My Meeting Notes: Week of September 12, 2022
My Meeting Notes (and Stray Thoughts): Week of September 19, 2022

The Instant Answer of Sunday’s Watchtower and What to do About Adam and Eve

Much was made at Sunday’s Watchtower Study over the Genesis 3:15 prophesy. Instantly, upon the first couple’s fall into sin, Jehovah had the answer as to how he would fix it. The typical response to disaster is to mope, to be bummed, to say ‘poor me,’ for awhile, even to fall into depression. Only after that process do you begin to wonder if anything can be salvaged. God had the answer immediately.

“I was touched when I learned that Jehovah took action immediately so that mankind would not be left without hope.” said the sis in paragraph 17.  Someone else drew the contrast to how humans routinely screw up during crises, drawing on the worldwide pandemic response as the latest example. What a chaotic mess that was (is)!

Adam and Eve may be okay for us but they are hard to swallow for the general public in our neck of the woods. When I first came to learn of Jehovah’s Witnesses, I was astounded that here were people who actually believed in Adam and Eve. They didn’t look dumb—yet all my life I had believed that only the reddest of the rednecks believed in Adam and Eve!

If you dismiss them, you toss away all hope of answering the deepest questions of life. ‘Why is their evil and suffering?’—gone, if you dismiss Adam and Eve. ‘How is it that people die?’ as well as related questions of hope for the dead—none of them can be answered without Adam and Eve. So don’t get too hasty in giving them to boot, regardless of what the learned ones say. The learning of the learned ones is not always the bee’s knees. Sometimes it is the “foolishness” that “catches the wise in their own cunning.” (1 Corinthians 3:19) If, thinking yourself very clever, you have tossed away answers to the vexing problems of life, you have indeed been caught in your own cunning.

The trick with Adam and Eve is to view them as though you were putting together a jigsaw puzzle. You are trying 
to replicate the picture on the box top. Nobody cares if the picture is real or not. That concern is shelved if it even occurs to someone.

Upon completing the puzzle of a Book that was long regarded as a hodgepodge of conflicting ideas, a hopeless mess that one ought not remotely dream of untangling—and yet the completed puzzle is evidence it has been done . . .  Well, then, at that time you just may want to revisit your assessment as to whether the box top cover is real.

Once you’ve put together the puzzle and have reproduced the picture on the cover, you’re pretty much immune to someone saying you put it together wrong. And when you are cruising down the highway at 60 MPH, even the scientist on the radio telling you your car doesn’t run does not cause undue distress.

 

******  The bookstore

 

 

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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