But as I also brought up earlier, this is not how Jehovah operates within the new covenant which is understood to be a better covenant.
... no, which is
said to be a better covenant.
You have to be careful, JST, with statements like the above - the 'better' in the church is subjective, based on what we're taught.
... I'm explaining this poorly. And.. something tells me you haven't read
Candide, so the absolute best example I can give you is off the table. Let me try a sort of anecdotal parable fable thing:
Imagine, if you will, a child born to parents who are addicted to meth. They love their child very much, but they don't have any money and they're very unreliable. The child spends its formative years in a home where food comes at irregular times, bathing and clothing comes only when the parents remember it, and things like toys or 'routine' are nonexistent. However, life isn't wholly bad: the parents
do love their child, the child has brothers and sisters who assist with the varagries of their life, and, all in all, to that child, life seems good.
Their father tells them stories about times before they were born; "it was awful," he says, "we couldn't keep the lights on, the cops were in the building every week - I'm glad we moved to this trailer. It's so much better!" The children, having never experienced anything but the trailer, will grow up considering the time before the trailer 'the bad times', and, should they never see an alternative, will view their current life as 'the good times'.
This is similar to the idea of the 'new covenant' - the 'old covenant' was bad, or insufficient, or failing. It had to be, right? Why else would there be need for a new one? In this new one, things are so much better! God no longer requires messy sacrifices of living creatures, he no longer cares what we eat, women aren't even unclean anymore! (well, over time - we grew into that, I think). But, to those of us
outside, not part of this covenant, it doesn't look much better: you are now fractured almost priest by priest, each one teaching a different brand of intolerance right alongside the words that say 'and love everybody'. Hypocracy and immorality run rampant through the faith. Apologetics are used not to clarify, but to justify - and actions that remove freedom, encourage a sort of mental slavery, and promote ignorance are the things being justified.
This 'new covenant' is two thousand years old, and its fruit is painfully obvious.
For you, it seems to make sense - you, like many of us were, have been raised with these ideas, and you've heard (and bought into) the justifications. But.. to us, these covenants aren't 'understood to be better'. Just... different. Perhaps even worse; Judiasm is fractured, yes, but the amount of fracturing doesn't even begin to approach the amazing shattering of the Christian faith following Martin Luthor. What you think every christian believes? It's not. It's just.. not. Every single tenet of the faith I can think of (save a very small handful - maybe five or so) is in dispute.
Your church insulates you with these concepts. It isn't good, it isn't bad - it just is; your faith is unchallenged by the people who teach it to you. Phrases like that are evidence of it.
Your church today would not have lynched those men from the picture earlier in this thread - but good, churchgoing Christians did, and felt justified in doing so... and were affirmed in it by their pastors.
When I was young, a man named David Duke ran for governor of the state of Louisiana. Let me quote him to you: "I don't call myself a white supremacist. I'm a civil rights activist concerned about European-American rights." This man was endorsed by a good half-dozen church denominations in the state, including the Catholic lobby.
Would your church have endorsed him? Are the thousands that voted for this man, the white supremacist organizations that backed him under a cross - are they not Christian? How can you say they're not? They certainly wouldn't say
you are.
Do you begin to see what we do?
