Awakening, Part 2: What’s It All About?

[Video Transcript]

Hi my name’s Eric Wilson. I’m also known as Meleti Vivlon; and this is a flip-flop circuit.

Now, a flip-flop circuit is the simplest of all electronic circuits. It basically has two components. You can’t have fewer than two components and still call yourself a circuit. So, why am I showing you this.  Well, I wanted to show you something which is extremely simple, from which we get something which is extremely complex. You see, a flip-flop circuit is a binary circuit. It’s either on or off; either a 1 or 0; current flows, or it doesn’t flow. True, false; yes, no…binary. And we know that binary’s the language of all computers, and this little circuit here is the fundamental circuit found in every computer.

How can you get such complexity, such power, out of the simplest of all things? Well, in this case, we replicate the circuit over and over again, millions of times, billions of times, to build a more complex machine. But fundamentally, simplicity is at the basis of all complexity, even in the universe as we know it. All the elements there are, lead, gold, oxygen, helium—everything that makes up our bodies, the animals, the plants, the earth, the stars—everything is controlled by four and only four fundamental forces: the force of gravity, the electromagnetic force, and two forces that control the atom itself—the weak and the strong.  Four forces, and yet, from those four, all the complexity that we know in the universe is derived.

What’s that got to do with waking up? We’re talking about waking up from the Organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses. What this simplicity and complexity have to do with that?

Well, I get emails on a regular basis from different ones around the world; brothers and sisters who are going through very traumatic times as they are awaking, because they feel disillusionment; they feel despondency; they feel depression, sometimes even to the point of suicidal thoughts. (Sadly, some have even gone that far.) They feel anger. They feel betrayal. All of these emotions, welling up inside of them; and emotions, we know, cloud thinking.

Then there’s the question of ‘Where do I go from here?’  ‘How do I worship God?’  Or, ‘Is there even a God?’ Many turn to atheism or agnosticism.  Others turn to science, looking for answers there. And yet, a few retain their faith in God, but don’t know what to do. Confusion…complexity…the way to resolve it is to find the simple element and work from there, because you can understand the simple element, and then it’s easy to build from there into the more complex ones.

John 8:31, 32 says, “If you remain in my word, you are really my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”

Jesus told us that.  That’s a promise.  Now, he’s never let us down and he never will, so if he promises that the truth will set us free, then the truth will set us free!  But free from what?  Well, the key question is: What did we have before?  Because obviously we weren’t in freedom, and it is the truth that is now setting us free. What kind of situation were we in, that lacked freedom? Was it not the case that we were enslaved to men? We were following the dictates of men. In this case, the Governing Body, local elders.  They told us what to think, what to say, how to act, how to speak, how to dress. They controlled our lives, all in the name of God. We thought we were doing what God wanted, but now we’ve learned that we, in many cases, were not.  For instance, they told us that if someone resigns from the Christian congregation, we were to completely shun them; and so what happened in more than one case is the victim of child abuse who was not given the justice that was his or her due in the congregation was so disillusioned that she or he resigned from the Christian congregation—and the elders told us: ‘Don’t even speak to them!’ This isn’t Christian. This isn’t the love of the Christ at all.

The Bible does allow for shunning, but only for those who are anti-Christs, who turn against the Christ himself, and who try to teach falsehoods, not some poor victim of child abuse; and yet we obeyed men rather than God, and became enslaved to men.  Now we’re free. But what do we do with that freedom?

In the Civil War in the United States, after the war, the slaves were free; but many didn’t know what to do with the freedom.  They were ill-equipped to handle it. Perhaps some of us, as we leave the Organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses, feel the need to be in some other group. We can’t worship God unless we’re in some kind of organization. So, we join another church. But we’re just trading one form of rulership by men for another, because if we join another church, then we must subscribe to their teachings. If they say, ‘we must obey the 10 commandments’, ‘we must keep the Sabbath’, we must pay a tithe’, ‘we must fear Hell Fire’, or ‘teach the immortal soul’—then we must do so, if we want to remain in that church.  We again become slaves of men.

Paul criticized the Corinthians because they were submitting to men.  In 2 Corinthians 11:20, he said:

“In fact, he put up with whoever enslaves you, whoever devours your possessions, whoever grabs what you have, whoever exalts himself over you, and whoever strikes you in the face.”

We don’t want to do that. That would be surrendering the freedom that Christ is given us through the truth.

But then there are those who are so afraid of being subjected to the teachings of men, of being misled, that they reject all religion—but then they go to science, and they trust those men. Those men tell them there is no God, that we evolved; and they believe it, because these men have authority. They surrender again, their will to men, because those men say there is evidence, but these ones don’t take the time to investigate whether the evidence is valid or not. They trust in men.

Some would say, “Oh, no. I don’t do that. I don’t submit to any man anymore. Never again. I’m my own boss.”

But isn’t that the same thing? Put it this way: If I’m my own boss, and I do only what I want to do, would—if there was a clone of me, an identical me in every way—would I want him to rule over me? Would I want him to be the prime minister or president of the country I’m in, and tell me what to do in every sense of the word? No! Well, then why do I want me to do? Am I not appointing myself as the ruler? Is that not the same thing as before? The rule of man? But in this case, it happens to be me who is the ruler…but still the rule of man? Am I qualified to rule me?

The Bible says at Jeremiah 10:23 that “it does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step.” Well, maybe you don’t believe the Bible anymore, but you should believe that because the evidence of that is everywhere around us, and it’s in history. Throughout thousands of years of human rule of man does not know how to direct his own step.

So, we get down to a binary choice: Do we let men will let us, whether it be others—scientists, other religionists, or ourselves—or do we submit to God. It’s a binary choice: zero, one; false, true; no, yes.  Which do you want?

That was the choice given to the first man and the first woman. The devil lied to them when he said that they would be better off ruling themselves. No one else was ruling them; it was just the two of them. They ruled themselves. And look at the mess we are now in.

So, they could have chosen God’s rule. Instead, they chose their own. They could have chosen to be children of a loving father and live in a family relationship with a father that cared for them and would be there to guide them through all the challenges that they would face in life, but instead they decided to figure it out for themselves.

So, as we awaken from the Organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses, we are going to experience a lot of trauma, and that’s natural, and will deal with that in future videos, but if we can keep this fundamental truth—this simplicity, this “flip-flop circuit”, if you will, this binary choice—if we keep that in mind; that it all boils down to whether we want to submit to God or to man, then it becomes easier to figure out where we should go. And that’s something we’ll deal with in more detail.

But to start looking at it, let’s consider one Scripture, and this scripture you’ll find at Romans 11:7. This is Paul speaking to Christians and he’s using Israel as an example, but we could substitute the Organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses for Israel here, or indeed any religious denomination that is in existence today. It all applies. So he says:

“What then? The very thing Israel is earnestly seeking, he did not obtain, but the ones chosen obtained it.” The question is, ‘Are you a chosen one?’ It all depends on what you do with the freedom you been given. He continues, “The rest had their sensibilities blunted, just as it is written: “God has given them a spirit of deep sleep, eyes so as not to see, and ears so as not to hear, down to this very day.” Also, David says, “Let their table become for them a snare and a trap and a stumbling block and a retribution; let their eyes become darkened and so as not to see, and always bow down their back.”

We may try to help our JW brothers to waken up and sometimes it will work, and sometimes it won’t; but really, it’s up to them.  It’s completely up to them as to what they are going to do with the truth. We have it now, so let us grasp hold of it. It’s not easy. The Bible says that we’re citizens in the heavens. Philippians 3:10, “Our citizenship exists in the heavens.”

This kind of citizenship is advanced citizenship.  You have to want it. You have to work at it. It doesn’t come easy, but it is worth so much more than any citizenship in any country or institution, or religion of today. So let us bear that in mind, focus on the freedom that we’ve been given, not looking back and dwelling so much in the past, so as to bring yourselves down, but look to the future. We’ve been given freedom and we’ve been given a hope that we didn’t have before; and this is worth more than anything else we have sacrificed in the course of our lives.

Thank you.

Meleti Vivlon

Articles by Meleti Vivlon.