A few days ago I read a post of someone who has recently awakened to what the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society really is. In their comments, they stated that they had been accused of "running ahead of Jehovah."
"Running ahead of Jehovah" was a statement levied at me many times during my convoluted journey through that organization. I often wonder how many JW's think about that phrase "running ahead of Jehovah?"
If Jehovah actually existed and was the ultimate being he is portrayed to be, is such an act even possible?
Of course, what the Societies representatives usually meant was that your idea or understanding of a matter was something that could possibly happen one day but it was not yet time for God's one true organization to embrace that mindset.
The first time I recalled hearing that phrase was at a elders / ministerial servant meeting one time at the presiding overseers house around 1985. He was talking about a situation regarding the ability of a woman being able to scripturally divorce her husband if she discovered him to be a practicing homosexual.
Prior to sometime around 1972 or so, homosexual behavior was not viewed as "pornia" and therefore it was not an act that severed the bonds of matrimony. It was something viewed as an "unclean practice" like masturbation or oral sex.
The elder commented that before this "new light" of the early 1970's, a woman who divorced her gay husband and remarried was disfellowshipped for "conduct unbecoming a Christian" since she had now committed adultery.
Then when the Society had updated its teaching on the matter and did consider homosexual sex as something that severed the marriage vows, some asked the question as to the status of those throngs of women who were still disfellowshipped and if they would be automatically reinstated.
The answer was "No" and the reason given was "they had run ahead of Jehovah" or had "run ahead of the organization."
I always had an issue with that concept. How could one run ahead of an entity that was the "Most High" and supposedly knew everything and anything there was to know?
It was a question to which I never received a satisfactory answer to and that phrase haunted me until the day I plugged the hole in my head where the contents of my brain had been leaking out.
I came to realize that the reason it was possible to run ahead of Jehovah because he was the product of human beings who wandered around the deserts and plains of the Middle East about three millennia ago. They committed their stories and viewpoints to parchment that would later be retranslated and reinterpreted thousands of different ways.
Unfortunately, some of us just happened to become part of a group who were suckered and bamboozled by the versions presented by Joseph Rutherford, Freddy Franz and other subsequent members of the so-called "faithful and discreet slave."
Well I for one, am glad that I ran ahead of ol' Jehovah and it makes me happy to see him farther and farther in the rear view mirror.
