Our Sovereign God is a God of order. He has given a prescribed way in which He is to be worshipped. He will not accept any other way. Think back to Genesis 4 when it was time to bring the sacrifice before God. Abel offered the prescribed sacrifice of the lamb. His sacrifice was accepted. Cain, on the other hand, offered another sacrifice…the works of his hands. God did not accept his sacrifice. I have no doubt that God showed Adam what was required when He sacrificed an animal after Adam and Eve had sinned. It was the blood of that sacrifice that covered their sins and they were clothed by the skins of that animal.
That event pointed Adam and his family to Christ who would one day lay down His life as a sacrifice. I believe that at least once a year Adam sacrificed a lamb to cover his sins and he taught his sons to do the same. Abel believed. Cain did not. Cain offered a strange sacrifice which was not accepted by God.
Years later when God was instructing Moses in the building of the Tabernacle and how the service of God was to be performed, He made it very clear the way He wanted things to be done. In Exodus 30 God prescribes the way in which incense was to be burned and when and what type of incense to use. Notice what God tells Moses in verse 9 concerning the Altar of Incense…
Exodus 30:9 Ye shall offer no strange incense thereon, nor burnt sacrifice, nor meat offering; neither shall ye pour drink offering thereon.
What does the word “strange” mean? What was God telling us here? I grabbed my trusty Stong’s Exhaustive Concordance and looked up the word “strange.” In Exodus 30:9 the English word “strange” is transliterated from the Hebrew word “zuwr.” Strong’s reference 2114 zuwr zoor a primitive root; to turn aside (especially for lodging); hence to be a foreigner, strange, profane; specifically (active participle) to commit adultery:--(come from) another (man, place), fanner, go away, (e-)strange(-r, thing, woman).
Specifically in this verse the word means: Opposed to that which is upright, true, and lawful, strange is the same as unlawful, strange fire, unlawful or profane fire, as opposed to Holy fire. The understanding is God told Moses exactly what kind of incense to use and how to burn it and when.
Is our God pleased when any other method is used to worship Him? What happened when the sons of Aaron, knowing what God prescribed, offered a strange fire unto God?
Leviticus 10:1-2
1 And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire before the LORD, which he commanded them not.
2 And there went out fire from the LORD, and devoured them, and they died before the LORD.
Scripture is clear that God is serious when it comes to how we worship and honor Him. Consider in the New Testament the Church at Corinth. This was a called out group of men, women and children that had repented of their sins and believed on the Lord Jesus Christ. Yet, like us, they had sin.
In 1 Corinthians 11:18 we see that they were not observing the Lord’s Supper as was prescribed by our Lord Jesus Christ who instituted it during the Passover. It appears that many were observing it in a profane and unlawful way. Some were getting drunk and some were starving. This was not a meal to be eaten as if a party was going on. It was to be a solemn occasion in which the participants remembered what Christ did on their behalf on Calvary and how He rose again from the dead sealing their redemption.
What happened to those who were taking the Lord’s Supper in a “strange” way?
1 Corinthians 11:27-30
27 Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.
28 But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup.
29 For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.
30 For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.
Many Christians were weak and sick and many died because they did not keep the Lord’s Supper in the manner prescribed by God.
Consider the way in which we honor God and worship Him. Are we guilty of offering the sacrifice of a strange fire before God? Think about what God told Moses concerning how the children of Israel were to worship Him when they came into the Promised Land.
Deuteronomy 12:29-32
29 When the LORD thy God shall cut off the nations from before thee, whither thou goest to possess them, and thou succeedest them, and dwellest in their land;
30 Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them, after that they be destroyed from before thee; and that thou inquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise.
31 Thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God: for every abomination to the LORD, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the fire to their gods.
Israel was not to observe the heathen, pagan people who lived in the land before them to see how they worshiped their gods so they could worship the one true God the same way. God specifically told them not to worship Him in the same way. Are Christians today guilty of doing that very thing?
Jeremiah 10:1-3
1 Hear ye the word which the LORD speaketh unto you, O house of Israel:
2 Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them.
3 For the customs of the people are vain:
Are we guilty of learning the way of the heathen? Their customs are vain! Before I go on, some will say that this is only for Israel. Let me address that. According to Romans 11:13-21, Israel was cut off for a short season so the Gentiles (church) could be grafted into the Vine (Jesus Christ). These Old Testament verses are applicable to the church today.
We are not to learn the way of the heathen. We are not to see how the pagans worshipped their gods and incorporate their practices into our worship of God. Yet, a vast majority of Christians have done just that. It may not have been intentional, but many are guilty just the same. The guilt may lay squarely on the shoulders of their parents who never taught them. Generations of believers blindly observe and celebrate Easter simply because of traditions passed on through the years. Many blindly follow the traditions of men and never once question those traditions.
Today’s Christians participate in sunrise services unaware of where that tradition started. They just believe what they have been told. Many happily hunt Easter eggs with their children never questioning what it has to do with the death, burial or resurrection of Christ.
The Scripture is absolutely clear that Christ was crucified on the Passover. He was the Passover Lamb. Does anyone even know that the Passover took place 4 days ago on March 25th or Nisan 14 on the Biblical calendar? Today is March 29th or Nisan 18. This is the day Christ, after lying in the tomb 3 days and 3 nights (the sign of Jonah), arose from the grave. Yet, the vast majority of Christians will be joining the world in celebrating Good Friday as the day Christ was crucified and Easter Sunday as the day Christ arose. I would think that one would have to ask why the world that hates Christ celebrates his death, burial and resurrection.
Easter eggs, Easter bunnies, and all the traditions of men…the playing of “God honoring” country music on the radio, what does it have to do with Christ?
I submit to you that Easter, and Christmas for that matter, are taking the pagan ways of worshipping false gods and using them to honor and worship Christ. I think God has made Himself clear about doing that.
Here is an article about Easter researched and written by David C. Pack, the Editor-in-Chief for “The Real Truth – A Magazine Restoring Plain Understanding.” You can read more at their website http://realtruth.org/articles/070302-005-eiao.html.
Mr. Pack writes:
Most people follow along as they have been taught, assuming that what they believe and do is right. They take their beliefs for granted. Most do not take time to prove why they do the things that they do.
Why do you believe what you believe? Where did you get your beliefs? Is the source of your religious beliefs the Bible—or some other authority? If you say the Bible, are you sure?
What about Easter? Since hundreds of millions keep it, supposedly in honor of Jesus Christ’s Resurrection, then certainly the Bible must have much to say about it. Surely there are numerous verses mentioning rabbits, eggs and egg hunts, baskets of candy, hot cross buns, Lent, Good Friday and sunrise services—not to mention Easter itself.
Easter requires close scrutiny and this article examines it carefully.
Bible Authority for Easter?
The Bible is the source for all things Christian. Does it mention Easter? Yes.
Notice Acts 12:1. King Herod began to persecute the Church, culminating in the brutal death of the apostle James by sword. This pleased the Jews so much that the apostle Peter was also taken prisoner by Herod. The plan was to later deliver him to the Jews. Verse 3 says, “Then were the days of unleavened bread.” The New Testament Church was observing these feast days described in Leviticus 23. Now read verse 4 of Acts 12: “And when he [Herod] had apprehended him, he put him in prison, and delivered him to four quaternions [sixteen] of soldiers to keep him; intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people.”
Is this Bible authority for Easter?
This passage is not talking about Easter. How do we know? The word translated Easter is the Greek word pascha (derived from the Hebrew word pesach; there is no original Greek word for Passover), and it has only one meaning. It always means Passover—it can never mean Easter! For this reason, we find a Hebrew word used in the Greek New Testament. Once again, this Hebrew word can only refer to Passover. And other translations, including the Revised Standard Version, correctly render this word Passover.
Instead of endorsing Easter, this verse really proves that the Church was still observing the supposedly Jewish Passover ten years after the death of Christ!
Now let’s go to the other scriptures authorizing Easter. This presents a problem. There are none! There are absolutely no verses, anywhere in the Bible, that authorize or endorse the keeping of Easter celebration! The Bible says nothing about Lent, eggs and egg hunts, baskets of candy, etc., although it does mention hot cross buns and sunrise services as abominations, which God condemns. We will examine them and learn why.
The mistranslation of Acts 12:4 is a not-so-subtle attempt to insert a pagan festival into Scripture for the purpose of authorizing it.
When Easter Came to America
Easter has long been known to be a pagan festival! America’s founders knew this! A children’s book about the holiday, Easter Parade: Welcome Sweet Spring Time!, by Steve Englehart, p. 4, states, “When the Puritans came to North America, they regarded the celebration of Easter—and the celebration of Christmas—with suspicion. They knew that pagans had celebrated the return of spring long before Christians celebrated Easter…for the first two hundred years of European life in North America, only a few states, mostly in the South, paid much attention to Easter.”
Not until after the Civil War did Americans begin celebrating this holiday: “Easter first became an American tradition in the 1870s” (p. 5).
Remarkable! The original 13 colonies of America began as a “Christian” nation, with the cry of “No king but King Jesus!” The nation did not observe Easter within an entire century of its founding. What happened to change this?
Where Did Easter Come From?
Does the following sound familiar?—Spring is in the air! Flowers and bunnies decorate the home. Father helps the children paint beautiful designs on eggs dyed in various colors. These eggs, which will later be hidden and searched for, are placed into lovely, seasonal baskets. The wonderful aroma of the hot cross buns mother is baking in the oven waft through the house. Forty days of abstaining from special foods will finally end the next day. The whole family picks out their Sunday best to wear to the next morning’s sunrise worship service to celebrate the savior’s resurrection and the renewal of life. Everyone looks forward to a succulent ham with all the trimmings. It will be a thrilling day. After all, it is one of the most important religious holidays of the year. Easter, right?
No! This is a description of an ancient Babylonian family—2,000 years before Christ—honoring the resurrection of their god, Tammuz, who was brought back from the underworld by his mother/wife, Ishtar (after whom the festival was named). As Ishtar was actually pronounced “Easter” in most Semitic dialects, it could be said that the event portrayed here is, in a sense, Easter. Of course, the occasion could easily have been a Phrygian family honoring Attis and Cybele, or perhaps a Phoenician family worshipping Adonis and Astarte. Also fitting the description well would be a heretic Israelite family honoring the Canaanite Baal and Ashtoreth. Or this depiction could just as easily represent any number of other immoral, pagan fertility celebrations of death and resurrection—including the modern Easter celebration as it has come to us through the Anglo-Saxon fertility rites of the goddess Eostre or Ostara. These are all the same festivals, separated only by time and culture.
If Easter is not found in the Bible, then where did it come from? The vast majority of ecclesiastical and secular historians agree that the name of Easter and the traditions surrounding it are deeply rooted in pagan religion.
Now notice the following powerful quotes that demonstrate more about the true origin of how the modern Easter celebration got its name:
“Since Bede the Venerable (De ratione temporum 1:5) the origin of the term for the feast of Christ’s Resurrection has been popularly considered to be from the Anglo-Saxon Eastre, a goddess of spring…the Old High German plural for dawn, eostarun; whence has come the German Ostern, and our English Easter” (The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 1967, Vol. 5, p. 6).
“The fact that vernal festivals were general among pagan peoples no doubt had much to do with the form assumed by the Eastern festival in the Christian churches. The English term Easter is of pagan origin” (Albert Henry Newman, D.D., LL.D., A Manual of Church History, p. 299).
“On this greatest of Christian festivals, several survivals occur of ancient heathen ceremonies. To begin with, the name itself is not Christian but pagan. Ostara was the Anglo-Saxon Goddess of Spring” (Ethel L. Urlin, Festival, Holy Days, and Saints Days, p. 73).
“Easter—the name Easter comes to us from Ostera or Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, for whom a spring festival was held annually, as it is from this pagan festival that some of our Easter customs have come” (Hazeltine, p. 53).
“In Babylonia…the goddess of spring was called Ishtar. She was identified with the planet Venus, which, because…[it] rises before the Sun…or sets after it…appears to love the light [this means Venus loves the sun-god]…In Phoenecia, she became Astarte; in Greece, Eostre [related to the Greek word Eos: “dawn”], and in Germany, Ostara [this comes from the German word Ost: “east,” which is the direction of dawn]” (Englehart, p. 4).
As we have seen, many names are interchangeable for the more well-known Easter. Pagans typically used many different names for the same god or goddess. Nimrod, the Bible figure who built the city of Babylon (Gen. 10:8), is an example. He was worshipped as Saturn, Vulcan, Kronos, Baal, Tammuz,Molech and others, but he was always the same god—the fire or sun god universally worshipped in nearly every ancient culture. (Read our booklet The True Origin of Christmas to learn more about this holiday and Nimrod’s part in it.)
The goddess Easter was no different. She was one goddess with many names—the goddess of fertility, worshipped in spring when all life was being renewed.
The widely-known historian Will Durant, in his famous and respected work Story of Civilization, pp. 235, 244-245, writes, “Ishtar [Astarte to the Greeks, Ashtoreth to the Jews], interests us not only as analogue of the Egyptian Isis and prototype of the Grecian Aphrodite and the Roman Venus, but as the formal beneficiary of one of the strangest of Babylonian customs…known to us chiefly from a famous page in Herodotus: Every native woman is obliged, once in her life, to sit in the temple of Venus [Easter], and have intercourse with some stranger.” Is it any wonder that the Bible speaks of the religious system that has descended from that ancient city as, “Mystery, babylon the great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth” (Rev. 17:5)?
We must now look closer at the origin of other customs associated with the modern Easter celebration.
The Origin of Lent
According to Johannes Cassianus, who wrote in the fifth century, “Howbeit you should know, that as long as the primitive church retained its perfection unbroken, this observance of Lent did not exist” (First Conference Abbot Theonas, chapter 30).
There is neither biblical nor historical record of Christ, the apostles or the early Church participating in the Lenten season. Since there is no instruction to observe Lent in the Bible, where did it come from? A forty-day abstinence period was anciently observed in honor of the pagan gods Osiris, Adonis and Tammuz (John Landseer, Sabaean Researches, pp. 111, 112).
Alexander Hislops, The Two Babylons, pp. 104-105, says this of the origin of Lent: “The forty days abstinence of Lent was directly borrowed from the worshippers of the Babylonian goddess. Such a Lent of forty days, in the spring of the year, is still observed by the Yezidis or Pagan Devil-worshippers of Koordistan, who have inherited it from their early masters, the Babylonians. Such a Lent of forty days was held in spring by the Pagan Mexicans…Such a Lent of forty days was observed in Egypt…”
Lent came from paganism, not from the Bible! (To learn more about the Lenten season, read our article “The True Meaning of Lent.”)
Eggs, Egg Hunts and Easter
Eggs have always been associated with the Easter celebration. Nearly every culture in the modern world has a long tradition of coloring eggs in beautiful and different ways. I once examined a traveling display of many kinds of beautifully decorated egg designs that represented the styles and traditions of virtually every country of modern Europe.
Notice the following: “The origin of the Easter egg is based on the fertility lore of the Indo-European races…The egg to them was a symbol of spring…In Christian times the egg had bestowed upon it a religious interpretation, becoming a symbol of the rock tomb out of which Christ emerged to the new life of His resurrection” (Francis X. Weiser, Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs, p. 233). This is a direct example of exactly how pagan symbols and customs are “Christianized,” i.e., Christian-sounding names are superimposed over pagan customs. This is done to deceive—as well as make people feel better about why they are following a custom that is not in the Bible.
Notice: “Around the Christian observance of Easter…folk customs have collected, many of which have been handed down from the ancient ceremonial…symbolism of European and Middle Eastern pagan spring festivals…for example, eggs…have been very prominent as symbols of new life and resurrection” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1991 ed., Vol. 4, p. 333).
Finally, the following comes from Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought, James Bonwick, pp. 211-212: “Eggs were hung up in the Egyptian temples. Bunsen calls attention to the mundane egg, the emblem of generative life, proceeding from the mouth of the great god of Egypt. The mystic egg of Babylon, hatching the Venus Ishtar, fell from heaven to the Euphrates. Dyed eggs were sacred Easter offerings in Egypt, as they are still in China and Europe. Easter, or spring, was the season of birth, terrestrial and celestial.”
What could be more plain in showing the true origin of the “Easter egg”? An “Easter” egg is just an egg that pertains to Easter. God never authorized Passover eggs or Days of Unleavened Bread eggs, but there have been Easter eggs for thousands of years!
It naturally progressed that the egg, representing spring and fertility, would be merged into an already pagan springtime festival. Connecting this symbol to Christ’s Resurrection in the spring required much creativity and human reasoning. However, even highly creative human reasoning has never been able to successfully connect the next Easter symbol to anything Christian, because there is not a single word about it anywhere in the New Testament!
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Another good website to visit for more information is: http://www.biblicalfulfillment.org/id9.html
It is evident with even a casual reading that Easter was and is a pagan celebration of a false goddess. Yet it is celebrated around the world by Christians as the resurrection of Christ. I think it is done out of ignorance of the truth or out of a love of tradition and an unwillingness to depart from it.
Some will argue Romans 14 as a justification for celebrating Easter and Christmas. They will say they are celebrating it as unto the LORD. Notice that Aaron didn’t argue with the LORD about the intent of the hearts of his sons when they offered strange fire unto Him. He could have said, “Yes, Lord, they offered strange fire before you, but they were doing it as unto you.”
Leviticus 10:3 Then Moses said unto Aaron, This is it that the LORD spake, saying, I will be sanctified in them that come nigh me, and before all the people I will be glorified. And Aaron held his peace.
I wrote this out of love and a desire to share the truth with my brothers and sisters in Christ. Christians need to know the truth about what they do and the holidays they observe. How we worship and honor God is a serious thing, not to be taken lightly. He has prescribed how He wants that done. We would do well to take heed. God is more interested in our obedience to His word than He is with the intent of our heart as we violate what He has commanded us to do. According to 1 Samuel 15:22, "To obey is better than sacrifice."
I also wrote this for my wife and children. I want them to know why we don’t celebrate Easter, Christmas or any of the other pagan holidays that somehow have found their way into the church. Think about what you have just read and search the Scriptures to see if what I have written is true.
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