“Prove all things” (I Thes. 5:21)
Is the name “Easter” of divine origin simply because it is found in Bibles, in the King James translation of Acts 12:4—”…intending after easter to bring him forth?” The R.V. renders it “after the passover,” as it is given in the original. In reading lines every honest mind will be able to discern whether or not the celebration of Easter and also Christmas has divine sanction.
The setting of different dates for Easter from year to year is explained thus, in Schaff-Herzog Ency. Of Religious Knowledge, Vol. 2, p. 682:
The present variable time was appointed by early Romanism in amalgamation with the very ancient pagan spring festival to the goddess of the spring. It was fixed on the Sunday immediately following the 14th day of the paschal moon which happened on or first after the vernal equinox.
The Babylonian “queen of heaven,” Semeramis, the wife of Nimrod, was the original imperonation of the heathen goddesses, Astarte and Venus of the Greeks, Juno of the Latins, Ashtoreth, of the Zidonians, Ishtar, of the Babylonians, and Eostre, the goddess of spring, of the early Anglo-Saxons. The Druids held religious festivals in her honor and the sun-god in April, calling it Easter Monath. Hence the careless insertion of the word “easter” instead of “passover” in Acts 12:4 by the King James Translators.
This Ishtar, or Eostre, was worshiped as the goddess of love and fertility, and as the life of nature. In Babylonian mythology this “queen of heaven” was worshiped as the goddess of the sexual impulse. In Hasting’s Ency. On Religious Ethics, p. 117, we read of these ancient “easters”:
A spring feast was celebrated. These occasions were marked with great sexual license.
This is the vile phallic worship referred to in Isa. 57:5-8 and Ezek. 16:17. The “groves” connected with “high places” that Israel so frequently “went whoring with” (Ps. 106:28-39) were the images and places where these filthy “queen of heaven” festivals were carried on. The word “groves,” found forty times in the KJV English, comes from the Hebrew word asherah and is always associated with the worship of Ashtoreth, alias Ishtar, Eostre, the goddess of spring, Easter.
The so-called “Lent season” is of purely Babylonian origin. The word “Lent” came from the Saxon word “Lenct”, meaning “spring.” Pagan Mexicans also celebrated forty days in April. Forty days in the vernal equinox in April was celebrated by the devil worshippers of Koordistan in honor of the sun-god. This was brought from Babylon where 2000 B.C. It originated in the weeping for Tammuz, the supposed reincarnation of Ishtar’s (o.e. Semeramis’) husband (Nimrod). In the spring, his death and reappearance was celebrated. A time of mourning was followed by one day of joy. God condemned Israel’s partaking in this celebration as given in Ezek. 8:13-14:
He said to me, “turn you yet again and you shall see greater abominations that they do.” Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the House of YHWH which was toward the north, and behold there sat women weeping for Tammuz.
Modern Easter Customs
One may well ask, What connection have buns, eggs, rabbits and new clothes with the resurrection of Yeshua the Messiah? The origin of modern “hot cross buns” is sufficiently explained in Jer. 7:18; 44:17-19:
The children gather wood and the fathers kindle the fire and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven and to pour out drink offerings to other gods, that they may provoke me to anger,
Surely God’s anger is still being provoked when believers take up these pagan customs in connection with the resurrection of His beloved Son.
The custom of giving eggs in April can be traced the philosophy and theology of the Egyptians, Persians, Gauls, Greeks and Romans, among whom the egg was an emblem of the universe—the work of the Supreme Being. The dyeing of eggs can be traced to the Chinese. Eggs were the sacrificial emblem of the Druids. Rome made the egg to become the consecrated emblem of Messiah’s resurrection. Pope Paul V taught people to pray at Easter:
Bless O Lord, we beseech thee this thy creature of eggs that it may become a wholesome sustenance unto thy servants, eating it in remembrance of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Ancient Babylonians believed an egg fell from heaven into the Euphrates river and the fishes rolled it to the shore where the doves hatched out “the Queen of Heaven”, or Ishtar. Hence the egg became a symbol of Ishtar, the licentiously worshiped goddess of the ancients, and is used today by deluded unthinking Christendom in its celebration of Easter. What ungodly travesty!
The rabbit fad at Easter time can be traced back to pagan Germany. Children were told that if they were good, a white hare would steal into the house while they were asleep and secrete any number of beautifully colored eggs in odd corners of the house. Here originated the modern “Easter egg hunt” provided for innocent children.
The hare, from ancient times was a symbol of the moon (the consort of the Sun Venus or Ishtar), it being a nocturnal animal. The hare is the only rabbit born with its eyes open. The Egyptian word for hare is “un”, meaning “to open”. Thus the hare was associated with the opening of a new season, spring, in April, at the vernal equinox. The hare and eggs were mutually symbolical in Egypt of the opening of their new year, at which eggs were ceremoniously broken.
But from where did the custom of wearing new clothes at Easter come from? Answer: In early England it was considered unlucky not to wear some new article of clothing at Easter time.
Lastly, what about Easter sun-rise services? Do they too come under divine condemnation? We need only look to the criticism of the Tenach itself. When Israel took to the idea of “sunrise services”, God expressed His disaproval in Ezek. 8:15-18:
Turn you yet again and you shall see greater abominations than these. And he brought me into the inner court of the House of YHWH and behold, at the door of the Temple of YHWH between the porch and the alter, were about five and twenty men with their backs to the Temple of YHWH and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east… and though they cry in my ear with a loud voice, yet will I not hear them.
Reading this in the Tanak and knowing the sun-god, Ba’al, or Tammuz, the “husband-son” of Semeramis (Ishtar) has been given idolatrous homage from the very beginning of all idol worship, the sincere follower of YHWH will have no part with a Messiah rejecting world in seemingly innocent and sentimentally “beautiful” Easter sunrise services or in any and all Messiah-deflecting customs which are of proved, HaSatan inspired, pagan origin.
“Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.”
(Eph. 5:11).
The Torah reminds us:
“You shall not follow a multitude to do evil”
(Ex. 23:2)
And as Yeshua himself said:
“That which is highly esteemed among men is abominable in the sight of Elohim”
(Luke 16:15)
And as Paul writes:
“Be you not conformed to this world but be you transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may know what is that good and acceptable and wholehearted will of G-d.”
(Rom. 12:2)
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