From Jehovah’s Wittnesses to Christianity

g'day welcome to pints with aquinas today i am joined around the bar table by jace roose to discuss his conversion to christianity from the jehovah's witnesses uh jace was raised a jehovah's witness he was knocking on doors at the age of five um but later on in life when his sister left and became a christian he had a lot of questions he wrestled with his faith a great deal and eventually had a profound experience of the lord jesus christ right and his his being god as he read through the gospel of john and that led him to leave the jehovah's witnesses for christianity and today we discuss a lot of different things now what are the distinctive beliefs about jehovah's witnesses how do they differ from what christians believe why don't we consider them christian should we consider them a cult how do we lovingly reach out to our jehovah's witnesses jehovah's witness friends we talk about the emphasis they have on jehovah for example that word and the tetragrammaton and um how we should understand that uh we just kind of it was just a fascinating discussion um i've encountered jehovah's witnesses they've come to my door and things like this but i've had a lot of questions so it was really cool to actually sit down with somebody who used to be jeff's witness to learn from them i really pray that this is a respectful dialogue nobody likes to have their religion straw man and if you're a jehovah's witness um i love you and i i really we don't want this to come off as insulting in any way but i suppose we would say just just like you would look at say me as a catholic and say well you're wrong but you can love me in that you know this is us you know disgusting jokes which is why we think y'all are wrong uh but but this is in no way meant to be disrespectful uh and if you have jehovah's witness friends you might want to pass this on to them i think that would be a tremendous help before we jump into the episode i want to say a big thank you to our sponsor ethos logos 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compelling enough to begin investing with them so there you are ethos logos investments el investments.net slash pints el investments.net pints click that link below and you can learn more here's my chat with jace jace lovely to have you on pints with aquinas thanks for being on thanks for having me i'm so excited today to talk about your conversion from jehovah's witness is that how you say jehovah's witnesses no that's not jehovah's uh yeah jehovah's witnesses yeah yeah to to christianity um this is excellent uh my first encounter with jehovah's witnesses was at uh my front door in in brisbane and i remember they pulled out a bible and you know like a lot of people aren't too sure okay these guys mormons or these jehovah's witnesses well they weren't as clean-cut as some so i'm like okay they can't be mormons i mean the mormons yes they have the best way i would say to differentiate them is mormons typically wear the white shirt black tie black suit witnesses will have all kinds of different colors of ties and shirts so you see when it's with like a blue shirt and a red tie that's a witness not a mormon usually and they don't ride bikes usually very good well before we get into your uh story maybe tell folks just a little bit about yourself uh where are you from you're married all that yeah yeah so again my name is jace reese i'm from north idaho so way up in the uh the boonies snowy weather right now in a city called coeur d'alene and yeah i was raised a jehovah's witness i was one of them pretty much about 20 years so i was 20 years old um and then i had a pretty uh massive conversion to christ that was difficult went through a lot to get to there but um it was just just great and nothing nothing but praising god for that man yeah yeah keep going sorry oh yeah yeah um and i uh was a christian for a couple years and i met my wife uh we'd worked together for a few years we're just really close friends for a while and then when we kind of separated in jobs kept in contact started dating and then got married about two and a half years ago or so um and then recently just had our first baby back in october a baby boy named javier yeah cool name yeah such a beautiful little boy so great um i don't know if a caucasian dude like myself could get away with a name like that this is my son javier when you say it it's really cool yeah yeah yeah um yeah so now i'm just here working taking care of the baby busy busy christmas season beautiful beautiful all right um where to start well first of all i guess like i want to point out like we mean i i know you you you don't mean and i don't mean any offense to our jehovah's witness friends um and i wouldn't and catholics wouldn't consider jehovah's witnesses are christians because of their views on the trinity and obviously therefore an invalid baptism and things like that but that doesn't mean you know we we can't learn from them in some ways and love them um but we don't consider them christians and um do you have something to say about that or yeah and i would agree with that yeah um you know i would say uh because of their denial of some major doctrines like the trinity the bodily resurrection of christ the deity of christ i would say that would you know similar to the mormons that would kind of disqualify them from being considered a christian in our worldview yeah a lot of people a lot of catholics don't realize this you know we talk about needing you know proper matter and form in order for baptism to come into effect and while mormons baptize with i think the same words as catholics do it's invalid because what they mean by father son and holy spirit is is obviously different but okay so tell us about what it was like growing up jehovah's witness yeah you know and i it was it wasn't that bad it was actually a pretty good upbringing one thing i'll say about witnesses is they're very moral people you know very disciplined moral uh by the rule book and so i'm i'm pretty fortunate to have been raised that way in the sense that i was protected from a lot of um you know doing a lot of stupid stuff when i was a kid and um my mom was pretty strict on that so that was good but yeah i was very devout when i became a teenager so when i was you know a young kid didn't really know a ton but when i became a teenager my sister left the religion um and became a christian and so that really kind of rocked my world a bit and i had to figure out okay what do i believe how can and his parents respond to that oh man yeah that was uh they were pretty upset about that there was a lot of arguments and my sister eventually you know was kicked out and wasn't allowed to live at home with us anymore and they still kept in contact but it was yeah it was it was pretty pretty rough a couple months when she said she was leaving and then do jehovah's witnesses take it as an insult if somebody says i've become a christian i presume jehovah's witnesses would consider themselves christian yeah yeah i i don't think they would be insulted by that i think they they understand what they mean by that you know that they're no longer jehovah's witnesses and you know um witnesses don't typically refer to themselves as christians like they'll say we're christian but they prefer to be called where jehovah's witnesses and um yeah but uh yeah when she left it just really made me kind of have to straighten up and start digging into the bible and figuring out what do i believe why am i a witness i was 16 at the time and that led me to get really like deep into the witness beliefs and i was very devout at that time a lot of it i admit now was probably pride just due to my sister leaving and i wanted to be the good child and you know and wanted to prove her wrong and so i was yeah getting pretty active in the witness religion after that uh what year was this oh man let's see this was the point i'm trying to get to is like was this around the time of the internet yeah it was it was about 10 years ago so yeah so did you did you is that kind of where you got a lot of your kind of jehovah's witness apologetics from or was it yeah from friends at church no yeah so uh they have a website called jw.org and so i would go there a lot and read their stuff we had a lot of like magazines and books from them that they gave out to witnesses and so i'd read a lot of those and they have this book that they made in the 80s called reasoning from the scriptures and basically what it is is it's just like a almost like an apologetics handbook that they have where it has different topics different questions people might ask and like verses to respond with and so that was the book i mainly like jumped into so whenever my sister came over or talked to me i could just throw out verses and be like i'm right you're wrong you know yeah yeah it is funny how um coming into conflict with another person's views really helps solidify your own i became a christian uh catholic when i was 17. i mean i was baptized to catholic but i really embraced it when i was 17 and it was only after i started encountering protestants who had objections to catholicism that i really kind of did a deep dive and you know sometimes that has the effect of kind of galvanizing people in a false position um yeah but so how did that go with you yeah you know i it kind of did that for me for a couple years too um just you know my sister and i and her boyfriend at the time was like very hardcore calvinist and so when we would talk you know that was just button heads and it really it changed me in my beliefs does calvinist have a beard uh off and on yeah sometimes sometimes not yeah my sister hated the beard so he would shave it but then he would get i'm gonna grow out my understanding of calvinists is they're you know they're into the beards and the beer drinking they're like the the the treads of protestantism or something okay yeah we always call them the hipsters of christians that's right yes yes yes very good all right okay so you guys would butt heads a lot now um we were your parents okay at the time with you dialoguing with your sister and her boyfriend yeah yeah they were fine with that you know because at the time i was like i said pretty active in the religion which what i mean by active is yeah tell us what that means yeah so it basically means i was going out in the door-to-door ministry so knock on people's doors every saturday usually two or three times a week i would do this for a couple hours at the times um sometimes standing out on like a sidewalk with those carts they have yeah literature and people coming up and talking so i did that sometimes uh and then in in their congregations at the the church service which they call meetings uh when i would go there i was i had what are called responsibilities which are basically i would pass out yeah yeah pretty much says what it is i love that there's no kind of like this is a meeting where we meet and this is a responsibility sorry yeah pretty much yeah super super cut and dry um but yeah so what would you do with these responsibilities i would pass out literature um to people when they could be this back counter and i would go up there and then people would order stuff and when it got delivered i'd go hand it out to them i would run mics so uh whenever they every week they go over the watchtower which is like their magazine and there's like a question and answer portion to their watchtower and um during that time i would run and hand mics to people so people can answer so it's like a question answer format and i would do that i would mess i would do the sound so when they would adjust the mics for the speakers i would adjust the sound to them for the microphones i would occasionally give talks up there so i'd go up there and on you know certain subjects and have a talk about that where i'd read the watchtower during that section so i was pretty involved with it yeah man there's so many directions i want to go in because this is obviously a big topic and i think a lot of christians um protestant christians and catholic christians orthodox christians may not have a lot of understanding about jehovah's witnesses so forgive me if these questions are very kind of elementary um y'all meet on sundays and at a meeting what would take place you've already said you read from the watchtower which i want you to explain in a minute but would you also read from scripture or yeah yeah so on sunday mornings they would have the first half which they call a just a bible discourse they don't like to call it sermon they pretty much don't like to use christian terms they like to use their own terms to discourse and some people have responsibilities sorry yeah and um so that bible discourse it's all topical so it's not like if you've ever been to like a reformed service or like a non-denominational service typically it's expository right so they'll go over a passage yeah and then they'll talk about the past they're not like that at all okay it's topical so uh they're assigned the speaker every week is assigned the topic and then they'll prepare for that topic and then they'll just go over it read a couple proof texts and talk about how witnesses can apply whatever they learned in their life is basically the order they'll go okay oh that's that's cool and then like are there pastors or head people kind of yeah they're called elders yeah so there's every congregation has a body of elders um it's the number is different for every congregation and um i basically refer to them as pastors now that's the responsibilities that they do um they're unpaid so it's all voluntary so when they usually work full-time jobs and then all their free time is either to their family or being an elder um and they're the ones who usually give those those bible discourses on sundays all right now uh what is the watchtower so the watchtower is the famous magazine of the witnesses that's the one they're always one that hands you at their door uh that and the awake those are their two magazines and that magazine came started out in the late 1800s when it be really when the religion began um and they have two editions of it now so they have like a public edition the one that they handed you at your door and they have a study edition which is for you know the rank and file witnesses and that's what they study from and that's where they do that question and answer format every sunday and so what is the watchtower who writes it is it yeah considered quasi scripture these sorts of things yeah yeah so it's it's uh written by a writing department at their headquarters called they call it bethel their headquarters um and all the topics in it are typically picked by the leaders of the jehovah's witnesses called the governing body um and they and then they have a writing department that kind of writes all the articles puts all the scriptures in there uh then it's approved um and yeah it just has all kinds of different topics um usually like the more more recent ones that i've seen are typically going over like christian living you know how to be moral okay so it's it's it's not it's certainly not considered scripture or quasi scripture or anything like that oh that's kind of hard to say so your average rank and file witness would say no it's it's not scripture but they tend to treat it like scripture so you know what within catholicism right you have scripture and then you have the teaching authority of scripture right yeah the watchtower is kind of like that teaching authority it would be yeah so it'd be like a papal encyclical huh yeah yeah okay so it's considered direct you wouldn't dismiss you would have to kind of give a cent to yep exactly exactly yeah and so everything in the watchtower is considered a like direction from god is what they say they don't say inspired by god they say god directed them for those articles which to me it's kind of the same thing but yeah yeah yeah very good um at what age did you start going door to door and is this something of a rite of passage among jehovah's witnesses yeah yeah so i was i was young man i was probably i five or six when i go with my parents out door-to-door yeah they start very very young and usually parents bring their kid with them and they'll knock on the door and it's usually very simple you know i'll have like a little tractor magazine and have a little saying and give it to the person and that's about it um since you started at a young age because you know if somebody told me to go do that now as a catholic i'd have a ton of anxiety about doing that uh but maybe if i was doing it since i was five i wouldn't did you what was your experience yeah um you know when you're a kid yeah it was easy and then as i got older because i started as a kid it kind of my public speaking really was improved because of that i was able to kind of just talk to anyone about anything religious even which is usually the hardest conversations to have but i could bring that up anytime and even now it's the similar way because of that do you always go out and pairs yeah yeah that's that's sort of the way to do it um part of it is like a safety thing they say you know you're in pairs so you don't have to worry too much about that but then um another reason they do pears is the unsaid reason and that's to have each other watching each other sort of to keep an eye on the person you're with you know so yeah yeah even from a spiritual perspective if if somebody is getting talked out of the faith maybe exactly to help their brother or sister yeah okay um what's some of the most interesting you know experiences you've had going door-to-door door-to-door why i had one time so i live in north idaho so it's very conservative uh they love we they love their guns up here we love our guns it always makes a little more nervous yeah and so we went to a door and you know there's there's definitely a lot of uh anti jehovah's witnesses around this area and just around the world really um and i was with this uh i was held was i was probably like 14 or 15 and i was with this other witness and we went to this door and knocked on it and no one answered for a bit so we rang the doorbell and this guy came out and he was an older guy probably in the 60s and he had a gun in his hands and he said if you don't leave my property i'm going to shoot you and we were like okay so we just took off and we didn't call the cops i don't know why we didn't call the cops but yeah that was pretty much it well you're on his property yeah yeah all right that was pretty scary though i was how many um yeah you go sorry i was just gonna say i didn't go out in service or they call it service the door-to-door i didn't go out in service for probably three or four weeks i was pretty traumatized oh yeah yeah yeah that's that's scary um i had some jehovah's witnesses come to my door in san diego you know i was taking a nap actually i don't know if you've heard me say the story i know you listen to pints sometimes my wife came to the door and she's like hey i know you're about to go to sleep but we have some guys at the door with bibles and that really got mixed gets me excited man i love you so what was it like uh you know i'm sure there are different types of people that you meet and i'm what's it like when you just meet this super enthusiastic protestant dude he's like oh let's talk i mean what yeah what was your reaction to that life you know it's it's kind of nerve-wracking because you know as a witness your your your like typical audience you like to talk to is usually people who don't know a whole lot about the faith or if they are claimed to be christians they just don't really know what they believe so when you met someone who really knew their stuff man like it you i mean i probably spent two or three hours sometimes debating these people and you know they'd usually invite you and you'd sit down and just talk and talk and talk and i've had some times where i'm trying to get up to leave and they just won't let me like they just keep going and i'm like i gotta go and like no but you said this and oh man but um usually it's it's usually done in a pretty good spirit like i i never left you know feeling judged or um attacked or anything you know most people were pretty good about that who wanted to talk one of the things you said earlier is like that there's this kind of anti-jehovah's witness spirit vibe whatever around the world you know and i've been trying to think about this like what does it mean to say someone is anti-joe's witness or anti-catholic or anti-protestant because sometimes i think that say if a catholic gets upset at a protestant saying that catholics are wrong they say oh they're anti-catholic you're like well that or he just thinks you're wrong and that you should convert so i'm trying to fight like you know what what is it you mean i suppose when you said that people are anti-jers witness i would say what i mean by that is probably a lot of anger and animosity towards jehovah's witnesses you know i think if someone just disagrees with you that's that's not that's not empty anything i mean that's everyone in the world disagrees with someone about something right so yeah i think um but you know from what i've just experienced and seen a lot of people just have a lot of anger towards witnesses um honestly probably just from knocking on their doors all the time i really think that's part of this leave me alone yeah and in the in the 60s and 70s when the witnesses i would say were probably at their peak on at least like apologetics when they really wanted to debate witnesses were pretty pushy they would uh they were like salesmen i mean they would i their stories about when people would try to shut their doors and witnesses would stick their foot in and stop them and keep trying to talk and drop their mouths that's when you get the gun though yeah yeah um but uh wow yeah yeah yeah that's interesting um okay so i i i've heard that jehovah's witnesses are not allowed to take uh kind of paraphernalia or books uh that promote other religions in some of my dialogues that i've had when i've tried to give them they weren't they wouldn't even touch it and i just wanted to make sure i was right about that so what's that yeah so yeah they're not allowed to or not at least supposed to accept any other religious material from any religion um they would call any other christian religion christendom sort of the the term they have for it and that's to them that's a a bad word like that's not good to be part of christian dumps to them um and they would call any christian church apostate and the wrong and satan's church like they have all these terms for them um and so to them if anyone is trying to hand them you know a brochure a book or anything like that i mean that's like the book of satan to them like it's it's pretty bad to them what's interesting is like i think you could be tempted to kind of to dismiss jehovah's witnesses on that account just saying see like they're not willing to expose themselves to other points of view but if that were true you wouldn't be going door to door and sitting down with people and arguing with them i mean yeah to be if it were if it were the case your job's witnesses which is completely closed-minded to other opinions presumably they would tell you the missionary is that what they called you are you a missionary publisher okay all right cool uh it's like i mean it's like being introduced to catholicism for the first time there's a ton of weird terms so i'm not making fun of it but okay you know like the they would say to the publisher like if the person tries to engage you or convince you of their religion you are to leave but it doesn't sound like they do that um yeah when i was in it it wasn't as much like that more recent though it's become like that so it has become very much if a person's wanting to argue with you just leave but when i was really active it it wasn't in that stage yet it was you know talk with them as much as you can um so it's definitely changed now to where like if a witness came to admire your door and we tried to talk to them and debate with them not even debate just have a good discussion with them they would be less likely to stay and more likely to try to leave okay yeah yeah um i i've noticed that everyone's very like they say first of all they seem very diverse i don't know if there's an emphasis on being diverse but whenever i see jehovah's witnesses it stands there's always people who are like they look black or white or hispanic but there's usually a lot of kind of ethnic it's a very uh very worldwide um you know they're all about that and there's not like a focus on diversity you know it's not like i don't know politics where they're trying to you know focus on one side of identity politics or anything but it's very they're just anyone you know they don't really have any sort of prejudices toward anything which is which is cool yeah um okay tell us uh okay you know what i really want to know about is i know there's been a number of obviously falsified predictions concerning the end of the world yeah yeah yeah so i mean there's so many i don't have a list on me there's there's quite a few and i'm gonna make these go for it yeah uh they they made these predictions more in the late 1800s when they were first beginning in a couple in the early 1900s in like the 1940s and 50s they sort of learned their lesson except for except like you get that wrong one but okay yeah i know it should be get it wrong what don't do it again but um yeah you know the big one that came that didn't come true was their 1914 prediction which came from their original ship yep yeah charles russell was the leader of the witnesses at the time and he had this prediction that you know armageddon apocalypse would happen on in october of 1914 jesus would return and the end of the world would happen and witnesses would be taken to heaven um and yeah it didn't happen world war one happened instead yeah i know and so they they what they what do they do because i mean if you make a prediction like that and you're wrong i would imagine you would you would try to pivot like well that's what i did right look at the world war like do you see it is that kind of what happens exactly what they do yeah they um they just try to like say okay and usually they'll admit like they'll say yeah we were wrong about this detail but this means this now so we were right about something in 1914 and it was what they believed now which was the end which was jesus was enthroned in heaven is what they say now okay that's they say that was when satan was cast down to have it or to earth in 1914 jesus became king of heaven and satan now rules the world in 1914 okay satan happened yeah yeah yeah that makes sense i mean look again if there are jehovah's witnesses watching this this is not a slide on you we have like i'm a catholic and we have catholics who are doing things like this who have done things like this the difference is it hasn't got the backing of the church you've got these isolated people who find the following so yeah you find you find this in in in many different religions okay um interesting stuff but yeah they have all kinds of all kinds of prophecies uh or predictions that they had a big one was the 1970 what was the 1975 prediction that they did uh this one was was less like in your face prediction it was more they were just hinting at stuff because in their chronology they believed that um adam and eve you know were born 6 000 years ago or something and 1975 is what they were teaching at the time was the 6000th year since adam and eve were created is what they were teaching and so they thought it'd be very and this is kind of their wording he said it would make a lot of sense if that's when god decided to return and then they were yeah we're just saying if it does happen you know we makes a lot of sense yeah okay cool yeah and they they were kind of encouraging people to like sell their houses and sell their properties and just like prepare for the end basically and then of course 75 came and went so was this do you think like um i'm not calling jervis witnesses a cult i i'm not accusing them of that but like in these you hear these kind of cult stories where you have a leader or several leaders who are very much benefiting from uh you know the underlings and they're giving up things and giving money was there some of that kind of nefarious behavior going on or do you think that this was very well intended from the top all the way down um that's hard yeah i my view is it's it's very well intended from the top down there's definitely a lot of control within the religion and it's just been built and built and built up until now where it's very controlling um very similar to those you know cult-like religions out there i would say i mean i i the reason i said i wouldn't call them a cult is i feel like cult is like a four-letter word to just disparage people and yeah that's just why people throw it around and would you consider jehovah's witness as a cult and if so or if not why yeah um there's a really good book out there by walter barton called kingdom of the colts yeah and there's a section there where he kind of goes over the witnesses and he uses you know because i know if i'd call it a good book just because catholics are included in that but that's true yeah yeah but his section on the witnesses is very good that's what i'll say um and he gives a different like definition of cult compared to like the normal what you would think when i think of a cult right now i think of like jonestown or you know the david the davidian branch people with you know all that stuff that's what i think of david yeah but you know the witnesses i wouldn't put in that category um yeah but the definition he gives for colt is anything that is like unorthodox sort of so like you get like yeah i mean he would call islam a coal he would call you know all these other religions occult so but i don't really like i mean to me i would think like if a religion is refusing to allow their kind of adherence to engage with other ideas and competing philosophies in a strictly controlling way it's bordering bordering on culture yeah wow man this is this is awesome okay so tell us about how you started to encounter as you put it jesus christ yeah so i mean really my first big exposure to it was when i was 16 right and when my i would have my debates with my brother-in-law my sister and stuff and they just left a lot of questions in my mind my brother-in-law was pretty pretty smart on that stuff and had a lot of scriptures and questions that i just couldn't answer at the time and that really stuck with me um so once we stopped debating and you know i didn't really talk to them a whole lot because i just was kind of confused um i just began doing research and now you know you're not supposed to look up on the computer what other religions teach they don't like you to do that but i started doing that because i couldn't really find any good answers in the um witnesses literature for the questions i had um like some of them like for instance one of the questions that i got was in um the prophet isaiah isaiah says that only god god doesn't share his glory right and then in the gospel of john jesus says now share or give me the glory i had alongside you before the world was um and the question was well god doesn't share his glory if jesus isn't god did isaiah lie and that really stuck with me i thought well why i have no idea i don't know how to answer that and so um when i looked in the witnesses literature there wasn't really an answer for that so i had to go elsewhere and that sort of led me to reading other christian material stinking and buying christian books so my mom couldn't see him all this stuff um and just delving into it and the big book that really got me that i i would say is probably one of the most influential on me was c.s lewis mere christianity and i picked that book up at a bookstore and i just devoured that thing and i and i i love that book and um yeah c.s lewis just the way he worded the trinity and the way he described it in there made so much more sense than what i had been taught because that's one thing about the witnesses too is you know they're not trinitarian don't believe in the trinity and they describe the trinity wrong though in most their literature uh you know they tend to attack modalism yeah and not trinitarianism um i noticed and that book christianity really showed me the differences between those and what real trinitarianism actually is um and it pretty well convinced me and this was i was about 17 or 18 when i read that book and so i kind of had that crisis of faith at that moment where i was pretty convinced that i don't think the witnesses were right anymore um so i did what any good witness would do and i contacted a good witness buddy of mine and i moved and got rid of all my christian books threw them all away uh well my mom threw them all away i should say but anyway um i moved to california with a buddy of mine and tried to just like forget everything and just be a good witness over there yeah um but it just didn't work i just it was all in my head that takes a lot of courage man i also should point out like this isn't like unique to jehovah's witnesses like if i be started to become convinced that the jehovah's witnesses were true i would do exactly what you did right i would find someone smarter than me who could help me understand these things yeah because there's a lot to give up and i said this i've said this a million times on the show like we often don't um take into consideration just how you know emotionally traumatic it must be for someone entrenched in a particular worldview religion community to be pulled out of that it's like we're not we're not empathetic enough you know we just look at people like okay here's the syllogism just leave your family and religion and support systems and adopt this worldview you know yeah yeah and it was very it was very hard um you know it because a big part of it too is witnesses have a belief uh they call disfellowshipping um and what does fellowshipping is when you leave the witnesses if you were a baptized witness which means you're a member of the jehovah's witnesses you um if you leave them to join another church or you um even if you you know commit a major sin so you i don't know commit fornication or something you know of a major sin you can get disfellowshipped which means you're essentially shunned by anyone that's a jehovah's witness they won't speak to you they won't acknowledge you if you see them on the side of the street like is this sort of what your folks were doing to your sister not necessarily my sister was never baptized so because she was never a technical member of it she wasn't ever disfellowshipped okay but my parents still kind of treated her like that for a little bit just because of how like of all the fighting and arguments that were going on they just pretty much did talk to her for a while um but you were saying you you had an experience or you saw an experience of this yeah yeah so when i left the witnesses i was baptized and so i became christian um and i had an experience so i got disfellowshipped and so when i was walking or was i was at a grocery store and i happened to see um some old friends of mine and at the time when i was a witness they were we were very close and like they uh i was very close with the kid's dad but then he passed away and when he passed away i was at their house for days it was emotional you know we were all together and then when i left i saw them at the store and i waved at them and they just turned their heads and walked away they wouldn't speak to me and i it was it was heartbreaking um so yeah that experience happens a lot to a lot of witnesses all the time i mean is it something like you you referred to the congregation i guess we would kind of call that a parish like a particular you know church um so is it is it announced that this person has apostatized and that therefore we are going to yeah yeah so it's not announced like specifically what they did but what usually happens is an elder at their local congregation will get up on stage at the end of the uh their meeting and he'll say so and so is no longer one of jehovah's witnesses and that's the key word of their disfellowshipped don't talk to them don't acknowledge them basically i mean like i i want to kind of i want to kind of put this in the best possible light because again it's too easy to straw men other people's positions um in in i think saint paul in second timothy talks about you know those who uh have a form of godliness but but tonight's power i know that's talked about in romans as well but like have nothing to do with them so yeah there is scriptural basis for this yeah i i think um because you know they appeal to those verses and the main one they appeal i think it's in corinthians um or maybe it's romans it's one of the two um and it basically says you know don't even dine with them don't even have a meal with them basically uh and there's different christian interpretations on that right there yeah i would say the biggest one i would say that i've heard agreed on was that he's talking about communion holy communion and so when they say don't have a meal with them or don't break bread with them that's meaning don't partake of holy communion with them but then of course there's other views you know there is the the shunning view don't actually have anything to do with them don't do anything and but i mean i mean i know you said this there's multiple passages i'm looking at second timothy three but mark this there will be terrible times in the last days people will be lovers of themselves lovers of money burst will proud abusive disobedient to their parents ungrateful unholy without love unforgiving slanderous without self-control brutal not lovers of the god of the good treacher is not the god we get to that in a minute treacherous rash conceded lovers of play et cetera et cetera then it says having a form of godliness but denying their power have nothing to do with them um yeah that that's obviously different i mean it's somebody who's begins to question a faith begins to leave it isn't yeah isn't necessarily brutal or slanderous or anywhere continuously i think there's the one verse that i've always held in in remembrance of any of the of those verses as well is in jesus uh when he said you know treat them as a gentile or a tax collector yeah right yeah and what that means to me is not necessarily don't shun them because right jesus didn't shun the gentiles and tax collectors he gave him the gospel right and so that's sort of where where i think as christians are called to do with someone who leads the faith is not to just cast them aside and say i have nothing to do with you ever but to say i you know my goal is to give you christ is to come with you with christ and his gospel you know you're like just like a normal person now you're no longer a christian so that's what i'm called to do yeah yeah okay uh good stuff all right so you're chatting with your sister's boyfriend who you say they ended up getting married and um you were kind of looking into this you started looking elsewhere to get your your questions answered i like what you said i love that honesty and just that that reality of the struggle right you went to another witness you got rid of all of your christian material you tried to be a good jehovah's witness what so then what happened yeah so i lived in california for uh four or five months and i just couldn't afford it eventually it was way too expensive i was like 18 when i did this yeah yeah i didn't work so i had to move back so i moved back home to coeur d'alene idaho and when i got home um i felt good at first and i felt very like uh refreshed and very uh zeal for for the witnesses when i moved back but all those questions and doubts were still there and i hadn't answered them i just kind of threw a band-aid and just covered them and said i just not gonna think about it anymore but when i was back it just kind of all came flooding back and i just could not get over it couldn't get over the doubts you know who jesus is who god is did the trinity true did jesus raise bodily or spiritually you know and all these these christian views and so i went back to studying and comparing really just witnesses say their verses and reading what christians have to say and their passages that they use and eventually i um decided i'm going to read the gospel of john with no biases which is kind of impossible but i tried to do it yeah and so i opened up gospel of john of course there's the very first verse of the gospel of john you know in the beginning was the word the word was with god and the word was god but in the witness bible it's translated a little differently it's translated in the word at the end and the word was a god but i kind of said you know i'm not going to focus on that verse that verse is so yeah you know con conflictory so i just keep i just kept reading okay i'm just going to disregard that one and just keep going um eventually i got you know there's so much evidence especially in john's gospel from the deity of christ and i just kept listing the verses that i would find that would that were just strong evidences for it but then eventually i got to the the one that sealed the deal for me and that was john chapter 20 verse 28 and this is the account of uh doubting thomas and jesus appears to him you know the apostles the second time in the locked room and uh when thomas sees him you know jesus says you know here's the wound in my hand here's the wound in my side touch me and so thomas falls down before him and he exclaims my lord and my god and i remember i was how old was that i was about 19 now and i read that verse and i just started crying i just started bawling in my room and i just knew at that moment jesus is god and i have to believe that i have to do what saint thomas did bow and say my lord and my god to jesus yeah it was overwhelming that i realized it yeah yeah it sounds like it wasn't just an intellectual conversion obviously uh the holy spirit moves intellectual conversions i'm not separating the two but it sounds like our lord was definitely kind of reaching out to you through through his word hey one thing one thing i haven't gotten to but we could do it now is what are some of the distinctive jehovah's witnesses beliefs you know that contradict with what christians believe and talk about how you overcame them and yeah i would say the i mean there's of course the big one which is the trinity of course you know they're very unitarian so they believe that only god the father is the being of god they teach a form of arianism so that jesus is the first creation of god um and he's just the greatest creation but not of the same nature as god and then another one is the holy spirit is not a person so the holy spirit they would call the phrase they use is the active force of god um but the way i kind of understood it was sort of like if you got like a generator right and that's god and then the electricity that comes off the generator that's the holy spirit okay so it's not a person a force really um and those are the big ones i'd say another one would be their belief on the resurrection of jesus so the we would say the orthodox historical view has always been that jesus was raised bodily right and he's still in a body now but they teach that jesus was raised as a spirit wow not bodily in that god it's amazing but yeah what they say about his body is that god um dissolved his body like took his body away so people couldn't use it as like a worshipping thing oh i mean if you if you were to start to kind of like look into arguments for the resurrection of christ that would be enough to disprove jehovah's witnesses you wouldn't even have to get into the is jesus like equal to the father you wouldn't have to do that you would just have to say all right so if we do this whole thing that god dissolved his body like um how do we explain other things like how do we explain you know the the appearance uh that that's clearly not spiritual if i'm yeah in my hands the way they the way they describe it is yeah the way they describe it is um they say that jesus it was a spirit but he was able to manifest a body yeah what they do is they go back to like in the old testament where ain't like in sodom and gomorrah right angels appeared and when they looked like humans and they had bodies and so they said that that's exactly what jesus said he just created a body and used it basically when he appeared to his disciples and then when he went back to heaven the body just disappeared i guess i don't really know what happened to that but i mean as as a catholic like this is why we need the buck to stop somewhere i mean scripture by its nature is not infinitely interpretable but it's it's almost you know you can sort of make it say whatever you want it to say yeah yeah yeah you know and um uh so and it's sort of and the reason they sort of have their view about the spiritual resurrection of jesus instead of a bodily resurrection is part of it is they try to use a couple verses that they think means that of course but if you really look at them they don't but and then it also comes down to one of their other peculiar reveals is of the soul in the body so they don't believe in like a immaterial immortal soul that every human has they believe in the soul is i mean it's kind of like you know what aristotle even aquinas would say it's the the animation principle of the body but it's it can't be separated they would say so when the body dies the soul dies yeah and there's no separation when peop people go to heaven it's not like their soul is going to heaven it's a new spirit is made sort of what they would say so there's no connection that way so when jesus died they think his soul died that he his soul was ceased to exist they don't believe in hell or any of that those things they believe in annihilationism um and he just no longer existed anymore for those three days so god created a new spirit not a body and put the basically the memories of jesus in whatever he was in his pre-incarnate life into that spirit and called it jesus basically it's kind of the way you can explain it all right so so far we've kind of got like a denial of the trinity the idea that the holy spirit isn't a person jesus is less than the father there wasn't a bodily resurrection a hell people don't go there they're annihilated i suppose if they're damned talk to us about the emphasis on the name jehovah why that's so important and yeah how you view that now yeah so um back when they first began their whole movement back in the 1800s uh they were using the king james bible that was you know the bible they had and there's four verses in there um i can't remember all of them exactly but what i do is exodus 3 14 and 15. and in that the king james bible does use the word jehovah and so the founders of the religion decided that that was god's name because the bible says so so that's where they kind of got that term jehovah now and we all know there's you know there's tons of verses talking about glorify the name right or glorify jesus says glorify your name and god says i have glorified it now and will glorify it again or in the lord's prayer hallowed be thy name right so there's multiple pastors talking about some name but the witnesses take that literal instead of taking it like you know the name means reputation and honor and who the person is they take it as it actually means the name jehovah and so that's where their zeal and emphasis on that name jehovah comes from and so when i began researching it though and trying to figure out is jehovah actually the name i i discovered where the name jehovah came from and basically what it was was when the mesoretic text you know which was kind of like the official text that the jewish mesorites made and they used when they wrote the tetragrammaton at that time they wouldn't put the vowel markers in it because they considered the name too holy to have anyone pronounced they didn't put the vowels there what they instead would do is they would put the vows of lord in hebrew adonai they would put those vowels there so what happened then was is the tetragrammaton in hebrew was latinized and that became yhwh but some also did jh vh and when they did that uh there was i forget who it was it was some some guy in like the 13th century or something and he thought that the vowel markers for adonai that the mesorites used was the vowel markers for yhwh so he it did j a h o v a h jahovah and that's where the name came from but so really i i learned the name actually doesn't really mean anything it's just a combination of a word you know yhwh and vowels of a different word is all it is um and that's where i began learning about different pronunciations so yahweh yahuwah you know and there's a lot of different propagations for the divine name and really the answer is we don't know how it's pronounced you know there's no absolute certainty because the jews never kept any vowel markers for it so but yeah so yeah they're they're pretty zealous for it though uh do you mind if i ask what your relationship with your parents and maybe other friends who are jehovah's witnesses like now yeah yeah um sadly there's no relationship anymore am i sorry for a while my parents you know had a relationship but things just kept getting worse and worse and worse and then i was officially disfellowshipped and then yeah it kind of just ceased to be there and my grandparents my aunt uncles who are all witnesses haven't talked to them in five or six years what would happen if you reached out to them to say hi hm i think i think my mom would probably respond back i'm not too sure what she would say but i think she would respond at least just because i'm her son um but my aunts and uncles and i'm not too sure about my grandparents but my aunts and uncles wouldn't say anything to me um and i had i had you know quite a few friends at the time that were witnesses and all of them shunned me now i like i said i've seen them before and they don't acknowledge me anymore um i reached out to one friend just to see if we could talk and he basically responded just saying you need to go to the elders and get right with the congregation first before we can talk and that's kind of the response i've gotten from anyone i've ever reached out to about it wow did you have friends growing up who have since become christians no i'm the only one out of all my friends that converted christianity from the witnesses i have a couple friends who left the witnesses but they didn't become christians more just became agnostic after that yeah yeah um do you feel a sort of obligation to sort of reach out to jehovah's witnesses say if you see them on the street or if somebody comes to your home yeah for sure um you know i definitely try to especially of course if i know them i'll wave to them but usually if they know me they're not going to respond but i have met some uh i moved to hawaii actually for about a year a couple years ago or two years ago um and so when i was there i got to meet all sorts of uh different witnesses and i would reach out and try to talk with them and as best as i could and not mention that i was once a witness because once you mention that there you go that's actually a great great defense mechanism to those who don't want to be interrupted at their house if so if jervis was came to my house i wouldn't like he's lying to sin but and they said hey and i was like hey i was i'm actually i was once a witness i'm not any longer what would they do oh man no billy you said that if i want to join this witness yeah they probably say okay we'll have a good day and they'll probably just walk away ah i don't mean to make a lot of it that's tough yeah but yeah you know and the guy's been good and i've made quite a bit of friends and learned a lot you know and have been stronger in my faith now than i've ever been um and you know he's always providing and that's one thing i recognized at that moment when i realized who christ really was i realized too that if he's god and if this is true i have to follow him yeah and no matter what happens he is gained and everything else is lost um compared to him and so he's ready for it who's doing really good work in this area of reaching out to jehovah's witnesses oh man it's hard to reach out to people who won't read your stuff but who's kind of at least doing really good jehovah's witness apologetics have you jason everett are you familiar with him i've seen him on your show so jason is chastity that's his thing now right he shares the good news about chastity but prior to that he worked at catholic answers and his first book was on answering jehovah's witnesses oh wow yeah a lot of people a lot of people don't know that but but he yeah i know he's he's got a real heart for them as well but do you know anyone else who's doing this kind of work maybe you need to yeah you know i'm trying yeah um i actually am in the process of starting hopefully a channel soon to be able to kind of reach out and go over you know each and every disagreement between christianity and jehovah's witnesses and delve deep into it and responses we can have and things like that um but besides that you know there's a couple channels that i i had watched um that had some pretty good content on it um one of them was called apologia studios um they were protestant evangelical studio and yeah calvinist yeah yeah you know and they have some good stuff and some bad stuff i'll say but um there's they do have conversations where they you know just stop by and talk to witnesses on the street and they film it and it's really good stuff and you know the the the pastor there uh jeff durbin he has a he's pretty pretty quick pretty clever a lot of good responses that we can use for witnesses so if you know anyone wants to watch one of those i recommend watching that those videos um and then there's a a really good debate um it's one of the only jehovah's witness christian debates you can find like like official moderated debates witnesses are like not really allowed to do moderated debates and so this one this witness kind of he actually got a lot of trouble for doing this but he did it anyway it was great stafford versus james white yeah and it was over um is jesus god or a god and they both sides moderated it's actually really good the guy who um did a great staff of the witness he's no longer like a jehovah's witness now he kind of started his own little thing he left the witnesses but like still believes what they teach just doesn't agree with everything so he started his own little movement um but um he did great he was very smart for the witnesses and then james white was great on the trinity and it's a good debate good stuff but yeah there's not a whole lot like there are some websites and stuff you can go to but yeah like you said witnesses don't usually look those up so but but you know i suppose some people might be listening to this and they're thinking well look apologetics isn't really the road we need that's not really kind of converting anybody but that your exhibit a of why that's false yeah yeah you know i and that's something about the witnesses too they're very big on the bible and reason and if you can convince them of certain things it may take a while for them to get the courage to leave but they will um and i'm an example of that it's very emotional right there's a lot of a lot of things attached to the witnesses family friends that's kind of your group so to even consider leaving is super hard but you can get there and you gotta be patient well jase thank you so much uh thanks for taking the time and uh god bless you as you seek to kind of develop this page i let me know once that's up so i can help promote it it sounds like it could be really helpful all right god bless you thanks for having me okay thank you so much for watching that uh if you are not yet subscribed to the channel the fact that you've watched this far means you're interested enough it's probably time to subscribe also a big thanks to our patrons if you want to become a patron we've got a lot of great stuff going on one of the things you will get is this pints with aquinas beer stein which is not focusing right now handmade in the united states uh yes it is the size of a pint you can drink coffee out of it you can drink beer out of it it is absolutely amazing um i got some friends i've given this to and they just absolutely love it i'm pretty sure it's unbreakable not sure haven't tested it but there you are um you also get access to a bunch of free things we put online we're always doing these online courses we're doing one right now actually it's about to begin so if you join right now patreon.comfred you'll get access to this hasn't started yet we're doing a five-part video series on the bible uh with dr andrew swafford uh sal on salvation history so go over to patreon.comrad support all the work that we're doing um and you get access to all these free things thanks a lot see ya

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

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Id: um58fIODp08

Length: 56min 5sec (3365 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021