Click image to access this “Bible Teach” chapter on the Watchtower’s website
Do you think of “Judgment Day” as a terrifying time?
The Watchtower believes it will be “a wonderful time…of hope and restoration.” Continue reading
Page 46 of 105
Click image to access this “Bible Teach” chapter on the Watchtower’s website
What the Watchtower calls “resurrection” is really a re-creation from God’s memory in which he creates new bodies and implants the person’s personalities into them.
When you think about it, that view is required by the Watchtower’s teaching that the dead no longer exist and that there is no separate soul or spirit to re-enter a body. Continue reading
Click image to access this “Bible Teach” chapter on the Watchtower’s website
Chapter 7, “Real Hope for Your Loved Ones Who Have Died,” and two related appendices explain what the Watchtower believes will happen to people after they die.
Christians don’t all agree on the sequence of end times events, so it’s only fair that I give you my views before critiquing the Watchtower’s. If your opinions are different than mine, you can make the necessary adjustments in your conversations with Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Unlike the Watchtower, I believe the Bible teaches that people have separate souls and spirits that surviving physical death. At death, the souls and spirits of the saved go to heaven to be with Christ (Philippians 1:23). The souls and spirits of the unsaved go to Hades to await the final judgment (Luke 16:19-31).
Resurrection is a reuniting of body, soul, and spirit (1 Thessalonians 5:23). Resurrection bodies won’t be identical to the bodies that died, but there will be continuity, as there is between a seed and the plant it produces (1 Corinthians 15:35-43). Continue reading
Click image to access this “Bible Teach” chapter on the Watchtower’s website
“For the living are conscious that they will die; but as for the dead, they are conscious of nothing at all, neither do they anymore have wages, because the remembrance of them has been forgotten.” (Ecclesiastes 9:5, Watchtower’s New World Translation, 1984 edition)
This verse is probably the Witnesses’ favorite proof text referring to the afterlife. They frequently quote only a few words from it—“the dead… are conscious of nothing at all” or “the dead know nothing at all” (from the 2013 edition).
For them, this definitively excludes the possibility of human beings having a soul or conscious spirit that survives the death of the body.
Click image to access this “Bible Teach” chapter on the Watchtower’s website
The “Soul” and “Spirit” Appendix
This portion of “Bible Teach” shows the importance of defining terms biblically.
Chapter 6, paragraph 5 (p. 58) refers you to an appendix entitled, “’Soul’ and ‘Spirit’—What Do These Terms Really Mean?”
That appendix states, “Many believe that these words mean something invisible and immortal that exists inside us. They think that at death this invisible part of a human leaves the body and lives on. Since this belief is so widespread, many are surprised to learn that it is not at all what the Bible teaches.” (p. 208, the appendices don’t have numbered paragraphs) Continue reading
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