Featured This says it all! (cept for what we say)

Which indeed it is. Just as each LORD's Day is. What makes this one any more special than others?

 

Not so much, I was referencing the dispute between what God says and what the government "says" we are to do can do.
God did create the Passover and God did say to Israel to keep it forever. As Christians we do observe the Resurrection Day of Christ. It is observed weekly on the first day of the week.

 

My biggest problem is much like the Christmas issue. The mixing of a religious celebration and a secular celebration. So intertwined you can't tell where one ends and the other begins.

In this case it the Resurrection of Christ that has evolved into Rabbits and eggs.

 

that's not my position. Surely we can celebrate things outside of the established of God. My position is the celebrations of "Holy" events should not be celebrated so mixed in with secular events. Like saying the celebration is the resurrection of Christ and do it by having a mythical rabbit bring chocolate and eggs.

 

Every LORD's Day a believer should celebrate the resurrection of Christ as their guarantee of resurrection.

First council of Nicaea. I have heard of it. Never studied it though. I have read the prophets and know the exact date is known. I also enjoy eating chocolate in an oblong mold. Chocolate eggs, no so much I wouldn't think.

 

Zenas, does your church sponsor egg hunts for the children? What are your thoughts concerning the celebration of such a special Christian event that include egg hunts which have the origins in goddess worship?

 

I don't think you really get where I'm coming from:
I'm coming from the place where I hate to see children taught by their parents that such a sacred event such as the resurrection of Christ has no more place in their life that they lie to them as small kids about a rabbit that brings toys and eggs. Jesus is worthy of so much more respect that to have his children spend more time hiding and hunting eggs than teaching the entirety of who He is and what led to the actual days of crucifixion, resurrection and ascension. Watered down American Christianity where a fable of man is more defended than Truth.:BangHead:

 

The Christian Walk
Easter: The Devil’s Holiday – Recalling the fundamentals of the Papist Holiday and what we should be thinking about as true Christians.
Easter: The Devil’s Holiday
by Dr. C. Matthew McMahon

See the “Jelly Bean” POST SCRIPT

Easter has little to do with real Christianity. Does that surprise you? It should not. For example, Easter was not popular with the Puritans or the Pilgrim settlers in America. Neither Puritans or Pilgrims had use for ceremonies associated with religious festivals invented in either pagan history, or reinvented by Roman Catholicism. In actuality, here in the America’s only after the bloodshed Civil War did Easter “begin again” to be accepted. As Walsh states in his “Holy Time and Sacred Space in Puritan New England” (Walsh, American Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring, 1980), pp. 79-95) “The New England [Pilgrims] like Reformed Protestants everywhere, rejected traditional Roman Catholic and Anglican beliefs and practices that organized time around consecrated churches, railed-off altars, holy shrines, miraculous wells, and that supposed the flow of time to be an irregular succession of holy days and sacred seasons. The Reformers argued, what was intended as a crutch for others had become a cast for Christians who willingly accepted the obligation of constant worship. They for whom all days are holy can have no holidays.” (See, for example, The Sermons of John Calvin Upon the Fifth Book of Moses called Deuteronomie, trans. Arthur Golding (London: H. Middleton, 1583).

The Post Reformation pastors and theologians of the day, following the Reformers, abolished Easter, among other things. In June 1647, England Parliament, headed by the Puritans at Westminster, passed legislation abolishing Christmas and other holidays: “Forasmuch as the feast of the nativity of Christ, Easter, Whitsuntide, and other festivals, commonly called holy-days, have been heretofore superstitiously used and observed; be it ordained, that the said feasts, and all other festivals, commonly called holy-days, be no longer observed as festivals; any law, statute, custom, constitution, or canon, to the contrary in anywise not withstanding.” (Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans (London, 1837; rpt. Minneapolis: Klock , p. 45).

The Puritans “proposed a stricter observance of Sundays, the Lord’s Day, along with banning the immoral celebration of Christmas — as well as Easter, Whitsun and saints’ days.” (Patino, Marta, The Puritan Ban on Christmas). The reason the puritans denied the celebration of any holy days was a biblical foundation to deny the “dressing up” of any other day than what God had specifically prescribed in Lord’s Day worship. “Holy days’ have no such prescription — there is no Scriptural command, approved example, or good and necessary inference, which warrants tying specific acts of redemption to ‘holy’ days of our own choosing.” (Chris Coldwell, The Religious Observance of Christmas and ‘Holy Days’ in American Presbyterianism) (I would encourage the reader to read the entire article that Coldwell has at that link which covers not only Easter, but other holidays.)

In “The Quest for Purity: Dynamics of Puritan Movements” by Walter E. a Van Beek, he states, “Because Easter invariably fell on a Sunday, this was a problem for Puritan preachers who were consistent with their repudiation of of the traditional calendar. The usual solution was to preach a sermon that had no direct connection with Easter.” (Page 77.) How would a congregation today take a non-Easter sermon on Easter Sunday? What would your reaction be, reader?

Rightly so, the Westminster Confession states in the appendix entitled, “An Appendix, Touching Days and Places for Public Worship,” the following, “The key clause of interest to this study is, “Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued.” Later Presbyterian theology followed suit. While people “say” they adhere to the Confession, they dip hardboiled eggs into food coloring, and buy Easter Baskets for their children. Robert Dabney states in abolishing Easter, “The objections are: first, that this countenances “will-worship,” or the intrusion of man’s inventions into God’s service; second, it is an implied insult to Paul’s inspiration, assuming that he made a practical blunder, which the church synods, wiser than his inspiration, had to mend by a human expedient; and third, we have here a practical confession that, after all, the average New Testament Christian does need a stated holy day, and therefore the ground of the Sabbath command is perpetual and moral.” (Robert Lewis Dabney “The Christian Sabbath: Its Nature, Design and Proper Observance”, Discussions: Theological and Evangelical (Richmond: Whittet and Shepperson, 1890) 1. 524-525. See also, “The Sabbath of the State,” 2.600.)

What do we find when entering into Roman Catholicism’s “borrowing” of paganism? John Gill states, “Popish festivals were observed very early, long before the Pope of some arrived to the height of his ambition. The feast of Easter was kept in the
second century, as the controversy between Anicetus and Polycarp, and between Victor and the Asiatic churches, shews.” (John Gill, Sermon 57: A Dissertation on the Rise and Progress of Popery, page 17; Ages Ultimate Library, 2004). We find their continued alliance with breaking the regulative principle, and the replacement of true worship, with worshipping that which is unholy. They institute unscriptural burdens such as Lent, fast days, sacred rites that control their kingdom with superstitions and false religion guised in the cloak of “authority” and hide the truth from people to damn them for all eternity. One such deception is their introduction of the “Christian festival of Easter.” Look around and you will see the world-wide acceptance of the chocolate bunny and hardboiled egg. It is harmless, right?

What does one find when looking at the celebration of Easter? The term “Easter” is certainly not Christian, and is of Chalcedonian origin. Easter is nothing else than Astarte, one of the titles of Beltis, the queen of heaven, whose name, as pronounced by the people at Nineveh, was evidently identical with that now in common use today. That name, as found by Layard on the Assyrian monuments, is Ishtar – the devil or Satan.[1]

Worship of the devil in this way was introduced to the English people through the Druids who worshipped the devil through nature.

Take a moment and note that Romanism or Druidism for that matter, would not openly say “they are worshipping the devil.” Of course they would deny it. However, the Scripture is exceedingly clear that any doctrine not brought to men through the Triune Godhead, and the Savior Jesus Christ, is a doctrine of demons and therefore, a worshipping of the devil. This certainly applies not only to the contemporary church when it introduces destructive heresies, or twists Paul’s words to their own destruction, as Peters states, but also applies to false religious ideas that pull people away from the one true Savior and only God Jesus Christ. One cannot introduce false religion without partaking of demonic influences and devil worship in that light.

excerpt from http://www.apuritansmind.com/the-christian-walk/easter-the-devils-holiday-by-dr-c-matthew-mcmahon/

 

My experience has been that the choir are as in need of Christ as the back row.. Maybe a better word would have been "as" important as the truth.
This is one reason I'm not upset by the decrease in foreign missions. We pollute wherever we go. Western Traditions and often another gospel where man "let's" a Sovereign God do something.