The Handbook / JWS
The deity of Christ and the Watchtower.
The missing article does not make theos indefinite. In Greek a predicate noun placed before the verb often lacks the article for reasons of word order and emphasis. Most grammarians read theos here as qualitative: the Word has the very nature of God. 'A god' also creates a problem the Bible won't allow: a second, lesser god beside the one true God, who says there is no other (Isaiah 44:6-8).
No text in the Bible says Jesus is Michael. The identification rests on an inference from 1 Thessalonians 4:16. Meanwhile Scripture draws a sharp line between them. Daniel calls Michael 'one of the chief princes', but the Son is unique. Michael would not rebuke Satan on his own authority, but Jesus did. And the letter to the Hebrews spends a whole chapter showing that the Son is not an angel at all, but the Creator whom angels worship.
'Firstborn' in Scripture often means the one with first rank and inheritance, not the first one made. God calls David his 'firstborn' though he was the youngest son. And Paul immediately explains why Christ is firstborn: 'for' by him all things were created. Paul doesn't say 'all other things'. That word is added in the New World Translation. In Paul's Greek, Christ stands outside the whole created order as its Creator and heir.
Witnesses are right that the Hebrew word for 'soul' often means the whole living person, and that Greek philosophy shaped some later ideas. But Jesus and the apostles taught that people continue to exist consciously after death, awaiting the resurrection: Jesus promised the thief 'today' in paradise, and Paul says being away from the body means being 'at home with the Lord'. Christians differ on the nature of final judgment, but Scripture presents it as real, just and everlasting.
Matthew 24:45-47 is a parable calling every servant of Christ to faithfulness; it does not name an organization. And by its own claims, the Watchtower invites testing. Over more than a century it has published dated expectations for 1914, 1925 and 1975, and a 1914 'generation' teaching that it later revised. Scripture tells us to test teachers by their fruit and their predictions, and points us to Christ, not an organization, as the one mediator.
