It's OK, I meant well

How much does one's real motive -- his heartfelt belief on the matter -- influence whether an act is moral or immoral?

If a man murders another, but his heart believed it was done for good, is it still evil? If the man truly believed his action was done out of righteousness or human ethical behavior, does it make the otherwise unethical act more ethical?

I encounter this argument from many gentile Christians who, after being confronted about the very un-Christian backgrounds of supposedly Christian holidays like Easter or Christmas, respond with the quip, "All that may be true, but I'm honoring God in my heart."

It's the religious version of "it's the thought that counts".

It's a good point. I know there are many folks, filled with God's spirit, doing their best to walk a righteous life before God and relying on God for their righteousness, who are trying to honor God in celebrating Christmas, Easter, Lent and other so-called Christian holidays, as well as now non-Christian holidays such as All Hallow's Eve (Halloween). Gentile Christians have told me many times, "I'm not worshipping my Christmas tree, and these other pagan symbols mean nothing to me, they're harmless decorations!"

Where does that leave us? What's the truth here? Well, let's summarize what we know:

1. The Christian holidays of Easter, Christmas, and Lent were formed from pagan rituals. These were chosen over God's holidays largely because of the hatred of Jews and all things Jewish in the early gentile Church. (See Church: Behold Your Founder) For example, man's Easter was chosen over God's Passover because Roman Emperor and founder of the Roman Catholic Church, Constantine, decreed in the 325 CE,

   "We ought not therefore to have anything in common with the Jew. It would be your duty not to tarnish your soul by communication with such wicked people (the Jews). It was declared to be particularly unworthy for this, the holiest of festivals, to follow the customs (the calculation) of the Jews who had soiled their hands with the most fearful of crimes, and whose minds were blinded. In rejecting their custom we may transmit to our descendants the legitimate mode of celebrating Easter. You should consider not only that the number of churches in these provinces make a majority, but also that it is right to demand what our reason approves, and that we should have nothing in common with the Jews."



2. These holidays have largely been scrubbed of their former pagan symbolism and racist past, although some forms still exist. Easter eggs, Easter rabbits, yule tide, mistletoe, Christmas trees, silver testicles of the Egyptian god Ra (excuse me, silver balls on Christmas trees), candles on Christmas trees, and the mythical St. Nick who knows when you're sleeping or when you're awake and whether you've been bad or good, are a few examples.


3. Most Christians are unaware of the pagan and anti-Jewish, anti-Torah backgrounds of these holidays.


4. The few Christians who have knowledge of this and continue to celebrate have justified their doing so by saying they are honoring God in their heart.


5. It is true that most Christians who are truly desiring to walk with God are, in fact, trying to honor God through these holidays, despite their pagan and racist backgrounds.

So, are Christians right in saying, "These holidays are what I make them to be, the pagan & anti-Jewish backgrounds don't mean anything to me"?

I'd like to look at Scripture and see. Is there anything in Scripture that would indicate either way? Let's look.

From the Torah

One thing that immediately comes to mind is something found back in the Torah. When Moses ascended the mountain to receive the commandments, the people of Israel became weary and, in their impatience, melted down their gold and from it, formed an undoubtedly beautiful golden statue of a calf, and worshiped it. To us, this sounds like pretty straightforward idolatry, doesn't it?

But a crux most Christians miss in this story is something that Jewish tradition holds: the golden calf they molded wasn't a new god; after all, the Lord was doing all kinds of miracles right before their eyes -- the splitting of the Red Sea, the leading pillar of cloud by day, the leading pillar of fire by night, the closing of the sea on the Egyptians, the giving of manna and water in the middle of the Negev desert -- the Israelites weren't in the market for a new god.

This golden calf was not a new god, no, Jewish tradition holds the calf was molded for the "unseen God", the Lord, who rode invisibly on the back of this calf. The Egyptian tradition of creating idols of their gods riding triumphantly on the backs of cattle was borrowed by the Israelites, and now the Israelites were making an idol for the Lord, the invisible god, riding on the back of a golden calf.

Still with me?

If this tradition holds water, the Israelites meant well. In fact, they were worshipping the Lord.

But this was something God didn't approve of, despite Israel's good intentions. Why? They were mixing holy and profane: a tradition of the world mixed with an otherwise holy people and holy God.

From the B'rit Chadasha (New Testament)

When Messiah went to the Temple in Jerusalem, he encountered folks who were selling the necessities for offerings in the Temple -- grain offerings, sin offerings, praise offerings -- as commanded by the Torah.

These folks meant well, they were even helping those who were giving to God. But when Messiah saw them, he did something rather unexpected and violent,

Jesus entered the temple area and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. "It is written," he said to them, " 'My house will be called a house of prayer,' but you are making it a 'den of robbers.'"

Despite the good intentions of those selling offerings for the Temple, Messiah rebuked them and sent them away. Why? Mixing holy and profane, mixing God's house with man's market.

What about when Messiah related to his followers all the things that must happen to him and how the Messiah must suffer and die? Kefa (Peter) responded, "Never!"

Certainly Peter had good intentions and meant well; he was stating he'd never let harm come to Yeshua. But did Peter's good intentions spare him?

From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the Torah, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.

Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. "Never, Master!" he said. "This shall never happen to you!"

Jesus turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men."

Wow. Why did Messiah himself come against Peter so harshly, especially when his intentions were good? Because he was mixing holy and profane; God's plan mixed with man's ideas. Peter meant well, even meant to glorify God, but that didn't make it right.

From logic and reason

If heart-felt motive is the only thing that determines whether an act is moral, anarchy exists and morality is relative.

Taken to an extreme end, the thinking of "It's OK because I mean well" results in any act being defensible. I could steal from you justly because I was fully convinced in my own mind that stealing from people wealthier than myself is morally good; a modern Robin Hood, if you will.

A more reasonable position, some might say, is that because you are fully convinced that a mother has a right to choose whether to let her developing child live or die, and because the mother's intention isn't evil -- she just doesn't want to have kids -- it is morally acceptable and agreeable that she kill her child abort the fetus if she so chooses.

When led to it's ultimate end, any crime is a non-crime, every sin is a non-sin, if we define morality or righteousness as "whatever I want it to be" or "whatever the purpose of my heart is", we're left with a humanist's utopia: relative moralism, no real rights or wrongs, nothing truly righteous, nothing truly evil.

Conclusion

Indeed, such thinking will lead one to a kind of washy unitarianism: for if the intent of one's heart is what matters, who's to say Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and other world religions have it wrong? They all believe in their heart they're following God, in some form or another, so why bother them?

If believers in Messiah can justify observing the world's holidays in good conscience, with all the pagan and anti-Jewish paraphernalia associated with Easter, Christmas, and Lent, we cancel out a gospel that insists on itself as the only way to God, we cancel out absolute morality, we remove the very idea of righteousness. We relegate absolute morality to the backseat, placing a greater importance on the intent of one's heart, allowing for wiggle room.

We've discovered in Scripture that one can try to please God and still do something unpleasing to God. We've seen that intent of the heart isn't the only thing that matters. While God does look on the heart, it can't be the only scale of right and wrong.

Your celebrating Easter is no better than putting a cross on a Buddha; we're mixing holy and profane. One must ask Christians, would you feel comfortable with celebrating such things if Messiah was visiting your home tonight? Would you talk to him how beautiful your adorned tree looks? How much fun the kids had at the Easter egg hunt? And then tell Him how you're doing these things in His name and for His sake? I can only imagine his response!

No matter how much we convince ourselves otherwise, seemingly harmless things like this do not honor God. God is not honored by your Christmas tree, God is not honored by your Easter eggs. Let's stop pretending otherwise.

Undoing the Reformation

It's a strange irony that when Jesus walked on the earth, he consistently rebuked only 1 people group: pious, religious people who believed in God. Here he had a wide variety of people following him: prostitutes, tax collectors, average fishermen, poor people, yet he was consistently at odds with the Pharisees: a group of pious, religious Jews who followed God.

The problem wasn't that the Pharisees followed God. The problem was they were fakes: carefully doing religious ritual, even building their own rules and rituals twice as strict as the ones found in the Law. (Everything from not mixing dairy and meat, to not eating food baked in an oven built with a brick laid on the Sabbath, all inventions of Pharisaical rabbis.)

Jesus put it this way:

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the Law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

Did you catch that? The reason Jesus was at odds with them was not because they were Law-followers, but rather, because they were Law-less, missing the "weightier matters of the Law". Jesus compares them to tombs: the outside gravestone may be beautiful polished marble, but the inside is a rotting corpse.

Paul reinforces Jesus:

I have a special word of caution for you who are sure that you have it all together yourselves and, because you know God's revealed Word inside and out, feel qualified to guide others through their blind alleys and dark nights and confused emotions to God. While you are guiding others, who is going to guide you? I'm quite serious. While preaching "Don't steal!" are you going to rob people blind? Who would suspect you? The same with adultery. The same with idolatry. You can get by with almost anything if you front it with eloquent talk about God and his law. The line from Scripture, "It's because of you that the outsiders are down on God," shows it's an old problem that isn't going to go away.

The religious people of Jesus' time were so concerned with religion, they missed the Messiah right in front of them. They held so dearly onto their rituals, festivals, and religious rites, they lived for the religion, not for God. Anything that went against their theology, then, was labeled heretical.

It's a real wake-up call to Christians to be humble and be tied to God instead of religion and rituals.

I bring this up on the eve of Lent and Easter. For the 3rd straight year, I visited the largest Protestant Christian church in Minnesota, US, yesterday, after finding out they were celebrating the Roman Catholic festival of Lent. Not to criticize or condemn, but to learn.

A short history on Lent

Now the festival of Lent is rooted in several old pagan feasts celebrating Spring and the reincarnation of the world after its death in the winter. The word Lent actually comes from a old word meaning "spring". Unfortunately, Lent derives from a very old Babylonian religious rite of weeping for Tammuz, the son of Nimrod and Easter/Ishtar. The weeping is in honor of Tammuz's tragic death by a wild boar. This festival is mentioned by the prophet Ezekiel:

The Master said to me, "Son of man, have you seen what the elders of the house of Israel are doing in the darkness, each at the shrine of his own idol? They say, 'The LORD does not see us; the LORD has forsaken the land.' " Again, he said, "You will see them doing things that are even more detestable."

Then he brought me to the entrance to the north gate of the house of the LORD, and I saw women sitting there, mourning for false god Tammuz. He said to me, "Do you see this, son of man? You will see things that are even more detestable than this."

He then brought me into the inner court of the house of the LORD, and there at the entrance to the temple, between the portico and the altar, were about twenty-five men. With their backs toward the temple of the LORD and their faces toward the east, they were bowing down to the sun in the east.

Ezekiel is dismayed to see people weeping for Tammuz; then he sees the sun worshipers, bowing to the sun. This same Tammuz-worship and sun-worship was common for well over a millenia, lasting at least until the 300-400 CE, and was embraced by the Roman Catholic Church.

Before Christianity spread over Europe, Christians never celebrated such abominations. It wasn't until about 320 years after Jesus, when a man named Constantine, a Mithra-follower himself, pulled a brilliant political move and assimilated all the various cultures under his rule to this new fledgling Christian religion, thereby becoming the first so-called Holy Roman Emperor, founding the Roman Catholic Church in the process.

Of course, Constantine never let Christianity and its teachings of humility and rejection of sin take over his Mithra religion. The Catholic Church to this day acknowledges Constantine rose at sunrise every morning, bowing to the sun on the steps of the church in Rome. (If only Ezekiel could see him!) Nor did Constantine let Christianity change his lifestyle: instead of bringing on the Biblical feasts (Passover, Pentecost, Trumpets, etc.) he instead took the existing Mithra and pagan holidays of Tammuz Weeping, Easter/Ishtar, Nimrod's Birthday, and others, and simply re-labeled them as Christian, making them official holidays of Christianity. Thus, the Tammuz Weeping holiday became Lent. The first day of the 40-day festival of Lent became Ash Wednesday, the day you put ashes on yourself in mourning for Tammuz. But instead of weeping for Tammuz, we pretend we're weeping for Jesus in the desert. Easter/Ishtar holiday, honoring Tammuz' mother Easter, was preserved, but we instead pretend we're remembering Jesus' resurrection.

As an interesting side note, of all the pagan holidays, Easter is easily the best preserved: the name remains the same as Tammuz's mother, the goddess of fertility and spring. The Mithra sunrise observances are still often held in the form of church sunrise services, and many people still eat a pig on the festival, just as the old pagans ate a pig out of spite for the wild boar that killed Tammuz. Even many fertility symbols such as rabbits and eggs remain an integral part of the pagan festival.

Nimrod's birthday on the 25th of December was relabeled as well. Instead of Nimrod's birthday, we're to pretend it's Jesus' birthday.

This same version of Christianity found it no difficult thing to change the sabbath to a Mithra-follower's favorite day, Sun-day. Constantine used this opportunity to institute sun worship at the church, at sun-rise, every Sun-day.

Of course, over time, the whole Biblical calendar was thrown out and replaced with one whose months and days are named after false gods. To this day, we've inherited such a calendar: January is named after the false god Janus, February named after a ritual of whipping women with goatskin whips, a pagan fertility rite known as Februa, and so on.

And the days of the week are no exception: Thursday named after the norse pagan false god Thor, Saturday named after Saturnalia. And of course Sun-day is named for the object of a Mithra-worshiper's affection. Not all of these are Constantine-instituted -- they're pulled from different pagan cultures, many of them rooted in the Babylonian mystery religion -- but Constantine's initial mixing blazed the trail for other pagan mixings of holy and profane.

In short, Constantine created a new Christianity and promoted the hell out of it. What we have today in Western Christianity is based largely on that version of Christianity created by Constantine when he founded the Roman Catholic Church.

Undoing the Reformation

But after several hundred years of spiritual darkness in the Dark Ages brought on by this false Christianity, a man named Martin Luther spotted the unbiblical, ungodly nature of these things. He saw the confession of sins to priests, and realized this was a man-made ritual without basis in Scripture. He saw the selling of indulgences and saw the huge gap between this practice and Jesus' teachings. He realized the "Pope-as-god" idea was pure idolatry. He nailed his famous 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg church, and started a movement to get back to the basics of the faith: no more ritual, just faith in God. He threw out many of the rituals of sun-worshipping, threw out priestly confessions, selling of indulgences, he tried to get Bibles into the hands of anyone who could read (the RC church never allowed Bible reading), and he almost restored the sabbath to its biblical day.

In short, Martin Luther threw out much of the paganism took on by the Roman Catholic Church and got back to the basics. He kept some of the rituals: communion, certain religious holidays, for example, but by and large, he got rid of much of the evil the Roman Catholic Church had swallowed up so happily. Luther was quoted as saying we should do away with the traditions of men. Interestingly, Luther and Lutherans never fully realized this goal. They removed plenty, but they stopped cleaning house at a point, perhaps due to the strong cultural and religious ties involved. However, at least most Protestant Churches eventually succumbed to that basic urging by Luther, ridding themselves of "traditions of men", including Lent.

Going spiritually backwards

But in our modern Christian religion, we are embracing these old rites once again. Just yesterday I attend the largest Protestant church in Minnesota, USA, for a Lent service. Like Ezekiel, I was both shocked and saddened to see a congregation of 7000 strong re-instituting pagan traditions of men.

But what irked me most was the pastor, who is now head of the National Association of Evangelicals, got on the pulpit and told his large congregation things that simply aren't true. I cringed when I heard him speak of Lent as a patently Christian holiday celebrated by early Christians -- an historical falsehood, verifiable by anyone who wishes to research the origins of the holiday: the apostles and early Christians certainly never celebrated -- let alone heard of -- this Lent holiday. I curled my toes and bit my tongue when I heard the pastor tell the congregation things that I knew to be false.

I thought to myself, "Surely he had to research this a bit before writing a sermon on the topic?!" That thought scared me: if the pastor did research and discovered the origins of Lent, yet still taught something contrary to reality, he was knowingly and purposefully misleading many.

And for what? For religious rites, for ritual, for tradition unbiblical.

As the organist played a deathly, melancholy tune, blasting away through the hundred foot tall pipes reaching the unreachable ceiling, and as I looked over the Latin inscriptions on the wooden background behind the altar, watched as unbiblical ceremonies were performed, it dawned on me that these people are practicing a different faith than I. They're worshiping a Greek Christ Jesus that destroyed the Law and created a new religion. That's not the same Jewish Yeshua HaMoshiach I know.

These people, God bless them, are being led astray by the inherited lies from our ancestors. What's worse is that some of our fathers did away with these lies, we only are restoring them in our modern times. We're rolling back the progress of the Reformation.

Modern Pharisees

When Yeshua the Jewish Messiah comes back with the blast of a shofar to Zion, will our Christianity dismiss him because he's not a Greek white Christian adonis with a halo around his head? When the prophesied Messiah comes back as a political king and destroys evil, conquering all the nations and turning our warfare into joy, will our Christianity pass him up because he's not a peacenik, touchy-feely Jesus? When this Jewish Messiah revolutionary invites the whole world to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles with him, in Jerusalem, will our Christianity thumb its nose at such "Jewish" things, opting instead for our so-called Christian holidays of Lent and Easter?

I wonder. At the same time, I am worried the answer is "yes", if history is any indication. The religious people of Jesus' time were too caught up in their religion, too caught up in ritual and unbiblical tradition to recognize Messiah right in front of them. I hope with everything in me that history does not repeat, hope that we won't miss Messiah because he's not the Greek, anti-Jewish, anti-Torah, pale-skinned peacenik adonis we pretend Him to be.

I already anticipate replies to this post: "there is no condemnation...for those in Christ!", and the obligatory, "Paul says this...", "Paul says that...". Friends, I'm not here to condemn anyone, I've sinned worse than all of you. I'm here to say, "Let's get out of sin, get out of false-god practices." It's time for some humility. Unlike the Pharisees, let's acknowledge that we both can be wrong and can be corrected. The Pharisees thought they had it right and had a whole host of Scripture to back them up, but without any humility, they rejected Messiah outright because he didn't fit the religion they had created. I fear unless we change and reject our man-made religious rites, traditions, and holidays, we'll follow suit, and reject Messiah because he doesn't fit our Western, Christian definition of Him.