Luke 17:21
Luke 17:2121Nor will people say, ‘Look, here it is,’ or ‘There it is.’ For you see, the kingdom of God is in your midst.”
The Watchtower acknowledges that the Kingdom of God was "in the midst" of Jesus's hearers in the sense that the King himself stood among them, but argues that the actual Kingdom government was not established until 1914. The verse is rarely cited in JW publications because its plain meaning — that the Kingdom was already a present reality during Christ's earthly ministry — sits uncomfortably with the framework that puts the Kingdom's founding nearly nineteen centuries later.
Pair with ("the Kingdom of God has come near") and (the stone that struck the image and grew into a mountain that filled the earth). The Kingdom is not waiting for an invisible founding date — it broke into history at Christ's first advent and has been growing ever since. The Witness's instinct that Jesus's contemporaries did not yet experience the Kingdom in its consummated form is right; the Witness's conclusion that nothing Kingdom-related happened until 1914 is wrong. Inaugurated eschatology — the Kingdom is here in seed form, not yet here in full — fits the parables of mustard seed and leaven and the trajectory Daniel describes. The Watchtower needs an empty millennium between Christ's ascension and 1914 to make the chronology work; the New Testament does not allow it.