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Pursuing My Purpose in LifeThe Watchtower—1959 | July 1
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to stay on the job. The assembly made me realize more than ever before how much the New World society is doing to care for its members and to prepare them for the coming storm of Armageddon. It helped me to appreciate my assignment and to continue to pursue with vigor my purpose in life.
It was impressing to me to see what a good influence the assembly had on New Yorkers. One day I was stopped by a store manager who inquired what it is that makes Jehovah’s witnesses so clean-cut, neat and polite. A little while later, right in the middle of the traffic, a priest from a local Catholic university brought his car next to mine and, leaning out the window, politely complimented Jehovah’s witnesses on being such an orderly people and such a good influence on the people of the city, and he invited us to return to New York. Whether we return before Armageddon or not, the assembly served the purpose of making me better equipped for New World living.
It was generous of the brothers to make it possible for the Society to give me the assistance to be there, and that generosity and the Society’s spiritual and material provisions make it possible for me and others to continue working for the expansion of Jehovah’s pure worship in this country. All the thanks I have to give can best be expressed in the form of an invitation for you to come and join me in a foreign assignment and have a joyful and theocratic purpose in life as a pioneer.
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Questions From ReadersThe Watchtower—1959 | July 1
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Questions From Readers
● When the book From Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained says, on page 229, that faithful servants of Jehovah who die now “will be brought back in the ‘resurrection of life’ to get the same blessings that the people who live through Armageddon will receive,” does it mean that they will marry and share in fulfilling the procreation mandate?—F. B., U.S.A.
The statement referred to, which speaks of the prospects that await dedicated, baptized and faithful witnesses of Jehovah who have the hope for life on earth, means that they will get the blessings that the Scriptures say they are entitled to. There is nothing in the Scriptures to indicate that they will marry and participate in fulfilling the procreation mandate. Jesus said, as recorded at Luke 20:35: “Those who have been counted worthy of gaining that system of things and the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.” This applies also to those who died before Christ appeared in the presence of God to present the value of his human sacrifice in behalf of his faithful followers here on earth; so it includes those faithful ones from Abel to John the Baptist.
Consequently a woman who has been made a widow by the death of her husband now before Armageddon is not obligated to wait for his resurrection from the dead after Armageddon. She is free to remarry whom she wants, only in the Lord, and to bring forth children by her new husband. Death dissolves the marriage tie, as Romans 7:1-3 shows.
● Is it all right for Christians to resort to sterilization to avoid childbirth?
We can be guided in this matter by the principle that is set down in the law of God given through Moses. We know that if any member of the priestly family of Aaron had broken testicles he could not serve as a priest; also, no person sexually mutilated could enter into the congregation of Jehovah. And God so cared for the procreative organs of the male that if any woman took part in a fight between her husband and another man and reached out and grabbed that man by his privates to disable him, she was to have her hand cut off. (Lev. 21:17-20; Deut. 23:1; 25:11, 12) So if God
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