Men have always been prone to forget the simple way of God and have tried to worship Him as they please instead of how He pleases. To do so is to ignore the warning of Christ: "But in vain do they worship me teaching as their doctrine the precepts of men" (Mark 7:7). Soon after the establishment of the Lord's Church on Pentecost (Acts 2) men began to fall away from the simple doctrine and brought error into the doctrine and practice of the church. Such a falling away was foretold by Christ and the apostles (Mat.. 7:15-20; Acts 20:28-30; 2 Thess. 2:3-4).
It is a shock to many to learn that there is no authority in the Bible for the observance of an annual religious holiday known as Easter. The observance of Easter is a heathen origin, handed down to us through the commandments of men, not God. The word "Easter" comes from German mythology and is derived from Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring. The Teutonic tribes worshipped this goddess at least 300 years before the birth of Christ with rituals that were often horrible and obscene, even to the offering of human sacrifices.
After the introduction of Christianity among the Germanic nations, the name Easter was carried forth into their new religion to denote the rising of the spring sun and to designate the festival of the Resurrection. Some of these vain worshippers in the church adopted Easter as a church festival in the second century. Some of those that had been converted to Christianity from the Jewish religion later adopted the celebration of Easter, but insisted that it be on the 14th or 15th of their month, Nisan, in keeping with the Jewish passover. Others were opposed to this date and to this combination of heathenism and Judaism, and therefore dissention and division followed in the churches.
In an attempt to settle the great controversy, Constantine, Emperor of the Roman Empire, called the council of Nicea in 325 to settle several church practices which ere not authorized by the Word of God, Easter being only one of them. The Council ruled that Easter should be observed on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox.
The Roman Catholic Church and most Protestant churches observe the date set by the Nicean Council. The eastern branch of the Catholic Church has another date for the Easter observance. Because the Eastern churches have reckoned from a different calendar than that used by the Western churches, their Easter has usually come either before or after the Easter observed in the West. Despite the fact that Russia adopted the Gregorian calendar as the state calendar in 1923, the Eastern churches continued to reckon Easter according to the Julian calendar and therefore the Easter date of the Eastern and Western churches rarely coincides. The inconvenience caused by a moving Easter and the other holy days has long been recognized, and many conferences have held in an attempt to fix the date. In the Western churches Easter never occurs before March 22 or after April 25. In 1761 and 1818 it fell on March 22 and in 1886 and 1943 on April 25. Easter will not occur again on these dates during the remainder of the twentieth century.
EASTER DATES --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1956 April 1 1971 April 11 1986 March 30 1957 April 21 1972 April 2 1987 April 19 1958 April 6 1973 April 22 1988 April 3 1959 March 29 1975 April 14 1989 March 26 1960 April 17 1975 March 30 1990 April 15 1961 April 2 1976 April 18 1991 March 31 1962 April 22 1977 April 10 1992 April 19 1963 April 14 1978 March 26 1993 April 11 1964 March 29 1979 April 15 1994 April 3 1965 April 18 1980 April 6 1995 April 16 1966 April 10 1981 April 19 1996 April 7 1967 March 26 1982 April 11 1997 March 30 1968 April 14 1983 April 3 1998 April 12 1969 April 6 1984 April 22 1999 April 4 1970 March 29 1985 April 7 2000 April 23 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why should the Christian's hope of a resurrection to a future life be stained and polluted by this clumsy mixture of heathenism and Judaism and Catholicism? Many people have borrowed this pagan observance without questioning its origin. Easter has become to many the one time of the year that they attend church services. It is a commercialized, traditionalized, and denominationalized day of show and tell--showing off the new Easter clothes and telling where they were purchased and how much they cost. The words of Paul would be appropriate: "ye observe days and months, and times, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labor in vain" (Gal. 4:10-11).
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