Episode 18 Podcast - Easter: What Does That Word Mean? (Part 1)

Episode 18 - Easter: What Does That Word Mean?

What is the true meaning of Easter, and where did many of today’s Easter traditions come from?

In Part 1 of this series from Tomorrow’s Truth Found Today, we begin an in-depth study into the history of Easter, the origins of common traditions, and how they compare with scripture.

Most people associate Easter with eggs, rabbits, baskets, sunrise services, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But are these traditions rooted in the Bible, or do they come from somewhere else?

In this episode, we begin examining:

•  The meaning and origin of the word “Easter” 
•  The “sign of Jonah” in Matthew 12:38–40 
•  Questions surrounding the Good Friday and Easter Sunday timeline 
•  Sunrise services and biblical references 
•  The importance of worshiping God in spirit and truth 

This episode is not about attacking anyone’s beliefs or traditions. Instead, it is an invitation to study, examine the evidence, and compare history and tradition with scripture.

Scriptures Discussed:

•  Matthew 12:38–40 
•  John 4:24 
•  Acts 12:4 
•  Ezekiel 8:15–17 

This is only the beginning of the study. In future episodes, we will continue exploring the origins of Easter traditions, including:

•  Easter eggs 
•  The Easter bunny 
•  Hot cross buns 
•  The preparation day and High Day 
•  The timeline of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection 

Thank you for listening to Tomorrow’s Truth Found Today. Please follow, share, and join us for the next part of this study.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Good day. Mark Long here again with Tomorrow's Truth Found Today. This is episode 18 titled Easter. What does that word mean? Here again, I'm going to ask that you please subscribe to the channel and leave a comment if you would. And please share this information with everybody you know. It's very important that you do. Before we get started today, let me state this. I know the history that's going to be given in these episodes isn't going to be easy to hear, let alone believe in. But it doesn't change the facts or the truth. Sometimes we have to ask ourselves, is what I've always believed the actual truth, or am I just holding on to tradition because it's convenient? I also have to ask, what do you do when you're faced with something that doesn't fit the norm? Do you continue as you always have, or do you change to what you now know to be true? My friends, only you can make that determination. In these upcoming episodes about Easter, I'm going to ask you to have an investigating eye and that you examine all the evidence given before deciding whether or not any of it makes sense and does any of it match up with what the Bible says. Only then should you decide whether or not to believe it. Let me start with a question. What comes to your mind when you hear the word Easter? You probably think of things like rabbits, eggs, Easter egg hunts, candies, baskets, hearing about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and attending the ever-popular sunrise service. Easter, my friends, I'm sure holds many special memories for most people. After all, what's not to like about Easter, right? A family gets together, you have a special meal, and maybe even read a little bit of the Bible. But how many people do you know have ever studied the history of Easter to learn where it actually came from? I, myself, like most people, I never gave it a second thought. I was just grateful for the festivities and family being together. Although we rarely went to church, we did acknowledge Jesus dying for the sins of the world, and that gave me comfort. But I have to admit, I didn't care much about the history of it. After all, Easter seemed innocent enough, right? But was it? Or for that matter, is it innocent today? As I grew older and I began to study, I had to ask some pretty tough questions. Questions like, what do rabbits and eggs have to do with Christ dying for the sins of mankind? And what exactly does the word Easter even mean? I once heard a minister ask, is it the opposite of Wester? I had no idea. What I did know is I didn't have a clue about any of it. It's sad for me to admit that through all my early years of calling myself a Christian, they never gave that word a second thought. I just took it for granted. When I did finally start wondering about these different aspects of Easter, I began to think about things like the Catholic season of Lent and what's that all about. Also, hot cross buns and all the other things already mentioned. Well, finally, after a long while, my thinking slowly started to change when I came across a magazine with an article about Easter. After reading it, I got to thinking about something that's written by Christ in Matthew 12, 38 to 40, where it says, Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered, saying, Teacher, we want to see a sign from you. But he answered and said to them, An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. Those scriptures got me to thinking about something, about Good Friday and Easter Sunday morning. And at that point I had to ask, how could Christ die on a Friday and rise back to earth back to life the following Sunday morning when that only amounted to half the amount of time he said he'd be dead and buried? It made no sense. I thought, either something's wrong with what's being taught today, or Jesus has to be a liar. I saw no alternative. After all, Jesus was staking his very claim of being the Messiah on this one statement. That means he had to be in the tomb exactly three days and three nights. When you read all four Gospels, you learn that what he said in Matthew is the only place that he gave his sign of being the Messiah, of his messiahship. After learning that, I knew I had a bunch of studying to do. I need to know if any of this could be verified. But what I did know is I didn't know where to start. As time went by, I eventually decided the best thing to do was to look at each individual part of this springtime celebration and learn where it came from. I soon found out that none of what I believed was as innocent as I thought. Let me give you a little background. During the early 1980s, while I was driving a truck for a furniture company, one day, in between stops, I came across a booklet titled The Resurrection Wasn't on Sunday. It was put out by a church in Tyler, Texas, called the Church of God International. After reading it, I thought they were making some pretty amazing claims that at first, I have to admit, angered me. But as time went on, I had to ask, could any of what they were proclaiming actually be true? Well, after looking into this, I learned that what I grew up believing was mostly founded on deception, and nowhere was any of it in God's word. Wow. That was hard for me to believe, but I eventually had to yield to the fact that Christ did not die on Good Friday, nor did he rise back to life the following Sunday morning, the day that we call Easter. What I did learn is that he actually died on a Wednesday of that week, and he came back to life the following Saturday, or the day which is known as the Sabbath day, making exactly three days and three nights, as he stated to the Pharisees. I also learned that celebrating Easter, what we're actually doing is celebrating a pagan goddess of fertility. Now, if this information shocks you as it did me, then hold on, because we're going to tear down the facade that holds all the trappings of Easter, and we're going to expose it for what it truly is. As we proceed, if you doubt this, you can easily verify all these facts by going online and Googling the history of Easter. I'm sure you're going to be amazed. Let's start by looking at several aspects of Easter and let's remove the lies that blind us to this truth. I find that when something's broken, the best way to fix it is to take it apart piece by piece and replace what's needed. My friends, if we are to worship God the way He requires, then shouldn't we get the facts right? The Bible tells us in John 4 24, God is spirit, and those that worship him must worship in spirit and truth. Let's start by checking out the word Easter and let's learn where it came, where it came from. To begin, you're going to need to know that there's only one scripture in all of the King James Bible that uses the word Easter. It's found in Acts 12, 4, where it incorrectly states, and when he apprehended him, speaking of Peter, he put him in prison and delivered him to four Cotinians of soldiers to keep him intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people. Understand this. It was the early Protestant translators like William Tyndale and the King James translators who exchanged the word Pasha, meaning Passover, with the word Easter. You might wonder why. It's because, way back at the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325, that council decided that the celebration of Christ's resurrection should always take place on the first Sunday following the first full moon that occurs on or after the vernal equinox of March 21st. The word Easter, as we know it today, it's a corruption of the word Ostarte, Ostra, or Ostara, which is a name of Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, being dedicated to our fourth month of April. This Ostara was venerated as the goddess into ancient Teutonic mythology. This in turn came from the Babylonian idea of a queen of heaven. There's other names in the ancient times that are the counterparts of this so-called deity. In Egypt, she was known as Isis. In Phoenicia, Astarte, in Greece, Aphrodite, and in Rome, she was known as Venus. These were all female goddesses of fertility and therefore all pagans or all pagan. The Catholics who had Venus attributed many of the characteristics of this pagan goddess to Mary, the mother of Jesus or Yeshua. Today, Catholics still pray to Mary, and they still believe she is sinless or was sinless, which of course goes against what Paul tells us in Romans 3.23, which says, For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. That includes Mary, as blessed as that woman was. They also believe that Mary was preserved from all original sin and that she remained a virgin even after Christ was born, even though the Bible clearly states that Jesus had four brothers and at least two sisters. That's found in Matthew 13, 55 to 56 and Mark 6, 3. We also learn that in the year 1854 on December 8th, Pope Pius IX declared that Mary was immaculately conceived like Jesus and should be considered a deity. Although some say they've changed their minds about that today, I truly doubt it. Also, back in 1854, Pope Pius IX declared capital infallibility and the Pope's right to suppress heresy by force. You can find that information in Halley's Bible Handbook on page 781 under the title Modern Popes. Clearly, the Catholics have it wrong. The Catholic traditions are based entirely on myth, and therefore they blaspheme by claiming that their teachings and traditions are equal to God's word. Nowhere in the Bible does it even hint that Mary was or is any type of a co-redemptrix. People, we fail when we try to place man's word over the clear word of God. You may be wondering, how does any of this pertain to Easter? Well, it's very much like a puzzle. You have to put it all together in order to get that complete picture. That's why we're going to take each part of Easter apart and look at it to get that picture. Remember Isaiah 28, 10, for precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept. Line up online, line up online, here a little, there a little. Now, let's look at the Easter sunrise service to start with. Back in 1975, while I was attending a little church in Fremont, California, called the Open Bible Church, when Easter would come around, I'd get up early, before dawn, get ready, go to that church and celebrate the Easter sunrise service, not knowing at the time that what I was partaking in was something declared by God to be an abomination. But I didn't learn that truth for several years. That is until I learned and read what God told Ezekiel in Ezekiel chapter 8, verses 8 through 18, or 10 through 18. Please stop here and read those scriptures to get a full understanding about this. Once you've read them, pay very close attention to verses 15 through 17, where God explains to Ezekiel that what these men were doing was in fact an abomination. Here's what it says. Then he said to me, Have you seen this, O son of man? Turn again, and you'll see greater abominations than these. So he brought me into the inner court of the Lord's house, and there at the door of the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, about there was about twenty-five men with their backs towards the temple of the Lord, and their faces were towards the east, and they were worshipping the sun towards the east. And he said to me, Have you seen this, O Son of Man? Is it a trivial thing that the house of Judah for them to commit the abominations with the abomination which they commit here? They have filled the land with violence, and they have returned to provoke me to anger. Indeed, they put the branch to their nose. My friends, these men were having a sunrise service, and that action is what's called Mithraism. And that amounts to sun worship, and God calls it an abomination. Question, how long do you suppose God's going to put up with us repeating this same action by honoring this abomination that we call Easter? He didn't put up with Israel and Judah doing it forever, and he's certainly not going to keep putting up with us doing it either. One day, you can rest assured there's going to be a reckoning. Just look at the condition the United States is in today. We have murder, lust, rape, mass shootings, fratricide, homicide, lack of truth, sexual immorality everywhere, wokeism, and many other atrocities taking place. Unfortunately, we seem to have forgotten the many blessings that this nation was given in its beginning. When you contrast those same blessings against what's taking place today, you have to realize, my friends, we have to be running out of time. We have to stop mixing pagan practice with true worship. If we don't, then we shouldn't be surprised when these same blessings that he blessed us with are systematically taken away. It's not just Easter, my friends. Today we celebrate many days of the year that are influenced by paganism and the Catholic Church, and that needs to stop. If you think these words are the words of a fanatic, then I suggest you read the books of 1st and 2nd Chronicles, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and learn what God did to Israel and Judah for their idolatrous practices. And if those books aren't enough, then I suggest you read the book of Revelation and learn what is prophesied to happen in the future, and thus we repent as a nation, as our world, and return to God in true worship. I'm going to close this first part of our Easter study, but we're going to continue in the next couple episodes. My prayer is that by the end you come away with the urge to study and equip yourself with this truth. There's quite a bit to cover. So please be patient. We're going to talk about the history of how the rabbit and the egg became associated with Easter, about hot cross buns, the sign of Jonah, the preparation day, the high day of John 1931, his last week before his passion, and also the women that were present and how they help us discover when he actually died and was resurrected. It's a pretty exciting history if you check it out. My hope is that by the end you have somewhat of an idea of how man over time has twisted God's word to fit today's narrative about Easter. But for now, take care, my friends. Please study and pray to God for guidance and understanding. And always remember, you are worth it. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.