Colossians 1:6
Colossians 1:66that has come to you. All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and truly understood the grace of God.
The Watchtower teaches that and — "the earth will be full of the knowledge of Jehovah as the waters cover the sea" — apply only to the future paradise after Armageddon, not to the present age. On that reading, — where Paul says the gospel "is bearing fruit and increasing in all the world" — does not carry the prophetic weight it looks like it carries.
Paul's own language is difficult to reconcile with "zero fulfilment yet." He writes that the good news "is bearing fruit and increasing in all the world, just as it has been doing among you also from the day you heard and accurately knew the undeserved kindness of God in truth." The present active tense is emphatic — it is bearing fruit, it is increasing, right now, in all the world. A few verses later in the same chapter Paul says the gospel has been "preached in all creation under heaven" (). The apostles understood the great commission as already fulfilling the prophetic promise that the earth would be filled with the knowledge of Jehovah. The imagery of waters covering the sea is gradual — a tide rising, not a thunderclap. From twelve disciples () to Paul's first- century claim of global reach, and from there to the present-day translation of Scripture into over a thousand languages, the trajectory matches the prophecy. The waters are rising.