Isaiah 6:10
Isaiah 6:1010Make the hearts of this people calloused; deafen their ears and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.”
Like 6:9, the JW reading treats this verse as a description of rejection — God's word hardens those who refuse it. The verse is used to comfort Witnesses encountering opposition in their ministry. The decisive New Testament use of the verse — five times across the Gospels, John, and Acts — is largely unaddressed because each NT use is tied to the rejection of Jesus, not to any successor body's reception.
is the most-quoted Old Testament passage in the New Testament. Jesus quotes it (, , ); John quotes it (); Paul quotes it as the closing word of Acts (). Its New Testament use is uniformly about Israel's rejection of Jesus as Messiah — and supplies the inspired commentary: "Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke about him." The same prophetic vision that produced 6:10 produced 6:1-5, and John identifies the throne-room figure as Jesus. The doorstep form: "Even your jw.org footnote on links back to — the Watchtower itself connects the two passages. The question is what John says they connect to: he says the glory Isaiah saw was Jesus's."