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[121] For {foreign speaking} readers who may be unfamiliar with it, it goes: It looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck. What is it? (You get one guess.)
The Internet experience is still very new to many persons. Some inexperienced ones have been seen to behave as though the rules for identifying fellow believers are different when a computer is involved. If they encounter another person on the net who introduces himself as a fellow believer, they are immediately suspicious, and require multiple proofs before they will even reply with a simple greeting.
Personally, I have met many hundreds of Witnesses on the Internet.[122] In all the years that I've enjoyed this form of communication I have never yet had the experience of meeting someone claiming to be one of Jehovah's Witnesses who later turned out to be otherwise. Which is not to say that it could never happen. For me, the look and feel test has proven to be quite effective in selecting electronic association.
NOTE: The reason love is included as a headword is to point out a common misconception held by persons not well-trained by the Bible. Some feel that administering discipline is unloving, and that one should always overlook others' faults no matter how serious they may be. But real love seeks the best interests of others. Is it really loving to fail to hold children accountable for rebellious behavior when they have embarked on a course that could permanently ruin their lives? Bible love will not blind one to the point of causing him to ignore or condone conduct that he knows Jehovah hates.
NOTE: In these verses Paul was not talking about materialism, but about the destructiveness that attachment to money itself can have on a person. Money is an abstraction, especially these days when cash is becoming rare, and wealth is represented by numbers in various electronic accounts. Money represents a potential, namely the power to buy. The moment money is spent, even if on something worthwhile, that power is converted, and its potential no longer exists. Thus a perceived need arises to replace it, leading to an unsatisfying vicious circle of working to acquire money followed by more spending. (Compare Ecc 5:10.)
NOTE: Readers report that in some other countries Witnesses are not as squeamish about such phrases. An elder in Sweden tells me that the last thing the brothers say before leaving the meeting for field service is <<Good luck in the service today!>> There is clearly a difference between the kind of luck Isaiah spoke about and the de facto luck that arises as a result of ``time and unforeseen occurrence''. (Ecc 9:11) Our lives unfold unpredictably from our own point of view. (Jam 4:14) As creatures unable to tell the future, we see the coincidence of simultaneous events as a chaotic mass of virtual randomness. When they turn out favorably for us, even if it is all the doing of Jehovah and the angels personally directing the flow of every physical molecule in the universe and influencing every thought we have, as Calvinists believe, we are still blind to it. Even though we thank Jehovah for every good thing, we sometimes tend to say we are fortunate because we really do not know at the outset how things will turn out for us.
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Newton
Last modified: Wed May 6 12:58:28 MST 1998
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