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Jehovah of the Watchtower

  The Theism Of Jehovah’s Witnesses: Possible or Impossible?

James Stewart

 

 

I intend to show that the God of the Watchtower is finite and is in the same metaphysical situation as the rest of his alleged creation and therefore could not be the Creator of all that exists.  It is my opinion that the Anointed of the Watchtower have done what it states in Romans 1:22-23:

 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man...

Historic Christianity has always taught that God is infinite.  He has all-knowledge (omniscience), all power (omnipotence), and is non-spatial (omnipresent).  Here are definitions for those terms:

Omnipotence

“By this we mean that God is all-powerful, that all power subsists in him.  We mean that God has complete control over all power and is the author of all power.  However, god never utilizes his power to contradict any part of his nature.  For instance, God cannot lie, neither can he make a rock heavier than he can lift.  He can make all things, and he can lift all weights.  If one of these abilities were restricted, then his nature would be limited and contradicted” (Bob Passintino, The Nature and Attributes of God, p. 4).

Omniscience

“By omniscience we mean that he knows everything.  God has a perfect and eternal knowledge of all things.  Everything that is able to be known, is known by God.  The omniscience of God does not come in the same way that knowledge comes to men.  We arrive at knowledge by learning.  God does not go through the learning process to know.  The omniscience of God does not come through reasoning, inference, the senses, imagination, or induction or deduction.  His knowledge is direct, sharp and distinct, true to the reality of things.  Whatever can be known, is known, by God” (Bob Passintino, The Nature and Attributes of God, p. 5).

Omnipresence

“By this we mean that God is present everywhere, but we must be careful to define our terms precisely so that there can be no confusion as to what we mean.  Everything that has been make is immediately in the presence of God.  This does not mean that God is in everything.  The creator of all things (John 1:3, Hebrews 3:4) cannot be a thing or a part of the things themselves.  For example, the builder of a box could have the box in his presence without being a part of that box.” (Bob Passintino, The Nature and Attributes of God, p. 6).

Next, we will establish what the Anointed of the Watchtower officially teach about God.  In Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Twentieth Century, 1978, page three they state:

Jehovah’s Witnesses believe in Almighty God, Jehovah, Creator of the heavens and the earth.  The very existence of the intricately designed wonders in the universe surrounding us reasonably argues that a supremely intelligent and powerful creator produced it all.

In this statement, the Anointed teach that God is almighty.  In their practical theology, individual Jehovah’s Witnesses often emphasize this attribute of God over all others.  For example, some have told me that “God can do anything He wants – even contradict Himself.  That’s because He has the power to do literally anything.”

In the Aid to Bible Understanding, 1971, page 665 the Anointed state:

The true God is not omnipresent, for he is spoken of as having a location.  (1 Ki. 8:49; John 16:28; Heb. 9:24) His throne is in heaven.  (Isa. 66:1)  He is all-powerful, being the Almighty God.

According to the Watchtower, Jehovah God has a physical location.  This doctrine is closely associated with its view that God has a “body of spirit.”  Jehovah’s influence may reach to all corners of the universe, but He is confined to a spirit body in a specific location within His creation.

In this same text, page 595, the Anointed present their view of God’s knowledge:

Similarly, if, in certain respects, God chooses to exercise his infinite ability of foreknowledge in a selective way and to the degree that pleases him, then assuredly no human or angel can rightly say: “What are you doing?”  (Job 9:12 ; Isa. 45:9; Dan. 4:35)  It is therefore not a question of ability, what God can foresee, foreknow, and foreordain, for “with God all things are possible.”  (Matt. 19:26)  The question is what God sees fit to foresee, foreknow, and foreordain,…” 

Jehovah’s Witnesses have often expressed to me that God knows everything He wants to know, but He choose not to know everything.  They ground this belief in what they see as the Bible’s teaching that humans make real choices with real outcomes.  But, they say, if God knows everything from the beginning, humans cannot make “real” choices.  I will examine this belief in more detail later in this paper.

As can be read from these statements, the Anointed teach that God is almighty.  But they also teach that God chooses to limit his knowledge and is local/spatial just as all created things are.  The belief that God is all-powerful is one that we share.  An infinite God must be all-powerful.  We do not agree, however, that God’s infinite power means that He can literally do anything imaginable.  For example, a Jehovah’s Witness may argue that God can lie, because He is all powerful; He just chooses not to.  The problem with this view is that it presupposes a “truth” apart from God by which we may determine if God is lying.  In the view of historic Christianity, God is the foundation of Truth.  We cannot determine truth apart from God.  Therefore, whatever God says is true.  This is not a limitation of His power, because lying is not a matter of power, but of moral character.  God enjoys a perfect moral character, and indeed is the very foundation of “truth” itself.  He therefore cannot lie – not because He chooses not to – but because He is the definition of truth in the first place.

The beliefs that God is local and ignorant (even if by His own choice) present even more philosophic and theological problems for Jehovah’s Witnesses.  This study will concentrate on the Anointed’s claim that God has limited knowledge.  I will demonstrate that this belief makes God finite. Of course, it is hard to deal with just one attribute of God in that all His attributes are linked, for God is simple (one).  When one limits one of God’s attributes, all the attributes are affected.  

What are the logical consequences of these beliefs?

  1. God did not know that Adam and Eve were going to fall, therefore the ransom was not planned until after the fall: 

Before the perfect Adam and Eve sinned in the in the garden of Eden there was not need for God to purpose the ransoming of the world of mankind by a perfect human sacrifice.  But as soon as that first human pair sinned God knew it or learned it, because now they felt guilty and hid themselves from sight.  God extracted their confession of sin.  Immediately he formed his purpose of ransoming the world of Adam and Eve’s descendants (Watchtower, 1/15/64, p. 52).

  1. God can make himself lose his memory:  Watchtower, 1/15/64 , page 52 “Hence God does not keep the wicked ones in his memory” (Watchtower, 1/15/64, p. 52).
  2. God is bound to a place:

God being an individual, a Person with a spirit body, has a place where he resides, and so he could not be at any other place at the same time (Watchtower, 2/15/81, p. 6);  

Humanity cannot think without a body.  God Himself has a body—a spirit body; it is an organism, of the divine nature (Golden Age, 1/16/24, p. 253).

  1. Until the 1950s, the Anointed taught that Heaven was in the Pleiades star system: 

…the group Pleiades.  And the reasonable suggestion has been made that that center may be the heaven of heavens, the highest heaven, the throne of God (Watchtower, 5/15/1895, p. 121);

The Bible seems to show that God’s throne in heaven is in what we call the north, very likely near the stars called the Pleiades (Job 38:31) (Golden Age, 5/16/28, p. 540);

 In evidence that heaven is a place and at a distance from the earth, and that it requires time to go and come,…” (Golden Age, 8/26/25, p. 755)

Probably some few days would be required to make the journey from heaven to earth (Watchtower, 2/1/1896, p. 291);

Probably some few days would be required to make the journey from heaven to earth (Watchtower, 7/31/31, p. 203).

  1. How does God learn and control the universe? 

However, he has a distribution system, his power by which he sustains the universe, as well as his active force and his angelic hosts by which he accomplishes his purposes (Awake, 8/22/63, p. 28);

While God is in heaven, yet by his spirit He is everywhere present and cognizant of all that occurs (Golden Age, 5/19/37, p. 542).

As can be read, the Jehovah’s Witness God is not omnipresent. God is in our universe or space-time continuum.  But in the traditional view, God can only be limited by his nature.  If his nature is not limited, he is infinite.  An infinite being has what philosopher's call "necessary existence," not a contingent existence.  "Necessary existence" is defined as follows:

“A necessary existence is one that cannot not exist...a necessary existence would be pure actuality with no potentiality whatsoever. If it had any potentiality with regard to its existence, then it would be possible for it not to exist.  But this is precisely what a necessary existence cannot do; it is not possible for a necessary existence not to exist  Therefore, a necessary existence would be pure actuality with no potentiality in its being whatsoever...would be changeless...would have to be a nontemporal and nonspatial existence...would have to be eternal...There can be only one...would have to be simple and undivided...would have to be infinite in whatever attributes it possesses….The reason for this is simple enough: only what has potentiality can be limited.  Limitation means that which differentiates the sphere of one thing from another.  Pure actuality is being pure and simple; everything else only has being in one form or another depending on its limiting potential.  Pure actuality would be unlimited by any potential in and of itself...must be an uncaused being” (Norman Geisler, Christian Apologetics, Baker, 1976, pp. 239 - 241).

Since Jehovah of the Watchtower is limited in His physical location and knowledge, He is – by definition – not infinite in His being.  He therefore must be finite.

A finite being has contingent existence.  “Contingent existence” means that existence is caused by something or someone else.  Contingent means dependence.  It is antithetical to necessary existence.  If a being is contingent on anything, it is limited and changing, and finite; therefore, it must have a cause.  But the Watchtower teaches that God does not have a cause.  It must then prove that a finite being can exist necessarily, which it cannot do. 

Also, as we have seen, the Jehovah’s Witness God is not omniscient.  Jehovah of the Watchtower is potentially omniscient, but chooses not to know all things.  As Cornelius Van Til and others have demonstrated, God is the pre-condition for the intelligibility of knowledge and experience.  This precondition can only be met if God is in a position to know – not just potentially, but actually.  (For more on this please see Van Til’s Apologetic Readings & Analysis by Greg L. Bahnsen, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1998.)  That is, if God chooses not to know certain things, He cannot know what knowledge is necessary to convey to humanity, so that humans can think, reason, and “know.”  He can make a ‘best guess,’ but He cannot know with certainty.  The Witness may say, “God just has to exercise His power to know everything necessary to pass on to humanity.”  But this presupposes that there is a body of knowledge outside of God from which He draws upon at will.  It further requires that God know in advance what pieces of this treasure trove to extract and which ones to leave “unknown” so as to preserve human choice.  But since He cannot know in advance what He does not know, it would seem impossible for Him to selectively “learn” all that is necessary.  God is only in a position to know if he is infinite in his nature and attributes, including his knowledge.  By limiting God, knowledge is destroyed.  Such a God cannot satisfy the preconditions for knowledge and experience. 

Further, if God has not always existed as an infinite being, he can never become one and therefore He is not God.  The further away you move from an infinite God, the more unintelligible your world-view is

      The only conclusion I can come to by these statements of the Anointed is that they believe that God is temporal.  If God is in time, he would have to be finite.  Beings in time are limited and changing, therefore contingent:

“…whatever exists in time can be computed according to its before and afters”  (Norman Geisler, Creating God in the Image of Man, Bethany House Publishers, 1997, p. 29).

Such a God would be local and learn empirically. If God learns empirically, then his knowledge is finite.  If his knowledge is finite, he is contingent, because he is gaining knowledge.

There are some major problems that face the Anointed’s teaching that historical Christianity does not face:

  1. Their god only has probable knowledge, since he is in a continual state of learning more.  His knowledge is not absolute.  His knowledge is not immutable; that is he could turn out to be wrong about something.  Consider:

Anointed View

 

Christian View

 

If God believes p, p is not necessarily true (God may not yet have learned enough to conclude that p is true)

 

If God believes p, p is necessarily true

 

Saying that God can choose to know p with certainty is not going to help because He still has only limited and probable knowledge.  God can only choose to know everything about something if He already knows how much He needs to know to know everything.  The logical absurdity of this view is, I hope, apparent.

  1. Jehovah of the Watchtower only learns what happens moment by moment (as we do), but he also realizes moment by moment which of his beliefs about the future have been wrong.  This view comes from a wrong interpretation of passages that refer to God regretting or repenting over his own past decisions.  This means He was surprised by some turn of events that made His thoughts about the future and past decisions disappointing and misguided.  And yet we are to think that the God of the Anointed is all-wise.  This “god” differs little from limited human beings.  This type of theism strips Romans 8:28 of any real confidence and assurance we can have in God.  According to this type of theism, this passage can only teach God’s resolve to do His best.    

  2. Jehovah of the Watchtower can make a mistake based on finite knowledge.  In other words, according to the Watchtower view, what God thinks may be knowledge may turn out to have been mere belief. 

  3. Jehovah of the Watchtower can make a wrong decision based on finite knowledge.

  4.  How can Jehovah of the Watchtower know what to foreknow?

  5. Jehovah of the Watchtower does not know the future with certainty.  This lack of complete knowledge means he can not guarantee its outcome!  If He decrees, for example, that Babylon will invade Israel as part of His judgment, in the Watchtower’s view, He can only guarantee that Babylon will invade if He chooses to know every event that might impact the invasion.  But how can He know in advance what to choose to know?  Again, the Watchtower’s view presupposes a body of knowledge apart from God that He can learn from, as if He were accessing a computer database.  But you can’t get information out of a database unless you know what queries to write.  And you can’t know all the queries necessary to write to obtain everything in the database on a given subject, unless you know everything in the database pertaining to that subject in the first place!  

  6. It is possible that a lack in one piece of information could change everything Jehovah of the Watchtower thinks or plans.

  7. If Jehovah of the Watchtower doesn’t have necessary existence, then He can cease to exist.  Some Witnesses have agreed with this premise, and have said that God is powerful enough to cease to exist, but chooses not to.

  8. How does Jehovah of the Watchtower know that someone greater than himself is not allowing himself to be known?

  9. Several scholars have pointed out the fundamental deficiencies in the Watchtower teaching of selective foreknowledge:

The reason given for limiting God’s foreknowledge is that if man is to be “really free,” then God cannot know the future absolutely.  Thus he chooses not to know what men will do in the future.  The main problem with this argument is that in order for God to choose what future events He wants to know and what events He does not want to know, he has to know everything at the beginning.  For example, given that events A-Z will happen in the future, how can God choose to know A, F, K, J, L, P, R, O and choose not to know B, C, D, E, G, I, M, N, etc., if He does not know why not to know them?  The only alternative is to think that God “rolls the dice” in some kind of gigantic cosmic crap game and lets chance decide what He should and should not know.  The attempt to solve the problem of evil by claiming that God choose not to know all the details of the future solves nothing.  Who would argue that someone who turned on his car, put it into gear, then jumped out with the doors and window locked, letting it run down the road until it ran over and killed thirty people, is ‘innocent” because he did not know all the details of what would happen and was powerless to do anything about it even if he knew?  The Watchtower’s argument is worse than no argument at all (Robert Morey, Battle of the Gods, p. 68)

There are also logical problems with affirming that God is temporal.  This would mean that time is either inside God, that is part of his nature, or else outside God.  If inside, then how can God be without a beginning, since an infinite number of temporal moments appears to be incoherent (as proponents of the Kalam argument for the existence of God have shown)?  For if there were an infinite number of moments before today, then today would never have come (since in infinite cannot be traversed).  But today has come.  Therefore, there were not an infinite number of moments before today but only a finite number.  That is, time had a beginning.  But if God were temporal, then he would gave had a beginning (Norman Geisler, Creating God in the Image of Man, Bethany House Publishers, 1997, p. 118).

For if God is temporal, then he must also be spatial, since space and time are held to be correlative.  As mentioned earlier, contemporary science speaks of the space-time universe, i.e., there is no time without space and not space without time. If this is true, then logically a temporal world would also be spatial  (Norman Geisler, Creating God in the Image of Man, Bethany House Publishers, 1997, p. 129).

  1. How does Jehovah of the Watchtower know what good and evil are, based on finite knowledge?  There could be something he has not foreknown or information he has not learned or received from the Holy Spirit or angels that could change things.

  2. It is possible that what Jehovah of the Watchtower thinks is absolute could become relative because of new knowledge or situations.

  3. Jehovah of the Watchtower is in a constant state of change in knowledge and space.

  4. Such a being would be contingent since its having such a property (temporally everlasting) would be accidental because non-intentional temporal states form the background or context for such a being’s existence.  (Sorry, James, you went over my head, here!  Can you please rephrase this?)  Hence, he may not continue to be everlasting in the future and his existence would be explained by reference to space/time.  The logical question arising from this fact is: What determines space/time?

  5. First, possibility forms the ontological and epistemological background for God and hence one needs a reason or an explanation for that background.  Second, if God got every thing right, it would be by mere fluke, there would be no explanation for it, and hence one has cease to give a rational account of reality. (Again, you’ve gone over my head, here.  I think we’ll need to break this down a bit for the average reader (or dolt like me!).

  6. Having finite knowledge destroys the wisdom of God.  He is just like the father who has the best intentions, but makes mistakes or regrets decisions.  As Bruce Ware (Book Citation?) states on page 156, “Pressing this issue one more step, it raises the question of ultimate or eschatological hope in open theism.  Since it is true that God’s present purposes may be frustrated by the unforeseen and unanticipated free actions of his creatures, what basis is there for believing that God’s ultimate purposes and promises will be fulfilled in the eschoton?”  And again when referring to the Flood he states on page 159, “To think that God looked back and thought to himself, This was too severe and I am not entirely sure I should have done it; in fact, I’ll never do it again, is nothing short of staggering!  What confidence can we have in a God who must second-guess his own actions?  What does this tell us about the wisdom of God’s own plans?  If God is not sure that what he does is best, can we be sure that he really knows what he is doing?  The simple fact is that a God who can only speculate regarding what much of the future holds, at times second-guesses his own plans, can get things wrong, can falsely anticipate what may happen next, and may even repent of his own past conduct is a God unworthy of devotion, trust, and praise.”

  7. Divine guidance is also called into question, for Jehovah of the Watchtower might regret a decision He made.  Or, He didn’t foreknow something he should have and caused disaster.  

This God cannot exist because he destroys the intelligibility of knowledge and experience.  He cannot be the reference point for meaning because he needs a reference point!

 

            I now want to deal with the misinterpretation of some passages that Jehovah’s Witnesses quote to prove that God is not omniscient.  There is an assumption that the Jehovah’s Witness will have in bringing up these passages.  It will be that a ‘straightforward, literal, or face value’ understanding is the right way to interpret these texts. Now, this is an important hermeneutical principle unless there is a compelling reason not to use this principle. Some compelling reasons for not using this principle would be if using it makes the passage unintelligible, logically absurd, or contradicts obvious teachings. Another reason is that these texts that give God human features are anthropomorphic.  On page 86, Bruce Ware (God’s Lesser Glory, Crossway Books, 2000) defines this as, “A given ascription to God may rightly be understood as anthropomorphic when Scripture clearly presents God as transcending the very human or finite features it elsewhere attributes to him.”  I am not going to deal with every verse that a Jehovah’s Witness can bring up.  I am only going to answer representative passages from certain categories such as God learning inductively, God’s ignorance, and God’s repentance.  I will be quoting from Bruce Ware a lot, for he says it a whole lot better than I can.

  1. God learning inductively: Gen. 22:12, ‘Do not raise your hand against the boy, ‘ the angel said.  ‘Do not harm him, for now I know you fear God.  You have not refused me your own beloved son.’  With a ‘face value’ interpretation of this verse, God learned what he previously did not know.  We do not have to interpret this text so that it makes God finite.  Let’s take a deeper look at this text.  Ware states on pages 67 and 68, “There are at least three problems raised by this openness interpretation.  First, if God must test Abraham to find out what is in his heart...then it calls into question God’s present knowledge of Abraham’s inner spiritual, psychological, mental, and emotional state.  Consider that 1 Chronicles 28:9 (‘for the Lord searches all hearts, and understands every intent of the thought”) and 1 Samuel 16:7 (“God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the lord looks at the heart’) teach us that God knows fully the thoughts and intentions of the hearts and inner lives of people.”  A ‘face value’ interpretation contradicts these passages.  Again, Ware states, “Second, the even more interesting and important question is this: Does God need this test to know specifically whether Abraham fears God?  That is, while it is significant that the openness interpretation implicitly denies God’s present knowledge (the first point), even more telling here is the implicit denial of the specific content of this present knowledge, that is, knowledge that Abraham fears God.  For we are that only at the point that Abraham raises the knife over his son does God then learn that Abraham in fact fears God.  But is it reasonable to think that God really does not know until his moment whether Abraham is God-fearing?”  Romans 4:18-22 talks about Abraham’s faith before Gen. 22:12 took place.  Hebrews 11:8-12 and 17-19 again talks about Abraham’s faith including the near-sacrifice of his son.  Verse 19 is very instructive at this point for Abraham new God could raise his son from the dead.  Compare this verse with Gen. 22:5, Then Abraham said to his servants, ‘Stay here with the donkey.  The boy and I are going over there; we shall worship and then come back to you.’  As Ware states on page 71, “Both the pattern of Abraham’s faith commended in Romans 4 and Hebrews 11, and the specific reference in Hebrews 11:19 to Abraham believing, before the attempted sacrifice, that God could raise Isaac from the dead, give clear biblical warrant for taking Genesis 22:12 anthropomorphically and analogically, not literally and at face value.”  Assuming the openness worldview, on page 72, Ware states, “But since Abraham possesses libertarian freedom, and since even God can be taken aback by improbable and implausible human actions, what assurances could God have that Abraham would remain faithful in the future?  One realizes how transient the “now I know” is for God.  As soon as the test is over, another test would seemingly be required.”  All God can have according to Jehovah’s Witness theism is probable knowledge.  God can only guess based on a pattern of behavior.  The problem with this is that Abraham also had a pattern of disobedience.  Ware states on page 72, “Either way, whether Abraham had previously demonstrated a pattern of faithfulness or not, the singular and transient nature of his specific test demonstrates that what openness proponents claim God learned simply could not have been gained.”  God is immutable.  His nature and attributes do not change.  What does change for God is relationship.  Here is an anthropomorphic interpretation of this passage from Ware on page 73-74, “Therefore, when God observes Abraham bind his son to the alter he has crafted and raise his knife to plunge it into his body, God literally sees and experiences in this moment what he has known from eternity.  When the angel of the LORD utters the statement, “for now I know that you fear God,” this expresses the idea that, “in the experience of this action, I (God) am witnessing Abraham demonstrate dramatically and afresh that he fears me, and I find this both pleasing and acceptable in my sight.”

  2. God’s ignorance: In Jeremiah 7:31; 19:5; and 32:35, he repeats the phrase, “...that had never entered my thoughts...”  A face value interpretation of these passages would be that God is ignorant of something his people are capable of doing.  But this interpretation is absurd!  First, if God knows at least what the Jehovah’s Witnesses claim He knows and He did not foreknow what happened in these passages, He at least knows the possibility of what his people are capable of doing.  Second, before Jeremiah wrote, God warned the Israelites in Deut. 12:31 stating, “This is not the way to treat Yahweh your God.  For in honour of their gods they have done everything detestable that Yahweh hates; yes, in honour of their gods, they even burn their own sons and daughters as sacrifices!”  And in Deut. 18:10 , it was stated, “There must never be anyone among you who makes his son or daughter pass through the fire of sacrifice...”  Notice the reference to Molech in Jeremiah 32:35 and compare it to Leviticus 18:21, “You will not allow any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech...”  Obviously it had entered into His mind!  As Ware states on page 79, “Apparently we are to understand by these phrases the extreme disapproval God has for his people in this vile activity: God expresses his disapproval by saying that it is a kind of behavior so vile, so wicked, so detestable that he does not want even to consider such a thing as happening...”

  3. God’s repentance: Exodus 32:14 states, “Yahweh then relented over the disaster which he had intended to inflict on his people.”  Relented here means repent or change of mind.  There are two scriptures that imply that God transcends human feature attributed to him in other passages.  Numbers 23:19 , “God is no human being that he should lie, no child of Adam to change his mind.  Is iit his to say and not to do, is it his to speak and not fulfil?”  1 Samuel 15:29, “He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind; for he is not a man, that he should change his mind.”  Just like God cannot lie, nor can He repent.  If you say God can repent, then you have to say that God can lie.  Therefore, verses like 1 Samuel 15:11 and 35 have to be taken anthropomorphically.  Ware states on page 90, “But what do the divine repentance statements of Scripture mean?  If they are anthropomorphic, they nonetheless convey a meaning, albeit not the meaning that God literally changes his mind....First, when God is said to repent, it indicates 1) his awareness that the human situation has altered and 2) his desire to act in a way fitting to this changed situation.  In Exodus 32:14, God was aware of and took into account the urgent prayer of Moses.  In 1 Samuel 15:11 and 35, God was aware of and took into account the failure of Saul.  In no cases of the divine repentance is it necessary to go further than this and say that God learned something new by this changed situation....Second, when God is said to repent, it indicates his real experience, in historically unfolding relationships with people, of changed dispositions or emotions in relation to some changed human situation.”     

           

I will now give positive evidence of an omniscient God from Scripture.  Consider Ephesians 1:3-11:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will --  to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.  In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding.  And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment--to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.  In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will.

Notice here that God is said to be able to ensure the salvation of His people because He "works out everything in conformity" to His will.  His entire plan of salvation, from the choosing of His own before creation, to the coming of the Messiah, the bringing together of all things under Christ "when the times will have reached their fulfillment," all of this is guaranteed because God knows everything will work out according to His divine will and foreknowledge.

Contrast this passage to the Anointed’s belief that that God did not know Adam and Eve were going to fall.  God fully anticipated (knew) all future factual and counterfactual events.  Let’s look at a scriptural example of this concept:

(Now Abiathar son of Ahimelech had brought the ephod down with him when he fled to David at Keilah.)  Saul was told that David had gone to Keilah, and he said, "God has handed him over to me, for David has imprisoned himself by entering a town with gates and bars."  And Saul called up all his forces for battle, to go down to Keilah to besiege David and his men.  When David learned that Saul was plotting against him, he said to Abiathar the priest, "Bring the ephod."  David said, "O LORD, God of Israel , your servant has heard definitely that Saul plans to come to Keilah and destroy the town on account of me.  Will the citizens of Keilah surrender me to him? Will Saul come down, as your servant has heard? O LORD, God of Israel, tell your servant."  And the LORD said, "He will."  Again David asked, "Will the citizens of Keilah surrender me and my men to Saul?"  And the LORD said, "They will."  So David and his men, about six hundred in number, left Keilah and kept moving from place to place. When Saul was told that David had escaped from Keilah, he did not go there (1Samuel 23: 6-13).

Here David is asking God about the future.  God gives him a definite answer.  He doesn’t give a possible or probable answer.  Here God knows what free moral agents will do in the future. 

If God is contingent on anything, the passage cannot be true. 

Who directed the Spirit of Yahweh, what counselor could have instructed him?  Whom has he consulted to enlighten him, to instruct him in the path of judgment, to teach him knowledge and show him how to understand? (Isaiah 40:13-14).

These questions expect a ‘no' answer!  This passage demonstrates that God depends on no one for knowledge nor does he learn empirically.  These passages give a very strong case for the omniscience of God.

 

            In conclusion, Jehovah of the Watchtower is a finite being, contingent upon His creation.  He is limited in His knowledge and is confined to a specific location.  He cannot satisfy the preconditions for human knowledge, for He cannot know that everything He needs to communicate to humanity has been communicated - because He Himself may not have chosen to know all that He needed to.  Jehovah of the Watchtower exists in a cosmos in which some knowledge may exist outside and apart from Him, some things that He has chosen not to know, and therefore (potentially) forever unknown to Him.  But if God does not know something, how is it possible for humans to know it?  "Knowledge" obtained apart from God that He does not know cannot be verified in any meaningful sense.  Jehovah of the Watchtower therefore inhabits a universe in which some knowledge - that which He lacks - is fundamentally relative, unverifiable and ultimately meaningless.

Such a God is logically incoherent.  He cannot be what God must be in order to be God - the necessary Being upon which all reality is grounded and given meaning.  He is not the God revealed in the Bible - all powerful, all knowing, and fully present throughout and beyond His creation.

 

Note:  Some other verses teaching the God's omniscience are: Psalm 139; Isaiah 41:21-29; 42:8-9; 43:8-13; 44:6-8; 44:24-28; 45:20-23; 46:8-11; 48:3-8; 48:14-16.

Note: For the best book on this subject related to Jehovah’s Witnesses, please see The Heavenly Weather Man by Duane Magnani, Witness Inc., P.O. box 597 , Clayton, Ca 94517

For a general book dealing with Open Theism, please see God’s Lesser Glory by Bruce A. Ware, 2000, Crossway Books. This book was of great help to me in writing this study!