Matthew 12:28
Matthew 12:2828But if I drive out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.
The Watchtower reads as Jesus's foretaste of the Kingdom that would later be established in heaven in 1914 — his exorcisms during his ministry are read as small-scale displays of Kingdom power, not as the Kingdom itself arriving. The perfect-tense ephthasen ("has come upon") is reframed as "has drawn near" rather than as describing a present-tense inauguration.
Take Jesus's verb seriously. Ephthasen is a strong perfect of arrival — "has come upon you" — and Jesus is making a consequential argument: he is casting out demons, demonstrably, and his exorcisms prove that the Kingdom has actually arrived in him. He is not previewing a future Kingdom; he is demonstrating that the King is here. Pair with (binding the strong man), ("the Kingdom of God has come near"), ("the Kingdom of God is in your midst"), and (the stone that struck the image and grew into a mountain). The Kingdom is not waiting for an invisible 1914 founding; it broke into history at Christ's first advent and has been growing ever since. The Watchtower needs an empty period between Christ's ascension and 1914 to make its chronology work; the New Testament does not allow it.
The NWT renders the clause "by means of God's spirit" rather than the standard "by the Spirit of God." Two doctrinally loaded choices: lower-cased "spirit" (depersonalisation, consistent with the JW doctrine of the Spirit as an active force rather than a person) and "by means of" (instrumental framing, recasting the Spirit as a tool used by God rather than as the divine agent acting in concert with the Son). Standard English translations preserve "by the Spirit of God" because the Spirit is the personal agent doing the casting-out in cooperation with the Son's authority — Trinitarian work the NWT systematically softens.