It is with a mixture of joy and sadness that Mrs Know_You and I depart John and Eunice's sanctum of sanity. Truly their home is an enclave of peace in this mad, doomed, sybaritic world. What a contrast to the spiritual lunatic asylum inhabited by the apostates with their shrill cacophony, their puny fists, like the men of Babylon, raised in anger to their Creator! But the experiences I will share will surely motivate many otherwise faithful brothers, who, perhaps in the weakness of their curiosity may have been attracted to this grim snakepit where vilification of holy things is the norm, this webpalace of spiritual pornography, to consider making room for it, as did John and Eunice so many years ago. Despite their cramped and modest living quarters, John and Eunice, by making room for it, have expanded their spiritual boundaries to mansion-like proportions.
After a fine wholesome dinner prepared by Eunice and assisted by Mrs Know_You, and while the two of them were doing the dishes and readying the table for our Monday night Watchtower study, John and I relaxed, reflecting on our lives as servants of Jehovah. Accompanied by a backround of respectfully and appropriately low chatter from the womenfolk in the kitchen, as they went about the necessary chores, John recounted some of the many fine experiences that he has been blessed with because he made room for it. Let me fill you in a bit: John was first contacted by colporteurs when he was a young man in a remote part of southwest Arkansas. He had a promising and lucrative career ahead of him - a fellowship to Harvard to study economics and the almost certain promise of a Rhodes fellowship (just like dear Brother Franz). Soon, as he got into the meat of the word - he read all of the Judge's fine books in less than a week, often spending many hours checking, as did the Beroeans, that this was the truth he had so longed for - he realized that Jah was indeed leading this organization. Recognizing the urgency of the times he immediately declined his fellowship to Harvard and started preaching the good news. No time was to be lost!
Sadly, his fiancee, from a well to do Southern Family saw things differently and left him when John persisted in cleaving to the very center of the organization. Many things happened in the year that followed, but John was richly rewarded when a year later his former fiancee, Eunice, knocked at the door of his rented and run down trailer in a sparsely populated corner of northeastern Alabama. She wanted a study! What a tearful and joyous reunion that must have been! After a year as the high paid secretary of a company president who tried to accost her in an immoral fashion whenever he could, demading that she wear tight fitting and revealing clothes, and heavy makeup, she realized that there was more to life than the glamor of a well paying position as a high powered secretary in the Big Business Empire so vaunted by this old order of things. Sadly her family refused to have anything more to do with her after that - preferring that she live the immoral life of a high society debutante than the simple and pure life of a modest Christian woman. She has never seen any of her family or so-called friends since, demonstrating that the world is quite willing to cruelly shun those who reject its immoral and lascivious ways. John is thankful that during their year apart he developed a healthy view of the carnal aspects of life, rejecting once and for all the sin of Onan that he had battled against for all of his youth. How many marriages have been shipwrecked because this sin has never be handled firmly, resulting in it taking root, perhaps for years, before destroying the marriage in a sudden and often unexpected outpouring of pent up immoral yearning?
John recalled many other moving experiences after that but one stood out in particular, showing how Jehovah always takes care of those who make room for it. In a small backwater town in Tennessee John was preaching the hard hitting truths revealed so perceptively by the Judge. He was talking to a group of farmers in a beautiful rural area in the northwest section of Obion county (now covered by suburban dwellings), explaining how the Judge had fingered the US Postmaster General as a dupe of Satan for sanctioning mail fraud by allowing the Catholic Church to use the postal system to disseminate their fraudulent circulars with the clear intent of extorting money from their already skinned and knocked about flock after the Great Depression when so many were bilked of billions by Big Business in cahoots with Religion and the Medical Establishment. Unbeknownst to him, one of the farmers had a son who worked in one of the larger cities as a successful and popular mailman, and the crowd soon started to pelt John and Eunice with potatoes and other mixed veg. No sooner had the crowd dispersed (but not until they had made many other threats) than did John and Eunice hurriedly pick up the vegetables, together with much fine fruit, including several varieties of syncarp, and make good their escape. Why, they had been down to their last dollar and didn't know how they would eat for the next week! How Jehovah looks after his own, and especially those who have made room for it.
After our study, the womenfolk made us all a light supper, and the talk flowed easily; the two of them exchanged recipes, excitedly talking about who was now a new grandmother - or even great-grandmother - and they compared modest dress patterns and the latest theocratic hairstyles. After they had retired, tired out by their animated conversation, John and I fell into a deep spiritual discussion in which John handled the meat of the word with skill. John is of the anointed, although he is senior to me - being, as it were, my spiritual father since he - ably assisted by Eunice - first contacted us. John has never regretted having made room for it, noting that Jah provided him with a fine partner to support him - at least during this life - in the form of Eunice who herself looks forward to an unending life on a paradise Earth. He does not look down on her grey-headedness, nor does he pine for the lost beauty of her youth, or the slim, firm, body that is now long gone. To him she remains as radiant as ever, her heavy wrinkles being a sign of maturity and the many years she has labored in the Lord's work. No, he looks beyond the flesh and at the inner woman - how unlike those in this sex-mad apostate world.
We talked into the wee hours about many things including the puslike scourge of apostasy that, as the scripture foretold, is now rife within the ranks, now swelled up like a boil ready to burst, and a sure sign of the end. You see, to those of the anointed, God's Word reads like a letter from a father to a son - clear and direct. That is why the Slave has been able to so unerringly and consistently identify the sequence of steps that this wicked old system will surely slither down on its way to certain, violent extinction. However, certain parts of scripture are not like this; it is as if a gauze has been drawn over them intentionally, hiding their meaning even from the true anointed servants of God. How thankful we can be that the Slave has never tried to force an interpretation of these verses, never fallen into the trap of having run ahead.
Of course, in their enthusiasm the brothers in the congregations - those of the Jonadab class - have sometimes fallen into this trap - we talked of the years just before 1975 when many brothers misapplied Brother Franz's fine insighful comments and mistakenly held that 1975 would see the end. Despite being urged to show caution and restraint by the Slave, many brothers made life-changing decisions out of fear - out of serving to a date. Lovingly the Slave did not berate the brothers for their misplaced enthusiasm, beating them with sticks for their natural, albeit misguided, desire to see the end of this evil world order. No, gradually they were readjusted in their thinking. Of course many left - a thinning out at God's hand really, part of the great winnowing that had to occur - these sick ingrates were disappointed by the false promises and expectations raised up by the selfish longings of their own wicked hearts and by apostates who encouraged the speculation that was rife among the brothers at that time. The apostates were rightly cleared out of the organization in the ensuing years like rats infesting a barn or cockroaches from under the sink - to the four corners of the earth they scattered, never again to penetrate to the very core of the spiritual paradise. But many faithful brothers stayed through all this - throwing their lot in with the man who is a Jew - and many were blessed by being reinvigorated to make room for it. How such ones have been rewarded!
But I digress. John and I have noticed how the gauze over certain passages in a number of the minor prophets seems to be lifting, like a fog clearing on a sunny fall morning. Habbakuk talks of a time when a man's entrails would turn to liquid and his very knees would knock as a great force swarmed from the west and north of Jordan and into the Euphrates region. We read in other places, mainly Ezekiel, of men with smashing weapons who would descend from Kittim, and from great ships, and like eagles from the air, and who would deliver fearsome, death-dealing blows to the heads of the sons of Ishmael who, in their turn, would cause a great plague of fire and pestilence to descend on Jerusalem. Oceans of sulfur would be set afire during this time and none would think that any could be saved as the armies attacked even up to the Land of Decoration. But, it is not fitting or meet that on a board riddled by proud apostates that these pearls should be laid out for all to see: Not before the swinish class who trample and despise precious things will these precious truths be revealed. No apostate dog can be privy to the marvelous truths sealed up for the time of the end - at least not just yet, since apostate dogs will experience the outworking of the Lord's anger firsthand.
But make no mistake the day is close - almost upon us. Those of you who have been titillated by the pernicious ravings of the gang of apostates who run this board should take care that YOU are not overtaken by Satan yourselves. Truly, now is the time to make room for it - else Jah make room for YOU in the the lake that burns with fire and sulfur.
This is to be my last post - at least for a while. John has pointed out that the days are so short that no time can be lost. The scene of this world is changing and so too the work is also changing - from one of preaching the longed for good news of the coming destruction of most of humanity - man, woman, child and small baby, to one of denouncing those who have either failed to turn to the organization or who have actually left it and now oppose the Slave. The door to the Ark will shortly be sealed shut by God himself. Apostates will claw to get inside but to no end. Then they will have ample time to reflect on their having rejected God himself - after that there will be a brief time of intense fear when an apostate's innards will literally melt and his bowels will run freely. A time to reflect on the unwise course of action he or she has made in his or her rush to assuage the desires of his or her selfish, passion-inflamed, lustful flesh. And then, sudden - by God's standards with whom a thousand years is as a day - destruction by fire and sulfur which will cause a slow, a seemingly interminable - to the sufferers - rotting of the flesh on the bone, a separating of the bone from the marrow, a deconstruction of the marrow into its parts, and a terrible disection of those parts, while alive, into their subcomponents, followed finally by a quaking of the brain on its very pedestal - all culminated by the grim view of Jehovah's hand as it plucks the mortal soul straight out from the sons of destruction, the Boanerges-like ones, who make up this sick old world - to be cast into Gehenna which means eternal destruction - but not until the apostate has fully come to realize his error during a time of great wailing as his flesh crawls in an agony only transcended by the breakdown of heart and the failure of the spirit during that great day of vengeance. And then and only then will a new day dawn as the anointed lead a great crowd into a paradise like new earth.
The time is short. According to a park ranger we met this past weekend the California Condor is laying many more eggs than usual, along with other birds of prey. We hear reports of new territories being opened up, of sudden changes of heart by previously opposed Government officials in far off lands, and many other stories too numerous to recount. Our Deliverance is surely getting near! Truly now is the time to come back to Jehovah's one true spirit-directed organization and the time to make room for it.
Know_You