the “day of vengeance of our God,” and therefore the coming destruction of this world and of all those who remain a part of this world. So we stink to these world-lovers. To them we are pestilential, we are death-dealing, we ought to be buried out of sight, out of smelling and out of hearing. This message of Jehovah’s universal sovereignty and of his new world and of the destruction of this old world is an offense to them and puts us in bad odor with them. We give them no promise of life in the eternal future.

40, 41. How do such offended ones act, and with what effect?

⁴⁰ Jehovah, who put Christ in Kingdom power, has become a great Stumbling Stone and an offensive Rock to these. They try to remove the stumbling stone and to overturn the offensive rock by their worldly schemes of conspiracy against Jehovah God and his reigning Christ. In harmony with this they try to silence the Kingdom message proclaimed by Jehovah’s witnesses so foul-smelling to them. They may remove the name of Jehovah from translations of the Hebrew Scriptures of the Bible, but they cannot remove Jehovah the Rock from his position of Universal Sovereign. Hence they will be squashed flatter than a pancake by that great Stone at Armageddon.

⁴¹ Just as they can never remove the great Rock from his royal sovereignty over this earth, so they have not been able and never will be able to silence the Kingdom message and destroy its preachers. Till now they have had to smell Jehovah’s witnesses, and they will have to keep on smelling us, until their own noses are mashed in at the coming day of the ‘war of God the Almighty’ at Armageddon. (Rev. 16:14-16, NW; Matt. 21:42-44) It is Jehovah the almighty Unconquerable that leads us, and it is in his triumphal procession that he leads us in company with his King of kings and Lord of lords, the winning King and the winning Lord. The message of Jehovah’s kingdom by Christ has already gained grand triumphs throughout the earth because He backs up and blesses the preaching of this “good news” by his witnesses in all the inhabited earth. It will continue to triumph under his protection and guidance of us until Armageddon, when his own triumphant act of vindication will cause all the earth’s atmosphere to be permeated with the sweet, life-giving odor of the knowledge of God for every praiser of Jehovah that then breathes.—Hab. 2:14, AS.

Oh, for a Fragment of Faith!

In Kirkcaldy, Scotland, a pioneer witness of Jehovah was having a Bible study with a young lady who was interested in the name “Jehovah.” The witness determined to procure a copy of the Scriptures in Hebrew so that she could show her the tetragrammaton in its original form. She felt that the person most likely to have a copy would be a clergyman; so she visited one in the town. After listening with interest to her reason for wanting the book he willingly loaned her a copy. Then he said that if his, or any other church in town, could boast of having one, yes one, Bible student with a fragment of the faith displayed by every one of Jehovah’s witnesses, they might be hopeful of being on the right pathway. He confessed that the churches were in a hopeless darkness and that he had spoken openly to other clergymen about the manifest faith of Jehovah’s witnesses at a time when God’s true witnesses should be expected to display such outstanding faith. The Bible gives this reply: “Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.”—Prov. 29:18.