The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (WTBTS): Your Heavenly Tour Guide?

I have been to Israel twice….Both times, it was with groups that had booked with a reputable company that handled the many details involved with travel by air and ground. Hotels and two meals a day were also arranged in our package. They checked our passports and credentials to ensure there were no issues with customs when we arrived. The company also provided us with a professional tour guide and bus driver when we arrived. The tour guide knew the area, the various Biblical sites, and why each site is important to a biblical understanding. A good, reliable tour guide and company can make a trip enjoyable and very educational.

An unreliable tour guide, however, would be a disaster. You have paid your money, and you trust their leadership and are truly invested in their expertise, but at some point, it becomes obvious the guide has no real knowledge about the area and is simply making things up on the fly. Worse, what if the bogus company convinces you that they are the only reliable tour company and all others are deceivers that will lead you into danger and perhaps to your death? If you have your eyes truly open, you might realize that the site they insisted yesterday was Christ’s tomb they are claiming today is a different thing entirely, perhaps the ruins of Pontius Pilate’s favorite barbershop. A keen observer with an open mind will immediately spot a problem with this glaring inconsistency, but someone deeply invested in that bogus guide may notice nothing amiss, and even if the “problem” is brought to their attention, they might dismiss the contradiction as a very small matter.

This seems an unlikely scenario – and probably is indeed very improbable, when it comes to Holy Land tour guides, but dubious and contradictory spiritual claims are made all the time among cults and false religions. Very often, they are completely overlooked by their followers, who are heavily invested in the leadership of that particular group. Members may actually feel endangered by the prospect of finding fault with the only “true tour guide” on the face of the earth! They have been taught to accept the leadership as God’s anointed guide for all things spiritual and believe that to doubt God’s chosen guide and spokesman is to be flung out into the cold, cold world – lost forever….One such group is the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. According to them, they are God’s one true leader and must be obeyed and believed at all costs. For example, at one point in their history, the anointed guide of the Watchtower was certain they knew exactly where in the universe God lived and even had His location pinpointed on their astrological tour map:

It is estimated that light travels 186,000 miles per second; and that the Pleiades are 120 light years of 365 days each from the earth. It is understood that the Pleiades mark the throne of Jehovah, from which he rules his universe.

The fact that most Bible scholars in the 1920s, nor even today, did not use astrological criteria to pinpoint God’s exact residence in the Universe did not matter to them in the least. There were a few pseudo-scientific fringe groups that were teaching this nonsense in the 1920s. Then, as now, there are always people on the fringe teaching other people on the fringe “new insights” on spiritual themes that have nothing whatever to do with the main themes of the Bible nor any bearing on the gospel.

The leaders of the WTBTS at the time jumped aboard this fringe teaching and rode it out for a time. As added evidence for their claim, the WTBTS linked it to another fringe teaching of that era concerning the Pyramids of Egypt, which they called “God’s Stone Witness”:

Then again, the position of the Pleiades at the time of the completion of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, “God’s Stone Witness,” is a very prominent feature of that building in the midst of the land of Egypt. For these and for other reasons Bible Students have good cause to believe that in the region of the Pleiades is located the throne of Jehovah God, the spiritual center of the universe,- whence go forth the “sweet influences” of the Almighty to the Earth and to all other parts of the starry universe.

Somewhere along the way, the Watchtower concluded they had made a heavenly wrong turn on this one. Oops! Jehovah, it turned out, didn’t actually live in that neighborhood, and in 1953 the WTBTS announced in the Watchtower – as an aside: “Incidentally, Pleiades can no longer be considered the center of the universe and it would be unwise for us to try to fix God’s throne as being at a particular spot in the universe. Were we to think of the Pleiades as his throne we might improperly view with special veneration that cluster of stars.”

The average Jehovah’s Witness might consider this about-face a small mistake. After all, no one was planning on traveling to the Pleiades to pop in and perhaps have lunch with Jehovah. That is more in the domain of charismatic and some evangelicals in the heavenly tourism industry. But we digress.

In its over 140-year history, the Watchtower leadership, who supposedly get their teachings directly from Jehovah as His mouthpiece, regularly – and most often very quietly – changes major doctrines that Jehovah’s Witnesses have been required to believe – and teach – or risk being kicked off of the JW tour bus. These include such doctrines as the dates of Christ’s return (they were wrong on Christ’s arrival date at least seven times) and organ transplants (which were forbidden to JWs even to save a life and would get them kicked out of “God’s Organization”). Then there is the very important question of whether the men of Sodom will be resurrected – the Watchtower leadership has waffled between yes and no eight times on this essential issue. But the fumbling and bumbling about bible doctrines never stopped. The list of the ‘higher authorities,” mentioned briefly in Romans 13, was identified first as the political government by leader Charles Taze Russell, yet in 1929, the higher powers were identified as being Jehovah and Jesus by leader Judge Joseph Rutherford – and then in 1962 the WTBTS leadership identified the “Higher Powers” as governmental authorities, basically back to Russell’s understanding.

Jehovah’s Witnesses work very hard to earn the reward of eternal life. According to the organization booking their passage, what will be their final destination? Well…that depends. Until 1935, the “Anointed Class” and the “Great Crowd” were both booked to receive eternal life in heaven. Between 1934 and 1935, Rutherford moved the “Great Crowd” out of heaven, and their final destination was said to be earth and all future “Great Crowd” travelers would be advised their final destination would be, well, earth:

It appears that moving the Great Crowd to earth was to support Rutherford’s concept of narrow salvation. The most effective way to rapidly grow Watchtower followers was making survival at Armageddon contingent on being one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. With anointed Jehovah’s Witnesses going to heaven and a Great Crowd of Jehovah’s Witnesses being Armageddon’s earthly survivors, the only option for worldly people became eternal destruction. This concept worked; between 1935 and 1975 the Watchtower Society was one of the fastest growing religions on earth.

With this itinerary change, the Watchtower now provides two possible destinations for faithful JWs. The now dogmatically verified location of the relatively small “anointed class” is in heaven – and the dogmatically verified location of the 2^nd class, “Other Sheep,” is on the earth – and never the twain shall meet. The “anointed” are to reign forever with Jesus (recreated as Michael the archangel 2.0) over the ”reigned-upon” great crowd of mere mortals, forever living on the earth. According to the WTBTS, these two distinct classes are laid out in the Bible book of Revelation. However, as we look at the Book of Revelation, it seems the WTBTS’s destinations are wrong—again.

[TBC: For the full article and footnotes:]

https://midwestoutreach.org/2023/11/16/the-wbtbs-your-heavenly-tour-guide/