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Should Christians celebrate Easter?

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THE celebration of Easter is based on several misunderstandings.
The New Testament gives no grounds for Christian fellowship and worship on Easter.
Objections that are commonly made against Easter have merit.
They show the domination of the Western culture and the enforcement of the same unto us covered in religion.
The first issue is the word ‘Easter’ itself.
(Of course, this objection is valid because the word for this Christian spring festival in other languages has no connection with the word ‘Easter’.)
We should remember that the resurrection of Jesus was celebrated in the spring for centuries in Christendom before the word ‘Easter’ was adopted as a label for this festival in the English language.
The fact that this was done for a long time does not make it right.
Nonetheless, the word ‘Easter’ is derived from the name of a Germanic goddess of spring, Eastre.
The English monk, Venerable Bede, who lived in the 8th Century, popularised this view.
So Easter becomes a worship of a Western ancestor.
To make it credible, the coloniser had to package it in a Christian value to make sure that it would gain acceptance in all Christian worlds.
The King James Version translators certainly did not have the word ‘Easter’. They actually translated the Greek pascha, or Passover, in Acts 12:4. Passover should not be mistaken for Easter.
Easter is clearly an ancestral worship of a German goddess which was transported to us.
It should be known that Christians are not celebrating Jesus, but are unwittingly worshipping an ancient pagan deity when they participate in such activities as Easter sunrise services.
If you attempt to celebrate your own ancestors, you are viewed as a Satanist yet in our churches the ancestors of Europe are given to us packaged as Christianity.
No matter how many times the word Easter is used, it remains a pagan worship used by the Western world to stupefy and soil our trust in God.
Another explanation is that Easter derives from an old German root, ostern, for dawn or east, which is the time and place of the rising sun. This makes more sense as a reason a day commemorating Jesus’ resurrection would have begun to be called ‘Easter’.
Jesus is thought to have risen around dawn or sunrise on resurrection Sunday (Matthew 28:1; Mark 16:2).
Easter is actually a word used for worshiping the sun; all the Christians have been fooled to worship the goddess of the Sun.
We have many words in the English language connected with ancient gods.
For example, our word ‘cereal’ comes from the name of the ancient goddess of agriculture, Ceres.
The word ‘cloth’ comes from Clotho, the spinster goddess who was said to spin the thread of life.
The word ‘hymn’ is thought to come from the god of marriage, Hymen, and in ancient times meant any song offered in praise or honour of a god or gods.
But when we use ‘hymn’ in church services, we mean a song sung in praise of the one true God.
In connection with the word ‘Easter’, the concept of an Easter sunrise service is also labelled as pagan by the serious Bible scholars.
Ezekiel 8:14-17, describes individuals with their faces toward the east, worshipping the sun.
This practice in Ezekiel, is spoken of as idolatry and an abomination in God’s sight.
Easter is a replica of this vain worship in ancient Israel which has been imported in our present life. 
However, in Ezekiel, the individuals were forsaking the worship of the true God, as is evidenced by them turning their backs on the temple of the Lord (verse 16).
They were purposely worshipping the sun.
When Christians attend an Easter sunrise service they worship the sun disguised as worshiping Christ.
The dawn or rising of the sun has great symbolic value in that it reminds them that Jesus is the dawn of our salvation, and that he had risen on a Sunday morning along with the sun, so to capture the allegiance of the Christians they worship both the sun and the Lord.
It becomes clear that in an independent era, we still are engrossed in the cultures of the former colonisers.
Did pagans worship the sun, though?
Yes, of course.
Pagans worshipped many things, including stars, the moon, many animal specie and even the earth itself.
Devout Christians see this, and sometimes confuse ancient forms with modern substance.
Yet, what is often overlooked is the fact that many of the practices God commanded for ancient Israel had previously existed in paganism.
Temples, priests, priestly vestments, incense, animal sacrifices, harvest time as the lynchpin of festivals – these and other forms used in pagan worship systems found their counterpart in Israel’s worship system given by God.
The reality is the devil imitates God and people follow the imitation.
We should explain one other major objection to Easter.
What seems particularly offensive to some people is the use of coloured eggs at Easter.
A related objection has to do with references to rabbits, which are known for their prodigious reproductive capacities.
There was never an egg on the resurrection.
Of course, it is quite evident that pagans used eggs in rituals and ceremonies dedicated to their gods, and in fertility rites.
But let’s first ask why eggs might have been used in religious activities. They are certainly a symbol of new life and thus would have been a ready metaphor of fertility.
Since nature comes alive in the springtime, we shouldn’t be surprised that eggs may have been associated with festivities at this time.
It certainly is also true that many of the pagan fertility rites were associated with abominable practices such as temple prostitution and other revelry.
No wonder condoms are found in churches on these celebrations.
Fertility is something God himself commanded.
He told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28). Children are a blessing from the Lord.
So is an abundance of livestock and fish.
The ancients were not wrong in understanding the key role of fertility in life, nor in knowing that sex and reproduction are gifts from God.
What they erred in was worshipping the created rather than the Creator, and then worshipping in ways that were abominable to God – such as in fertility revelry, which included temple prostitution.
But is there something inherently evil about eggs or rabbits?
In fact, eggs are hardly thought of in a religious way at all in modern times.
The egg-rolling festivity is merely a secular time of fun for children, and not Christians.
We put chocolate bunny rabbits in Easter baskets, but they have no Christian religious association.
True, the Bible nowhere tells us to celebrate Easter.
But, as mentioned earlier, when Israel added Hanukkah and Purim to its religious calendar – events that celebrated God’s saving acts in Jewish history – these were acceptable to God.
Jesus attended temple worship during Hanukkah, then called the Feast of Dedication (John 10:22).
The Jews added the synagogue and its traditions, and nowhere is this said to be displeasing to God.
In John 7:37 it is widely recognised that Jesus made reference to the Jewish water-drawing ceremony, which pictured the salvation they looked for.
Jesus did not condemn this ceremony but used it as a convenient vehicle for explaining that he was the one who would bring true salvation.
These were not taken after gods or goddesses.
How can you honour God by naming his day after what is abominable.
The church also has no freedom to add to its calendar festivals that celebrate God’s redemptive acts through Jesus while taking abominable names.

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