Sheep and Goats

Category: Bible Books

  • Filling the Tables with Vomit: Part 2

    While they were puking their guts out, there were a lot of underpinnings they were turning a blind eye to—this part was in the oral Bible reading: 

    “Woe to those who join one house to another house and who annex one field to another field until there is no more room and you live by yourselves on the land.” (Isaiah 5:8)

    It is a reference to the Mosaic Law that supposedly governed that long-ago agricultural society. Each extended family was allotted a certain amount of land. That land was inviolate. You could neither sell it nor expand it into an empire. If you did, say due to some temporary hardship, the land reverted back to its original ownership at the end of designated 50-year periods, called Jubilees. Thus, there could never arise a wealthy landowning class, pricing their poorer countrymen out of existence. 

    That this is a good thing is obvious from contemplating current events. In the U.S, whereas a house could once be purchased for 2-3 times the average annual income, the figure is now 7 times. Whereas, the average age of first time ownership was once 30, it is now 37. All this within about a 30 period. Large firms now buy up homes and would seek to turn the entire nation into renters. (All this according to Charlie Kirk, heard in interview, who was later shot and killed.) It is the most recent manifestation of a very old problem. At our mid-week meeting, one brother related how long ago, well before Kirk was born, his mother had returned home to find all of her belongings on the street. The family had fallen behind in rent and had been evicted. The experience traumatized her for life, the brother said, himself now up in years.

    The Mosaic Law, when observed, would have prevented such things. That is why, to those who would ignore it—the majority of the nation, as it turned out, Isaiah pronounced “woe.” It was among the reasons (there are six “woes” in the chapter) that God would “raise up a signal to a distant nation [and] “whistle for them to come from the ends of the earth; And look! they are coming very swiftly.” (Verse 26)

    This spelled bad news to the nations of miscreants: “None among them are tired or stumbling. No one is drowsy or sleeps. The belt around their waist is not loosened, Nor are their sandal laces broken. All their arrows are sharp, And all their bows are bent.  The hooves of their horses are like flint, And their wheels like a storm wind.  Their roaring is like that of a lion; They roar like young lions.  They will growl and seize the prey And carry it off with no one to rescue it.” Such a “distant land” did invade subsequently: first, the nation of Assyria, later, that of Babylon. (27-29)

    As though alarmed that wrong conduct might be dissuaded by seeing things this way, higher critics regards verses such as these as a “gnomos,” a way of looking at the world. A long-standing gnomos (that God will fight for his people) is set upon its head after the invasion. Emergency repair is needed. Wait—isn’t there some fine print somewhere to the effect that Israel must behave to enjoy such protection? Yes, there is! Gnomos restored. God could have fought for his people, but he chose not to.

    Save us from the world of higher critics. It is as I wrote in ‘Workman’s Theodicy:’

    “It is as though someone runs a stop sign and a horrific accident results. Thereafter, survivors are desperate to impart meaning to the event, to understand how such a horrible thing could happen. Whereupon, one of them recalls a long-ago contract to the effect that you are supposed to stop when you see one of those things, as though no one had ever imagined such a connection before.”

    In other words, per the higher critics, the warning of 26-29 is not advance prophecy, but after-the-fact damage control. The enormous benefit to those who adopt this scholarly view is that, with it, they may act unjustly if they want to. Nobody’s going to call them out on it. Nobody’s going to forbid them from (verse 20) “say[ing] that good is bad and bad is good [or] who “substitute darkness for light and light for darkness.” One man’s light is another man’s darkness. Who are you to impose your standards of good and bad on us, trying to control us that way. We’ll do what we want. It is a mainstay theme of the entire Bible, that first couples departing from God’s dictating “good and bad”to “know” matters on their own.

    With such an enlightened view, If calamity happens, it happens. It was meant to be. Don’t embarrass yourself claiming it way punishment from some higher source. We’re wise in our own eyes and discreet in our own sight! (verse 21) We’ll keep on keeping on, until buying a house costs 20 times the average salary and the age of first-time ownership is 50! Should that course trigger upheaval, we’ll deal with it when the time comes.

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  • Filling the Tables with Vomit

    The old fellow who became a Witness in his mid-seventies showed me photos he had taken on his phone. They were sunrises and sunsets. One was just a snapshot of the starry heavens. “See the beautiful things that Jehovah makes,” he said.

    He regrets that he didn’t begin studying the Bible with Witnesses long ago. “My wife would always chase them away,” he laments, a problem that wasn’t resolved until she died. It made me think of that time years ago, when I was in my twenties, when zeal had yet to be tempered by common sense, when I had a really fine discussion with a man at his door. So I went back—again, and again and again and again—and caught his wife each time—who got madder and madder and madder and madder. Finally I found the man again and he said, “I don’t know why you keep coming back. It wasn’t THAT interesting to me.” These days I let one mate speak for the other. If someone has married a guard, that’s his problem. The problem eventually resolves, assuming he lives long enough.

    With this retired fellow showing me the photos he’d snapped, I thought of that verse from this week’s Bible reading assignment: 

    “Woe to those who get up early in the morning to drink alcohol, Who linger late into the evening darkness until wine inflames them! They have harp and stringed instrument, Tambourine, flute, and wine at their feasts; But they do not consider the activity of Jehovah, And they do not see the work of his hands.” (Isaiah 5:11-12) 

    The brother is clearly the flipside of this. He does consider the “activity of Jehovah” and he does “see the work of his hands.”

    He doesn’t see it very literally, though. He is legally blind. When he gives a Bible reading at the Kingdom Hall, he enlarges the words—I have seen his tablet—so that only six or seven fit on the page. Plainly, much of whatever he reads will be from memory—as would be expected of a guy who “considers the activity of Jehovah and sees the work of his hands.”

    I don’t know that he ever got up “early in the morning to drink alcohol,” but he does get up early, as early as 3 AM. What’s with that? To be sure, it keeps him from “linger[ing] late into the evening darkness until wine inflames” him, but I doubt he would do that anyway. Probably, he just has a beer once in a while, if that.

    What do you call a guy who “gets up early in the morning to drink alcohol” and lingers late in the night for the same purpose? Might you sarcastically call him “mighty” in that activity? Isaiah does.

    “Woe to those who are mighty in drinking wine And to the men who are masters at mixing alcoholic drinks,” he continues in verse 22. Imagine—being described as “mighty” in drinking wine, a “master” at mixing alcoholic drinks! Did the prophet have an alcoholic in the family?

    Evidently ,alcohol fueled that deviating system back then and it dulled their sensibilities. No way would they not have “harp and stringed instrument, tambourine, flute, and wine at their feasts; [while] they [did] not consider the activity of Jehovah [or] see the work of his hands,” the way verse 11 says. When they really got going, it would be that “their tables are full of filthy vomit —There is no place without it.” (Isaiah 28:8) Sheesh! How’s that for a closing image?

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    Huh! The missing psalm! Scholars have long suspected its existence, especially the dumb ones. I am pleased to present it here:

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  • Crooning Love Songs in the Vineyard

    Even though it’s the same story, the narrator changes during the first seven verses of Isaiah chapter 5. The first two verses is the start a love song! Is Isaiah the one to sing it?

    “Let me sing, please, to my beloved, A song about my loved one and his vineyard, My beloved had a vineyard on a fruitful hillside. (1)

    “He dug it up and rid it of stones, He planted it with a choice red vine, Built a tower in the middle of it, And hewed out a winepress in it. Then he kept hoping for it to produce grapes, But it produced only wild grapes.” (2)

    Bummer. All that work for nothing! (The brother covering this portion at the mid-week meeting said that, if it were he, he would pave it over at this point and install a basketball court.)

    But, then the narrator changes. It becomes God, who laments the outcome of the vineyard HE planted! And who or what is the vineyard? The nation of Israel itself! “For the vineyard of Jehovah of armies is the house of Israel.” (7)

    “And now, you inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, Please judge between me and my vineyard. What more could I have done for my vineyard That I have not already done? Why, when I hoped for grapes, Did it produce only wild grapes?”(3-4)

     “Now, please, let me tell you What I will do to my vineyard: I will remove its hedge, And it will be burned down. I will break down its stone wall, And it will be trampled on.” (5) This is where the speaker said he would construct a basketball court. I mean, if it’s going to be trampled on, one might as well have fun doing it.

    So, what is it with the change of narrators, from Isaiah crooning a love song to Jehovah saying that his nation was no good? It looks as though the prophet is laying a trap!

    Q: What if Nathan had approached David with the words: “I want to tell you a story about a big jerk: you!” Would he have been granted a listening ear? Maybe not. So Nathan led off with a story about  a poor man who has just one little lamb that he loved and a king who needed one to roast and feed his visitor. “Oh, wow, a story!” David exclaims at its start, leaning forward. There’s nothing on TV, anyway. There never was back then. It’s not like today when I search for a murder mystery to watch after dinner and my wife restricts me to ones in which no one gets killed—or at least ones in which, if they do get killed, it is without too much unpleasantness. 

    Back then, you could sucker people in real easy with a story—but not one if you stated bluntly upfront that your audience was the villain.

    So it is with Isaiah and the first seven verses of chapter five. At the promise of a love song, the Israelites get their hankies out. Who isn’t up for a love song? When it turns out to be dashed hopes over a vineyard, the audience says, “Yeah, that sucks. We’ve all been there. The poor guy.”

    But then the mask drops. YOU are my vineyard, God grumbles, and I’m going to put you out of your misery for all the pissy wine that you are yieldng! 

    It is a very clever storytelling technique, which we have already seen with Nathan rebuking David. Even among textual scholars, that view prevails. All but the most hopeless acknowledge that it is a unified account, and not two separate narratives stapled together. 

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  • Avoiding the Birdcatcher’s Trap

    The Sunday speaker focused on avoiding the “trap of the birdcatcher,” taking for granted that Satan is the birdcatcher (“fowler”), only not everyone thinks it is he. Jehovah’s Witnesses do, and also many other faith traditions. Really, more do than don’t. In medieval times, the linkage was well-nigh universal. Augustine, for example, explicitly said so the birdcatcher (fowler) was the devil.

    But, in modern times of “higher criticism,” where people assume each Bible book is a separate island, bearing little relationship to its fellow Book-mate, they are more inclined to say, ‘Nah, it’s just a guy trying to catch birds.’ It’s any human pitfall that might trip a guy up. 

    G. K. Chesterton’s words come into play. The Catholic writer from a century ago called those “wrong who maintain that the Old Testament [and by extension, the New] is a mere loose library; that it has no consistency or aim. Whether the result was achieved by some supernal spiritual truth, or by a steady national tradition, or merely by an ingenious selection in aftertimes, the books of the Old Testament have a quite perceptible unity. . .” 

    It’s like how Jehovah’s Witnesses point out that the Bible was written by some 40-odd writers of vastly different backgrounds, over a period of 1600 years. What are the chances that anything coherent will emerge from that? That it does is powerful evidence to them of the book’s inspiration. But modern people haven’t taken the time to familiarize themselves with the Bible, mostly, or they do so under the guidance of those determined to tear it apart. Its unified nature is lost on them. 

    At any rate, assuming unity of Scripture, you take into account that the New Testament often speaks of Satan laying traps and snares, just like the Psalm 91 birdcatcher. See Luke 13:16, for instance, also “the snare of the devil” of 2 timothy 2:26 and 1 Timothy 3:7. Ephesians 6:11 speaks of the “wiles” (cunning traps) of the devil.

    Anyhow, the speaker ran with Satan as the birdcatcher, then branched out to how hard it was to catch a bird. His brother had tried that, as a child, standing stock-still under the birdfeeder for an hour (it took that long for birds to let down their guard) then swooping up his hand fast to catch one, only to emerge with just a few feathers. “Birdcatcher” sounds a little wussy next to the “lion” description of 1 Peter 5:8, but if you take into account the craftiness required, then it evens out. Thing is, he said, a bird’s eyes are on both sides of its head, giving it a wide field of vision. He contrasted this with how he had noticed that those in the audience had eyes up front and spaced much like his. I had noticed this, too, though I admit, I wasn’t mulling it over the entire time.

    He used a lot of images from his childhood in that talk, alluding to traps he saw set on Saturday morning cartoons when he wasn’t taken out in field service, traps that would catch any creature “except the roadrunner”—including the simple upside down box propped up by a stick. “Those things work!” he related how he had once caught a skunk that way, luring it in with dogfood. Who would think a skunk is going to follow a trail of dogfood, “but it did!”

    Silly putty played into his talk, too. He told how the “iPad of his day” could bounce, be shattered, suck up ink from the Sunday comics, but eventually became such a disgusting blob, full of dirt, ink, and cat hair, that you tossed it out. He likened that to how Satan toys with his victims for a time, dirtying them up, before discarding them.

    close up of a road sign
    Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Pexels.com

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  • Come Now and Let Us Reason Together

    “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD.” It was M.D. Craven’s favorite Bible quote. Or at least, he sure did use it a lot. I can hear him now. “Come now, and let us reason together,” he would say. It was sort of his mission statement as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. 

    It is not particularly a good rendering of Isaiah 1:18, but it’s how the King James Version of the Bible translates the verse. By the time I’d met Merrill, the New World Translation had been out for only a dozen years. Witnesses had previously used the King James Version in their personal study, meetings, and ministry. Merrill had stuck with what he knew. 

    The NWT much better conveys the thought, with it’s: “‘Come, now, and let us set matters straight between us,’ says Jehovah.” (‘LORD’ in all caps is always a fill-in for the divine name “Jehovah”—sometimes rendered “Yahweh” or something similar. It is the consonants that matter. The vowels are anyone’s guess.) “Set matters straight” is plainly what has to be done. The rest of Isaiah chapter 1 (and the preceding) makes that clear. It will not be just a matter of “reasoning.” Changes will have to be made. 

    “Though your sins are like scarlet, They will be made as white as snow; Though they are as red as crimson cloth, They will become like wool,” says the rest of verse 18, in any translation. For that to happen, Israelites must not just “reason.” They must “return to me [Jehovah] with all your hearts, With fasting and weeping and wailing.  Rip apart your hearts, and not your garments,” as Joel 2:12-13 puts it. It’s not an intellectual effort called for. It’s an effort of the heart. But if they made that effort, the rift between them would heal: Though their sins were like scarlet, they would be made white as snow.

    “Let us reason together” still prevails among Bible translations. Such is the influence of the KJV. I counted 24 translations at BibleGateway that do it that way. But more recent translations (the KJV is 400 years old!) are given to variants as “settling” (7), “discussing,” (5) or “talking things over.” (8) A few invite those Israelites to “argue” (5) and you get the impression that this is not an argument God is going to lose. Still, it is humble for him to phrase it that way, consistent with offering to “settle,” “talk things over,” or “discuss.” “Let us have it out,” says Byington, as though inviting those renegades to a barroom brawl. And NET ominously invites them to “consider your options.”

    It’s like how I would “consider my options” when Merrill himself would ask to borrow my car because his was in the shop. In normal circumstances, the answer would be “No way!” for he was a horrible driver. He had once been a good driver, presumably. In his working days, he’d driven the Bangor to Boston route for Greyhound Bus and, when asked what the M.D. stood for, he would reply, “Master Driver,” a title he would explain was “self-assumed.” But that was long ago. Unbeknownst to him, but painfully obvious to everyone else, his skills had slipped. “Forget about it!” is what I wanted to tell him.

    But he had been so good to me, taking me under his wing at a crucial time, that had he said: “Tom, I’d like to borrow your car and wrap it around a tree,” I would have still felt compelled to lend it to him. I “considered my options,” and then handed him the keys. Despite my misgivings, it always came back to me in one piece. 

    not like this

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    Some kickback from those who preferred “reason” for Isaiah 1:18 sent me cracking the books, but not before offering a glib: 

    “Excuse me, sir, I’m taking a poll,” said a guy in sweats. I agreed, of course, and made ready to spout off opinions. “I’ll take that one,” he continued, and made off with the 10-foot pole behind me for his upcoming pole vault.

    Context is everything. Many words have multiple meanings & shades of meanings, even words spelled identically. Context indicates “set matters straight” works better.

    But then: One commentary (Grok) lists the key verb as “nivvakhah.” It has a judicial flavor. Primary meanings: to decide, judge, prove, rebuke, reprove, convince, arbitrate. In the times of King James, “reason” often carried that meaning, but today it just suggests an intellectual discussion. The upshot of the entire verse is that they will lose their case for sure, but God is offering terms to wipe that slate clean.

  • Reading Isaiah 2:1-11 at the Mid-Week Meeting

    If one is reading aloud the second chapter of Isaiah, it’s clear you have to put a long pause between verses 5 and 6. The thrust of the two is completely different:

    Verse 5:  “O house of Jacob, come, Let us walk in the light of Jehovah.”

    Verse 6:  “For you have forsaken your people, the house of Jacob.”

    Verse 5 belongs to the preceding verses of how “(2) In the final part of the days, the mountain of the house of Jehovah Will become firmly established . . . And to it all the nations will stream,” that (3 ) “many peoples will go and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of Jehovah, To the house of the God of Jacob.  He will instruct us about his ways, And we will walk in his paths,’” that “law will go out of Zion, And the word of Jehovah out of Jerusalem,” who (4) “will render judgment among the nations And set matters straight respecting many peoples.  They will beat their swords into plowshares And their spears into pruning shears.  Nation will not lift up sword against nation, Nor will they learn war anymore.”  

    Who wouldn’t get excited about that? Isaiah sure does, so he appends his own plea: (5) “O house of Jacob, come, Let us walk in the light of Jehovah!”

    But the next verse is addressed to God, not to “the house of Jacob.” God has “forsaken [his] people.” A list of their offenses follow, culminating in (8): “Their land is filled with worthless gods. They bow down to the work of their own hands, To what their own fingers have made.”

    I would not likely have picked up on this need for a long pause had I not been assigned that Bible reading (Isaiah 2:1-11) at the mid-week meeting. But I was, and so I looked for other areas to emphasize. It’s not a sure thing, but all the same, I stomped rather hand on the “becomes” of verse 9:

    “So man bows down, he becomes low, And you cannot possibly pardon them.”

    I mean, to bow down, you must physically get low. But, given that final clause, “you cannot possibly pardon them,” it probably ought be read as though man also becomes spiritually low when he does that—he becomes low. Imagine: bowing down to “gods” that you yourself made!

    Idolatry is a consistent no-no in the Bible. Witness groups speaking to Muslims point this out fairly early. It generally comes as a surprise to them, since they are conditioned by churches, especially Catholic churches, into thinking that Christianity and idolatry are one and the same.

    “We are walking by faith, not by sight,” says 2 Corinthians 5:7. How is it not “walking by sight” if one feels best connected with God only if they are holding something, even something so ubiquitous as a cross? 

    It’s like when Israelites leaned on Aaron to cast that golden calf and then tried to pass it off as though God would be cool with it. “There is a festival to Jehovah tomorrow!” they announced. (Exodus 32:5) Sure, they knew the calf was not God; it just represented God. Surely God would be okay with that. He wasn’t.

    Neither is he shown that way in the last verses of the assigned reading: 

    “And you cannot possibly pardon them. (10) Enter into the rock and hide yourself in the dust Because of the terrifying presence of Jehovah And his majestic splendor.  (11) The haughty eyes of man will be brought low, And the arrogance of men will bow down.  Jehovah alone will be exalted in that day.”

    There are plenty of critics who will carry on about God being mean, so that his “presence” will be “terrifying.” Instead, I usually figure that he is giving a friendly heads-up. Take note of what gets him going and don’t do those things. It’s not that hard.

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  • “The Best Way to Respond to Injustice”-a Study

    I found that return visit at home who had previously told me he cuts back on the news because it gets him all cranked up. So I decided to show him that paragraph from Sunday’s Watchtower study (1/23/25: The Best Way to Respond to Injustice) which recommended exactly that course. I even left it with him. Given the choice of digital or print, he said he preferred digital, so I used that transfer feature on the app to email the article to him.

    I had commented on that paragraph during the study. There is a new Watchtower conductor now and I can’t lean into him so readily as I could with the old conductor, so I have to look comments over carefully before letting fly. For sure I won’t get in as many. But that’s not really a bad thing. It means other people do.

    That paragraph (12) went: “What can help us to control our feelings of anger over an injustice? Many have found it helpful to be selective in what they read, listen to, and watch. Some forms of social media are full of posts that sensationalize injustices and that promote social reform movements. Often, news agencies report information in a biased way.”

    Yeah. Anyone on social media knows that the political stuff encroaches like an invasive species. You have to keep pruning it back or it will take over. Some Witnesses just uproot it on sight, or more thorough yet, avoid social media altogether. I’m not one of them but I do understand the response. It gets you all worked up. One sis even recalled a visit to a U.S. city much in the news lately for a certain protest. A few Witnesses had been there, she said, and they got their faces on TV! Like that commercial, I told her afterward, where the guy helps himself to the cotton candy of the kid in the stadium row before him and it is captured by the Kiss Cam and displayed on the Jumbotron! Yeah, like that, she agreed.

    Then, there was the sister cited in paragraph 9, recalling her former protest days, who the paragraph quoted: “When I was at protests, I would question whether I was on the correct side,” contrasting that with “Now that I support God’s Kingdom, I know that I’m on the right side. I know that Jehovah will fight for every victim of oppression better than I ever could.” 

    I commented on that paragraph too, ramming it past the new vigilant conductor. “Sure. Just once I would like to see a war in which one side or the other says, ‘We are the bad guys.’ But it never happens. Always, both sides fob themselves off as the good guys. Social reform is like that too. You can wonder if you’re on the correct side.” One person’s reform is another person’s pouring fuel to the fire.

    a man in red and black sweater
    Photo by Anton Bohlin on Pexels.com

    2 Peter 3:13 was quoted in the final paragraph: “But there are new heavens and a new earth that we are awaiting according to his promise,and in these righteousness is to dwell.”

    The “heavens” make an apt analogy for human government. In those Bible times, they would scorch you one minute, drench you the next, freeze you the moment thereafter—and there wasn’t a thing you could do about it. In most respects that is still true of human governments today, even participatory ones, in which your input is not exactly zero, but close to it. The “new heavens” is God’s just government to come and the “new earth” is those constituents who will benefit from it.

    They even slipped in that verse about how Jesus so wowed the crowds that they wanted to appoint him king. (John 6:15) He couldn’t get away from that bunch quick enough—for the same reason that he later told Pilate: “My Kingdom is no part of this world. If my Kingdom were part of thisworld, my attendants would have fought that  should not be handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my Kingdom is not from this source.” (John 18:36) 

    Exactly. They would have fought. Get yourself too cranked up fighting over the current “heavens” and it will be at the expense of looking to the “new heavens.” That was the overall thrust of the article.

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  • “You Always Have the Poor with You”

    As fine as helping the poor is and it is well to do it, Jesus said the following to those wishing to do it at the expense of attending to the Lord’s interests at that moment: (Matthew 26:11): “For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me.” It sounds kind of callous but serves to show that the two activities are not the same.

    Even more significant than the plight of the poor and needy is that there should be so many of them, 2000 years after Jesus said what he did. Does it not show the utter failure of human government, which supposedly exists to alleviate such suffering? That being the case, the work Jehovah’s Witnesses are best known for, announcing the incoming kingdom of God, the same one Jesus taught his followers to pray for in ‘the Lord’s Prayer’ becomes an important component of Christian activity. It’s what gives people hope.

    To be sure, it is a specialty. Nobody works that specialty as the Witnesses do, and most don’t do it at all. Those who respond to the good news correspond to the man who learns how to fish, instead of eternally needing a fish supplied him. The good news imparts hope. Thus, two huge factors causing neediness and homelessness are eliminated. Preaching the good news is an activity not to be minimized.

    That said, I never criticize those who do run soup kitchens and such projects. They are undeniably alleviating suffering and it is something Witnesses don’t make their main focus.

    Given all the criticism directed at Witnesses for their focus on preaching, sometimes taking the form of spiritual one-up-mans-ship, one might assume that everyone else in the Christian world IS fully devoted to alleviating suffering and hunger. If so, why so little result? Given that Witnesses are but the tiniest sliver of the overall religious population, and that they are generally of modest means themselves, if they forgot all about preaching to devote themselves fully to rendering physical aid, how much of a dent do you think it would make? The problem is structural, gets worse with time, and will be fully solved only with the coming of God’s kingdom.

    Meanwhile, there is nothing to stop Witnesses as individuals from donating to local charities focused on neediness and hunger if they wish. I have done so. I assume there are others, according to their means.

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  • Angels Desiring to Peer

    “Well, here’s another clue for you all. The walrus was Paul.”

    We might wish it were all laid out definitively—every particular addressed. But clues are all we’re going to get. The walrus was Paul.

    “Into these very things [outworking of the things of Christ], angels are desiring to peer.” (1 Peter 1:12) I like to picture them crouching, as though trying to squint through a hole in a solid fence. Anyone up for telling them to knock it off and get back to work?

    It’s not that prophesy is bad stuff. It is very good stuff. It’s just that prophesies are best understood after the fact. Beforehand, they work as do clues. They might be fulfilled in any number of ways.

    “Predictions are hard. Especially when they are about the future.” – Yogi Berra

    It’s why it’s good to focus simply on declaring the good news. Whether the finale is tomorrow or many years out, it is not a problem. The record numbers I meet saying they avoid newscasts since they’re “disgusting” suggests it is soon indeed. (Not to mention my neighbor who likens the news to a bad accident—“you know you should look away, but you can’t”) But it comes when it comes.

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  • The Secret of Contentment-Philippians 4:11-12

    Congregations going through the Book of Ecclesiastes in their mid-week meetings, two chapters at a time. It’s good for its descriptions of the curves life can throw at you regardless of your spirituality. Solomon writes how “I have seen everything—from the righteous one who perishes in his righteousness to the wicked one who lives long despite his badness, (7:15) and “that the swift do not always win the race, nor do the mighty win the battle, nor do the wise always have the food, nor do the intelligent always have the riches, nor do those with knowledge always have success, because time and unexpected events overtake them all. (9:11) This reality lends the present life a certain “futility,” a continual theme of the book.

    There is no scriptural correlation between spirituality and material wealth. Sometimes the latter works out. Sometimes it doesn’t. It is sort of like winning or losing in a game that is part skill and part dumb luck. In neither case is it the “real life” of 1 Timothy 6:19 that Witnesses make their primary hope, life in God’s new system under Christ’s reign.

    A previous Sunday’s Watchtower study (Have You Learned the ‘Secret of Contentment’? – October 2025) focused on how to be content. Philippians 4:11-12 was the theme, in which Paul said: “I have learned to be self-sufficient regardlessof my circumstances. I know how to be low on provisions and how to have an abundance. In everything and in all circumstances I have learned the secret of both how to be full and how to hunger, both how to have an abundance and how to do without.”

    He had had periods of both in his life. He had “learned the secret” of how to adapt to both, to be content. It’s something people very much need today—all people, not just Witnesses. There was a lot in the study article on cultivating a spirit of gratitute. It is healthy to do that. Viewing the glass as half-full rather than half-empty helps. Both descriptions are equally accurate. But they evoke different attitudes. You can be grateful for a glass half-full but we never hear of people being grateful for one half-empty.

    Being content is the key. Witnesses by and large are. Even when they are not, their discontent seldom rises to the greater world’s level of discontent. It is a very tragic thing to lose faith in God’s promises because then one joins them in discontent. For whatever reason, those who have lost faith tend to gather on social media. There, I read descriptions of my own faith that I do not recognize. It is as what Paul writes to Timothy of those who have come to think materially, those who suppose that “godly devotion is a means of gain.” They immerse themselves in “things [that] give rise to envy, strife, slander, wicked suspicions, constant disputes about minor matters.” (1 Timothy 6:4-5) To hear some former Witnesses carry on at the venues they have chosen, you might not even realize that there is a Bible. Faith has been shipwrecked so all people have are the minor matters to stew about, matters of human interaction reframed as “control” and “manipulation.”

    When it is said that Witnesses are getting by “just fine” it’s referring more to their overall state of happiness than their material state. Materially, some do well. Others do not. The same as is true with the greater world. On the ordinary matters of life, Witnesses are as likely to say what is commonly said everywhere else: “If I knew then what I know now…” or “if I had it all to do over again….” People say such things all the time. Witnesses are people. They say it too.

    They seldom say it regarding their spiritual outlook, however. They call their set of beliefs “the truth” on account of how it all dovetails together. It sees them through both good times and bad. If they have made some moves in life that, in hindsight, didn’t work out so well, it doesn’t change the tenets of faith that anchors them. I doubt there are fewer children among Witnesses than anywhere else, in a Western world that has decided not to have many, nor would home ownership be lower, in a world where some rent and some own. College, I concede, is lower. Witnesses are very much top-heavy with “workmen,” which is probably why Paul used that word in at 2 Timothy 2:15. He could have said elite or scholar, or even student. He said workman.

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