John 5:24
John 5:2424Truly, truly, I tell you, whoever hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life and will not come under judgment. Indeed, he has crossed over from death to life.
The Watchtower teaches that no one can be certain of salvation until they have proved faithful to the end; claiming present possession of eternal life is treated as presumption (Watchtower, 15 Jul 2011, pp. 9-10). The NWT preserves Jesus' own wording — "has everlasting life... has passed over from death to life" — but members are counselled that this only becomes true after a lifetime of faithful endurance and obedience to the Governing Body. A living Witness is not permitted to say it about themselves today.
Jesus' own words in the NWT read: "he that hears my word and believes him that sent me has everlasting life, and he does not come into judgment but has passed over from death to life." Three tense markers are decisive. "Has" is present indicative — eternal life is a current possession, not a deferred reward. "Has passed over" is the perfect tense of metabainō (metabebēken) — a completed action with a permanent standing result. And "does not come into judgment" is an emphatic denial of future condemnation. Paired with ("that you may know that you have everlasting life"), establishes that assurance is not presumption but obedience to God's explicit instruction. The argument lands with unusual pastoral force, because most JWs will quietly admit they cannot say they have eternal life — and then Jesus, in their own Bible, tells them they can. If God wrote so you could know, and your organisation tells you that you cannot know, one of them is contradicting the other, and it is not God. See assurance-of-salvation and imputed-righteousness.