Today's question deals with a common situation for a lot of us. Jehovah Witnesses, ring your doorbell and you answer it. Pastor John, what will you say? Well I've developed an approach that might not be for everybody, and it depends on whether you have time to talk deeply and extensively.

If you feel like this is not the time to get into an argument, here's what I've done. And we used to get a lot more at our front door here in this neighborhood than we have recently. Maybe they put me on a blacklist or something. But if they would come to the door, and they always come in twos, I would say as gently and graciously as I could, you know, I know Jehovah's Witness theology enough to know that we have deep differences.

I know that you believe Jesus is the highest created being, a created angel, Michael, and you do not believe that he is God, that he is of one essence with Jehovah. You think he's an angel. I believe he is co-eternal with Jehovah God, and therefore I think your religion is a serious dishonoring of the Lord Jesus, and leads people astray from a true relationship with God.

And so what I'd like to do with you right now—I'm saying this right here on the porch—is pray. And I'm willing to let you pray, and I'll pray, and we'll both ask that God would show us what's true in his Word, the true way to understand the Bible, the true way to honor Jesus.

Would you want to pray with me? They have never agreed to pray with me. They have just left at that point. So I'm not sure what's behind that, but that's my approach, is to set up the disagreement, explain it clearly, offer to pray, and they've never accepted. Now I'd say one other thing.

That doesn't enter you into a dialogue very well, and I think there is a place for serious witnessing and extended time with Jehovah's Witnesses, and therefore if it goes to that—and I've sat in my living room for hours with folks from the Jehovah's Witnesses, and the direction I go is twofold.

One, I show them from the Scriptures that I do believe Jesus Christ is vastly, infinitely more than a created being. And I'd go to John 1, "In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God." And I know what they're gonna do at that point is get out their New World Translation and say, "No, no, it doesn't really say that." And I would say, "But look at the next verse.

He was in the beginning with God, all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made." So I think that is worded explicitly to exclude the fact that he was made. He is the maker, not the made, and they believe he was made.

So even with their New World Translation, I don't think it works. And at the end of the Gospel, Thomas says, "My Lord and my God," and all through the Gospel of John, Jesus is presented as the divine one who existed before Abraham. And then you go to the Gospel of Luke, and you have the Virgin birth, and Elizabeth saying to Mary when she sews up with Jesus in her womb, "Why is it that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" And in the very next two verses, she refers to God as her Lord.

And so you have Luke testifying this way, and then you have Paul, "For in him all the fullness of deity was pleased to dwell," in Colossians 119, and "For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily," Colossians 2.9. So that's my first take. Go to the Trinity and argue from the Bible for the deity of Jesus.

And then the last thing is, when you deny the deity of Christ, when you diminish who it was who died on the cross, you almost inevitably change the doctrine of the Atonement. And they do. Justification by faith alone falls apart in the Jehovah's Witness theology, and law begins to creep in, and works begin to take their place alongside faith as the ground, because, I think in root, because the Atonement just isn't great enough, because the Christ isn't great enough who died for us, and so you're going to get a kind of works religion with the Jehovah's Witness that I think undermines the gospel.

Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Please email your questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. At DesiringGod.org you'll find thousands of other free resources from John Piper. I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.