How would you react if someone told you that you need to pray to Michael the archangel and ask him to forgive your sins?

That’s how Jehovah’s Witnesses feel if we tell them they need to come to Jesus for forgiveness.

They believe it’s only the Father we should pray to.

Only God can forgive sin.

And they think Jesus is Michael the archangel, not God.

If you try to address the issue by showing them Jesus is God, the need to come to him for salvation often gets forgotten aside amidst controversy over the deity of Christ or over the Trinity doctrine.

You can avoid this problem by bypassing identity issues in order to focus attention on the Witnesses’ need for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Focus your discussion on what Jehovah wants.

Because they believe Jehovah is the ultimate authority, they need to know that they are obeying Jehovah God if they come to Jesus for forgiveness of their sins and that they are disobeying Jehovah God if they don’t.

This concept will surprise them.

The Watchtower hasn’t trained them to deal with it.

Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that it is the Father, Jehovah, who forgives sins, not Jesus.

Accordingly, please request that they read aloud and give you their understanding of Jesus’ words in Matthew 9:6: “‘But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the paralyzed man, ‘Get up, take your mat and go home.’”

You can ask a number of stone-in-the-shoe questions:

  • According to that verse, who has the authority to forgive our sins? 
  • Do you see from that verse why I believe that it’s Jesus who has the authority to forgive sins? 
  • Do you see from that why I believe we need to come to Jesus if we want our sins forgiven?

They probably will ask, “Who gave him that authority?”

Rather than getting sidetracked into an argument about who Jesus really is, simply answer:

  • Jehovah gave Jesus that authority. That’s my point. It seems to me that this passage says that’s Jehovah’s arrangement for our salvation. He has delegated to the Son of Man the authority to forgive sins, so he’s the one we need to go to. 
  • If Jehovah told us to go to Moses to get our sins forgiven, we’d need to go to Moses. Instead, he tells us that to get forgiveness we need to deal with his Son, so that’s what we need to do. 
  • Have you ever done that? 

Summary

Sometimes, Witnesses will say that Jehovah does the actual forgiving and that Jesus just announces what Jehovah has decided.

If so, you can request one of them to read aloud John 5:22-23: “Moreover, the Father judges no one but has entrusted all judgment to the Son that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him.”

You can follow up by asking:

  • According to this passage, who will judge us—the Father or the Son? 
  • Is it blasphemous to honor the Son just as we honor the Father? 
  • Is the Father offended if we honor Jesus just as we honor him or is that what he wants?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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