...stop thinking just long enough to read a WTBTS publication cover to cover?
Ever since I was a kid, it would take me forever to get through a study article or book chapter. Red flags bearing/baring doubts, suspicions, and lots of extra questions were always popping up ( i guess my JW-installed pop-up blocker was non-functional). I was never content with the Q&As supplied at the bottom of every page.
Apparently nothing has changed (with the publications as well as with me). My ever-loving, long-suffering mother asked me yesterday to please read the current "study book"-- Draw Close to Jehovah-- as she is certain it will answer some important questions for me.
But, almost immediately, it brings up the conflict over the meaning of God's name ("He Causes to Become" vs "I am that I am") and my brain flashes to an article I recently read on that very subject that disagrees with their conclusion: ( www.freeminds.org/doctrine/jehovah.htm )
"Okay, keep reading," I urge myself. Next comes the simple, non-controversial statements (emhasis mine) that "In the Bible, a bull often represents power....A lion...often pictures justice....Eagles......God's far-sighted wisdom....Man, made in God's image...love." I remember being taught this but can't seem to remember anything in the Bible that supports it and there are none of the usual scriptural references the writers usually include to back up their statements. Once my curiosity is roused, I have to go looking. So I did and, to my actual surprise, found...nothing.
If anyone out there knows where in the Bible they get their support for this interpretation of Ezekiel 1:4-10, please set me straight. I no longer have a Strong's Concordance and the index entries for these creatures in the back of the NWT give rather different shades of meaning to them than those listed above (bulls = sacrifice; lions = roaring and tearing; eagles = power, high position, escape; man, in the context of being made in God's image = dominance and subjugation).
SO, WHY WOULD I NIT-PICK ABOUT SOMETHING AS HARMLESS AS THIS??? Maybe because "The person faithful in what is least is also faithful in much and the person who is unrighteous in what is least is unrighteous also in much." (Luke 16:10) If they would lie about, invent, or misrepresent the little things (to which they devote several paragraphs), what else are they lying about/making up/misrepresenting???
----of the idiot-for-trying-to-make-my-mom-happy-and-failing-miserably class