Man was built in God's image. So we all have the capability to think like God. But modern society has so many features which prevent us from doing what we were designed to do.
We have accepted the wisdom of politicians who merely wish to be popular, and of large companies who merely wish to make money and of media organisations who merely wish to be heard (all the time) and we have rejected the wisdom of God who merely wishes to teach us how to live in a morally sustainable way.
Any society of free willed beings will destroy itself along with its citizens unless it formulates and obeys laws which provide moral sustainability. Putting this the other way around, a set of laws is morally sustainable if it enables a society of free willed being to survive indefinitely without destroying itself.
But the LWs trying to teach moral sustainability to modern man is like Al Gore trying to teach environmental sustainability to republicans. You just cannot get through to them due to prejudice.
Oh the hypocrisy, the hypocrisy of those who make a showy display of their non racism and of their non homophobia but are absolutely prejudiced against all the people from the party they do not vote for!
Al Gore is obviously correct when he asserts that modern man has now reached the point where he is damaging the environment so badly that he is a finite number of years away from destroying himself. And the LWs are equally obviously correct when they assert that society has no future unless it becomes morally sustainable. What is not so easy to see without a lot of bible research is that we have less time left in this system than even Al Gore suspects.
But for the benefit of all republicans and in fact of all democrats who support Obama, who has totally silenced Al Gore in order to avoid blame for the US governments role in licensing the 'worst environment disaster in US history' and then not contributing a dime to fix it, lets forget about the man who was cheated out of the presidency and smeared out of the glory of his Nobel prize. Let's just for argument's sake accept the verdict of common sense in the face of melting glaciers and dying oceans and asphyxiating cities and sinking pacific islands that without environmental sustainability we have no future. Then we can understand what moral sustainability is. For it is mankind's lack of moral sustainability that has led to his lack of environmental sustainability.
It is not sustainable to pour CO2 into the atmosphere at a rate higher than the ecosystem can absorb it. It is not sustainable for banks to destroy money at a rate faster than the world's economies can produce it. It is not sustainable for the public sector in the West to spend money at a rate faster than the private sector can produce it. It is not sustainable for governments to continue to be lawless at the international level.
Every society needs a set of laws which prevent conflicts and which provide a framework in which its members can find security without having to bear arms. The worldwide society of 200 plus governments has no such set of laws. True they have the UN. But the UN are powerless to deal with Israel, Zimbabwe, Iran, Mayanmar, North Korea, or the US and UK when we choose to start wars under false pretexts (however good an idea those wars might seem at the time). It is not sustainable to protect the enormous worldwide black market in drugs by failing to legalize them for the addicts whilst keeping the pushers criminalized. Yet this is what our governments do and this is why we cannot win in Afghanistan, which produces 90% of the world's heroin, or in Columbia which produces most of the world's cocaine or Mexico which traffics the cocaine or most of Asia which traffics the heroin. It is not that we have not learned from Al Capone and prohibition. It is not that we cannot make the comparison between 1920s prohibition and modern prohibition on drugs other than alcohol. It is that our governments are corrupted by the people who make money out of this black market.
None of the governments on this planet presently have morally sustainable laws. In fact our laws have never been less morally sustainable than they are today. Pandering as they do to every vocal minority and every powerful pressure group. We can see this from the destruction of families, economies, cultures, the physical environment, the moral environment and banking systems around the world.
So yes, it is really important to think like God because if continue to think like modern man we are finished as a race.
We have many scriptural proofs that this system ends on 2019Tebbeth10 judicially, the end of Satan's ministry payback lease over Cain (see U659) and on 2024Shebat14 physically, the 1st death Passover (when we stop eating from the tree of both good and bad, and therefore stop dying adamic death).
The lava flood lasts for 40+40 days inclusively and starts actually on 2024Nisan14.
The LW 2NCs, the last saints to enter into the ark, do so on 2023Shebat16-21
5 And the light is shining in the darkness, but the darkness has not overpowered it (John 1).
We are that light, the lampstand of the Christ, his true church. Our doctrine proves it, our grasp of the bible code proves it, our understanding of God's love proves it. But none of that is enough for 8 billion sons of Adam, and neither is it enough for our great Christian leaders or the members of their churches. They are all waiting for a sign. It is as if the whole of God's plan has become a Monty Python Sketch. It is like the lament of Paul at Romans3...
There is not a righteous [man], not even one;
11 there is no one that has any insight,
there is no one that seeks for God.
12 All [men] have deflected, all of them together have become worthless; there is no one that does kindness, there is not so much as one.
13 Their throat is an opened grave, they have used deceit with their tongues. Poison of asps is behind their lips.
14 And their mouth is full of cursing and bitter expression.
15 Their feet are speedy to shed blood.
16 Ruin and misery are in their ways,
17 and they have not known the way of peace.
18 There is no fear of God before their eyes (Romans3).
There will be a sign. The sign of Jonah no less. Fit for a wicked and adulterous generation. The sign they will get is an act of nuclear terrorism which kicks off the Great Tribulation. and when people respond to this having failed to respond to the unprecedented wealth of interpretations that the LWs had before the sign, we will all know that apart from a few LWs, there are no Christians amongst mankind, there are only Signians. In fact many even in the LWs have become signians, not really prepared to do anything until they see a sign. We have reached the point as a church where we could expound the wisdom of Solomon with the teaching elegance of the Christ and no one would have the slightest interest in the absence of a sign.
The tragedy of the LW church itself as of 2023May14 (2023Iyyar22) is that although we have found the answers to so many profound questions which have fascinated and inspired mankind for millennia, and although we have deduced from scripture many of the laws of Moral Sustainability which if implemented would fix many of mankind's present malaises, people have not been persuaded to join this church in preference to churches which do not have such treasures as we do. It is like Jesus said:
21 For where your treasure is there your heart will be also (Matthew 6).
The whole world has gone after the wrong type of treasure it seems to us.
We had no congregation as of February 2021 (around 30 people worldwide plus a few more interested ones) and around 120 in August 2022. We have no money. All our apostles are in debt. We have no buildings at all. We have never had any buildings or money or size of congregation. Yet God has seen fit to give us more understandings of his book and his purposes than anyone in this church ever thought it was possible to know - see U264a for example or our Watchtower doctrine comparison page.
The question is WHY? Why did he do it in this way?
6 Accordingly he answered and said to me: This is the word of Jehovah to Zerubbabel, saying, 'Not by a military force, nor by power, but by my spirit, Jehovah of armies has said (Zechariah 4)
Zerubbabel built the second temple of the Law of Moses. And we have built the second temple of true Christianity in the second presence. Well at least the first few stones of it! We did it without a military force (congregation) and without power (money, political influence). We did it by God's spirit which helped us to understand his book.
But there is much more to these events that at first meets the eye. Let us be blunt about all of this. There are those of us, most of us, who have invested their hearts and their hopes in this system of things. Their security and their treasure lies in money and political influence and a social network of contacts which keeps them informed. And there are those us who have chosen to invest their hearts and their hopes in the next system of things. Their security and their treasure lies in understanding how to love and be loved, not just their girlfriend, but all mankind. Their treasure lies in an understanding of God's righteousness which is moral sustainability. And their security lies in the unbreakable promises of God to set up a kingdom which will not be brought to ruin (unlike our present system) and to give men of faith or love a place within it.
Now God is trying to teach us to change our focus from the physical to the spiritual by the way he has guided the LW church. He has not guided us to money, to status, to buildings, even to having many members. But he has guided us in this state of physical impecunity to spiritual riches (bible understandings) beyond our wildest dreams.
Looking back at the first 18 years of the church and thinking about how things have gone, has lead us to understand what is wrong with the thinking of modern man and has shown us how far away from common sense mankind has gone.
There is hardly a man or woman alive who will choose content over status. There must be almost no one alive who values their own judgement highly enough to act upon it in the absence of a celebrity endorsement or a few million other people agreeing with him. Why is it that people are so fascinated by fictional codes in books and movies but express no interest in real code of the bible?
Why does mankind insist in putting its trust in governments who are demonstrably incompetent and corrupt whilst refusing seriously to consider the book which was written to fix all these problems?
How can we get people to jump off the bus which is plainly heading straight over a cliff and take a seat in the lifeboat designed for people who are able to make decisions on the basis of their own judgment?
57 Why do you not judge also for yourselves what is righteous? (Luke 12).
The answer may be that we all have to get the off our addiction to having more money, more status, more power, more financial security and more glory. All these things are fine as means of existence, but they are none of them Gods. It is when we worship these things, and everyone worships something, that we go astray and leave moral sustainability.
Simply put: The world is full of distractions meant to stop you, the reader, discovering the truth. The truth is that the world as we know it, is going to end. It will end because it's behaviour is unsustainable. Its behaviour is unsustainable because its laws are so unrighteous that they actually legislate the destruction first of our national identity (which has already happened in the case of the UK) then of our communities and finally of ourselves. We can say that because we know something about moral sustainability. John said it too...
17 Furthermore, the world is passing away and so is its desire, but he that does the will of God remains forever (1John2).
Fortunately there is to be a new world, not the new world order than the UN is soon to force upon us, which is in fact a counterfeit to this new world, but the kingdom of God, which we pray for in the Lord's prayer, which is a government headed by the one man who lived his entire human life in a morally sustainable manner, Jesus Christ.
It is true that God foreknew how things would turn out and that he has given enough understanding to this church to do its job and that his plan to save half of mankind into the Kingdom will succeed despite the failure of almost all of mankind to pay any serious attention either to his book or to help his last true church to decode it. But this does not excuse the idolatry of men who will worship anything put in their path so long as that thing is not God. Just because God knew that Arsenal would beat Manchester City 3 -1 last week does not excuse the poor performance of Manchester City. And just because God knew mankind would all be lead astray at the end, and therefore made provision to save them anyway, does not excuse that terrible and tragic failure.
But it is not the purpose of this website or this church to condemn. It is our purpose to give back sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf. It is open the eyes of those who have closed them and wiggle the toes of those that have fallen asleep. Please therefore make the effort to see as far as Zoar, the start of the Kingdom of God on earth on 2012Sivan16. A church that is eventually run by the descended 1NC angels (Peter and the apostles etc) after the 2NC kings of the LWs have gone into the ark. See as far as the invisible greater ark of Noah from which half of mankind will be raptured. See the mechanics of our salvation, the legal basis of our salvation, the necessity for our salvation and the purpose of our salvation. See the love of God for all of his children and see how that love is our future.
1. God regards all of the nation of Israel as one man. So for example torturing one suspected terrorist to save a million people is a sin. It is wrong. Human rights are independent of number. If you believe that torturing one man is justified because it might save a million, then you also believe that if 3 people turn up at Pamela Anderson's house, they all have the right to sleep with her, since there are more of them than there are of her and her husband.
There are two laws of God which could be construed as giving the right to torture. There is an eye for an eye and there is the law which permits a home owner to kill a burgler whilst he is in the act of burglery but not after he has left the premises.
2 If a thief should be found in the act of breaking in and he does get struck and die, there is no bloodguilt for him.
3 If the sun has shone forth upon him, there is bloodguilt for him. He is to make compensation without fail. If he has nothing, then he must be sold for the things he stole (Exodus 22)
One could argue that a person who has planted a bomb has constructively taken an eye and is constructively in the vicinity of the bomb in the act of killing.
If one could apply the law of Moses constructively then it would prescribe death or body part for body part repayment but it would not prescribe the attempted mental rape that torture amounts to. However the law of Moses was not meant to be applied constructively. There is no scriptural precedent for pre-emptive punishment, that the LWs have seen. If a man set out to murder a family he did not break the law until he actually murdered them. The law did not police intentions, only actions.
Now if the terrorist had already murdered you could argue that he has already robbed someone of all their body parts. So you could argue that you could step by step remove his body parts in repayment which of course would amount to torture and you ask the terrorist at each step did he want to tell you where the nuclear bomb was hidden. The trouble with that idea is that the victim, although having lost all his body parts, lost them in death, not whilst he was still alive. So unless the terrorist also tortured his victim you could not torture him under the law of Moses. We are using Moses here as a universal basic standard of Justice. But we must also add the law of the Christ to Moses. He said...
17 Return evil for evil to no one. Provide fine things in the sight of all men.
18 If possible, as far as it depends upon you, be peaceable with all men.
19 Do not avenge yourselves, beloved, but yield place to the wrath; for it is written: Vengeance is mine; I will repay,
says Jehovah (Romans 12).
Torture is certainly an evil. It should not be returned. The argument that a nuclear terrorist is a really big evil so it is OK do use a little evil on him to find out where he put the bomb is defeated by Romans 12. There is certainly no need to avenge. God can do a much better job of vengeance than any human. He can take away a sinners soul for 1,000 years, if his justice is infringed. So having had a good rummage through the scriptures we see that one cannot torture a person for the purposes of mentally raping them even if we think they may know where a nuclear bomb is that would kill millions if not defused. Neither can we kill them for an event yet to occur. We can kill them if they themselves have murdered, but under God's law that decision rests with the victim not with the state. The purpose of law is to empower the victim so as to redress the damage done by the crime. It is not to empower the state. Furthermore Jesus added mercy and forgiveness to the law of Moses so we no longer impose an eye for an eye or the death penalty in most western countries. It is a sad testament to US justice that money is regarded as more valuable than human life so that Bernie Madoff gets 150 years but a murderer gets perhaps 10. However God's penalty on Cain for murdering Abel was 7 years outside the camp of Adam. The death penalty only came in with Moses and ended with Jesus. So the present prison sentences for murder are not far from the mark.
Back to the terrorist. Suppose he was just about to press the button and the only way to stop him was to shoot him. Obviously you shoot him in third party 'self defence' on behalf of your brothers who he is about to kill. But suppose the only way to stop him was to torture him for a few minutes with a Taser. Obviously you Taser him in third party 'self defence' on behalf of your brother. But you cannot torture him in order to mentally rape him. There are no circumstances in which it is permissible to rape a woman sexually (if she has agreed to become your wife you cannot rape her since biblically the two are one flesh) and there are no circumstances in which it is permissible to rape a man or a woman mentally by torture or any other means. Sure you can get them drunk or give them the truth drug if it causes no damage to them and see if they volunteer any information. But they must be induced to volunteer without torture. They must not be raped.
So that is as close to the thinking of God as we can get on this tricky and emotive issue which is the subject of many US films which promote the torture of terrorists. There is evidence that the torture of a terrorist and his supposed confession lead to much of the false intelligence that was used as a pretext for the Iraq war. So unclean information (such as intelligence attained through torture or medical information from Nazi concentration camps) is very dangerous. If that torture had not occurred 500,000 lives might have been saved and 4 million people might not have been displaced and Iran might not have been radicalised as much as it has been and Iraq might not have become, in the words of Tony Blair, the crucible of middle east terrorism.
All of the above is the difference between the one step thinking of man and the multi step thinking of God.
One step thinking is: Torture him, get the info and defuse the bomb.
Two step thinking is: The bomb has been planted due to a failure of morality on the part of the terrorist. The bomb is the symptom, the failure of morality is the disease. If we torture this guy then we get a bigger failure in morality which will lead to a lot worse even than this bomb. It will lead to many more terrorists taking up his fight motivated by any form of injustice or perceived injustice. And it will corrupt the security services which will leave us wide open to further attacks either by these new terrorists, or indeed by the morally bankrupt torturers that the security services have become.
Society is as secure as the grasp it has on morality. The purpose of the terrorist is not to kill loads of people even with his nuclear bomb. It is to leverage through media attention his crime against humanity for political advantage at best. And it is to loosen the grip that society has on morality at worst. The terrorist seeks either to get political power for himself if he is from ETA or the IRA (as we see from Jerry Adams and Martin McGuiness who now have political power) or to cause society to destroy itself if he is an extremist. The way to fight extremists is to keep a strong grip on our morality and not permit them to loosen it. Society can withstand terrorism. It cannot withstand a moral collapse triggered by an allergic reaction to terrorism.
The way to stop nuclear terrorism is to destroy all the bombs of course, not to torture terrorists. Every terrorist you torture makes several more of them. And when you combine a whole new generation of brainwashed deluded suicide bombers with nuclear bombs you have an act of nuclear terrorism just waiting to happen. When such a thing does occur, and it will, in the very near future, we will then ban all nuclear bombs because the carnage they cause will be unbearable to all of us. So why wait until then? Where is our wisdom? Ban them all now! They are an obscenity.
For more of this type of applied Christianity see credit.html
It goes without saying that God is more intelligent than humans. So indeed are the angels who designed our genetic code for example. The human brain cycles at 10Hz. Imagine if you had one that cycled at 2.8GHz, like a modern PC! You would then think 280 million times faster than a human! Do you think humans can make machines that fast but God cannot? Who knows how fast the angels can think? They designed the physical universe which Newton and Einstein went some way towards decoding. They inspired the bible to be written and had real time editorial control of the precise words use by its writers and have some control even over its interpreters!...
19 Consequently we have the prophetic word [made] more sure; and you are doing well in paying attention to it as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until day dawns and a daystar rises, in your hearts.
20 [you are] the first ones knowing this,
that no prophecy [out] of scripture comes from a personally-owned interpretation.
21 For not by will of man did prophecy ever come, but men spoke from God being borne under holy spirit.
In other words, just as the prophet who wrote the scripture did not own the prophecy, in fact he did not even know what it meant or that he had made it in many cases, so the interpreter does not own the interpretation. This most emphatically does not mean that God or the holy spirit interprets its own scriptures. They prophetic word is written for us to interpret not the angels. However as Joseph once said to his fellow inmates...
8 Do not interpretations belong to God (Genesis 40).
So although we do the interpretation work, God determines when and how and if we get the true prophetic meaning. He maintains control of information that is his, not ours. But he does not merely give it to us. He expects us to work for it. However it is encoded just as the laws of physics were and just as the very DNA code of our bodies is. There was a wonderful quote from a professor of genetics at Queen Mary College who said that we now know the entire vocabulary of the human genome, but we cannot construct a single sentence from it because we do not understand its grammar. Well a grammar is a means by which an intelligence constructs a sentence from a vocabulary. So this professor was actually stating that the human genome was created by an intelligence, for if not, it would have no grammar. God is therefore the poet of our DNA.
So here is the mindset that a bible reader must have when he reads the book in order to understand it...
I am stupider than the guys who wrote this account!
The angels are cleverer than me!
So let's take one of the writers favourite examples of a daft looking scripture...
1 And this is the history of Esau, that is to say, Edom.
2 Esau took his wives from the daughters of Canaan: Adah the daughter of Elon the Hittite and Oholibamah the daughter of Anah, the granddaughter of Zibeon the Hivite...
8 So Esau took up dwelling in the mountainous region of Seir. Esau is Edom.
9 And this is the history of Esau the father of Edom in the mountainous region of Seir.
10 These are the names of the sons of Esau:
Eliphaz the son of Adah, Esau's wife; Reuel the son of Basemath, Esau's wife...
19 These are the sons of Esau, and these are their sheiks. He is Edom.
20 These are the sons of Seir the Horite, the inhabitants of the land: Lotan and Shobal and Zibeon and Anah
21 and Dishon and Ezer and Dishan. These are the sheiks of the Horite, the sons of Seir, in the land of Edom (Genesis 36).
We are told more than 3x in the same account the Esau is Edom. So rhetorically we must ask. Is God an amnesiac? Has he been alive so long that he has advanced divine Alzheimers? Did he forget in verse 8 what he had already told us in verse 1, namely that Esau was Edom? Is he an order of magnitude worse than Stephen Spielberg at telling a story? Sorry to be so patronizing but do you remember the mindset we must apply: The angels are cleverer than me? Let's apply that mindset. Where does it take us?
Well if this account only has a literal meaning then the angels are dumberer than us. So obviously the story is in a code and has a greater meaning wherein extra information is given by these 3 repetitions which are pointless in the literal meaning. This account actually presents us with an obvious choice. Either God is an idiot or the account is in some kind of code. This principle applies to every seemingly irrelevant detail and every seemingly pointless change of name given to every character or object in a bible account.
For example, in the account of the battle of Jericho in Joshua6, the ark of the covenant is referred to as the plain old ark, the ark of the covenant, the ark of Jehovah and the ark of the covenant of Jehovah. 4 designations for one ark in one account. Well obviously it was not the ark of Satan or of the Philistines or of the people of Jericho. So there is really no point in using all these different designations for the same box in one account in the literal meaning. Therefore, unless God had shares in the papyrus companies of the day, it is obvious just from the wording of that account that it has a greater meaning in which the 4 designations actually provide some extra information. We can also deduce this from the words of Paul who says...
12 For the word of God is alive and exerts power and is sharper than any two-edged sword and pierces even to the dividing of soul and spirit, and of joints and [their] marrow, and [is] able to discern thoughts and intentions of [the] heart (Hebrews 4).
Every word must exert power. So if there are words that have no power in the literal meaning then there is a further meaning, a greater meaning to the scripture. It is like Jesus said...
17 Indeed, it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one particle of a letter of the Law to go unfulfilled (Luke 16).
17 Do not think I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I came, not to destroy, but to fulfill;
18 for truly I say to you that sooner would heaven and earth pass away than for one smallest letter or one particle of a letter to pass away from the Law by any means and not all things take place (Matthew 5).
Even the tense or the number of a word can have great power both in the literal and the symbolic meanings of an account.
When you follow this through to its conclusion you discover that most scriptural accounts have greater meanings, further meanings in addition to their literal meaning. Even symbolic accounts have further symbolic meanings. Revelation for example has a meaning for each true Christian church and there have been 4 of them.
Simply put, this means there is a second new covenant, a second Judas, a second church and a second Elijah in each presence of the Christ and a second presence and that everything, absolutely everything, that the Jews did which is recorded in the old testament has some kind of symbolic application to the Christians that followed them. Even today their traditions prophesy the activity of the Christian church. For example after comparing carefully the 4 accounts of the Lord's evening meal in the New Testament, we deduced that there are 4 cups to be drunk at that meal representing 4 different salvation covenants. Then we realised that the Jews have been drinking 4 cups at the Passover for thousands of years - see U15. The Lord's evening meal is the Christianised Passover celebration.
Being more precise, the physical sons of Israel by genetics prophesy by their scripturally recorded actions and actually by their traditions, the activities of the spiritual sons of Jacob, who are the covenant sons of Jacob who are the saints, those who have been born again from above - see U9. What that means is that saints can behave very badly indeed! Incidentally nobody today whom the catholic church declares to be a saint is a saint. That church lost its priesthood in 75 AD when the first true Christian church founded by Jesus which had Peter as its first president, sold out, yes, sold out, to Rome. It became the harlot seen by John riding upon the 7 headed beast of Revelation 17. The 7 hilled beast of Rome. The Catholic church knew this at the time. Hence it left the Book of Revelation out of the oldest 'complete' new testament bible manuscript in the world, the Codex Vaticanus.
Here is St. Paul telling us that the bible is written in a symbolic code...
21 Tell me, you who want to be under law,
Do you not hear the Law?
22 For example, it is written that Abraham acquired 2 sons, one by the servant girl and one by the free woman;
23 but the one by the servant girl was actually born in the manner of flesh, the other by the free woman through a promise.
24 These things stand as a symbolic drama;
for these [women] mean 2 covenants, the one from Mount Sinai, which brings forth children for slavery, and which is Hagar.
25 Now this Hagar means Sinai, a mountain in Arabia, and she corresponds with the Jerusalem today, for she is in slavery with her children.
26 But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother.
27 For it is written: Be glad, you barren woman who does not give birth; break out and cry aloud, you woman who does not have childbirth pains; for the children of the desolate woman are more numerous than [those] of her who has the husband (Galatians 24).
God designs the physical which we can see to teach us about the spiritual or the emotional or the intellectual which we cannot see. When we reach the age of two we learn how to walk step by step. When we reach the age of 15 or thereabouts we are supposed to learn how to think step by step. The former prophesying the latter.
Hence if you look at some of mankind's great intellectual works, such as the great theorems of pure mathematics, or the sequencing of the Human Genome, or the formulation of the laws of physics or electromagnetics, you see that tens and sometimes hundreds of small intellectual steps are need to prove the theorem or to formulate the equations that describe our world. If you are not a physicist or a mathematician then you may know that Windows NT took around 1,500 builds to complete and Windows XP took around 7,000 builds to complete. That is 7,000 steps with the mind.
Yet whilst we have individuals and companies and academic departments able to make this number of steps with their minds without falling over (although in the case of Windows it is with falling over), we have governments and most of the public who expect everything to be solved with one step of the mind. Imagine how limited your life would be if you could not make any more than one step in any one journey. You would get nowhere. Well that is what has happened to our governments. This is because you cannot sell a multi-step argument to an electorate very easily. It is one of the many flaws in democracy.
Now just as it took Microsoft 7000 steps to code Windows XP, so it has taken the LWs 533 predicted iterations to reach the correct prediction dates for the pillar of fire and cloud that we have been following through our chronological wilderness.. This is not something to be surprised at. Encoding and decoding are multi step processes. We think as we walk. One step at a time. But the LWs are the only spiritual athlete who has chosen to enter this race. And there is a race (since the book is in a code) and there is a finishing line (since God does not do a single thing without revealing his confidential matter to his servants the prophets - Amos 3:7) and there is a medal for the church that finishes the race (1Kings18). So by an existence and uniqueness argument - see U26, we shall finish the race. It is not a question of if, it is merely a question of when.
This again brings us back to the Jews of the Old Testament. They wandered around in the wilderness for 40 years. They knew from the day the spies brought back a bad report that the wilderness period would be 40 years. They knew everything about time, but nothing about space. They had no idea where Moses would take them next from a geographical standpoint. Now the sons of Israel were the Geographical people of God, having as they did a geographically defined promised land from the Nile to the Euphrates. But the LWs are the Chronological people of God, having as we do a Kingdom of God running 1,000 years from 2008Nisan22 to 3008Nisan14. And we have been wandering in a chronological wilderness since 2006Iyyar1, when we first predicted a date for the start of the Great Tribulation, which is the first fire sign of 1kings18 - see U271. We know exactly where we are geographically, but have not known precisely where we are chronologically for over 10 years! So we know everything about space but nothing precise about time.
Now just as the Jews would say in their hearts to Moses after every miracle great - brilliant - miraculous, but the last time we looked around we were still stuck in a wilderness. And further they would say under their breath. Oh great we are breaking camp to leave this one part of the wilderness and go to this other part of the wilderness. Well how inspiring. I mean what different does it make?
5 How we remember the fish that we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers and the watermelons and the leeks and the onions and the garlic!
6 But now our soul is dried away. Our eyes are on nothing at all except the manna (Numbers 11).
So many of the LWs will be saying under their breath after we have written up a great new doctrinal understanding - great - wonderful - profound, but the last time I looked we were still in a chronological wilderness with no correct date for the start of the Great Tribulation. We have no sign - give me a sign! Then the holy spirit moves us on to another date in our chronological wilderness and they say: Great, instead of next Tuesday it is now gonna be the following Thursday - what difference does it make? We are nowhere chronologically.
The same mistakes are repeated again and again by God's people. They seek a sign today both inside and outside the church because they do not have enough faith in the fantastic doctrine God has given us already or actually in the fantastic chronology we have developed with his help, however far from perfection it may presently be. And those who seek a sign are never satisfied with one sign. Because they have no root. They have not laid a proper foundation for themselves. Hence God is providing two fire signs according to 1Kings18. Let us hope that is enough to convince them, in circumstances where dozens of major doctrinal advances are not - see doctrine and watchtowerdoctrine.
It is counter intuitive at first but please do not be put off by what is the first calendar mankind used. It was universal 3,000 years ago! Download a copy and use it to convert dates to Gregorian if you need to. For more about the BLC see U4.