An addition to my Easter 2024 message

Easter Addendum

This spring, billions of people will memorialize Jesus Christ's resurrection by observing the ancient rite of Easter. Although the festival's name and seasonal observance pre-date Christianity, and the Easter Sunday observance does not correspond to the day of Christ's resurrection, most professing Christians assume that this non-Christian festival has now been "Christianized" into something Jesus Christ would approve.
But is their assumption correct? Christians who study the Bible carefully and examine the historical records will come to a different conclusion. Rather than commemorating Christ's resurrection on an incorrect date, they will celebrate His sacrifice by observing the Christian Passover as the early Church did—in the way He instructed—as we find in Scripture. Does this shock you? Read on!
The origins of pre-Christian Easter festivals that began in pagan cultures are well-known in history. In the ancient world, some of the most significant female deities were the various incarnations of the great fertility goddesses known as Ishtar (Babylonian), Astarte (Phoenician), Atargatis (Philistine), Ashtoreth (Hebrew), Eastre (Anglo-Saxon), Ostara (German) and Aphrodite (Greek).
These goddesses are regarded as essentially the same deity due to the similarities of their mythologies, worship, names, and festivals.
Gentile culture, with its pagan past, gradually superimposed Christian themes over their existing pagan practices, practices that were already deeply ingrained into their societies and psyches. Therefore, incorporating Easter as a memorial to Christ's resurrection was an adaptation of an earlier Pagan resurrection festival. This practice did not originate in Christianity. Professing Christians observe Easter today, reasoning that it commemorates Christ's resurrection. The Bible commands Christians to observe a memorial to His sacrificial death! When Christ instructed His followers to keep the Passover with a fulfilled, Christian meaning, it became a memorial to His sacrifice as the Lamb of God—not His resurrection. Christ avoided confusing the meaning of His unique sacrifice with the well-known pagan "resurrection" rites of His time and before. Yet, as Christianity spread deeper into Gentile areas, with passing generations, some churches started gravitating back toward prior pagan cultural practices of their societies and away from religious practices associated with Judaism. As a result, the proper observance of Pasch, or Passover, was changed in time and meaning. The Gentile Christians altered the significance of the Jewish feast and the date. Therefore, today, Easter is a "Christianized" pagan festival. In Scripture, God strongly condemns attempts to worship Him with practices taken from the worship of false gods!
We are to worship God as He instructs, not as we might reason. Keeping Easter certainly adds to what God taught, and rejecting the Christian Passover takes away from what we are told to do as Christians.
You may be surprised to learn that the New Testament gospels have a lot to say about the actual practice that Jesus and His disciples followed the night before Jesus' death: "And He sent Peter and John, saying, 'Go and prepare the Passover for us, that we may eat'... And He took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, 'This is My body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me.' Likewise, He took the cup after supper, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in My blood, which is shed for you'" (Luke 22:8, 13–20). He also washed the disciples' feet and instructed them to do the same for each other (John 13:1–15).
Christ said they were eating the Passover and should "do this in remembrance of Me." He commanded them to keep that night as a memorial to Him and showed them how to do so, using unleavened bread as a symbol of His body and wine as a symbol of His blood. Notice on what day of the Hebrew calendar these events took place. It is important to note that, by biblical reckoning, a day begins at sunset and ends with sunset the next day.
The First Day of Unleavened Bread, an annual Holy Day, falls on Nisan 15 of the Hebrew calendar and begins in the evening, ending Nisan 14 (Leviticus 23:5–6). In the time of Christ, the Jews killed the Passover lamb on the afternoon of Nisan 14 at about the hour Christ, the Lamb of God, died at the hands of the Romans. Christ's last supper took place at the beginning of Nisan 14, on the evening before the crucifixion. That night, He was betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter, and beaten before the high priest (Matthew 26:30–75; John 18:1–27).
The following morning—still Nisan 14—Pilate tried him. He was condemned, scourged, and crucified (Matthew 27; John 18:28–40). Notice in 19:31 that Christ had to be buried before evening "because it was the Preparation Day, and bodies could not remain on the cross on the Sabbath, for the Sabbath was a high day. These scriptures show conclusively that the Passover memorial Christ ordained was on the evening that began Nisan 14. This was the evening before the Jewish Passover celebration, which was held in the evening starting the Holy Day of Nisan 15.
You now have seen what Christ instructed His followers to observe as a memorial to Him and when they were to keep it. But why did He say to do this? In his gospel, the Apostle John preserved Jesus' explanation of the reason for the Passover bread and wine: "I am the bread of life.... I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world. Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day" (John 6:48, 51–54).
CHRIST IS OUR PASSOVER
The events of the Exodus in the Old Testament pictured what would be fulfilled later in the New Testament by Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, is our Passover sacrifice. As the Apostle Paul reminded the Corinthians, "For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us" (1 Corinthians 5:7).
Remorse and repentance are not the same thing. True repentance changes what we are going to do—it changes our future. But all the repentance in the world cannot change what we did. Only one thing can remove the guilt of our past sins—the sacrifice of our Passover, Jesus Christ.
"For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life" (Romans 5:10). Christ was resurrected on Saturday evening, after exactly "three days and three nights" in the tomb (Matthew 12:40). We have a living, resurrected Savior. Our hope for eternal life is by resurrection through faith in Him. Jesus Christ's resurrection is essential to all Christians, but we were not given a spring festival to commemorate it.
What did the first-century Church teach and practice? Here is what Paul told the Christians at Corinth: "For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you: that the Lord Jesus on the same night in which He was betrayed took bread; and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, 'Take, eat; this is My body which is broken for you; do this in remembrance of Me.' In the same manner, He also took the cup after supper, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in My blood. This do, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.' As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes." (1 Corinthians 11:23–26).
The fact that this practice dropped out of sight is not surprising. The Christians who continued to practice were intensely disliked and excommunicated by the increasingly powerful Roman church, and as a result, many eventually suffered terrible persecution—even death.
The practice of observing the Christian Passover did not die out but continues today as a faithful observance by true Christians every spring, in the evening at the beginning of Nisan 14.
The Bible teaches that it is essential for us to worship God as He commands—and to commemorate Christ as He taught us to do. We should not borrow religious practices from pagan cultures!
This spring, billions of people will celebrate Easter. However, a few faithful Christians who faithfully follow Jesus' instructions and the examples of the Apostles Paul and John will joyfully continue the observance of the Christian Passover. Which will you choose?
Be a seeker of the Truth. There is so much more for you to learn!