by Mary 73 Replies latest watchtower bible

  • heathen

    I can say that I see the locusts in Joel 2 as being a great crowd because that's what it says at the beginning of the chapter . The white robed guy with the ink horn is a bit vague in interpretation because the people are moaning and sighing over some city not world conditions. Then the part about joshua and the attack on jericho seemed a bit off topic , what in the world could that have in association with the preaching work today ? Just seemed like another excuse to mention increase of preaching work since the Israelites increased their activity and made much more noise on the seventh and last day. All this just to get people excited or feeling guilty about preaching work.

  • JimmyPage

    Great job as always Mary. The explanations for what "house to house" really meant were especially enlightening.

  • mrsjones5

    Thanks Mary

  • Mary

    I feel sorry for whoever had to sit through this study yesterday........Speaking of which, I'm waiting to hear from Gumbers how it went. I dared him to stick his hand up and ask one of the questions that I raised here......I haven't heard back from him yet so I figure they're probably already getting a Judicial Committee together for him.

  • jgnat

    Appreciate your work, Mary. I especially like how you outlined the way news was spread before the advent of the printing press, radio, telephone, and the fuller brush salesman. Itinerant preachers had to go to town to town to spread the news, because there was no other way to spread it. Eager for news from the outside, people would gather wherever there was space. It might be in the town square, the synagogue, or in a wealthy person's upper room. Few people were literate, so if anything were written down, it would have to be a scholar who read it to the crowd.

    I particularly despise Watchower pictures of the early church, depicting Witnesses going "door to door" with scrolls under their arm. Never would have happened that way.

  • Mary

    Yep....No one can twist the scriptures as well as the WTS can. Another interesting point I just thought of deals with this quote:

    During the early 1950's,28 percent of the Witnesses in that country limited their preaching activity to distributing handbills or standing on the streets with magazines. Over 40 percent were irregular in the preaching work, allowing months to go by without doing any witnessing at all.

    In the early 1950s, you still would have had tens of thousands professing to be of the "annointed" class, yet over 40% were "irregular in the preaching work"? If knocking on doors is required for Jehovah's Witnesses to gain salvation today, then why wasn't this same reasoning instilled back then? If Jesus 'chose' these guys as the "F&DS" in 1919 based on their zeal and what they were teaching, why were almost half of them still in line for heaven if they were not going out in Service on a regular basis?

  • WTWizard

    I wonder how little they are going to accomplish with the upcoming Great Waste of Paper Distribution Campaign. It is supposed to start studies, with people being "shown" that God is love (and then told to disregard their real life experiences), wisdom (self-serving, short sighted), justice (how fair is it for God to impose celibacy, stagnation, sickness, war, death, and other tribulation simply to show off and to get more for Himself?), and power (along with absolute corruption).

    As if people are going to fall for that. I am betting that most of them are going to end up right in the garbage. And more will find their way into the garbage the more God refuses to actually display and demonstrate those qualities, especially the love part. The more He expects and demands people to proclaim live and graciousness and then digs His Almighty heels in, the more of those wastes of paper are finding their way into the garbage.

    Besides, if God really wanted His message distributed, why doesn't He create a new computer service? All He would need is to put in oscillating gravity Internet (which would be impossible to congest or run into blackouts), and put the message there. If there was any inherent value, everyone (all 6+ billion people at once) could study, and learn the message at once without so much as laying a finger on a doorbell. The message could have gone out to everyone, the work could have been closed, and there would be no moving line of children coming of age. Instead, He has chosen to send people out at great personal cost and hardship. How loving.

  • DoomVoyager

    Who is doing the next COMMENTS... ? Can't wait to read it.

  • Mary

    I believe Blondie'll be back for next Sundays. I'll check with her to see just to make sure.

  • kzjw

    Phenominal Mary!

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