“Oh, No. I Would Never Presume to Compare Myself With the Most High God!”
November 18, 2019
It’s funny how people are.
I ran into someone from pioneer school 30 years ago. Back then, students would learn techniques for the ministry, and would spend an afternoon field-testing them. So it was that I found myself working with a certain sister one afternoon long ago. I had barely seen her since.
She spoke so glowingly of me. Her memories of our working together were so appreciative. A householder had answered the door, as she recalled, and had asked, “Are you Jehovah?” ”Oh, no,” I had instantly answered, full of self-effacing humility, aghast at the very thought. “I would never presume to compare myself to the Most High God. No, I am just a lowly servant of His trying imperfectly to serve him. I would never, ever...” and so forth. The sister was so impressed at my humble manner. She had carried that memory around for who knows how many years.
It didn’t happen like that at all! I didn’t say any of that stuffl! Of COURSE I’m not God—I don’t have to explain why!
I remember the incident well. The friendly woman had been barely visible through the screen door that hot summer afternoon—she was way back there in the kitchen, and we were on the front doorstep. Interrupted and preoccupied, she had blurted out the first thing that had popped into her head: “Are you Jehovah?”
“Um....no....actually, I’m not,” was my hesitant reply. At which point, she realized what she had really said and she burst out laughing. Her gaffe served to make her still more friendly, as though she owed us, and we had a nice, if brief, conversation. I never said any of those silly things that my companion had for years attributed to me!
She was confusing, I am pretty sure, this experience with one in print from decades ago, of a lowly Mexican brother working in a fabulously wealthy territory—responding to the demand that he identify himself. Wasn’t he one of Jehovah’s Witnesses? a haughty fellow wanted to know. He had answered to the effect that he tries to be...he tries. It is not easy measuring up to the standards of the Most High God, and he would not presume to say that he does measure up....but he tries. The fellow peddled goods from a donkey cart, if I recall correctly. The householder was a leader of industry.
I didn’t even have a donkey cart that afternoon. I had left it at home. We had driven up in a car—just like that of the householder who asked me if I was God.
Defending Jehovah’s Witnesses with style from attacks...
in Russia, with the book ‘I Don’t Know Why We Persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses—Searching for the Why’ (free)....
and in the West, with the book, 'In the Last of the Last Days: Faith in the Age of Dysfunction'
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