The Reluctant Apostate: Leaving Jehovah's Witnesses Comes at a Price

by Lloyd Evans

Just as the Pastor before him had rested everything on the end of human rule coming in 1914, the Millions booklet would unveil the Judge’s own signature false prediction—that 1925 would herald the return of various prominent Bible characters from the Old Testament who would help usher in God’s Kingdom. Page 88 offered the following glimpse of the near future: What, then, should we expect to take place? . . . The chief thing to be restored is the human race to life; and since other Scriptures definitely fix the fact that there will be a resurrection of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and other faithful ones of old, and that these will have the first favor, we may expect 1925 to witness the return of these faithful men of Israel from the condition of death, being resurrected and fully restored to perfect humanity and made the visible, legal representatives of the new order of things on earth. So confident was Rutherford of his new teaching that it was referred to in his first hardbound book, released the following year, titled The Harp of God. “Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the other faithful prophets described by the apostle Paul in Hebrews 11” were to be “expected on earth within the next few years” and would “constitute the legal representatives of the Christ in the earth.” A Watchtower book for children by William Van Amburgh, released in 1924 (only a year before the big event) and titled The Way to Paradise, expanded on the teaching even more imaginatively: We should, therefore, exp...