Hi, I'm David Bercot, and tonight I want to share my testimony with you. During the past 10 years, I've received a lot of requests from my readers to hear my testimony and to obtain biographical information about myself. So I've finally decided after 10 years to make this recording. But I'm going to forewarn you that if you've got God in a nice, neat, tidy box, my testimony may not fit your box. But with that warning, here's the story of my spiritual pilgrimage.
The story of my own pilgrimage actually begins with that of my parents. My father was raised in Anaheim, California, and his parents were very staunch French Roman Catholics. My mother, in contrast, was raised at the other end of the United States in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania. And her family had loose Methodist and Presbyterian ties. However, basically they were non-religious and were not strong church members. They would go occasionally, but it was just a formality to them.
My parents met in Oklahoma during World War II, and that's where they were married. But in order to marry my father, my mother had to convert to Roman Catholicism, which she did reluctantly, but she was never very happy about it. Well, then in the early 1950s, my father, who was an Air Force officer now, was stationed in Anchorage, Alaska, and that's where I was born.
And while my parents were there, isolated from friends, family, and everyone else, some Jehovah's Witnesses called at their home and began a Bible study with them. As a result, both of my parents quit the Roman Catholic Church. My mother went on to join the witnesses, but my father never did. So from infancy, I was raised a Jehovah's Witness. When I was six years old, I remember going house to house with my mother and my two brothers and sisters. We lived in England at the time.
In fact, my sister is still a Jehovah's Witness, but my brothers both left when they were teenagers. When I was eight years old, I began to have some spiritual stirrings in my heart. I remember beginning to read the Bible every night before I went to bed. And the Bible I used was the King James translation, because in the 1950s, the witnesses did not have their own translation. They were coming out with it, and they had some of the books of the Bible translated into what they called the New World Translation.
But the Bible most of us were using was either the King James or the American Standard. And as I said, I was using the King James as what I would read at night. I would also begin witnessing at school to various classmates. However, my devotion to Christ was lukewarm and inconsistent. At school, I would take bold stands for what I believed was for Christ. I would refuse to salute the flag or sing the national anthem, refuse to celebrate any of the holidays.
And yet, even though I was an active Jehovah's Witness, I still love the world. I wanted to be popular in school, but being a Jehovah's Witness made me different from my classmates. So I tried to hide a lot of my witness life from them. And my close friends were nearly all classmates at school, not other Jehovah's Witness boys who were my age. Now, through one of these buddies from school, I got into the practice of shoplifting.
Nothing big, just candy, but I was doing it regularly, maybe once a week or a couple times a month on a regular basis. Now, you have to understand that I was getting $0.25 a week allowance at that point, which doesn't buy a lot of candy or toys or anything like that, which is what prompted me in continuing to shoplift. Yet, I was concerned for my salvation. I knew shoplifting was wrong, but I didn't really understand what salvation was.
In my mind, I imagine it being tied to being an active Jehovah's Witness, that is, making all the meetings, the assemblies, and going out house to house regularly. I remember when I was a boy, I would sit at the Kingdom Hall and I would notice various people in the congregation. And in my mind, I would call out those who I felt were certain to survive Armageddon, because we believed Armageddon was just a few years away. And if we were not found faithful, we would not survive it.
And so I'd look at these ones that I felt certain would survive it. And I would think to myself, well, now if I go house to house as often as they do, then I should be safe. Now, so far, everything I've said pretty well fits the mold that people want to hear about Jehovah's Witnesses. But I need to explain that my ideas of salvation when I was a boy weren't necessarily the official position of the Watchtower, the Watchtower being their principal publication.
The truth is, when I was a Jehovah's Witness, and it's probably still the same, there really wasn't a lot of clear teaching on the subject of personal salvation. Not like there is in evangelical churches where oftentimes it seems like every sermon ends up being focused on personal salvation. Jehovah's Witnesses don't talk that much about it. They focus more on Christian discipleship. So it was very easy for me to have the concepts that I had as a boy.
And I think a lot of other Jehovah's Witnesses had the same views and still do. Nevertheless, contrary to what most people think, Jehovah's Witnesses don't officially teach that a person earns his salvation by his works. At least not if you look at the totality of what they teach on salvation. But again, I don't doubt that individual articles in the Watchtower might give someone that impression, and I don't doubt that a lot of Jehovah's Witnesses probably think that.
Yet so many passages in the Watchtower and in their books make it clear that we are saved by faith, not by accumulating points through good works. For example, shortly after I left the witnesses, they came out with a commentary on the Book of James. Now, if there would be any place where they would go to to teach a work salvation, it would be from the Book of James. And yet their commentary on James reads something like what a Baptist maybe would write about it. I'd like to read to you a sample passage from it.
It says," James attacked several problems that had arisen in the congregations. One that caused much trouble was the misunderstanding and misconstruing by some persons of the doctrine of the free gift of righteousness through faith. These individuals mistakenly claim that a Christian, having faith, did not need works, that faith had nothing to do with works. They overlooked the fact that true faith would show itself in some form of action.
They were thereby denying that Christ, quote," gave Himself for us, that He might deliver us from every sort of lawlessness and cleanse for Himself a people peculiarly, His own zealous for fine works." James was contending with the idea held by some Christians that a purely intellectual faith was sufficient for the Christian.
This would ignore any need for faith to affect the heart and would deny that faith had power to move a person to make changes in his personality and his life and to do things for others in positive expression of that faith. They were if they maintained this idea, becoming like those of whom Paul speaks as having a form of godly devotion, but proving false to its power. I'm still reading from this JW commentary on the book of James.
It should not be understood that James argued against the doctrine of righteousness, quote, apart from works of law, which teaching the Apostle Paul clearly defines in Romans chapter 3 and 4. James's comments and counsel on Christian conduct always rest on the basis of the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ. James was not in any way saying that works of themselves can bring salvation. We cannot properly devise a formula or build a structure through which we can work out our salvation. The faith must be there first.
As James clearly emphasized, good works will come spontaneously from the heart with the right motive of helping people in love and compassion. Jesus's life is an illustration of this. The law that the Christian follows is the law of a free people, not a law code like the Mosaic Law. It is the divine law that is written on the Christian's heart. As James shows, no Christian should judge his brother or set up human standards for gaining salvation." End quote.
Now, eventually, the understanding that I grew into when I was still a Jehovah's Witness when I was 13 was this, and I'll number these. First, that Jesus died for our sins. We've been purchased with His shed blood. That was very clearly instilled in me. Number two, that salvation is a free gift offered to everyone. But each person has the power to either accept or reject that gift.
Now, in order to accept that gift, according to the witness teaching I was receiving, a person needs to consecrate or dedicate his life to Jehovah God the Father and to His Son, Jesus Christ. That is a complete surrender of your life to Christ in all that you do. Now, in the witness teaching, this surrender, this dedication of your life was not something that you originally would do publicly. It's something between you and God, that in prayer between you and God, you would consecrate your life to Him.
And then after you had made this personal dedication or surrender to Christ in His Father, then you were to be baptized in a public ceremony as a testimony to everyone that you had personally surrendered your life to Jehovah and Jesus Christ. However, Jehovah's witnesses don't believe in eternal security.
So even though a Christian is in a saved condition after his dedication, there still must be an ongoing relationship, which they usually refer to as walking with God, borrowing that expression from the book of Genesis. Now, when I was a Jehovah's Witness, we all believe that Armageddon, the end of the world, was just a few years away. So our primary reference point on salvation tended to be tied to Armageddon more than to the time of our death.
We believe that if a person faithfully walked with God up to or through the Great Tribulation and the Battle of Armageddon, then he or she would be delivered. So enduring to the end was essential to be saved at the time of the Great Tribulation and Armageddon. So shortly after I turned 14, I did just what the witnesses teach. I surrendered my life to Jesus Christ and to His Father, knowing that I was purchased with His blood and that I couldn't save myself.
Now, the witness the Spirit has given me in my heart is that I was truly born again when I surrendered my life to Christ at age 14. Of course, at that time, I never imagined that surrendering to Christ would eventually mean my needing to leave Jehovah's Witnesses, but I had given my life to him. And I clearly remember the statement that the elder made in his baptismal sermon. He said," You are not dedicating your lives to an organization.
You are dedicating your lives to Jehovah God and His Son, Christ Jesus." And that, in fact, is what I had done. And because I was truly converted, my life did change quite dramatically. Of course, I completely quit shoplifting, but I didn't feel comfortable simply not to shoplift anymore. Genuine repentance required more than that. The spirit convicted me that I needed to make restitution to the two grocery stores where I had done my shoplifting.
Yet I felt too ashamed to face the store managers and to tell them what I had done. So I calculated the approximate cost of the candy that I had stolen using a liberal figure that would clearly cover the total cost. And then I went back to those stores and reversed shoplifted. That is, I would buy an item, I would stick it in my pocket, and then I would go and put it back on the shelf after I paid for it.
I kept doing that over a period of several months until I had paid back everything that I had stolen from those stores. Again, remember, I was just getting 25 cents a week allowance, so it took me a while to completely pay them off. After I dedicated my life to the father and the son, I found that where I had formerly hated going door to door and witnessing, and I had not really enjoyed going to the meetings at the Kingdom Hall. I found that now I relished these things.
I began spending my summers in my Christmas vacations in full-time house-to-house witnessing. I was too young to drive, so I would set off on my bike in the mornings with my Bible and my briefcase tied to the back of my bicycle. And the neighborhood children pretty soon started making fun of me and calling me Little Jesus. When my mom didn't make it to the Kingdom Hall on Sundays here and there, I would get on my bike and ride there myself, even though it was about a 40-minute bike ride from where we lived.
I began taking my Bible to school and reading it during the lunch break, which often created witnessing opportunities with other classmates. I prayed regularly and I saw answers to my prayers. I could sense when I was walking in the Holy Spirit and when I was going through times of spiritual dryness. When I was 16, I was ordained as a deacon in the congregation where I lived. This was in South Texas.
And soon after that, they began using me to preach hour-long sermons on Sunday, both locally and at other congregations who were within about a 60 mile radius of where we lived. Now, I've always been inclined academically, and so I did very well in school, and I was awarded a number of scholarships upon my graduation from high school. However, I didn't want to pursue a career in the world. I wanted to serve God with my life. So I decided not to go to college, which the Watchtower Organization taught against.
They encouraged you not to go to college, although you were not disciplined if you did go. And of course, my decision not to go to college made my father fairly unhappy. As a result, I ended up leaving home just a few days after I graduated from high school, and I moved to Abilene, Texas, where I entered full-time ministry as a house-to-house evangelist with the witnesses. The witnesses call this pioneering. When I was 21, I was ordained as an elder. This was in a congregation in San Antonio where I was now living.
I met my future wife there in San Antonio at the local Kingdom Hall. She too was a pioneer like me, and her conversion and her walk with God weren't that different from my own. So even though I'm sharing all of this testimony in first-person singular, a lot of what I've said and a lot of what I will be saying would apply equally to her. After surrendering my life to Christ and being baptized, I never again worried about my salvation.
I never again thought of my witnessing and attending the weekly meetings as things tied to my salvation. I never again imagined that I was somehow accumulating brownie points towards my salvation. Witnessing to others and fellowshipping with Jehovah's Witnesses were things that grew out of my daily walk with God. Now, I fully realize that what I've shared doesn't fit the preconceived ideas that most Christians have about Jehovah's Witnesses.
I can only say I know what I experienced, and I know the witness the Spirit has given me in my heart. At the same time, please understand that I can only speak about what my wife and I experienced. To what degree this applies to other Jehovah's witnesses, I can't say. But I have spoken with other ex-witnesses who tell me that their experience was similar to mine. On the other hand, many ex-witnesses tell me that they never knew Christ at all when they were Jehovah's Witnesses.
I do know that the majority of persons who leave the witnesses go totally into the world. They never follow Christ after that, which makes me suspect that they were probably never born again in the first place. Although it's certainly possible that they were born again, but that the whole experience with the witnesses has ended up stumbling them. In a typical conversation between a Jehovah's Witness and an evangelical Christian, neither side is trying to truly understand what the other one is saying.
Rather, each side is trying to prove the other side wrong without really knowing what the other side is really saying. The result is that they are usually talking past each other, not communicating at all. However, as I grew in Christ, I found I wanted to understand what the people in the churches believed. I wanted to be able to communicate with them.
Because like all other Jehovah's witnesses, I firmly believe that if churchgoers simply read their Bibles with an open mind, they would all come to believe just like we did. So I felt confident that if I could simply converse with people, I could easily show them that what we taught was true. And like all other Jehovah's Witnesses, I believe that the eternal lives of the people who attended churches depended on this.
So even though I was just a teenager, I had no hesitancy to call at the homes or church offices of clergymen. For one thing, as I mentioned earlier, I believe that they knew that what we Jehovah's witnesses taught was true. Secondly, I felt confident that what we believe could easily be defended in Scripture.
Interestingly, when I would be in a car with a group of Jehovah's Witnesses going house to house and one of them called at the home of a clergyman, which would usually mean getting into a long conversation, that person would nearly always come back to their car after the conversation saying as they were shaking their heads, boy, those clergymen sure can twist the scriptures and everyone in the car would nod their heads in agreement.
Or they might say, you know, if you could just pin one of them down, you would have them, but they always keep changing the subject just when you're about to get them. But that was never the experience that I had. Instead, I found that most ministers could ably defend what they believed, and they had scriptures to support their views.
And so the discussion would nearly always come down to he would have his list of proof texts, and I would have my list of proof texts, and he would try to explain away my proof texts, and I would try to explain away his proof texts. And quite often, the issue would come down to how to translate the Greek in a given passage. And neither one of us would be Greek scholars, but we both had enough indoctrination about certain Greek words in the New Testament that we could present plausible arguments on our behalf.
And so it would always end up being a deadlock. And I don't mean to limit that scenario only to clergymen. It's just that my experience was that very few laypeople were able to make an adequate defense of their faith. Now, the two notable exceptions were the Church of Christ and the United Pentecostals. Generally, their people, I found, could give a pretty strong defense, and usually we would get into quite a match throwing scriptures back and forth.
Now, I assume that the Anabaptists and brethren would be able to make a good defense of their faith. But since I spent my entire time as a Jehovah's Witness in England and in Texas, I never encountered any Anabaptist or brethren because there were none in England or Texas at that time that I'm aware of. And there were always exceptional persons in many various denominations who were able to give a good defense of their faith.
Now, through the months and years as I listened to what people had to say, I came to realize that we had more in common than I originally thought. And I learned many of the differences in our spiritual vocabularies that enabled me to translate evangelical lingo into Jehovah's Witness lingo and vice versa. And so on many, many occasions, I had people tell me, you sure don't talk like any other Jehovah's Witness I've ever talked to.
And you may be thinking, well, that's because you were truly born again and other Jehovah's Witnesses aren't. And possibly that would account for many of the differences. But I think the main reason is because I had been able to bridge many of the language differences and had come to understand the essence of what various church people were saying. Not that there were never any communication gaps between us. I remember shortly before I left the witnesses of knocking at a door.
And when the lady of the house answered the door, she asked me," Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Savior?" No, I had never heard that expression before. Personal Savior? After all, it's not a biblical expression. I remember thinking to myself, well, Jesus is the Savior of the whole world, not just my Savior. He's not some sort of talisman that I can carry around in my pocket, my personal Savior. So I said no. And the conversation didn't go very far from there.
And I remember walking away thinking, those churchgoers sure have mixed up ideas thinking that Jesus died just for them, not for everybody. No doubt, the lady went back inside her house thinking," What a poor, mixed up young man he is trying to preach the gospel when he has yet to personally acknowledge Jesus as his Savior." Now, if I had understood what she was asking, I would have said yes. You see, we just simply weren't communicating.
But a large part of the time, I was able to communicate with various householders. One of the most interesting conversations I had was in Abilene, Texas, when I was 18. Now, Abilene has three different church-sponsored universities. There's a Church of Christ one ACU. There's a Methodist one, McMurry College, and there's a Baptist one, Hardin Simmons. Now, one morning I was doing house to house witnessing near Hardin Simmons, and a young man came to the door and invited me in.
After a brief discussion, I learned that he was a student at Hardin Simmons and that he pastored a small rural church near Abilene. After we talked for about 45 minutes, he invited his wife to come into the room where we were and to give me her testimony. Now, I had never heard the phrase before my testimony. That's because Jehovah's Witnesses have a different phrase. They call it my experience.
At every convention Jehovah's Witnesses have, they always set aside a certain amount of time for various persons to share their experience of how they came to a true knowledge of God in saving faith in Jehovah and His Son, Jesus Christ. After she shared her testimony, I volunteered to give mine and I told him the same things that I've related to you earlier about my conversion.
Well, this young pastor was really moved by our conversation, and he asked me if I would come to one of their prayer meetings some Wednesday night and share my testimony with his congregation. Well, I was a little taken aback by that. I told him I'd have to think about it, and I would return the next week. Well, later that week, I asked one of the witness elders about this man's invitation. Well, the elder pointed out that I must have done something wrong if this minister would want me to come to his church.
He probably believes in the Trinity, the elder said. So go back and talk to him about the Trinity, and then you'll find out just how much you really have in common. So obediently, the next week, I called back at this young pastor's house, and after he invited me in, I basically started an argument about the Trinity. Well, he had no inclination to argue, and he wasn't all that theologically inclined.
In fact, he had to pull a reference book off of his shelf just to understand what he was supposed to be defending that I was attacking. Well, throughout the conversation, I went out of my way to try to drive a wedge between us, and I eventually succeeded. And when I left his house, I remember feeling very good to myself saying, well, at least now he knows that we don't believe the same. Of course, now I look back on that conversation with a lot of sadness of what could have perhaps been.
I remember another conversation I once had with an evangelical Christian woman. This was on the front porch of her house. As we started to talk, she asked me," Have you been saved?" And I replied," Yes."" What saved you?" she fired back." The shed blood of Jesus Christ," I replied." Well, now she was stymied.
I guess she had probably read a book that said if you ask a Jehovah's Witness, if he's been saved, you're going to floor him." So then I seized the initiative and said," Let me ask you, have you been saved?" And she replied," Yes."" What saved you?" I asked.
The same, she said rather quietly." Well, now feeling a bit bold," I asked her." So how come you're not out here knocking on doors with us?" Now, if I had met that lady when I was 15 and she'd asked me that question, I would have probably replied," No," even though I was saved. That's because Jehovah's Witnesses focus primarily on the second stage of salvation, enduring faithfully to the end. So to ask the question, have you been saved in the past tense?
Sounds to a Jehovah's witness like you're implying that the race is all over with has already been won, which of course many evangelicals would believe because they believe in once saved, always saved or eternal security. However, once I better understood what an evangelical means by that question, well, I had no problem answering yes. I knew that I had come into a saved condition once I surrendered my life to Jesus Christ.
Now, it took years and years of conversations with many, many people before questions began to pop into my mind. Nevertheless, by the time I was an adult, I could plainly see that it wasn't at all true that the clergy knew what Jehovah's witnesses were teaching was true, but that they were just afraid to preach it themselves. I could also see that it wasn't true that if people just read their Bibles, they would all believe like Jehovah's Witnesses. No, things weren't quite that black and white.
And yet, according to the witnesses, Jehovah was going to destroy all of these people. Why? Because they held to wrong theological doctrines. You see, when I spoke about the witness view of salvation, there is one thing I left out. That is, among the witnesses, there is a definite view that if you hold to wrong theological doctrines, God is not going to give you eternal life.
Now, that didn't seem unreasonable or unmerciful when, like most witnesses, I held to the view that if anyone simply read his Bible, he would come to the same beliefs as the witnesses. But now I could see that the problem wasn't that these people simply had wicked hearts or they were so blinded by Satan that they couldn't see the plain truth of scriptures. Here I had taken the time and effort to learn what various churches and denominations believed.
I had made the effort to look past words and look at the substance of what people believed so I could effectively communicate to their hearts. Yet I felt terrible that I couldn't persuade anybody who was well read in the Bible that Jehovah's Witnesses doctrines were true. Sure, it was easy to persuade a Catholic or somebody who didn't really attend church, who didn't know anything about the Bible.
But whenever I spoke to somebody who did know their Bible or at least knew the indoctrination of their church, it always came down, as I said before, to their list of proof texts versus our list of proof texts. And I felt uneasy with the thought that all of these millions of professing Christians were going to be destroyed in just a few years at Armageddon when they were sincerely basing their beliefs on what they thought the Bible was teaching.
All of this, of course, led to the question," How do I know we're the ones who have it all right and not the churches?" Well, the answer I fell back on was the fulfilled prophecies or predictions made by Charles Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses. He had prophesied in the late 1800s that the time of the end would begin in 1914. And sure enough, World War I, the largest war in human history up to that time, had begun in 1914.
And even secular historians recognized it as a major turning point in human history. So I felt secure in that knowledge that if God had not sent him, he would not have been able to so accurately predict such a major event. However, over the years, various householders had given me tracts, which stated that the Watchtower Organization had predicted many dates for the end, such as 1914, 1919, 1925. And yet the end didn't come in any of those years contrary to what they had predicted.
Well, as a good Jehovah's witness, I immediately assumed that these tracts were simply lying. I knew that Russell had not said that the end would come in 1914. He had only said that the time of the end would begin in 1914 and that it would end sometime within one generation of 1914. And even though I'd been a witness for so many years, I had never heard any predictions about 1919 or 1925, so I was confident that those were just lies. But then something happened that opened the door of my heart.
Since the mid-1960s, the witnesses had predicted that the end would come sometime around 1975. Now, to be sure, the Watchtower never specifically said the end would come in that year, only that it would be around that time. In fact, I had been a witness who was very quick to correct any fellow witness who stated positively that the end would come in 1975. Yet the Watchtower had purposefully created that expectation in all of us, that sometime around the year 1975, the end would come.
The talks or sermons at their conventions continually pointed all of us to 1975. We certainly all expected that the Great Tribulation would begin by then. But when 1975 finally came and went, nothing had happened. Not only had the end of the world not come, human society was much more stable than it had been during the turbulent 60s. And so I thought about all of those tracts I had seen, which had said that this sort of thing had happened before.
Now, I still didn't believe them, but for the first time since my baptism, I allowed in my heart the possibility, although ever so slight, that perhaps we could be wrong. I realized I was standing at the threshold of the rest of my life. Most Jehovah's Witnesses earn their livelihood through various building or mechanical trades, and that's just fine. Unfortunately, I'm terribly inept at most trades.
Different Jehovah's Witness brothers had tried to teach me various trades such as carpet laying, and I was just plain terrible. What I am good at is working with my mind. However, practically no one will hire you for a white-collar job unless you have a college degree, which I didn't have. So I was throwing a large newspaper route for a living. My wife Deborah and I were now 26 years old. We had a son. We got by OK with the paper route, but things were a bit tight.
Now, if Jehovah's Witnesses were really the true church, I had no problem throwing a newspaper route the rest of my life, but I didn't want to find out when I was 70 that I had done all of this for nothing. And more importantly, I didn't want to find out that I wasn't truly serving Christ after making such sacrifices in my life. So one day, I finally decided I needed to investigate Jehovah's Witnesses once and for all.
So I could either permanently put to rest all of my doubts and be a zealous Jehovah's Witness the rest of my life, or to know for a certainty that I was in the wrong place. Since I was relying on the fact of Russell's prediction about 1914 as strong evidence that Jehovah's Witnesses constituted the One True Church, and since others were saying that he was a false prophet, that was the issue where I knew I needed to begin my investigation.
Now, the witnesses have a book that explains all of their history from the time of Russell through current times. But God put it in my heart not to rely on their history book, but to go back to the original sources. That is, to the writings themselves of Charles Russell. So it was back there in 1976 that I first embarked on the journey of going back to the original sources, a practice that years later would lead me to go back to the writings of the early church.
Now, to most people's surprise, Jehovah's Witnesses no longer published the writings of Charles Russell, their founder. In fact, they haven't published them for a long, long time. And as far as I know, they're the only church or denomination in existence that doesn't publish the writings of their founder. In fact, it discourages its members from reading their founder's works. I was 26 years old, and yet I had never read as much as one page of Russell's books.
However, my wife Deborah and her mother had found copies of most of Russell's books by looking at garage sales and used bookstores. So the wonderful dowry, so to speak, that Deborah brought into our marriage was a collection of most of Russell's writings. Not that either she or I ever read them. They were something to put up on a shelf for display. But it was wonderful that we had them because now I was ready to actually read them for myself and find out the truth one way or the other.
And I was astounded at what I found. I learned that he, that is Charles Russell, had made all sorts of very specific predictions, none of which came true. What's more, to my great surprise, he had not predicted that the time of the end would begin in 1914, as I had been told. Rather, he taught that the time of the end had begun back in the late 1700s, with the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon, and that this time of the end that had begun in the late 1700s would be finished no later than October 1st, 1914.
So it was not at all true that he had correctly predicted 1914, which is what I'd been hanging my hat on at that point, because what he wrote was that the Battle of Armageddon would be fought and be over with by October 1, 1914. He predicted that the Jews would all return to Palestine and be converted to Christianity no later than October 1, 1914. He predicted that the millennial reign of Christ would begin in 1914, and none of that happened.
And all of that would have been bad enough if he had written that these were merely his own calculations and that the reader should take them with a bit of caution because he was a fallible human. No, he stated in the foreword of every one of his books that he took no personal credit for the things he was writing, but that he was simply sharing the things that God had shown him.
Not that he believed his writings were inspired in the sense of the Scriptures being inspired, but he certainly was saying in the sense of a prophet that God has shown me these things and that's what I'm revealing to other people. So even though Jehovah's witnesses never refer to Russell as a prophet, at least not these days, the fact is that he was claiming God's guidance on his writing and he did make very specific prophecies. So I was faced with overwhelming evidence of two things.
Number one, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses was a false prophet. Number two, the Watchtower Society is not honest. Their official book of their history leads the reader to believe that Russell never made any specific predictions of what would happen in 1914, except that the time of the end would begin. When, in fact, he made many very specific predictions. I've only mentioned a handful of them here.
The Watchtower Society also tells everyone that Russell predicted that the time of the end would begin in 1914, when in fact he had predicted with utmost certainty that it would end in the year 1914. So by continuing to tout 1914 as something that Russell had correctly predicted, is the height of dishonesty. Now, ever since my baptism, I had been a completely devoted Jehovah's Witness, never questioning the watchtower on anything until the few months right before I left.
But now I could see that there were some serious problems with the claims that the Watchtower Society was making about itself. To begin with, there was the problem of false prophecy. Deuteronomy gives us this test for prophets.
It says," But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die." And if you say in your heart," How shall we know the word which the Lord has not spoken?" When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not happen or come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken presumptuously. You shall not be afraid of him." Deborah and I pondered that verse a lot.
There was no doubt that Russell had spoken in God's name, and there was no doubt that what he predicted did not come to pass. Therefore, he was a false prophet. Furthermore, Jesus had warned His followers to beware of false prophets. And it was unthinkable that Jesus would tell us to beware of false prophets and then send out a false prophet as his way of warning the world of his coming return and to rebuild his church. Well, Deborah and I had no idea what to do. Jehovah's Witnesses were all that we had ever known.
And the picture that the witnesses painted of the various churches was so black that I could hardly picture myself going to one of them because at that point, I still assumed that all of the Jehovah's Witness doctrines were true. It was just their end time predictions and their claim to be Christ's one true church that were the problem. So I kept reading more in the early witness publications and praying. And I found that they had indeed predicted that the end would come in 1925, just as the tract said.
I also read through the four gospels, trying this time to read them without any watchtower blinders on. And when I did that, one of the things that really jumped out at me as I read Jesus' teaching was how little he had to say about theological doctrines. He says a lot about living as his disciple. He says a lot about an abiding relationship with him. But he says almost nothing about correct theological doctrines.
So where on earth did we get this idea that our salvation depended on having the right answers to a list of doctrinal questions? Why would we think that Jesus is going to destroy millions and millions of professing Christians because their doctrines aren't right? And again, at this point, I was still assuming the JW doctrines were correct.
Another thing that jumped out at me were Jesus' words in Matthew 7, where He said," Judge not that you be not judged, for with what judgment you judge, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you." I thought about the judgment with which we were judging others, the measure that we were using. We weren't willing to allow any mercy to professing Christians who we thought had their doctrines all wrong.
Yet I had seen from reading the early witness books that we ourselves had made numerous errors and we expected God to overlook our errors. But Jesus said that He was going to measure us the same way we measure others, and that was scary. Well, I was now giving very serious thought to leaving the witnesses, although I had no idea where I would go if I did. What clinched things for me was one night in May of 1976. I was the elder in charge of what we would know today as a midweek cell group.
We were studying a Watchtower book entitled God's Kingdom of a Thousand Years. And that particular night, we were covering the section of the book pertaining to Jesus' kingdom parables in Matthew 13. Now, most of Jesus' parables about the kingdom don't fit the JW worldview or the JW organization. So the book explained these parables away by saying that many of them applied to the counterfeit kingdom, that is, to the churches. An example would be the Watchtower explanation of the parable of the dragnet.
Jesus said His kingdom was like a dragnet that gathered some of all kinds of fish, both good and bad, and that at the end the angels would separate the wicked from among the righteous. Well, the Watchtower book we were studying explained this parable by saying that there are two dragnets, the genuine dragnet of Jehovah's people and the counterfeit dragnet of the churches. And the counterfeit dragnet pulls in all of these bad fish and the true kingdom dragnet of Jehovah's Witnesses brings in the good fish.
But that's hardly what Jesus said. He said nothing about two dragnets, and he never said anything about a counterfeit kingdom. Furthermore, he said that the good and bad would be in the dragnet together until the angels separated them at the end. Now, I had always known in my heart that if ever I was forced to choose between what the Bible teaches and what the Watchtower teaches, I would automatically choose the Scriptures. In fact, the Jehovah's Witnesses who had mentored me had instilled that in me.
Now, of course, we didn't think it was very likely that such a choice would ever have to be made. But now the choice was right in front of me. If what the Watchtower was saying was true, then what need was there for a Bible? Because no one reading Jesus' kingdom parables would ever come to such conclusions on their own. I had to choose between the Watchtower and the Bible, and my choice was the Bible. When I left the Kingdom Hall that night, I knew I would never go back.
Two nights later, I turned in my resignation as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, and Deborah followed suit several months later. My mother, who was still a Jehovah's witness, she left shortly after I did. Right after I left, I tried to show my sister and some of my close witness friends the things that I had discovered. The evidence was so plain and clear, I thought there is no way they can reject this. And it was right in the very books that the Watchtower had once printed. But do you know what happened?
Nobody, including my own sister, was willing to even look at the evidence I had. Of course, quite quickly, I was silenced by the witnesses. They practiced total shunning, so Deborah and I were shunned by all of the people we had come to love dearly. The night that I had turned in my resignation, I wasn't planning to ever attend any of the churches, believing that they were all in darkness. But the very next day, I was at our public library pouring through books about what various churches and denominations believe.
I was hoping to find a group that believed similarly to the witnesses, but I found that there is no such group. The closest church to our house was the disciples of Christ Church. So the very first Sunday after I left the witnesses, I walked up there and attended their adult Sunday school class. The people were quite friendly and they made me feel very welcome. I discovered that all one had to do in order to be a member there was to believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and to be baptized.
And I definitely believed in Jesus as my Lord and Savior, and they accepted my Jehovah's witness baptism. So I became a member and later Deborah joined me there. Although the disciples of Christ were fairly liberal and could hardly be our final destination, they did provide us with a temporary haven. That's because we still were holding on to most of our JW beliefs, and that wasn't an issue with them. More importantly, the people there showed us an enormous amount of love for which I'll always be grateful.
Meanwhile, a few months after leaving the witnesses, I enrolled in Stephen F. Austin State University here in Texas. Leaving the witnesses had left a huge hole inside of me that to some degree, college now filled. I was probably the most motivated student the university had ever had. I poured myself into my studies and won various academic honors. I obtained a scholarship to study law at Baylor University, which is where I obtained my doctorate in jurisprudence. But I was dying spiritually.
Most of the members of the disciples of Christ Church didn't believe in the inerrancy or ultimate authority of Scripture. Deborah and I needed to be in a Bible-believing church, but there wasn't the same openness in Bible-believing churches. They all had detailed doctrinal statements, and they were very dogmatic about them. Now, Deborah and I had no problem laying down everything we believed on the altar of Scripture. In fact, we were more than happy to discard any of our Jehovah's Witness beliefs.
But after the experience I had gone through as a witness, I was resolute that I would never again believe anything, unless I was thoroughly convinced that this is what the Scriptures teach. I wasn't ever going to be a blind follower again. Even worse, I quickly found that practically no one in the Bible-believing churches could accept my testimony. You couldn't have been a true Christian or born again when you were a witness was the typical response.
In fact, when we visited evangelical churches, people invariably introduced us by saying, this is David and Deborah Bercot. They used to be Jehovah's Witnesses, but now they're Christians. So what about my walk with God, my relationship with Christ, the clear answers to prayers that I experienced? Was all of that my imagination, I would ask people? And the answer I got, not in direct words, but in essence, was yes, that was your imagination. Well, over time, I eventually began to believe that myself.
Maybe all of it was my imagination. And if all of my spiritual experiences were imaginary, what reason do I have to believe that anyone else's is real? I would ask myself. So I soon became quite a skeptic, and being in college at the time certainly didn't help matters any. I came to not only doubt my own relationship that I'd had with Christ, but to eventually doubt the Bible as well. I completely abandoned my devotional life. I quit praying regularly and I quit reading my Bible.
I decided to fill my life with a career in law and earning as much money as I could. So when I graduated from law school, I took a job with a prestigious law firm in San Antonio, Texas that practiced corporate labor law. I was eager to start and I felt quite certain that I was going to find real enjoyment and fulfillment in a legal career. But it took me only two weeks to know that I could never find fulfillment in a career or with money and prestige.
I had truly been born again, and so there was nothing else that could ever fill the hole inside of me except Jesus. I could never be happy again except by rebuilding that relationship with Christ that I had neglected and to resume walking again in the Spirit as I once had. So Deborah and I visited the conservative evangelical church that one of our neighbors attended, but we ran into the exact same barriers again. Once again, we could not possibly have been born again as Jehovah's Witnesses.
What we thought was a relationship with Christ had been our imagination. So we attended for only a few weeks and then quit. I actually reached a point where I didn't really care if I lived or not, but I didn't turn to God in my despair because I felt that I had done that most of my life, and apparently it was all my imagination. Well, thankfully, Deborah did pray for me and her prayers were answered in a rather dramatic way.
One morning at seven o'clock, totally out of the blue, the president and CEO of a large brick company back in Henderson, Texas, where we had lived, called me up and invited me to move back and be their corporate attorney. Why this was rather dramatic is I had never met the man before, although I had heard of him. He was well known in our town, and I had never applied for a job at his corporation.
So we moved back to Henderson, the town in which we had lived when we left the witnesses, and we rejoined the disciples of Christ Church there that we used to attend. In fact, soon I was made a deacon. But at the very first elder deacon meeting I attended, a nasty argument erupted between some of the members there. And I was so disgusted, I eventually got up and walked out of the meeting, never to return to that church. I decided that the witnesses were right, the churches do exist in darkness.
I remember telling Deborah I would never again attend a church. However, the next Sunday, Deborah and the children went to the local evangelical Bible church, and she came back quite impressed with the sermon that morning. So we got together that week with the pastor of the Bible Church, Ron Miller and his wife, Barbara, for dinner. Now, something I didn't know until years later is that Ron and Barbara were planning to share their testimonies with us that night and get us to pray the sinner's prayer with them.
However, when they heard me pray before the meal, they both realized from my prayer that I was already born again. However, they didn't say anything about it that night. The subject in fact never came up. Well, Deborah kept attending the Bible church, and I was quite impressed at the good teaching she and the children were receiving there and that they were bringing home and telling me. It was certainly a far cry from the disciples of Christ Church we had attended.
Yet I felt quite certain that there was always going to be that barrier of my Jehovah's Witness background. Well, eventually I made an appointment to meet with the pastor Ron Miller one Saturday afternoon. I shared with him the testimony that I've related to you earlier in this message. And at the end of it, I added, and I already know what you're going to say that that was all my imagination.
Well, to my utter surprise, he replied," No, from what you've related, I would say that you were truly born again when you were Jehovah's Witness, and that you did have a living relationship with Christ." I can't tell you what an impact his words had on me. I was totally overwhelmed, could finally put my spiritual life back together again and go forward once more with Christ. And Deborah and I both feel that we owe our eternal lives to Ron and Barbara Miller and what they did for us.
And it saddens me when I think that for five years, I had struggled and nearly lost my faith altogether simply because my conversion didn't fit the nice tidy box that people try to put God in. And I'm here to tell you that there is no barrier that human organizations can set up that will prevent the Holy Spirit from going in there and reaching a person who is truly seeking God. At the same time, I do think that God's Spirit will also lead someone to come out of an organization like Jehovah's Witnesses.
Well, although a new page had now been turned in my spiritual journey, the struggles weren't over yet. Ron and Barbara were able to accept Deborah and I where we were, as were most of the congregation at the Bible Church. But not everyone was able to accept us. And we soon found that with many people, it was better not to ever bring up our Jehovah's Witness background. Unfortunately, many of the members of the congregation didn't like Ron's openness, and they eventually forced him out as a pastor.
I don't mean his openness towards Deborah and I, but just on other issues as well. The pastor who replaced him at the Bible church was certainly a nice enough man, but he had a hard time thinking outside of a tight, fundamentalist box. And Deborah and I were still trying to contend with a number of doctrinal issues. Over the years, we had come to see that many of our JW beliefs were wrong and we had dropped them.
But as I've said, I wasn't about to believe anything unless someone could convince me from the Scriptures that it was so. And many times I found myself sitting in church, feeling like I was back at that last meeting I had at the Kingdom Hall. That is what the Scripture seemed to be plainly saying was totally different from what the pastor was preaching. Probably the most notable example of that was on the doctrine of eternal security.
The pastor and most of our Sunday school literature explained away scripture after scripture to try to defend that doctrine. And Deborah and I were still struggling with the Trinity. Now, we had no problem giving mental assent to the term and say, yes, we believe in the Trinity, but we hardly understood the doctrine. And the way it was explained to us seemed to contradict clear passages of the New Testament.
Actually, about a week after I had left the witnesses back in 1976, I had invited over to our house, a local Presbyterian pastor, for the specific purpose to explain the Trinity to Deborah and me. I wanted to believe it, but none of the explanations that had been given to me back when I had been a witness ever seemed to make sense, nor did they seem to fit the Scriptures. So this pastor said he would be glad to come over and explain the Trinity to us.
Well, his explanation was this:" Now, David, you're a father, aren't you?"" Yes," I replied." But you're also a son, aren't you?"" Yes."" Well, you see, it's the same way with God," he explained." He is the Father and He's also the Son." Well, I thanked him for his explanation, but as he left, I was thinking to myself, it doesn't make any sense at all. I may be both a father and a son, but I'm not my own father, and I'm not my own son.
Furthermore, the Scriptures seem quite clear that the Father and the Son are two different persons. Well, another minister explained the Trinity to me saying that it's like an egg. In an egg, he said, you have the shell, the yolk, and the white, and these three make up one egg. It's the same way in the Trinity. Well, that was understandable enough, but where does the Bible teach any such thing?
In fact, I realize now that in all of the years when I was a Jehovah's Witness, and during all of the years I attended the disciples of Christ and the Bible church, I had never once been given an Orthodox presentation of the Trinity. The church councils would have condemned every one of the explanations that were given to Deborah and me, and they would have condemned the Jehovah's witness view as well.
Well, at this point in my story, I think I should clear up a misconception that most Christians have about Jehovah's Witnesses. They think Jehovah's Witnesses believe that Jesus was just a man or simply an angel. But that's not at all what the Watchtower teaches. Now, it's true that Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the Archangel Michael is actually our risen Lord. But they don't believe that Jesus is simply the Archangel Michael.
To illustrate the difference, most evangelicals believe that the angel of the Lord in the book of Exodus is really the pre-incarnate Son of God. And Jehovah's witnesses believe that too. But evangelicals don't believe that the Son of God is simply the angel of the Lord. Well, it's the same way with the witnesses. They believe that Michael is really Jesus Christ, but they don't believe that Jesus Christ is nothing more than Michael the archangel.
When I was a witness, I knew Jesus as the divine Son of God, as my Savior, as my Lord, and as my Creator. However, although I believed in the deity of Christ, I, like all other Jehovah's Witnesses, did have an erroneous concept of his divinity. The two errors that I held to when I was Jehovah's Witness were, one, I had no clear understanding in my mind between the words begetting and creating or making as it applies to the Son of God.
I knew that Jesus was the exact image of the Father, but I would not have been comfortable saying that He was of the same substance as the Father, because I didn't understand what that term meant. And it's, again, not a biblical term. The second error that I, along with other Jehovah's Witnesses, held to, was that I didn't realize that the Son of God existed as the eternal Word or Logos of God before His begetting, or I didn't understand that His begetting was in eternity.
I assumed it was like the beginning of any other son at a point in time or at a point actually before time began. But the issue wasn't so much the correctness of the doctrine of the Trinity, assuming that the doctrine of the Trinity was an Orthodox part of the Christian faith. What disturbed me was this concept of what I call doctrinal regeneration, that God's grace will cover virtually every kind of sin, but it won't cover someone's sincere misunderstanding of the Scriptures. I have a problem with that.
We sing just as I am, and we believe it as to every sort of carnal sin imaginable. But we don't believe it when it comes to doctrinal sin. As I've mentioned, that was one of the issues that caused me to leave the witnesses. And here I was seeing the exact same thing in the evangelical churches, only now it was on the flip side. And I would ask people, what is it that Jesus said that makes you think that He won't forgive someone who sincerely misunderstands His divinity?
And no one could ever show me anything that Jesus said to that effect, but they were still just as dogmatic as ever that God's grace won't cover that kind of sin, which has always struck me as odd.
Even if you want to call my former views blasphemous, Jesus specifically said," Every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, except blasphemy against the Holy Spirit." He also said," Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him." But please understand, I'm not one of these persons who says it doesn't matter what you believe or whatever you believe is OK. I'm not the least bit liberal, but I am open.
If I didn't think doctrine was important, I wouldn't have spent so much of my life, both in trying to come to a correct understanding of the historic faith and in publishing so many works that try to explain that faith to other Christians. What I don't hold to, however, is doctrinal regeneration, that somehow doctrine is what the new birth is all about, or that God will withhold the new birth from someone who doesn't correctly grasp some of the more difficult things of the Christian faith to understand.
As most of you know, I come down pretty hard on doctrine that I'm convinced is quite false, but I try to always make a distinction between condemning a false doctrine and judging the person who may hold to that doctrine with all sincerity and is honestly trying to understand the Scriptures correctly. And I am very firmly convinced that the essence of Christianity is relationship, relationship with Jesus Christ, not doctrine. Doctrine is important, but is not the essence of Christianity.
Well, I knew I couldn't go on the rest of my life this way, being in an evangelical church, but not quite fitting in, being in a spiritual no man's land. Then one day, something happened that showed me the way out of this no man's land. I was speaking about Jehovah's Witnesses on a talk show on our local Christian radio station. What I was saying wasn't particularly favorable to Jehovah's witnesses, and the moderator and I were both on the same side.
But somewhere in the conversation, the moderator made the comment to the listening audience. We don't mean to pick on Jehovah's Witnesses, but the truth is they have departed from historic Christianity. Historic Christianity, that phrase really caught my attention. Of course, that was the way out of my spiritual no man's land, turning back to historic Christianity. I realized that this was a mistake that Charles Russell, the founder of the witnesses, had made.
Instead of accepting the historic faith, he had arrogated himself into believing that he better understood the Bible than the composite of all Christians who had lived before him. Maybe I was doing the same thing, I thought to myself, insisting that I had to be convinced from Scripture, perhaps I too was arrogating myself above all who had lived before me. Shortly after that, I was talking to our pastor about eternal security.
The few verses he was able to produce on behalf of Eternal Security seemed to be totally drowned out by a tidal wave of verses that taught the opposite. And I pointed this out to him. But he told me, yes, I see what you're saying, but how I'm explaining these verses to you is how the church has historically understood these passages. Now this was the second time I had heard this same thought. We should accept what the church has historically taught on various doctrines instead of inventing our own.
So I resolved then and there that I was going to find out what Christians had historically believed about eternal security, the Trinity, and a number of other doctrines. But following the same pattern I used when I was investigating Jehovah's Witnesses, I wasn't going to take anyone's word for it, what the historical faith was. No, I was going to go back to the original sources and read them for myself.
I wanted to know how the Christians who lived just after the close of the New Testament, how they understood passages such as John 1:1 and these various passages quoted on behalf of eternal security. And I further resolved that I was going to embrace the historic faith once I discovered what it was, regardless of how well it fit or didn't fit my own beliefs up to that time.
So in January of 1985, I purchased a set of the Ante-Nicene fathers and I spent every spare minute of that year reading them, reading all of them. Well, right off the bat, I saw that the early Christians did not teach eternal security. They clearly understood the scriptures the same way I did. So that was encouraging. On the other hand, I also saw that they clearly believed in the Trinity. But what was exciting was that their explanation of the Trinity was quite understandable.
And their explanation didn't have all of the problem verses that both Jehovah's Witnesses have and that the Trinity models presented to me had. So now I had no problem not merely giving mental assent to the Trinity, but embracing it with all my heart. But the biggest shocker was that the historic faith differed from both Jehovah's Witnesses and evangelicals in many, many areas. I had not at all expected to find that. And at first I had a hard time dealing with it.
But when I went back and read the New Testament, I suddenly saw that essentially everything the early Christians believed was right there in the Scriptures. Furthermore, what they believed was invariably the most literal natural meaning of the Scriptures. What's more, there were no problem verses with their teachings. The historic faith embraced the totality of the New Testament. It didn't depend on a list of proof texts, and it didn't require explaining away a lot of scriptures.
It's really hard to describe how excited I was when I saw all of this. I wasn't going to have to spend the rest of my life in a spiritual no man's land. I now knew for myself what the historic faith was, and I saw that it exactly fit the Scriptures. I would never again have to choose between what the Scriptures say and what church authority said, because the earliest authority fit the Scriptures perfectly. Well, I was so excited I naturally wanted to tell everyone what I had discovered.
But although I certainly found some listeners, the response wasn't that different than the response I had received back when I was a JW and I had tried to show them what I had found about their early history. Sadly, evangelical Christians changed their tune really fast. When I had been struggling with my JW doctrines, they had touted the historic faith. We need to stick to historic Christianity.
But now that I had discovered the historic faith for myself and had conclusive evidence for it, oh, well, now suddenly the historic faith wasn't that important. Well, you can't go by what those men said people would say. Or, well, you know, the apostasy had already come in before the apostles died. So no doubt the church went apostate immediately after their death. What? That's what Jehovah's Witnesses teach. And everyone had laughed at that notion when it was the witnesses rejecting the historic faith.
But now when evangelicals were face to face with the same historic faith and it didn't fit their paradigm either, they now took the same stance as Jehovah's witnesses. And this was truly shocking to me. But one thing for which I was glad was this, that because I had gone through such a great spiritual upheaval in leaving the witnesses and trying to fit into a conventional church, it had made it easy for me to lay down everything and embrace the historic faith. I really didn't have anything I had to defend.
In other words, what seemed like a spiritual cross for so long actually ended up being an immense spiritual blessing. Well, at first, when I saw that my fellow Christians weren't willing to even look at the evidence I was trying to show them, I thought I would just quit talking about it. The early Christian writings had enabled Deborah and me to clear out any wrong doctrines to which we were still holding. If others didn't want to know what the faith was, fine. At least my family and I did know.
However, some of my Christian friends encouraged me to write a book about what I had found. Well, at first I just laughed off their suggestion. But then I got to thinking, you know, they're right. I can't possibly go to my grave having seen all of this and not telling anyone else. No, I've got to get this message out. And if it's something God wants out, he will open the doors to help me do it. And that's what led to my writing. Will the real heretics please stand up in 1989? And indeed, God has opened the doors.
By way of an epilogue, I want to say that in the years following 1989, I thought about whether or not I should be rebaptized. I felt fairly certain about the reality of my new birth and God's acceptance of my baptism back when I was a witness. On the other hand, with something as important as baptism in the new birth, a person hardly wants to take any chances. After all, when I was baptized, I certainly did have a wrong understanding of the Trinity and of baptism as well.
So in 1992, I spent several days in prayer confessing my sins before God and resubmitting my life to Him. I was then baptized anew. And I feel I did the right thing in making sure of my baptism. However, the witness of the Spirit in my heart has been quite clear since then that God had accepted my original baptism. This god of love and His mercy had seen a 14-year-old boy who wanted to surrender his life to the Father and to Jesus His Son.
And this loving God had accepted me into His family and had given me a new birth, not because I deserved it, but because of His grace.