Or was it?
In a private chat with Junachin, I was introduced to another possibility. If the war had come in 1913 or 1915, perhaps we would have seen the folly of disregarding Acts 1:6,7 early on and we would have been spared the errors of 1925, 1975, and the multiple misinterpretations that forced us to consider 1918, 1919, 1922, and others as prophetically significant dates. This flirtation with numerology has caused us no end of grief. Certainly Jehovah wouldn't have led us down this path. Certainly our God would not have caused us so much needless embarrassment over the past century or so.
Now consider this from another perspective. If you're Jehovah's arch enemy and you see his servants deviating even slightly from the righteous path due to human imperfection, would you not do everything in your power to encourage them? We say that Satan is responsible for the Great War. It would have started in almost any case because the political pump was primed, but the timing is very suspicious. Did it not start on the flimsiest of events, the assassination of a minor nobleman? And even that attempt failed. The eventual success of the assassination was only made possible by the most uncanny of coincidences. We even speculate in our publications that Satan was responsible for it. Of course, we assume that Satan was just a dupe, forced to give us historical confirmation of an invisible heavenly event due to his rage at being ousted from heaven.
The trouble with that interpretation of events is that it only flies if we can support 1914 from Scripture, which we cannot. (See “Was 1914 the Start of Christ’s Presence?”) All Satan had to do was give us a really big, in fact, unprecedented historical event to light the fires of speculation. Like Job, it could be that we've been tested by events whose origin we falsely attribute to Jehovah, but which result in a test of faith in any case.
We had many, many date-based predictions and interpretations prior to 1914. We eventually had to abandon them all, because the reality of history failed to meet up with our expectations. Even with 1914, we failed, but the war was such a big event that we were able to redefine our fulfillment. We went from 1914 being Christ's visible return at the great tribulation to his invisible return in kingly power. There was no way to disprove that, now was there? It was invisible. In fact, it was only in 1969 that we stopped teaching that the great tribulation began in 1914. By then, 1914 was so entrenched in our collective psyche that changing the great tribulation to a future fulfillment had no impact on our acceptance that we were living in the presence of the Son of man.
Since we 'got it right' with 1914, could we perhaps double down and predict other hidden dates, like when the resurrection of the righteous would begin (1925) or when the end would come (1975), or how long the last days would run ("this generation")? However, if 1914 had been a complete misfire; if nothing had happened in that year to support our predictions; it may be that we would have wised up early on and been the better for it. At the very least, we would have been far more careful with our date-based predictions. But that is not how things turned out and we have paid the price. It is now very safe to say that the sanctification of Jehovah's name did not benefit from our many foolish mistakes nor from our disregard for the clearly stated Scriptural injunction against trying to know "the times and seasons that Jehovah has put in his own jurisdiction".
It is also safe to say that there is one who has surely taken great delight in our self-inflicted misfortunes.
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Comment by 1914 – A Litany of Assumptions « Beroean Pickets on 2012-09-09 21:10:22
[...] to overcome that bias. One doesn’t like to believe in coincidences, assuming it even was a coincidence. The fact is, we are constantly bombarded with reinforcement for the idea that 1914 is [...]
Comment by Chet on 2020-04-30 01:05:04
Thanks for bringing this post to our attention. The only s brings to mind is whether the Bible Student would have been interesting to Satan. They were, at that time, a very small group with modest prospects. While I can’t help but admire the zeal and sincerity displayed by many of the Bible Students, they were little more than a tiny fringe group, in 1914.
There is a book entitled When Prophecy Fails, which was written about a tiny cult whom were convinced that God was going to send flying saucers to rescue them, just before bringing a massive flood. Up until their chosen date, in 1956, they were relatively quiet and didn’t go out of their way to proselytize. When the date came and went, the leader retired to a room for a while, and then came out to announce that God had seen signs of repentance and decided against the predicted flood. It was only after these events that they began to search for followers.
Applying this to the Watchtower Organization; they had been somewhat more evangelical, but were still very small and inconsequential in 1914. If they were at all famed, it was for their bombastic attacks on other religions, which understandably upset some religious leaders.
However, after their major prophetic failure, that is when they really started stressing preaching and making converts. The religion of Rutherford was markedly different from that of Russell. It started from the roots Russell planted, but became much more growth focused and took the bombast even higher, calling out clergymen and governments alike. Rutherford also made some bold predictions, including the preposterous claim that the men of old would be resurrected in 1925 and would need a mansion in which to live. Ever considerate, Judge Rutherford lived there himself, keeping a luxury vehicle nearby, just in case one of the men of old needed a lift to the beach. A fellow like Moses would appreciate being near a large body of water and might even want to take a shortcut across San Diego Bay to North Island :) (If Rutherford can be absurd, so can I.)
It’s hard to say whether Satan would have influenced matters so as to perpetuate the delusion of the Bible Students. I have to say that 1914 was convincing evidence, until I learned that WW I happened before October.
As to 1914 being a marked year, I can understand that sentiment. The world did change in 1914. The map, as we know it today, was to a great extent drawn in the settlement of the Great War. Nation states were established, sometimes with boundaries which didn’t account for ethnic differences. Russia changed drastically during this timeframe, as well.
But one could say this about many other years. For the standpoint of someone raised in the US, 1776 was a world-changing year, when a British colony declared independence and no doubt emboldened many other nations to seek independence from colonial powers.
One could argue that 1620 was quite significant as well, marking a movement towards freedom of religious beliefs. It struck a serious blow to the hegemony of the orthodoxy. But the year of any significant historic event could be claimed to be significant, because such events tend to change the course of history.
Personally, I tend to favor explanations which do not place the Watchtower Organization in the center of anything significant. I could be wrong, but I suspect that when all is said and done, they will prove to be little more than a tiny blip in the charts, just another Protestant group that came and went.Reply by kallekula on 2021-11-07 13:35:56
But it is interesting tho. I just cut my emotional bands from the organisation because of how the famous attention seeking not very discreet leaders have acted during this "pandemic", it was the last straw and proof that they don't even try to inform themselves about world events, but obviously only read leftist media (rightist media is as biased, but that is a good thing, to get a balanced and neutral view then you just read from both sides, something they don't do.)
But could it not be that just as the apostate churches have spread the knowledge that Jesus Christ died for our sins around the world, which could only be done by the sword because peaceful true christians could never have preached the anti-government message of peace to nations around the world, that Jehovah's witnesses have spread the knowledge of god's name and that Jesus isn't god father Himself around the world? So even with all the lies and coverups of the beliefs of the organisation and false teachings etc etc, they have made a great thing. The other christian sects that talk about Jesus not being God and paradise are all small groups in the usa, if it were up to them the world still wouldn't know anything.
Which brings the point I want to get to: could that not be enough reason for Satan to try and confound this organisation to believe in a falsehood and thus make all it's members diverge from the truth? He is a spirit creature with thousands of years of experience of watching human psyke and behaviour, he could intuate that this organisation would preach all over the world. The almost perfect lie would be if the war started in october 1914. It would almost be impossible for us to prove that 1914 was not the right year then, the brain washed members could always point at that exact year and exact month. But as Jehova is the true master, he could be the one who thwarted this stratagem by making the assassination take place two months earlier, and thus showing to all sincere truth seekers that even tho by happenstance the war broke out that year, it wasn't a prediction inspired by him.
Comment by kallekula on 2021-11-07 12:49:12
Great post and great page! I am just impelled to say that you sound like the typical very ignorant american in saying that Franz Ferdinand was a minor nobleman. Franz Ferdinand was the crown prince of Austria-Hungary, one of the greatest european empires and probably the oldest one at that time. He was also the heir of Habsburg, the most powerful and oldest noble house of Europe. They have had scions on the thrones in most european countries from their founding up until today. Many roman empires in the middle ages were also o house Habsburg.
Reply by kallekula on 2021-11-07 13:55:59
"emperors", not empires