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Questions From ReadersThe Watchtower—1958 | January 15
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to enter into the kingdom of God, retaining his riches.
● Why, after receiving from God the express command to multiply and fill the earth, did Adam and Eve refrain from carrying out this procreation mandate while they were perfect in the garden of Eden?
Asking this question concerning Adam and Eve is like trying to meddle in the private affairs of a Christian married couple today, and asking why they have had no children as yet. Jehovah God set no definite time for Adam and Eve to begin having perfect children to fill the earth. They being perfect, their intercourse together sexually would be for the purpose of reproducing the human kind. Evidently there was no intercourse between them for the begetting of children while they were in the garden of Eden. Evidently there was no begetting of a child before they were expelled from the garden of Eden; otherwise their first son, born after their expulsion and named Cain, would have been born perfect of his mother Eve, just as Jesus was born perfect from his imperfect mother Mary. Why? Because Cain would have had the perfect Adam as his father.
Jehovah God did not drive Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden just because they did not promptly begin to have children, according to the procreation mandate. The sin for which they were expelled from Eden was their partaking of the forbidden fruit of “the tree of the knowledge of good and bad.” (Gen. 2:17) Their first act of intercourse that the Bible records was after their expulsion from Eden as sinners. Why they did not have intercourse and produce children during their stay in the garden of Eden is their own personal affair.
This proved to be very providential. It made it possible for all the offspring of Adam and Eve outside the garden of Eden to be redeemed by the one human sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ. It left no child or children born perfect inside the garden of Eden who did not need to be redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice, and the majority of mankind born imperfect outside the paradise of Eden who needed redemption by Jesus Christ. All Adam’s descendants being begotten in sin outside the garden of Eden, all were born imperfect through inheritance from the one man. All were made subject to death through the one man Adam, and thus all those who were disposed to salvation could be recovered to everlasting life through the sacrifice of the one man, Jesus Christ.—Rom. 5:12; 1 Cor. 15:20-22.
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Secondhand PrayerThe Watchtower—1958 | January 15
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Secondhand Prayer
A man who once lived in Tibet’s forbidden city of Lhasa wrote of his experiences in the July, 1955, issue of The National Geographic Magazine. He mentioned the Tibetans’ use of prayer flags and wheels. At the homes of the well-to-do, prayer wheels are huge. One Tibetan home, said the former Lhasa resident, had a massive eight-foot prayer drum; it was cranked day and night by men hired for the job of praying for the wealthy householder. A short item in a Philadelphia newspaper caused thinking persons to ponder that some professed Christians are not much different from the Tibetan who hires others to “say” his prayers. Said The Sunday Bulletin (June 26, 1955):
“A church in Scarsdale, N.Y., has been experimenting with an innovation which gives a strangely mechanical touch to the most intimate of religious experiences. It is offering a morning and evening ‘prayer of the day’ by telephone. Anyone dialing SC 3-4567 hears a recorded one-minute prayer, much as he might receive the weather report by dialing another number. The response has been astounding. . . . Now the word has spread to other cities, and the New York Telephone Company is dismayed to find that the flood of calls has swamped its lines, and compels the installation of new equipment. . . . It seems hardly likely that so many hundreds have been dialing SC 3-4567 just to hear a recorded voice.” Like the pagan Tibetans many in Christendom practice secondhand prayer, substituting a mechanical device or a book for the human heart.
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