Christmas and Constantine's Sword

I would like to begin today with some questions.

How did Christmas become so popular? We're just two days away. If you've been listening to the radio or watching TV, you're being bombarded constantly by all kinds of announcements. Another question. Who made Christmas this way? Another question. Why was there so little resistance against it? These are logical questions that deserve logical answers.

And thankfully, we live in an age when people can investigate. They can compare.

They can come to the truth of the matter if they wish to do so. Today, we don't have big encyclopedias in the home. You can basically go to the internet and just type origin of Christmas, and you'll have hundreds of different sites to examine the question.

But investigating such an issue was not always this easy. If we would have lived in the Middle Ages, there was a great persecution. You couldn't question such a thing. Christmas was imposed upon the Roman Empire. If you lived within its vicinity, within its bounds, you didn't have a choice. It was imposed upon.

That is something I want to talk about because I've been researching this subject now for over a week, and I've been struck by the answers, the truth of the matter.

Now, God says that if we have God's Spirit, it will lead us to the truth, that God's Spirit will guide us. It will open our minds to find the truth in God's Word, especially in 2 Thessalonians 2, verse 9. One of the main characteristics of a true Christian is his love for the truth in the Bible. 2 Thessalonians 2, in verse 9, it says, The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders. It's going to be a lot of deceit that Satan is going to trump up.

He says, And with all unrighteous deception among those who perish. Again, when the Bible talks about perish, are those that are going to perish in their own sins. That's what it talks about, because everybody's eventually going to die. But the question is, are we going to perish in our own sins, or are we going to be cleaned of our sins and forgiven as the first message that Enrique brought out? It goes on to say, Because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this reason, in a godless world, God will send them strong delusion. He will permit this to happen through Satan, that they should believe the lie so that people are going to be deceived doing the wrong things. These are not God's truths. These are deceptions. These are clever tales that people have learned to believe in. It says that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness. And the fact is that we have all been deceived at one time. Those that came into the church on their own, I was deceived. I kept all of these festivals before, and I was one of those that was condemned, who did not believe the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness. But we are bound to give thanks to God always for you, brethren, beloved by the Lord, because God from the beginning chose you for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth to which He called you by our gospel for the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. So the separation is not between who is good and who is evil so much and who is nice and who isn't. It's who gives their lives to following God's truths and who doesn't, who tolerates lies, because they're convenient. You just follow the stream of society. You just continue following the current, and you usually don't even question it. But when God calls you, then you have to question your own beliefs. Are they biblical or not? And God's Spirit is going to be there pounding away and getting our attention and constantly probing us to not accept lies. Notice when people will come to the understanding fully of what this world is about in Isaiah 11.

Verse 1, it's only when Jesus Christ comes back that the world will really wake up to this truth. Satan is so clever. He's got a counterfeit belief for everyone that God has that is truth and truthful. Isaiah 11 verse 1.

It says, there shall come forth a rod from the stem of Jesse, talking about here there's going to be a descendant of Jesse who was King David's father. So it's going to come from that family. And a branch shall grow out of his roots. The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him the spirit of wisdom and understanding the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge, and of the fear of the Lord. Talking about Jesus Christ. His delight is in the fear of the Lord, and he shall not judge by the sight of his eyes nor decide by the hearing of his ears. He judges by what's the truth of the matter. But with righteousness he shall judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of the earth. He shall strike the earth with the rot of his mouth and with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked. And so it talks about when Christ comes back, he's going to establish the truth on this earth. He is going to remove that veil of deceit that people have fallen into, that they have allowed Satan to deceive them in this way.

And then it says in verse 9, They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain. This is talking of Jesus Christ, who would come. He says, For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. I'd like to read this in the easy to read version. This verse says, people will stop hurting each other. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Because they're hurting each other today, like never before. We're listening to how now we've got not only missiles on land, but basically in space is where the next frontier is going to come. That's what they're heading for. People will stop hurting each other. People on my holy mountain will not want to destroy things because they will know the Lord. The world will be full of knowledge about Him, like the sea is full of water. So you see, people can believe what they want today. Lies are going to be pawned off, but there's going to be one day when the knowledge of God will purify people's minds of all lies. And so, brethren, we are blessed because God has opened our minds, and we know the truth about these matters. So here is a new angle on an old story about the origins of Christmas. About once a year, we give a message because it's important to understand what is the truth of the matter. Should we keep Christmas or not? A lot of people see it as something harmless. Maybe it's not biblical, but they don't see a big problem. So I'd like to just show you through the historical evidence of what is the truth of the matter. I have been reading primarily four historical sources. The first one is called Constantine's Sword by James Carroll. He is an American historian, Catholic in background. He was a former priest. He knows very well that whole system. And he wrote a book where he traces how the church became powerful through Constantine's sword. How Constantine was the one that imposed what people now believe in the Roman Catholic Church. And by extension, a lot of the Protestants believe it because it came from Catholic origins. The second source is called A.D. 381, Heretics, Pagans, and the Christian State by Charles Freeman. Now this is a renowned historian. He's not a Christian. He just examined the evidence of how the Christian state came to be as far as, again, in the Roman Empire. The third one is called Passover for Messiah and After by Donna and Mal Broadhurst. And they give the perspective of people that keep the Sabbath and keep the Holy Days, but they don't keep Christmas. And the fourth is Jesse Hurlbut in his famous history of the Christian Church. He's a Protestant historian, so these are the four sources. And regarding Christmas, I would like you to remember three key dates in history. The year 325, the year 381, and the final year 534 A.D.

Christmas, according to these sources, came about by the decrees of three emperors on those three dates. The first one, Emperor Constantine in 325, the second one, Emperor Theodosius, and the third, the Emperor Justinian. They set up and enforced such practices as Christmas by use of the sword.

I'd like to read just some excerpts from these books. First from the book Constantine's Sword, pages 185 to 189. Again, these are historians that are renowned. They're top-tier historians, written many books, won many awards. These are respected authors and historians. He says that Constantine's full embrace of a Christian identity took place gradually, and not all at once, as in the legends, is revealed by the fact that sol, which means sun in English, sol is the Spanish word for sun, it's also the Latin word for sun.

Sol, the pagan sun god, continued to be honored on Constantine's coins until 321 A.D. This was the date, I add the following, this was the date he proclaimed Sunday as a day of rest throughout the empire, 321 A.D.

And he dedicated that day to the invincible god of the sun. So apparently Constantine had already said some eight years before that he was following the Christian god, but he also followed the pagan god, the sun god. The historian Carol adds, as seen in Constantine's originating piety, that supreme deity would have been associated with the sun, and pagans would have recognized with reason their own solar cult in such Christian practices. Now you see how they mixed pagan teachings with Christian practices, and you see the influence of the sun god that Constantine was following by orienting churches to the east.

So if you look at Catholic churches, they're oriented toward the east where the sun rises up. Now God doesn't say anything about orienting anything to the east. If you're following God and you meet in a place, it shouldn't make any difference. What orientation? But here it was to honor the sun god. Another, he says, the worshiping on sun day, the day of the sun, and celebrating the birth of the deity of the sun at the winter solstice, in other words, Christmas.

So you see, once you started following Sunday instead of the Sabbath day, which is the seventh day, which is a holy day, now Sunday, the first day of the week, was followed. And not only by resting on that day, as the emperor Constantine imposed on the empire, in 321 AD he sent a decree that people should rest on Sunday, and also that they should honor this sun god. And so the churches following Constantine's guide and his laws, they started orienting their churches toward the east and celebrating Christmas, which means the birth of the sun god, which was the old Saturnalia feast that was celebrated in Rome to the sun god and the Saturn, which is another one of the gods.

The historian Carol goes on to say, as a politician, Constantine had put his trust in the universalist spirit, which from above appears as the humane bringing of order to chaos. So the emperor was kind of the symbol to unify the Roman empire and to prevent disorder. He was supposed to bring order, it says, while from below, now talking about down to earth, what was going on here, often appearing as totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is a system where there is complete control by the government over its people, its total. Now, thankfully, you have lived in a country that has never experienced totalitarianism. Here, a person cannot impose his rule and impose his will on the people because there are checks and balances.

But I, who was born in Cuba, lived under totalitarianism for a year and a half. Fidel Castro took over Cuba basically January 1, 1959. I was just a young boy, six years old at the time, and we left basically in October of 1961. So I lived under totalitarianism for a year and a half. And once he took over, he took over the schools, he took over the banks, he took over properties, he took over agriculture, he took over everything.

In schools, he put his own people, and I was in first grade back then. And I remember when they removed the Catholic monks and priests that were teaching in that school. We have a Catholic school in front of our home on La Palma there, and it's called Servite School, and it's a Catholic school. That's basically priests and monks teach there. Of course, nowadays they have more, but at that time it was exclusively monks. Castro took over the school, expelled the monks, and put his own people.

And I'll never forget that first day in school when we arrived, there was a lady teacher, first grade, and I just remember the first things that she taught. She said there are two things that you need to learn. First, God does not exist, and secondly, you should tell us what your parents are doing in the home. So basically, they wanted us to become atheists and also spies for our family.

Well, it's still the same system there. They still have a spy system. They still have atheism as a top and as a communist system. But I'll tell you, I know what living under totalitarianism is and here you had a Roman Empire where Constantine amassed all the power, and he had all the troops, and he had the spy system in the Roman. That's why God calls it one of the beasts in Daniel and also in Revelation. It's a beast system because if you did not follow the Roman Empire's laws, you were considered a rebel, and crucifixion was the price you paid if you did not follow their teachings. Now, the Roman Empire could be very generous if you submitted to them and they built up cities and built up a network of commerce. You could prosper, but the one thing you couldn't do is to defy the emperor and his decrees and the way he imposed system. He didn't have a democracy then, and what was left of the Roman Senate was just a bunch of men that would rubber stamp what the emperor said. So he says here that he often appeared as totalitarian. So in turning to religion, Carol goes on, unity of belief and practice, not tolerance of diversity, had to seem paramount. In other words, the most important thing. Thus, the now absolute and sole Caesar, demonstrating an authority no one had ever exercised before, summoned the bishops of the church to a meeting which he himself would preside. So you see, so you see, he took in and basically brought the bishops on his terms, and he would determine the eventual outcome of that council at Nicaea. He said those who dissented were exiled by Constantine, who did not accept the verdicts in the Council of Nicaea. He then issued a decree against Jews that referred to Jewish Christians, drawing the sword against them.

The other historians, the Broadhursts, which I mentioned as one of the sources, wrote, as far as Christian Passover is concerned, the beginning of the dark ages can be set at 325 AD with the Council of Nicaea. Along with turning their backs on Christian Jews, the Gentiles turned their backs on the Jewish scriptures. It took a major Protestant Reformation centuries later to begin to undo the horror and destruction the church brought on the world when the Gentiles at Nicaea formally adopted the policy of having, quote, nothing in common with the Jews. So in Nicaea, they threw out the Holy Days in the Bible, no more keeping the Passover as the Bible instructs on the 14th of the first Jewish or biblical month, Nissan. You couldn't do that anymore. Now you had to keep Christmas. You had to keep all the saint days that they had. You had to keep their Easter. And also Sunday was enforced, and with it, the keeping of Christmas.

It says it took a major Protestant Reformation centuries to begin to undo the horror and destruction, because what Constantine did was he took over. It wasn't the Pope in Rome. It wasn't the Patriarch in Constantinople. It was the emperors that determined what was to believed in the Catholic Church. And these authors document how Constantine didn't ask them about it. The phrase, having nothing in common with the Jews, comes from the words of the emperor Constantine in explaining his decision. This is from the Broadhurst book. He decreed that those who refused to follow his commands and the Roman Church's directions would become heretics. Be excommunicated and mercilessly persecuted. His resulting letter showed the depth of his contempt regarding practices he considered quote, Jewish, like the Sabbath day, like keeping God's holy days, even if those practices came straight from the Bible. The Broadhursts bring that up. It wasn't what the Bible said. It was now what the emperors said.

So here's where I continue. It says, in 354 AD, Christmas appears for the first time as part of the new church calendar. This would be imposed upon the Roman Empire in AD 381. This is the second book I mentioned to you, AD 381. He says, I stress the central role of the emperors, especially Theodosius, the first, in defining Christian doctrine. The power of the emperor was such, and the crises that faced his empire so immense, that Theodosius chose to champion one faction of Christians, the supporters of Nicaea, over its rivals. He not only isolated what were now described in law as, quote, heretics, but attempted to suppress pagan thought as well. Notice what Freeman says. Anybody who studied a little bit of history, what this is compared to, in 381, when the emperor Theodosius established, there would be only one church that would be backed, be supported with Constantine's sword. He says, it was a pivotal moment in classical and indeed European history. This basically determined what European history would be like for the next 1,400 years. Never before in the Greek or Roman world had there been such a sweeping imposition of a single religious belief alongside the active suppression of alternatives. So Theodosius was the one that really imposed the Catholic beliefs upon the empire. He says, the only precedent comes from ancient Egypt when the pharaoh Akhenaten replaced the mass of Egyptian deities with the single sun god Aten in the 14th century BC. So you're talking about, you have to go almost 2,000 years to have a ruler that establishes a new religion and deprives everybody of having alternatives. And you have to go back to the pharaoh Akhenaten. It says about Akhenaten, and even this policy was quickly reversed by his successors. So Akhenaten, once he died, it reverted back the Egyptian religion to what it had been before. But this did not happen in the Roman Empire. After Theodosius, it continued to be imposed upon. And so now you have a totalitarian state as far as religion is concerned. You don't have a choice anymore what you believe. He says, Theodosius' decrees were especially startling because less than 60 years earlier, in 313, the emperor Constantine had issued with his co-emperor, Licinius, an edict of toleration in which he promised, quote, that no one whatsoever should be denied freedom to devote himself either to the cult of the Christians or to such religion as he deemed best suited for himself. 60 years later, the curtain came down, and now this was going to be imposed upon the people.

Continuing on, this now takes us to the third date, the year 534 A.D. This is the time of the emperor Justinian, where he issued what is called the Justinian Code.

Freeman, in page 153, writes, In one of his laws of the 1530s, Justinian ordered all to come forward for Christian baptism, quote, Should they disobey, let them know that they will be excluded from the state and will no longer have any rights of possession, neither goods or property, stripped of everything they will be reduced to penury, which means poverty, without prejudice, to the appropriate punishments that will be imposed on them.

And so basically what Constantine started and Theodosius imposed, now Justinian made all of the subjects of the Roman Empire that they would have to be baptized. This would be an imposition at that time. And basically, that's when society and education really took a downward spin, because now you couldn't question anything. From then on, the study of religion in the Roman Empire, what you believe, was only going to be on those that would reinforce one church's point of view on things. Everyone else was excluded, considered a heretic, and be dispossessed of all of these goods.

So in 381, Theodosius issued that decree announcing that the only acceptable form of Christianity centered on a trinity in which God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit were seen as of equal majesty.

He went on to condemn all other Christian beliefs as heresies that would be punished by both the state and the divine judgment of God. By July of 381, the law had been extended across the whole of the Eastern Empire and then in the 380s to the Western branch of the Roman Empire. And so what is the result? This comes from the fourth book, Jesse Herbert's The History of the Christian Church. He writes, But with the triumph of Christianity as the Catholic Church resulted in much that was good, inevitably the alliance of the state and the church also brought in its train many evils. The seizing of persecution was a blessing, but the establishment of Christianity as the state religion became a curse. And of course, only one version of Christianity, as we have seen, everyone sought membership in this church and nearly everyone was received, both good and bad. Sincere seekers after God and hypocritical seekers after gain rushed into the communion. Ambitious, worldly, unscrupulous men sought office in the church for social and political influence. The moral tone of Christianity and power was far below that which had marked the same people under persecution. The services of worship increased in splendor, but were less spiritual and hardy than those of former times. The forms and ceremonies of paganism gradually crept into the worship. Some of the old heathen feasts, like Christmas, became church festivals with the change of name and of worship. Used to be called Saturnalia. Now it's called Christmas. About 405 AD, images of saints and martyrs began to appear in the churches. At first as memorials, then in succession, revered, adored, and worshiped. The adoration of the Virgin Mary was substituted for the worship of Venus and Diana. The Lord's Supper became a sacrifice in place of a memorial, and the elder evolved from a preacher into a priest. As a result of the church sitting in power, we do not see Christianity transforming the world to its own ideal, but the world dominating the church. The humility and saintliness of an earlier age was succeeded by ambition, pride, and arrogance among churchmen. If Christianity could have been allowed to develop normally without state control, and the state could have continued free from the dictation of the church, both state and church would have been better by dwelling apart. But the church and the state became one when Christianity was adopted as the religion of the empire, and out of the unnatural union arose two evils. One in the Eastern, the other in the Western provinces. In the East, the state dominated the church until it lost all energy and uplifting life. In the Western part, as we shall see, the church gradually usurped power over the state, and the result was not Christianity, but a more or less corrupt hierarchy, controlling the nations of Europe, making the church mainly a political machine. So brethren, we see here the difference and why it's so wonderful to be able to live in a country where we do have freedom of religion, where we can examine the truth. Because how many know these things? If how the system was imposed upon with the sword of Constantine, the point of the sword was there. And so of course people had to accept it, but this did not come from searching the scriptures, examining them, but being imposed upon by a totalitarian state. And so that is why the love of the truth is so vital.

Brethren, one day we are going to be blessed because we decided to follow that road less traveled, that narrow road of truth, the one that does keep God's commandments, we keep his word, but it is a tiny minority on this face of the earth. And so every time when this date comes along, we need to understand how it was imposed upon. And because we put God before man, we don't keep this Roman holiday that was imposed upon back in the time of Constantine and Theodosius. And finally, with the emperor that we talked about, Justinian, you know, if you take a pagan feast, it's just like taking a cow, painting it like a horse, and calling it a horse. It's still a cow. You're not going to change it. It's still something evil. Saturnalia was one of the most pagan, and it was full of sin and orgies and all kinds of things. And instead of saying no to this, what did they do? They changed it then, exchanging gifts that used to be given by the populace in the days of Saturnalia. Now people give gifts, but they don't really think about Jesus Christ. The apostles didn't exchange gifts. They didn't teach anything about exchanging gifts in the middle of December. And so, as it says in 1 John 2, verse 21, it says, no lie is of the truth.

We can't accept anything that is false, that is a lie. It's just like taking a little bit of arsenic and mixing it in with a beverage and giving it to our children. That arsenic is going to kill that child even if the rest of the beverage is fine. Poison is poison. A lie will never be a truth. And so, brethren, let us be so thankful for the love of the truth. And these are some of the reasons why we do not keep this day called Christmas.