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No one has love greater than this, that someone should surrender his soul in behalf of his friends.
(John 15:13)
Only in the spiritual paradise, among Jehovah’s Witnesses, can we find the self-sacrificing love Jesus said would identify his true disciples.
(The Watchtower. March 15. 1986. Page 20)
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In the Scripture quoted above, Jesus is reputed to have said that the greatest love would be
the ultimate sacrifice: surrendering one's soul on behalf of another.
In the quote from the Watchtower, we see that the Society has claimed that only the
Jehovah's Witnesses demonstrate this self-sacrificing love. But, do they?
Many Witnesses have had an opportunity to make just such a sacrifice. When a Witness
parent has a young child who needs a blood transfusion, the parent believes that to give the
child a transfusion would be to lose their everlasting life. Whose everlasting life? Not the
child's:
The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.
(Ezekiel 18:20)
The Witnesses believe that it is a sin to have a blood transfusion.
But if the parent chooses to let the child have a transfusion, the sin must be the
parent's: not the child's. What would this mean? It would mean that the parent was making the
ultimate sacrifice: deliberately giving up their own everlasting life in order to save the
life of their child. Such an action would demonstrate the type of love they only speak of.
However, far from praising such an action, the Society would immediately disfellowship
such a parent! So, their own policies preclude the sort of love to which they lay exclusive claim.
Here is another example of "surrendering their soul" on behalf of others: one which no
one should take seriously, given its false premises.
The Witnesses believe that people who die now, prior to the "Great Tribulation", will be
resurrected into the "new order" where they will have a chance at everlasting life.
But, those who die in the "Great Tribulation" will go immediately into
everlasting death. Following the principle of sacrificing one's soul so that others may live,
the most loving thing a Witness could do would be to murder as many non-Witnesses as possible.
This would then assure these people a chance at immortality!
Fortunately, no Witness has ever reached this logical conclusion which their bizarre
beliefs lead to. If one ever does, it is highly doubtful that they would act on it. One
Witness recently told me, "I'm just here [in the organization] to collect my everlasting life,
just like I go to work to collect a paycheck." Given that attitude, there is little reason
to fear that he would ever sacrifice his "everlasting life" for the benefit of others. If a
less selfish Witness ever reaches this conclusion, let's hope that their heart will tell
them that murder is the direct opposite of love, and therefore something is radically wrong
with their beliefs.
Update March, 2018: Unfortunately, at least one Witness has now taken the Watchtower's doctrine
to its logical conclusion: killing her family and herself in an attempt to earn a resurrection to paradise after having been disfellowsipped.
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