free Will because it sounds good and rational, and fills there emotional need of feeling important in the scheme of things. Most freepers or nonfreeper would not change their mind on the issue even if you were to show them their error theologically and rationally because have set their mind to the believe that they are right and you are wrong and they will not listen to any rational discussion on the issue and they align them selves with like minded people and create a culture around them selves with like minded people. If they were to change their mind theologically they would have to abandon their whole culture which they have emotionally attached themselves to and aligned themselves with. For instance when some one leaves an Amish sect they will more likely never be able to come back unless they repent of their sins of being in love with the world, and even if they did that they would probably never be fully accepted back into that fold again. That fear in itself makes many of them not even want to consider leaving their faith and culture, they won't even question authority over the truth, because admitting the truth would be a big emotional and scary thing for them, and as you fully know here on FR and else where that if they were to become reformed they would cease having a pay check as a preacher of the Free Will believes, and they would have to start over in life.

I don't think you had to do any thing like that in your life, but I know in your past you did not come upon the reformed truth willingly, you had to be pulled out of the Free will thinking kicking and screaming all the way into the reform camp, eventually you went down the reform road and probably found it wasn't as bad as you thought it was. Well I've got to end this editing of my response and move along here, I've already spent more then a hour on this response, that is why I don't freep much any more or lets say I am slowing monitoring the amount I do freep here because I'm just to slow at it.

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