Hebrews 11:3
Hebrews 11:33By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.
is read by JWs as a generic creation-by-word affirmation. The Watchtower's eschatological framework needs the NWT's "systems of things" rendering here and elsewhere, because it supports the teaching that the current world order is a "system of things" that will be replaced at Armageddon by a new "system of things" under the Kingdom. thus becomes a creation text that reinforces the distinctively JW world-system vocabulary.
's "by faith we perceive" establishes faith as the mode by which creation itself is understood — Christian cosmology is received as revelation, not derived from empirical observation. Pair with , where the Son is the one through whom the same "ages" were made. Creation is Trinitarian: the Father speaks the world into being through the Son. The verse's theological weight is Christological, not eschatological — which is exactly why the NWT's distinctive "system of things" rendering matters: it quietly redirects the cosmic scope of aion into a replaceable social order.
The NWT renders aionas (plural of aion) as "systems of things" at and across its 40+ occurrences in the NT (, , and throughout). Greek lexicons (BDAG, Thayer, Liddell-Scott) give aion the range "age, era, eternity, world, universe" — no lexicon lists "system of things." The Watchtower's own Kingdom Interlinear renders aionas as "ages" in its literal column, contradicting the NWT main text. The distinctive rendering supports the Watchtower's eschatological vocabulary (the "present system of things" ending at Armageddon) while quietly narrowing 's Christological scope from "Son through whom the ages/cosmos were made" to "Son through whom a replaceable social arrangement was made."