It is a highly relevant question and it is a question which spiritual leaders need to address.
There is so much confusion around regarding the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, that it places many people in a spiritually perilous situation.
How did the message of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and his resurrection from the dead, ever become confused with bunnies, eggs, and almost drowned in chocolate?
When March and April come April around, the shops and stores and malls are chock-a-block with chocolate. This might even start as early as February!
All this happened gradually, as man moved away from Passover, preferring the “E” word, which is never found in Scripture, and which the early apostolic church never used. It is now nigh on twenty years since I stopped using the “E” word. Let me explain simply and clearly.
Man will do many things to distance the Church of Jesus Christ from her Jewish roots.
We have a Jewish Bible and a Jewish saviour, and we wild Gentile branches are engrafted into the Jewish trunk. Man will even try to move away from geographical and historical words like Israel and Judah and use the Romanised version of Philistine, which then reads Palestine. When people refer to Palestine today, I usually ask them where it is, and some become quite embarrassed or annoyed and some become angry and furious.
The covenants, the law, the basis of worship, the promises, the patriarchs and the human ancestry of Jesus Christ, can all be traced back to the Hebrew people.
The background to the word Easter relates to the fertility cults, with references to the goddess of the spring, or the goddess of the dawn, and is linked to the vile goddess Ashtoreth, which the Word of God forbids, and warns the people of God to avoid. Oestrogen is derived from the same linguistic root.
Some time following Jesus’ birth, wise men came asking, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We have come to worship him.”
Wise men will always have that desire and longing to worship the living God.
Even Pilate had a significant placard prepared and fastened to the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews”. The sign was written in Aramaic, Latin and Greek, the three main languages of that time.
Whoever walked by, and looked at the cross, would have learned and known exactly who it was nailed to the tree, that Passover.
Jesus observed the Passover, and He says quite clearly and distinctly, “Follow Me”.
by Sandy Shaw