1 John 2:28
1 John 2:2828And now, little children, remain in Christ, so that when He appears, we may be confident and unashamed before Him at His coming.
JW commentary on reads "remain in union with him" as organisational loyalty — staying connected to Jehovah's arrangement through faithful association with the congregation. The mystical-indwelling theology of John's letters (the believer in Christ and Christ in the believer, with the Father and Son taking up residence in the obedient) is reframed into a cooperative alliance between a creature and his sovereign. The Watchtower's parousia framing also reads "his presence" in a technical sense — Jesus's invisible presence beginning in 1914 rather than his future visible coming.
Read with ("abide in me, and I in you") and ("that they all may be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us"). John's abiding-in-Christ language describes the believer's mystical union with the Son, paralleling and grounded in the eternal union of Father and Son. This is union, not alliance — the believer is incorporated into Christ, indwelt by him, and thereby brought into fellowship with the Father. Pair with ("everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born from God") and ("we are now children of God") — John writes to the entire believing community without the JW class distinction. The Watchtower's reservation of "child of God" status to 144,000 anointed and "abide in him" to organisational loyalty contradicts the universalising language John uses throughout the letter.
The NWT renders en autōi as "in union with him" rather than the standard "in him." The expansion is a systematic NWT pattern applied to nearly every Johannine and Pauline "in Christ" or "in him" formulation (compare John 15, Ephesians 1, Colossians 3). Standard English translations preserve "in him" because the locative-mystical force of the Greek preposition is the theological point — believers are incorporated into Christ, and Christ into believers, with the indwelling Holy Spirit as the bond. The "in union with him" rendering recasts the relationship as a cooperative alliance between two distinct parties rather than as a real ontological union, blunting the Johannine theology of mutual indwelling. The NWT also renders parousia as "presence" rather than "coming" — load-bearing for the JW doctrine of an invisible 1914 parousia.