James White Talks about Witnessing to Jehovah's Witnesses

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What I would like to do is to just work through a few passages, primarily out of the Gospel of John, and talk a little bit today about the deity of Christ, and make some applications toward the end.

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Because I know Jeff has been, y 'all are doing something called cultish, where you're dealing with various of the cults and things like that, and most people know that the person of Christ, the deity of Christ, is a central aspect of the focus of false religion, the focus of the cults is to present a different Jesus.

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And so, for many, many decades, believing

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Christians have, you know, at least taken the time maybe to attend a

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Wednesday night class on the cults to sort of, you know, when those little more missionaries come by, at least

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I want to be able to say something nice to them, or something along those lines. And so, most people have at least the general concept that there are certain aspects of Christian truth that are normally under attack.

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And so, people take the time, and maybe they'll flip the back and find a blank page before the maps someplace, and make a few notes, you know, some verses to share with Jehovah's Witnesses, or with Mormons, or Muslims, or wherever else it might be.

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Unfortunately, that has been pretty much the extent of our knowledge of the cults and related issues for many, many decades, and that's not deep enough.

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That does not go deep enough to be an effective witness, and certainly today with the internet, attacks upon these fundamental beliefs go much, much wider.

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And much deeper. So, with that in mind,

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I would like to invite us to go a little bit deeper into the text, and I will simply be translating and commenting on the text.

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So, if you're asking, well, what translation are you using? I'm not using a translation. Especially on this subject, if you're dealing with Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, they will frequently raise original language argumentation.

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Almost no Jehovah's Witnesses I've ever encountered were actually fluent in any sense, or trained in any sense in Koine Greek, but a lot of them have done some reading.

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So, they will at least allow you to think they are, even if they are not.

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I have told the story a number of times before. I think I was only in second year

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Greek at this time. So, this would have been somewhere around here, around 1983 or 84, probably.

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That sounds really long ago to some people today, doesn't it? It really doesn't feel that way, honestly.

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But I was meeting with some Jehovah's Witnesses in someone's home, and I used to get to do that a lot before YouTube.

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YouTube, in some ways, diminished. Now, it greatly expanded our ability to communicate and witness to people in other lands and things like that.

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But here in the United States, I can't get away with anything anymore.

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I used to role play for churches and stuff, come in and pretend I was a Jehovah's Witness, or a

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Mormon, or something like that, and role play with them. They didn't know because there wasn't a YouTube. I can't do that now, for obvious reasons, because, oh, come on, we know who you are.

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We've seen you on YouTube before. Same thing in meeting with Jehovah's Witnesses in people's homes.

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It's not as common as it once was, and some of the best witnessing encounters

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I've ever had were in that particular context. But I was meeting with some

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Jehovah's Witnesses, and the lady, as far as I could tell, a housewife, and there wasn't anything special about her in the sense of her making any claims to scholarship or training or anything like that.

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But she went through the standard pre -memorized speech on John 1 .1, because the

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New World Translation of Jehovah's Witnesses renders that particular text, and the word was a god.

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She was talking about definite articles and indefinite articles and pre -verbal anarthristic nouns and all the rest of this type of stuff.

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I had my, back then, Nessie Olland 26th edition.

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It's the 28th. That's how long ago it was, and it has no

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English in it. When she got done with her little speech,

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I handed it across to her, and I said, could you show me a definite article?

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She didn't even know which way to hold the text. She couldn't even tell which way was up with it. It was a pre -memorized speech.

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She didn't know whether it was right or wrong. There was no way she could verify it one way or the other. But give her credit that she had taken the time to pre -memorize it.

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We can't get most of our folks to go door to door, let alone memorize stuff to use in that.

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But that's one of the reasons you have to get a little bit more deep into things with individuals like this, because they have that kind of argumentation.

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Some of their people are not the norm that you're going to meet at the door, but some of their people can be quite challenging.

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There have been a few times, mainly in the earlier years, when the only reason that I was able to do what

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I did in the sense of keeping a person from becoming a Jehovah's Witness or answering their questions, the witnesses ended up leaving, and I was left the person, was because I had knowledge of the original languages.

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That's how good they were. It was a draw on the exegetical side, but the languages allowed for something more than just a draw.

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So, looking at John chapter 1, I do not suggest that you start with John 1 with a

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Jehovah's Witness. They've heard it before, and with Jehovah's Witnesses, what you want to try to do in the limited time you have is to get them thinking independently from the

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Watchtower Society itself. So, using a text that they've heard a thousand times before, they know all the answers to, is not what you want to do.

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At the same time, at some point, if you've been successful in presenting other evidences of the deity of Christ, you're going to have to deal with it one way or the other.

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So, I'm not looking just at dealing with Jehovah's Witnesses. It's a key passage, and it is meant that the first 18 verses of the

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Gospel of John, called the Prologue of John, is intended to function as the lens through which you read the rest of the

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Gospel. And so, if you get that right, if you get the lens right, then so much else in the

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Gospel is going to come into much clearer and sharper focus. If you don't have that lens, then you're going to be missing a lot of the important stuff that comes at a particular later point.

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So, the Prologue, you've got to get that down. And when you explain something to someone who, maybe they're just a believer that just hasn't been well taught, maybe they go to church where the sermons do not illustrate exegesis.

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I mean, that's the best way to teach exegesis, by the way, is by consistent exegesis of the

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Scriptures from the pulpit. You don't have to have a class on hermeneutics.

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It's fine to do that. It's fine to teach people about context and original language and all the rest of the stuff that goes into meaningful hermeneutical process.

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But the best way to teach it is to do it week in, week out, consistently.

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That's what matures a people, and that's what grounds a people in trust in the

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Word of God. So, when you look at the Prologue of John, the first 18 verses, what we find in the

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Prologue is something called bookending. Now, this doesn't mean as much today as it did back in my day.

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But back in my day, you would have books on a shelf. And if the books didn't fill up the width of the shelf, you would have something called bookends.

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And normally, they had a little thing that you would sit the books on that would hold it in place.

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Sometimes it'd be a horse head or something like that that would be decorative. And they would prop the books up and hold the books in place if it wasn't in a situation where you were filling the whole shelf.

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Hence, there was a way of holding the books in place. Well, bookending is a stylistic writing technique, a literary technique, where you start and end by presenting and repeating the same concepts, but in different words.

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And then that creates a literary whole out of everything that's in between. And so, what

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I want you to do is look with me at verses one and two, really.

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And let me just, just in passing, I know the vast majority of people in this audience know this, but let's remember, chapter and verse divisions are a modern innovation.

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I know I just bummed out some of you that are into Bible numerology and things like that, but they are a modern innovation.

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The chapters were introduced first, and then the verse divisions, at least in the

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New Testament that we utilize today, were first provided in 1551 by a man by the name of Robert Estienne, or as he was better known by his

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Latinized name, Stephanus. And so, in the 1550

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Stephanus Greek text, there are no verses. In 1551, they have been introduced. And let's give

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Stephanus the benefit. He did a pretty decent job, but not a perfect job.

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And look, sometimes it's really hard to know exactly where to break things off. It wasn't easily done.

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The point is they're artificial, and they are a great help in being able to find things and discuss things in scripture.

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But I wish we talked a little bit more about the dangers of them. There are dangers to verse divisions.

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When you memorize half of a sentence, that's dangerous.

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And given that, for example, you have pretty much just one sentence in the first 10 verses of Ephesians or so, you end up memorizing portions of sentences.

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Well, better to memorize something than nothing at all, I guess, but you can see the danger.

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If you're memorizing only a portion of a sentence, you should at least be pretty familiar with what the rest of it is.