“A Theatrical Spectacle to the World, Both to Angels and to Men”
As told by Maxwell G. Friend
“COME, listen, all you who fear God, and I will relate what he has done for my soul.” (Ps. 66:16) This is what I want to do now.
My forefather was Abraham. Like him, my most ardent desire has been to have Jehovah as my eternal Friend and to remain forever close to him.
I was born in Austria in 1890 to devoted Jewish parents of nine children, was brought up in the Jewish orthodox religion and learned to read Hebrew before I became of school age. I was drawn to God by my devout parents at an early age, not by my strict religious teachers. All that those teachers taught me were formalistic and mechanical Hebrew prayers and nonsensical rituals.
In 1897 my family moved to Zurich, Switzerland. There, during my first school year, I heard for the first time the story of the birth of Jesus. I was fascinated by it. I had hardly learned to read German, when a mutilated religious book, written and illustrated for children, found its way into our home. It was printed in large letters and told fascinating Bible stories from the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. With intense interest I laboriously read and reread them. Both the familiar Hebrew Bible accounts as well as the new ones about the Messiah and his early disciples became alive and absorbing to me. I believed them with all my little heart. Later I was attracted to books on popular science, chiefly on biology and cosmology. This widened my horizon, and at the age of fourteen years I abandoned formalistic religion.
MY ADULTHOOD
The so-called higher education of my college years along with more insight into the repelling formalism, nonsensical creeds and disgusting hypocrisy of the religions I saw about me robbed me of the heartfelt faith of my childhood. I became an unhappy skeptic, agnostic and evolutionist. But not for long. From childhood on, I had an intense love for the beauties of God’s creation. Admiration of his creation led me back to him. In 1912, after more than three years of intense dramatic training at the renowned City Theater in Zurich, Switzerland, I sat meditating on the shore of the beautiful lake close to the theater. It was here that my eyes were opened again to the manifest fact that all the marvelous things of creation were brought forth by an infinitely more wonderful Creator.
Soon afterward the mother of one of my close friends, noticing my faith in God, gave me a modern translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures. While I was reading these Scriptures with mounting delight, my sweet childhood faith in Christ revived. That was in 1912. Now I believed with maturer understanding that Jesus of Nazareth is my Savior and that he is the promised Messiah and King of his Father’s kingdom.
MY DEDICATION
After counting all foreseeable and unforeseeable costs, I decided from then on to follow faithfully in the footsteps of my great Master who had bought me at the cost of his precious earthly life. I decided to dedicate my life to God and to his Kingdom service at any cost.
There were still so many more things in the Scriptures that I desired to understand. I felt like the Ethiopian eunuch who said to Philip: “Really, how could I ever do so, unless someone guided me?” (Acts 8:31) To whom should I turn? I had no confidence in imitation Christians and much less in their religious teachers. The Master had said: “By their fruits you will recognize them” as being a rotten tree that produces “worthless fruit.” (Matt. 7:15-20) Their shameful, bloody history and their heartless massacres of the Jewish people during the entire history of Christendom testified against them and condemned them.
Where should I turn? Whom should I ask for further enlightenment? From the Scriptures I already understood that in the midst of the spiritual weeds in the world there must also be some genuine spiritual wheat. (Matt. 13:24-30) But how would I find it? I cried to God for help, and he answered me.
In 1912 there were about a dozen earnest Christians in Zurich who were proclaiming the kingdom of God without my knowing of it. They were then called “Bible Students.” Today the group with which they were affiliated is known as Jehovah’s witnesses. When visiting some friends I saw in their music room a tract entitled “The Three Worlds.” Their maid had just brought it in from the letter box. It was published in Germany by the International Association of Earnest Bible Students. It attracted my interest, and I asked for permission to take it home. When I finished a careful reading of it late that night, I knew it was the truth. I knew it was published by the true followers of Jesus Christ. I intended to read it again the next day and then to write to the publishers in Germany for more literature. But when I came home the next afternoon, the precious pamphlet was no longer on my desk. Our maid had mistaken it for part of the previous day’s newspaper and had burned it. I felt as if I had lost a priceless treasure. Try as I did, I could not remember the name or the address of the publishers of the tract. Again I turned to my Friend in heaven, and again he answered my prayer.
CHARLES T. RUSSELL COMES TO ZURICH
Soon afterward large placards appeared all over Zurich announcing a public lecture by an American Bible teacher and world traveler, Charles T. Russell. He was going to speak on the subject “Beyond the Grave.” The placards exhibited a large and striking picture of a Bible in chains out of which came the spirit of Christ pointing an accusing finger at a long and solemn procession of all kinds of clergymen. It indicted them by saying: “Woe to you . . . for ye have taken away the key of knowledge.” (Luke 11:52, AV) “How very true that is!” I thought. I could hardly wait for evening when the public lecture would be given in the Tonhalle, the finest concert hall in Zurich.
When I arrived at the Tonhalle, I found a large crowd at the entrance waiting for admittance. To my bitter disappointment, I discovered that the hall was already packed out and the doors had been shut. Then it was announced that the lecture would be repeated a week later by Russell’s interpreter. The waiting crowd then dispersed.
This time I arrived at the Concert Hall ahead of all the others. I waited until the doors were opened, and when I entered the lobby I immediately obtained the book The Divine Plan of the Ages. This was the first volume of Russell’s several books. I immediately plunged into the reading of it and found it to be fascinating. I did not close the book until the chairman introduced the speaker. I was convinced that I had finally found what I had been seeking with all my heart.
I drank in every word that I heard. The hour of the talk seemed very short. When I returned home I continued reading for hours the book I bought. I am not ashamed to confess that what I read in the book overwhelmed me at times and caused tears of joy to well up in my eyes. I just could not lay the book aside until a new day had begun to dawn, because it was unlocking to me understanding of the Bible. Then I had to get a little sleep for the day’s work before me.
The rehearsal that morning was of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy “Hamlet.” I just could not put my heart into it this time. I asked myself how I could, contrary to God’s Word, publicly express belief that my murdered king-father lived on as a haunting ghost? How could I swear bloody vengeance? How could I dialogue with the “immortal soul” of the dead king, speak of purgatory and hellfire as being realities? How could I repeat the lines: “In that deep sleep of death what dreams may come?” How could I say “the dread of something after death” or “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns” when I knew that such statements were unscriptural? I suddenly realized that similar conflicts of conscience would face me in nearly every drama I might participate in. I knew I could never again enact an ungodly lie. I felt like a child that had gleefully rushed after a beautiful, glittering soap bubble, and after his catching it the bubble burst.
MY FIRST ASSOCIATION WITH A CONGREGATION
I finally discovered where the Bible Students held their meetings and when. It was in a Zurich hotel room. The dozen or so persons assembled there received me with genuine and disarming cordiality. Their absorbing Bible study made me, for the first time in my life, acquainted with the features and prophetic significance of my forefathers’ tabernacle in the wilderness. I saw the gates of a new and true life opening to me, and I felt drawn irresistibly to that loving and lovable group of God’s people. I felt right at home with them. I still experience this warm feeling when in the meetings of Jehovah’s witnesses wherever I go in the world.
As to the good news of God’s kingdom, I felt like Jeremiah when he said: “In my heart it proved to be like a burning fire.” (Jer. 20:9) I just could not hold it back. I simply had to tell it out. My dear father was quite versed in the Hebrew Scriptures and listened to my message with an open mind but without saying much. My mother was likewise a God-fearing soul and was rather pleased with what I told her. With regard to Jesus both had to admit, “It may be true that he is the Messiah.” Years later on her deathbed my beloved mother devotedly read the Bible and our book The Harp of God. How I am longing for the promised resurrection when my parents will receive full enlightenment and I will be able to see them rewarded with endless life!
As for my four brothers and four sisters, none of them adhered to any religion. Liberal-minded as they were, they just tolerated my new belief and rarely argued against it. As for my intimate friends, none of them were religious, but they desperately tried to talk me out of what they called “idealistic phantasies.” To my deepest sorrow, I lost their friendship, but God has since replaced them “a hundredfold,” as promised at Mark 10:29, 30.
From the Zurich congregation I received literature for free distribution. At first I dropped a large Yiddish tract into the letter boxes of numerous Jewish homes. Then I obtained German tracts for Gentiles. In this manner, and by word of mouth, I shared in spreading the good news of God’s kingdom as well as in giving emphatic warning that the year 1914 would see the beginning of the world-shaking “time of the end” of the present evil disorder of things.—Dan. 12:4.
FULL-TIME SERVICE
Now that I discovered what the Bible calls a precious “treasure hidden in the field,” which is Jehovah’s kingdom, it became clear to me that in order to ‘buy that field,’ I had to give up all my materialistic desires as well as my worldly aspirations of being an actor. (Matt. 13:44) I was eager to play instead a humble supporting role in being what the apostle Paul calls a “theatrical spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men.” (1 Cor. 4:9) This would be to Jehovah’s glory and fame, not my own. When I disclosed my intentions and reasons to my atheistic director, he was visibly shocked. He tried to talk me out of it, but failed. Until he died years later he continued to hope that, as he expressed it, “time and realities” would awaken me out of my “idealistic dreams.”
In the following year, 1913, early in the spring, I was baptized in symbol of my dedication to Jehovah and to his eternal service. That baptism took place close to the City Theater in the chilling water of the lovely Lake of Zurich. Then I applied to the Watch Tower Branch in Germany for any kind of service I could do, and I was invited to come to the branch, called Bethel, and to work there. My parents felt crushed. Nonetheless, they unselfishly wanted me to do what would make me happy.
At the fine German Bethel at Barmen I found a warm and happifying atmosphere. I made myself useful by various humble services. At that time the Bethel family was still small, consisting of about fifteen adults and two lovable little girls of the branch servant. The younger of them, Phoebe Koetitz, is still alive and has, for many years, been devotedly serving as a pioneer, which is a full-time publisher of the good news, in the United States. Another person in Bethel at that time and who has survived until today is Heinrich Dwenger. He is still faithfully serving at our Swiss branch at Berne. Because the first year of my new life was full of activity and learning, it passed quickly.
When J. F. Rutherford, who later became the Watch Tower Society’s president visited us, he asked me if I would like to be sent to Austria-Hungary so as to spread the good news of the Messianic kingdom among the many Jews there. (Most of these Jews, as well as three of my fleshly brothers and a sister-in-law who lived in France, were later massacred by the Nazis.) I gladly accepted the invitation, and early in 1914 I traveled first to Prague, Czechoslovakia. There I distributed Yiddish tracts from house to house in the large Jewish sections of that ancient city. I then went to Vienna, Austria, where I did the same work. I was still working by myself at the time. There were only four subscribers for The Watchtower in Vienna, and I visited them repeatedly, increasing their interest in God’s Word. I started a weekly home Bible study with two of them. Then the Society sent me a helper. Two were certainly better than only one in this work. (Eccl. 4:9-12) The two of us were able to accomplish much more than I was able to do by myself.
Jews hardly ever responded to the good news, because they confused us with missionaries of Christendom. They had no love for Christendom due to the many centuries that she had driven them from country to country and mercilessly killed them with fire and sword. Even in their day there were inhuman, clergy-led pogroms or massacres of Jews in Czarist Russia. After covering the Jewish sections in Vienna we traveled to Poszony (Pressburg) in Slovakia. There, while we were distributing tracts in Jewish streets, a mob of outraged, fanatical Jews formed against us. Mistaking us for missionaries of Christendom, they mobbed us out of town, but with God’s help we came out alive. Not so those poor, blinded people. More than twenty years later practically the entire Jewish population of Poszony was annihilated by the demon-possessed Nazis. After Poszony, we covered Jewish territory in Budapest, Hungary.
We were approaching the fall of 1914 with growing expectancy because we were anticipating the end of the appointed times of the nations, mentioned in Bible prophecy. Looking back, we can see today how that year was a turning point in human history. We returned to Vienna, and while we were there World War I erupted. Our hearts ached because of the human suffering this brought upon the people. Nonetheless, we were indescribably jubilant because of the long-awaited fulfillment of Bible prophecy regarding the ending of the appointed times of the nations.
Then followed the sad three and a half years of humiliation for the remnant of Christ’s anointed body members on earth. It was a time when they were symbolically dressed in sackcloth. (Rev. 11:2, 3, 7-11) In 1919, when Jehovah began to liberate his captive people from their “Babylonian” bondage, the “spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet.” Together with them I too was revived to renewed full-time theocratic work in the “glorious freedom of the children of God.” (Rom. 8:21) I had returned to Switzerland, and there, because of my uncompromising integrity, I suffered heartrending and heart-searching trials.
It was in the Zurich congregation of Jehovah’s people that I found Irma, who became my helpful and faithful marriage companion. We served together first in the Society’s Central-European Office in Zurich and later in the Swiss Bethel in Berne. Those were very busy and fruitful years, overshadowing the severe trials caused by unfaithful men who held authoritative positions in the Society. To test my humility, Jehovah permitted them to ride over my head, to make me go through “fire and through water,” but afterward he brought me out to great relief.—Ps. 66:12.
SERVING AT HEADQUARTERS
In the spring of 1926 Brother Rutherford invited us to move to the Society’s world headquarters in Brooklyn. There my privilege of serving as translator was continued and enlarged. My good wife helped as a housekeeper, making good use of her gift of a typical Swiss sense for cleanliness, neatness and coziness. Between translations of books I enjoyed the privilege of visiting German-speaking congregations as a pilgrim, which was a traveling representative and public lecturer of the Society, in widely separated parts of the United States. Sometimes I went to Canada. Occasionally I had opportunities to broadcast the good news of the Messianic kingdom in German and in Yiddish over radio stations.
Then Jehovah favored me with an unexpected privilege of service. This was to produce and direct stirring Biblical dramas and realistic reproductions of outrageous court trials of Jehovah’s witnesses by clergy-influenced, prejudiced judges and prosecutors in America. The dramas exposed them to public shame and exonerated the work of Jehovah’s servants. The trained radio performers and musicians in these dramas were known as “The King’s Theater.” Their plays were performed for years over the Society’s own radio station, WBBR, and over other stations in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
GILEAD
In 1943 the Society established the Watchtower Bible School of Gilead, a ministerial school for providing advanced training to missionaries and ministerial representatives for specialized service in foreign fields. This school has had a significant share in the great increase of Kingdom publishers that has been seen since 1943. Jehovah showed me his unmerited favor by having me included in the faculty to teach courses on Bible research and public speaking. This I did wholeheartedly and with heavenly support and guidance for more than seventeen years, teaching thirty-four missionary classes and ten Kingdom Ministry courses.
Upon reaching the age of seventy, I necessarily had to lighten my work load. Considerately the Society’s president, N. H. Knorr, relieved me of my school duties and brought Irma and me back to Bethel in Brooklyn. There he assigned us to easier work. It hurt to leave our beautiful Kingdom Farm where Gilead School was located. The place and its inhabitants had endeared themselves to us so very much. But we have found Bethel, even more than before, a place that is truly, as some persons have said, “simply out of this world.” One must live and work here to appreciate fully the astoundingly smooth efficiency and the fine cooperative Christian spirit of its organization. No one is driven, overseers are inconspicuous and yet the place is humming with great activity and is amazingly productive.
Thus far in all my many and varied service assignments since 1913 every change has been gratefully seen, in time, as one for the better. Never before did we have it as good as now in our dear Bethel home. Another change for the better, we think, could only be heaven itself.
I am in my seventy-seventh year now and, understandably, I tire easily, but I do not feel at all like retiring now or ever. My spirit has retained freshness and enthusiasm for everything that is true, good, lovable and beautiful. As it is written: “The righteous . . . will blossom forth as a palm tree does . . . They will still keep on thriving during gray-headedness . . . to tell that Jehovah is upright.” (Ps. 92:12-15) I cannot do great things, but I can keep on doing small things devotedly. I am fully aware that I have been merely a “good-for-nothing” slave and that all I have done in the Master’s service is what I ought to have done.—Luke 17:10.
When surveying my Kingdom service over the years, I realize that it has had its ups and downs, its joys and sorrows, all for my testing and refinement. At times the thrilling ascent on God’s Mountain has been very steep and hazardous. True, I stumbled at times and got hurt, but with the strong help of our merciful Mountain Guide I always got up again, and with renewed courage and carefulness resumed to climb upward. I can truly testify that not one of God’s gracious promises to me has failed. They have all come true. (Josh. 23:14) To play a humble supporting part in the grand universal drama of Jehovah’s vindication, I esteem an inestimable and unspeakable privilege. I realize that, before I began to behold God’s light of truth, I was groping in the darkness of the valley of death and merely existed. Since the time I dedicated my life to our great heavenly Father, through the merit of my Savior and King, I have truly lived a full and joyful life, one worth living. My most ardent desire and my highest hope is not to be great in the kingdom of heaven, but to see God and to be forever close to him and to my Savior. That is why I have given up all I had, which was O so little, in order to gain the crown of life and, above all, Jehovah as my eternal Friend.