Revelation 18:4
Revelation 18:44Then I heard another voice from heaven say: “Come out of her, My people, so that you will not share in her sins or contract any of her plagues.
is the Watchtower's evangelistic charter. "Get out of her, my people" is read as the call to leave Christendom — "Babylon the Great" — and join Jehovah's organisation as the true church of the last days. The verse drives door-to-door recruitment and is one of the most-cited evangelism texts in Watchtower literature.
The call to "come out" echoes — "come out of her, my people" — which originally meant fleeing the literal city of Babylon before its destruction. It also echoes and . In every Old Testament use, God's people are leaving a city and political-economic system, not a religion. Revelation 18 keeps the imagery: chapter 18 mourns merchants, sea captains, and lost trade — commercial categories, not ecclesiastical ones. The call is to separate from a corrupt imperial-economic system, not to migrate from one religion to another. The Watchtower's reading converts a political-economic exodus into a denominational one.
The NWT renders the imperative with a colloquial "Get out of her" rather than the consensus "Come out of her" (ESV/NASB/NIV/ KJV). Mild stylistic divergence. More notable: the conditional "if you do not want to share" softens the Greek hina mē ("so that you may not"), which consensus translates as "lest you take part in her sins." The Greek is a purpose clause, not a conditional preference.