Daniel 2:35
Daniel 2:3535Then the iron, clay, bronze, silver, and gold were shattered and became like chaff on the threshing floor in summer. The wind carried them away, and not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that had struck the statue became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.
The stone "became a large mountain and filled the entire earth" is read by the Watchtower as strictly future — the paradise earth under millennial rule after Armageddon has removed all human governments. The earth-filling cannot apply to the present age because, on the JW reading, the present age is Satan's world system.
The verb "became" is the point. The stone does not fall as a mountain; it grows into one. That is exactly the imagery Jesus chose for the Kingdom — mustard seed, leaven, sowing, patient harvest. Paul tells the Colossians the gospel "is bearing fruit and increasing in all the world" ( NWT) and has been "preached in all creation under heaven" (). From twelve men in Palestine to a third of the earth's population today, from the abolition of slavery and temple prostitution to the spread of hospitals and literacy, the trajectory matches Daniel's imagery: a stone becoming a mountain. Pair this with and — "the earth will be filled with the knowledge of Jehovah as the waters cover the sea." Waters covering the sea is a gradual picture, a tide rising. The Watchtower's "zero fulfilment until Armageddon" model cannot hold the imagery the prophets themselves chose.