Yesterday I had a long conversation with some Jehovah’s Witnesses who were standing in our town square. It was really frustrating. So frustrating that this morning when I was trying to focus on reading the Bible and praying, I was still stewing on it to the point of distraction.

It was frustrating for a couple of reasons, one of which was simply that I don’t like hearing someone claim to know Jesus and at the same time deny that Jesus is truly God. Another frustration was that I couldn’t quite make the point I wanted to make as clearly as I wanted to make it, so that was my failure.

But less viscerally, it was a frustrating conversation because the JWs’ approach to reading the Bible is impossibly literalistic.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying we shouldn’t take the Bible very, very seriously. I’m a confessionally reformed Baptist, and I have a high view of Scripture: it’s infallible; it’s inerrant; every word in the Holy Scriptures, Old and New Testament, is breathed out by God and preserved for the comfort and establishment of the church; it’s the final authority on all matters of religion, and it’s the only certain rule of all matters of faith and obedience. We should read and study and believe the Bible, with utmost seriousness.

I’m saying that the JWs don’t take the Bible seriously enough. They want chapter and verse for every claim you make, and they won’t accept a single thing you say about God unless you can show them a line in Scripture that says the thing you’re saying. This isn’t a high view of Scripture, but a low view of Scripture. Why? Because they refuse to let the Scriptures speak together, only separately.

Let me give an example. The JWs believe that there is only one God, Jehovah, which is how they translate God’s name in the Old Testament — most Bible translations render God’s name as ‘the LORD’ in all capitals. They believe that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was created by Jehovah and is not himself truly God. This is part of their rejection of the whole doctrine of the Trinity. For the JWs, the LORD is God, and Jesus is ‘a god’.

In yesterday’s conversation, I was talking to them about the following verses:

I, I am the LORD,
and besides me there is no saviour.

Isaiah 43:11 ESV

…through the preaching with which I have been entrusted by the command of God our Saviour;
To Titus, my true child in a common faith:
Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Saviour.

Titus 1:3-4 ESV

Without being too mathematical about it, I think the line of reasoning is clear here.

1. First premise: The only Saviour is the God of Israel, the LORD.

2. Second premise: Jesus is our Saviour.

3. Conclusion: Jesus is the God of Israel, the LORD.

Speaking literalistically, you can say ‘The Bible does not say that Jesus Christ is the LORD God of the Old Testament.’ And in a sense, that’s true. There is no single verse that says such a thing.

But allowing the Scriptures to speak together, you cannot avoid the identity of Jesus Christ with the LORD.

This takes further reflection, of course, to answer questions like, ‘If Jesus is God, why did he pray to God while he was on earth?’ and ‘How can the LORD feel hungry, thirsty, and tired; how can the LORD die?’ But these aren’t questions to be afraid of. They’re the theological reflections that lead us to dig deeper into the Scriptures, and discover there the richness of the doctrines of the Trinity and of the Incarnation. Glorious, beautiful, life-giving truths, that unfold to us as we allow the Holy Scriptures to speak together in their authority and harmony.

A lot of the frustration yesterday was setting out clear and reasonable connections, even necessary connections, and having people who claim to believe the Bible say, ‘You can’t say that, based on those verses.’

One of the gifts of our Reformation forebears was incredible clarity of thinking around how the Scriptures say what they say. The Baptist Confession captures this thinking:

The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture.

Baptist Confession of Faith, 1.6

We have the Word of God in what is expressly set down in Scripture — that is, chapter and verse, here’s the line where it says it.

But we also have the Word of God in what is necessarily contained in Scripture — that is, the unavoidable conclusions drawn from the interrelated truths of several Bible passages.

In other words, as Sam Waldron expresses it,

What may be by sound logic deduced from Scripture, that is to say, what is necessarily contained in it, has the authority of Scripture itself.

Samuel E Waldron, A Modern Exposition of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith (Leyland: Evangelical Press, 2016), 51.