Today, I talked to Tony (and his partner Buddy), the "Jehovah's Witness" (I use quotation marks because, although the members of this cult claim to be witnesses of YHWH, the God of the Bible, they are false witnesses as they distort the plain truth of the Bible and impose false doctrines of man, dishonoring Him). We talked about what happens when we die, which is a big issue for JWs, who deny that man has an immortal soul and vigorously resist the truth of the existence of Hell (good JWs, they say, will be recreated by god on a perfect earth later). Since the Watchtower (the organization in charge of the cult) can't escape the fact that the word "soul" is evidently in the Bible, they have gone back to the Hebrew and Greek in an attempt to redefine it. In the Hebrew nephesh, which is properly translated soul in many places can also mean creature (Genesis 1:21 "And God created great whales, and every living nephesh that moveth..."), it can also refer (as can the English word soul) to (1) the immaterial part of a person which persists after death distinct from the body (Genesis 35:18 "and it came to pass, as her soul [nephesh] was departing (for she died)..."), (2) the "inner man" (2 Kings 4:27 "Let her alone, for her soul [nephesh] is vexed within her..."), (3) the seat of emotions and passions (Psalm 86:4 "Rejoice the soul [nephesh] of thy servant..."), and the person as a whole (Genesis 14:21 "Give me the persons [nephesh] and keep the goods thyself."). The Watchtower has deceitfully takes the first definition (creature) and the last (whole person) and claims that those are the only things that the word soul can mean in the Bible. Tony started our talk my saying it was important for us to first have a Biblical definition for soul and that the only way to do that was to examine the way it was used in the Bible. He went through some classic Watchtower verses showing only their chosen definitions in play. I warned against limiting the word to this, that it might mean creature, person, and the immaterial part of a person that persists after death. I showed him an example of it being used differently (as the seat of emotions, I was building up to other definitions, but was cut off), but he interrupted saying that he could not see how in the Bible soul could mean both living being (creature or person) and the immaterial part of a person that survives after death (so now his perceptions determine what the word must mean, rather than how it's used in the Bible?). I went to Matthew 10:28, which reads, in part: "do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul." True, this is Greek, not Hebrew in the New Testament, but the word for soul in Greek, psyche, has all the same meanings as nephesh.
Well, there it was in black and white, staring at us: Jesus was telling people that the soul could survive someone killing the body--which the Watchtower absolutely denies. How did Buddy and Tony react? They dismissed the verse with an explanation that of course Jesus only meant that no man can deny us the hope of resurrection/recreation. The soul, they maintained--with the verse right in front of their face--is always killed when the body dies. Did they think Jesus was lying then? Did they think hope for the resurrection was another definition of soul? They denied both: Jesus always told the truth and soul only always means something that dies with the body, making their position logically impossible. Then they rushed off to another verse and the discussion deteriorated into further frustrating stupidity from there.
By the time they had to go and I walked back to the dorm, I was about ready to scream. How could a man be so blinded and deceived so as not to see the plain words on a page? I settled into my chair and tried to cool off. About that time, the guy next door came back, talking on his cell phone to a friend. I could hear him through the wall, struggling with what advice to give to his friend. From the snatches I overheard, I gathered that he was trying to advise his friend about his friend's girlfriend getting an abortion (in his mind, it came down to her choice, "because it's her body"--ignoring the fact that the most affected body in the procedure does not belong to the woman: the fetus/baby is a separate entity with a unique complete human genome). I was about ready to scream again and took a walk so I could do just that if I chose. What kind of a world do we live in? Why is it that a man can be so blind to the truth that he cannot recognize it in black and white on the page before him? Why is it that two men consider cutting a pregnant woman open and ripping her child from her womb, killing it, a legitimate option--and can discuss it as if it were little more than getting a nose piercing or tattoo? Why is it that we live in a world were guys getting their girlfriend's pregnant is considered normal? What kind of a messed up world is this anyway? Evil is so prevalent and so strong. "Why?" I asked.
Then, I considered God, and the heroes of stories. In stories there is a reason why dragons are huge, evil, clever, and powerful--and there is a reason why heroes will go out of their way (or else be dragged out of their way by fate) to face the meanest and most ferocious dragons of them all. The reason is simple: the greater the dragon, the greater the hero is proven to be when he defeats it. So then God also allows great evil to exist in the world. He allows it to spread, to grow, to show it's full power of depravity and darkness in the world. He does all this in order that He might battle it and defeat it in the end, thus proving two things. The first is the greatness of His majesty, power, and goodness (as with Pharaoh in Exodus 7:3-4). The second, which is also a part of the first, is His great love for us, whom He rescues from all our ills (Isaiah 27:2-4). Then let us remember to glorify God when we see the evil in the world He vows to conquer!
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