This was the one I was thinking about. I forgot to say what site this is from. I originally found it somewhere else but this will suffice. I thought there was at least one other instance where they were unsure if the person being spoken of was Satan or Jesus or had flip flopped on it. I remember also pointing out to an elder where the wt said Christendom was 'chirrping' like birds or something to that effect (chirrping was in original) and later went on to believe and teach exactly what the rest of Christendom had been teaching all along.
- The sower in the Matt. 13 parable is Satan or Jesus?
- The sower of the mustard seed is Satan
- "It is the fake “kingdom of the heavens,” the counterfeit, namely, Christendom, that is filled with these symbolic birds, “the sons of the wicked one.” Today it is big enough to hold them all. In the parable, the “man” that sowed the mustard grain pictures the “wicked one,” Satan the Devil. Outstandingly in the fourth century C.E. Satan the Devil planted or specially cultivated this symbolic “mustard grain” of contaminated, adulterated, imitation Christianity." (Man's Salvation Out Of World Distress, 1975, p. 208).
- "In the days of Jesus Christ and his apostles the nation of Israel was just as apostate as in the days of Jeremiah and Hosea. In fact, it was the generation of Israel that brought about the death of Jesus the Messiah and that persecuted his apostles and first-century disciples. Such Israelites especially were the ones to whom Jesus, as well as Isaiah, referred as having their eyes plastered shut, their ears unresponsive and their hearts unreceptive so that there was no spiritual healing for them. (Isa. 6:9, 10; Matt. 13:13-15; Acts 28:24-28) Hence that apostate generation suffered national calamity in 70 C.E. So, now, does anyone ask the question, How could Jesus as the Sower of the parable plant the symbolic mustard grain and yet have it become a tree of a foreign kind, the corrupt counterfeit called Christendom? The experience of Jehovah God with the ancient nation of Israel gives the divine answer to such a questioner!" (Watchtower, 10/1/1975, p. 600).
Here is the parable
- “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field; 32 and this is smaller than all other seeds; but when it is full grown, it is larger than the garden plants, and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches,” (Matt. 13:31).