​​Introduction

Any of my readers, who have followed the main website of the Lords Witnesses, will no doubt be aware of the numerous failed attempts that our Church President, Gordon, has made in trying to predict the second and third fire signs that will be the hallmark of the time of the end: http://www.truebiblecode.com/understanding271-2018Nisan7.html, http://www.truebiblecode.com/understanding271Timelines.html. The continually failed predictions have certainly been a source of concern within the ranks of church members as well as a source of ridicule from some outsiders. However, it is the richness of our qualitative understandings that has kept those remaining within the church with the view that we are still members of the Fourth (and only current) True Christian Church. Now that our most recent chronological understandings have stabilised to a date in September 2019 (http://www.truebiblecode.com/index.html), we at least do not have to concern ourselves with reviewing that understanding for some months now, as at the time of my writing this paper. As the interested reader will have already noticed, some of the referenced links represent lengthy web pages where, in some cases, the specifically relevant sections of interest for this paper may lie well down the textual content. I hope you will persevere with your efforts to assess the material and, perhaps, you may well find some other matters of interest there.

However, to the outside world, I can certainly understand the scepticism that exists in terms of our church’s credibility. Are we lead by a false or a crazy prophet? Well I think Gordon can speak perfectly well for himself if you care to review his responses to the criticisms he has received on the topic of our continued reworking of our chronological predictions: http://www.truebiblecode.com/qa.html#100. From my own personal point of view, there is an enormous amount of apparently irrelevant quantitative information provided in the bible which is either truly irrelevant or put there for a purpose. If one believes that the bible does truly represent God’s Word then there can be no doubt that it is there for a purpose and to my mind that purpose is to allow this church to predict the precise dates of events leading up to the end times of this system of things. The strides that Gordon has made in understanding how all the various complex interactions of this numeric biblical data all fit together is nothing short of awesome. No wonder numerous mistakes have been made on that long journey!

This topic did spark a thought in my mind that while I do not think Gordon is a false prophet, he may well be a crazy one from the world’s standpoint, which actually puts him in rather good company. Therein lies the main purpose of this paper, which is to examine a few of the large number of crazy things that the Old Testament prophets got up to. This should hopefully put Gordon’s activities into a proper context (I hope!!). 

 
Jonah

Now in some ways Jonah would seem to be a good comparison with Gordon, although I am not aware of Gordon’s having spent any time in the belly of a whale, which would be reason enough to send anyone totally nuts:

17 And Jehovah had appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. (Jonah 1 GLT)

But even with this somewhat alarming life circumstance, Jonah remained true in his belief in Jehovah’s saving grace which is clearly the mark of a true prophet of God:

1 And Jonah prayed to Jehovah his God out of the belly of the fish. (Jonah 2 GLT)

Steadfastness to God’s purpose is also what drives Gordon to carry out his persistent quest for scriptural understanding. However, it is Jonah’s and Gordon’s brush with apocalyptic human disaster that is mainly worthy of comparison. In Jonah’s case it was the prospective disaster that was about to befall Ninevah and its inhabitants at the hands of Jehovah Himself:

1 And the Word of Jehovah was to Jonah the second time, saying,
2 Rise up, go to Nineveh, the great city, and cry out to it the proclamation that I am declaring to you.
3 And Jonah rose up and went to Nineveh according to the Word of Jehovah. And Nineveh was a great city to God, of three days' journey.
4 And Jonah began to enter a day's journey into the city. And he cried out and said, Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overturned! (Jonah 3 GLT)

Well this sounds a little familiar don’t you think? Different time, place and chronology but the principle sounds similar does it not? So here Jonah was following the Words of God as spoken to him directly. We do not have such certainty; we are having to decode God’s Word second hand as passed down to us over the centuries. I would argue that this takes a far greater effort of faith than in Jonah’s case. But wait! Did this prophecy, even uttered by God Himself, prove to be correct? Well no it did not, due to the men of Ninevah changing their ways which was, presumably, always going to be God’s true purpose:

10 And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way. And God was compassionate over the evil that He had spoken to do to them, and He did not do [it]. (Jonah 3 GLT)

Has anyone ever declared Jonah to be a false prophet since the prophesy he proclaimed to the people of Ninevah turned out not to come to fruition? I think not. Nothing would give the Church of the LWs greater pleasure for a failed prophecy than if it were as a result of mankind changing its ways to avert the coming apocalypse. This is, in point of fact, a rather different reaction than we see coming from Jonah who got very angry with God for failing to ‘honour’ His promise of destruction:

1 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. (Jonah 4 KJV)

One should well argue that Jonah was rather more crazy than Gordon in that the former seemed to want the destruction of Ninevah which Gordon certainly does not parallel that reaction in today’s greater world meaning:

10 And Jehovah said, You have had pity on the plant for which you had not labored, nor made it grow, which was the son of a night and perished the son of a night,
11 and should I not have pity on Nineveh, the great city in which are more than a hundred and twenty thousand [of] mankind who do not know between [the] right [and the] left [hand], and many cattle? (Jonah 4 GLT)

 

Isaiah

Just to confirm the craziness of prophets we have the case of Isaiah who walked around naked for three years. But he did this because God required this of him as a sign to the nations. So was Isaiah truly crazy?

2 at that time Jehovah spoke by Isaiah the son of Amoz, saying, Go and loosen the sackcloth from your loins, and take your shoe off from your foot. And he did so, walking naked and barefoot.
3 And Jehovah said, Just as My servant Isaiah has walked naked and barefoot three years (a sign and a wonder on Egypt and on Ethiopia)
4 so shall the king of Assyria lead away the captives of Egypt and the exiles of Ethiopia, young and old; naked and barefoot, and with uncovered buttocks; [to] the nakedness of Egypt. (Isaiah 20 GLT)
 

Jeremiah

Then we have the strange behaviour of Jeremiah who took off his underpants and hid them under a rock for ‘many days’. Odd perhaps but this was a lesson that God thought He needed to teach to His prophet, and who are we to argue? Once again strange behaviour from the prophet but again he was following the Word of God:

4 Take the girdle that you bought, which [is] on your loins, and rise up. Go to Euphrates and hide it there in the cleft of the rock.
5 So I went and hid it by Euphrates, as Jehovah commanded me.
6 And it happened at the end of many days, Jehovah said to me, Rise up, go to Euphrates and take the girdle from there, which I commanded you to hide there.
7 And I went to Euphrates and dug, and I took the girdle from the place, there where I had hidden it. And behold, the girdle was rotted! It was not useful for anything.
8 Then the Word of Jehovah came to me, saying,
9 So says Jehovah, So I will spoil the pride of Judah, and the great pride of Jerusalem. (Jeremiah 13 GLT)
 

Prophet or King?

So I think we can see from this that the prophets of old were not innately crazy in that they were ‘merely’ following the commands of their God. They, no doubt, must have seemed crazy to the unbelieving masses around them however. Now, whilst I am not suggesting that Gordon is following a specific command from God, to publish his chronological understandings as they come to light from his research, he is nonetheless doing what he believes the scriptures are instructing him to do:

2 The glory of God [is] to conceal a thing, but the glory of kings [is] to search out a matter. (Proverbs 25 GLT)

Here, I think , we are being told that Gordon is more a king than a prophet and indeed, Gordon would not consider himself to be a prophet in the Old Testament sense: http://www.truebiblecode.com/intro37.html. This scripture could also be argued to be confirming that God's word is written in a code awaiting those who are able and prepared to commit their time to its decryption.
 

Elijah

Now Elijah is one very interesting OT prophet as far as the Lords’ Witnesses are concerned. Firstly, our bible decoding has revealed that Gordon is the Fourth symbolic Elijah figure: http://www.truebiblecode.com/understanding192.html. Secondly, we have the contest between the literal Elijah and the 450 prophets of Baal, a contest that Elijah was destined to win as the then earthly representative of his God Jehovah. The following website gives a good synopsis of Elijah’s work as described in scripture including the account of this contest: https://lifehopeandtruth.com/prophecy/prophets/prophets-of-the-bible/elijah-the-prophet/

The account of this contest is important to the current thesis since it parallels the greater meaning for the current times. The decoding of this is demonstrated in the following letter to the Watchtower: http://www.truebiblecode.com/jonah1.html

Well what a surprise! Looks like we have gone full circle back to the sign of Jonah. This open letter contains pretty much all the information the interested reader needs to know about the current thesis. However, it comes with the health warning that it is both lengthy and out of date as far as the prophetic chronology is concerned since it was written twelve years prior to the writing of this paper. The chronology has since moved on (as the interested reader will already be aware from the earlier reference to the True Bible Code Home Page), however all the principles are still fully intact. So, in summary from the letter, the LW's decoded greater meaning for today is that the prophets of Baal are ‘good hearted prophetically interested’ members of the JWs and Gordon is the fourth Elijah figure. The decoding of the last days chronology mirrors the dialogue between Ahab and Elijah, albeit updated as previously mentioned.
 

Prophets of God Yet to Come

Now the book of Malachi reveals what appears to be a fulfilment of an Elijah figure at the end of this age. Once again in an attempt by God to turn the hearts of man as He did with the Ninevites through His prophet Jonah:

5 Behold, I [am] sending you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of Jehovah.
6 And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the sons, and the heart of the sons to their fathers, that I not come and strike the earth [with] utter destruction. (Malachi 4 GLT)

Could this Elijah be Gordon? Well let us look at a further scripture on the subject of two future witnesses:

3 And I will give to My two witnesses, and they will prophesy a thousand, two hundred and sixty days, dressed [in] sackcloth. (Revelation 11 GLT)

We need to look at an even older letter from Gordon to the Watchtower that indicates that the JWs and the LWs represent those two witnesses bringing their message of God to the nations, warning them of the end of this system: http://www.truebiblecode.com/history30.html.

 

In Conclusion

Reading from the Book of Hosea, we come full circle in considering the attitude that the world always had, and still has, to God’s servants. They are considered foolish and insane by the world so I think my esteemed reader should consider the true status of Gordon and his church:

7 The days of her visitation have come; the days of retribution have come. Israel shall know. The prophet is a fool, the spiritual man [is] insane, because of the greatness of your iniquity and your great hatred. (Hosea 9 GLT)

Some considerable time after writing the original version of this paper, it struck me that by continually striving to establish the time of the Lord's return, the Lords' Witnesses are continually on the watch. We accept that the incorrect dates are due to our incompetence and are therefore not due to our Lord being late or not intending to keep His promise to His people. So, hopefully, we are establishing ourselves as the master of the house by keeping on the watch: 

​42 Watch therefore: for ye know not on what day your Lord cometh.
43 But know this, that if the master of the house had known in what watch the thief was coming, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken through.
44 Therefore be ye also ready; for in an hour that ye think not the Son of man cometh.
45 Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath set over his household, to give them their food in due season?
46 Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing.
47 Verily I say unto you, that he will set him over all that he hath. (Matthew 24 ASV)

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​​Date of Publication: 20th December 2018

Crazy Old Testament Prophets

Jonah calling Nineveh to repentance

Image provided by St-Takla.org

Jewish Lords' Witness