Is Halloween a Harmless Holiday?

Well, last week I spoke about Greece, and I spoke about the things that you see in Greece, and they really all have to do with paganism in one way or another. I mean, the whole country is a beautiful country, as I mentioned, but there is paganism throughout it. And while the country will tell you today that they're Christian, they are still very proud of their pagan background, and they highlight it and they make a lot of money off of it.

And Greece isn't alone. Greece isn't alone in that. All of Europe seems to have had a predilection, if you will, for false gods and for idols. Rome certainly was no stranger to that. They had any number of gods for any number of things that they worshipped at all times. And other countries followed suit as well. You know, it's really sad when you think about a nation and a people who aren't, who don't know God, who have no idea what happens after death.

They don't have any idea where they're going, why they're there. And in a world apart from God, they search for answers, and they come up with their own ideas. Some of them are very elaborate, the stories they go into. They try to picture a God because they know that it can't be just them. There's something that's there on the earth that's holding everything together and making the sunrise in the morning and holding the firmaments in place and making it rain and causing the crops to grow. But when they're man apart from God, he's a desperate and a very sad creature. Now, we see that reflected in the history of the world, because most of the world hasn't known God.

Back at the time of Adam and Eve, they rejected him and had been on their own. And they've tried to come up with their own answers, and some of them to us are pretty comical, if you will. Thousands of years later, when we look and think, people really believed that. People really thought that that's what their gods did, and that's how this God came into being and everything. But that's what happened. In other parts of the world, different things happened.

In the Far East, we have billions of people who believe in Buddha, and they worship the earth, and they believe the earth is eternal, and they'll worship the sun and the moon. And, you know, even today, sometimes you hear about people talking about Mother Earth.

There's a worship of the earth, who is included what God says. Don't worship the Creator. He created the earth. He created all these things. Worship Him the Creator. Down in Africa and some other parts of the world, witchcraft became the thing. Voodoo became the thing. People would worship those things, and they thought they could engage their gods in that way. So the whole world is kind of a toss, you know, tossed and turned, and they don't know what is going on.

You know, we can be very thankful we know the truth. We can be very thankful we know who God is, and we know what the truth is, and what is going to befall mankind, and what our purpose on here on earth is. But the world at large didn't know that.

We might, in the 21st century, champion ourselves, even the people in Europe and the people here in the United States, and think, oh, that was for the ancient history. We would never believe in things like that. All that pagan stuff is just ridiculous. But I have to wonder how far from paganism are we, really? You know, when we came home from the feast, where we are in Jacksonville, we arrived there on Sunday night, and I was greeted by two very large pumpkins, very large lit-up pumpkins in the house across the street from us. I mean, they were large, the largest jack-o'-lanterns I have ever seen in my life. And the house was decorated with all these colors, and there were cobwebs all over the house, and I thought, man, we come back from the feast, and this is the first thing I see is all these trappings about Halloween.

I took a walk around the neighborhood last week, and I saw another yard that had been transformed into a graveyard, and RIP this, and, you know, clever little sayings, and I thought, this is what we come back into, and the world celebrates these things, and, you know, in one way we might think it's, or some may think it's cute or whatever, but how far have we really come?

Because here we are now, you know, facing this week, the world's holiday of Halloween. And I don't think I have ever given a sermonet or a sermon on Halloween before, but as it was like their face-to-face, you know, through the week as I looked at those lights each night and couldn't get them blurred out of the house from the windows even, I thought, what about this holiday? We all know it's pagan, we all know the roots of it, but I thought I would look into it, and as I look into it more, it's been a while since I've done that.

So today I want to share with you some of the origins of Halloween, and I want to talk about that a little bit, because sometimes we can allow these things that happen to us to just kind of take it for granted and not see it the way that God does. Now, when I researched this, I didn't use any of the church literature, I used the Bible as my guide, and then I went through the Internet.

So anyone in the world can find out any of these facts. It's not secret church knowledge or anything like that. I used five primary sources. I looked at many more, but today I'm going to be quoting from History.com, the components of history, the HistoryTV channel, Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, just a little bit, and two Catholic websites, because the Catholics are associated with Halloween. They are the ones who kind of adopted it. It's on their website called CatholicStraightAnswers.com and CatholicCulture.org. So let me read to you a little bit here. I'm going to do this in two parts. First, I'm going to give you some of the background of Halloween.

I'm just going to read through this. This is from History.com. It says, The Celts lived two thousand years ago in what is now Ireland, Great Britain, and Northern France. They were pagan nature worshippers who had many gods, including the sun, which they believed commanded their work and rest times. The Celts observed their new year on November 1st, which marked the end of the harvest in summer as well as the beginning of the cold, dark winter. From October 31st to November 2nd, the Celts celebrated a forty-eight-hour festival called the Vigil of Samhain.

Now, it's pronounced Samhain, but it's spelled S-A-M-H-A-I-N. So if you look it up, it looks like Samhain is pronounced Samhain for some reason. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, that would be October 31st, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31st, it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth, assembled by Samhain, the pagan lord of the dead. Well, it's always been a curiosity to man. What happens after death? What's the great unknown? And the Celtic view, what they had envisioned was the dead come back.

The dead come back to earth on October 31st. And when the dead were coming back, they weren't coming back to tap people on the back. They had mischief in their minds, according to the Celts. In addition, History.com goes on, in addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Celtic priests to make predictions about the future.

For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world. Can you even imagine what it would be like to be totally dependent on earth and not know who God is and not be dependent on Him? For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter.

So we have a people here who were just looking for guidance. What do we do next? And they don't know where else to look. They think the dead come back, and they can get some prophecies from them. You've heard of the modern term, seance? This is kind of where it comes. We will conjure up the dead. It should remind you of Saul. Remember, he went to the witch of Endor and tried to conjure up Samuel, just to get his direction on things.

And God did not look kindly on that playing with the spiritual world. To commemorate the event, this sooth-saying event, this celebrating the dead event, this blurring of the dead and living event, this coniferous event that Celtic priests built huge sacred bonfires where the people gathered to burn crops and animals. Almost every website will say, and humans were sacrificed as well. It was just part of the culture and what they did that day.

They built huge sacred bonfires where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other's fortunes. So, when you see people running around in costumes on Halloween, we know what the origin of that is. The Celts did that. They were running around in costumes at that time during their celebration in honor and really out of fear of their pagan god, Saulin.

Now, that's what History.com says, and it has much more to say than that. Let me go to Encyclopedic Britannica and let me tell you what they say about the history of this day coming up. Saulin, they say, was one of the most important and sinister calendar festivals of the Celtic year.

At Saulin, the world of the gods was believed to be made visible to mankind and the gods played many tricks on their mortal worshippers. It was a time fraught with danger, charged with fear, and full of supernatural episodes. Well, that sounds like today, isn't it? People revel in that stuff. And you can see where trick-or-treat comes from, because the gods would play tricks on people. And so they would have their things. And there's the thing on November 2nd, and even the Catholic Church used to do this, the All Souls Day.

They would make cakes to appease the gods. And when you read through many of the temples, you know, those of us who were in Greece, we saw those temples. Much of that was done out of fear. If they could appease the gods, the gods would be pleased with them. It wasn't a word, it wasn't a religion based on fear or on the right kind of fear, the awesome reverence that we have for gods, but a fear of what they will do.

And so, in their custom here, associated with this holiday, their gods would come down, they would play tricks on them. Sacrilege on sacrifices and propitiations of every kind were thought to be vital, for without them, the Celts believed they could not prevail over the perils of the season or counteract the activities of the deities. Sowing, Fratonica says, was an important precursor to Halloween. So they say it pretty clearly. Now this is from CatholicStraightAnswers.com, and they give a little bit of history, and that website, someone can ask a question and then people will respond to it. And this is part of what they're talking about in response to a question about, is All Saints Day connected with Halloween, and did the Catholic Church create this in paraphrasing what the question was?

Here's part of their history on it. In ancient Britain and Ireland, they say the Celtic Festival of Solomon was observed on October 31 at the end of the summer. It was the occasion for one of the ancient fire festivals when huge bonfires were set on hilltops to frighten the way evil spirits. The souls of the dead were thought to revisit their homes on this day, and the Autonmal Festival acquired sinister significance with ghosts, witches, hobgoblins, black cats, fairies, and demons of all kinds said to be running about.

When you see a black cat somewhere this week on a statue or in someone's house, you know what the genesis of all that was. Now this is from CatholicStraightAnswers.com. They're displaying how other groups built off of the Celtic tradition. Particular ethnic groups, they say, develop their own lore. The word I have circled there is own. You know, when we rely on our own reasoning, on our own logic, we depart far, far, far from God.

We can get off into these things just like these people of old did as they tried to fashion answers using their own reason. They didn't know God, and it wasn't God's purpose to open His truth to them at that time. They did what they needed to do, but as they developed their own ideas and explanation, this is what they come up with. Particular ethnic groups developed their own lore, which was merged with the celebration. Remember that word merged, because all through Halloween, and as we get into the spiritual side of this, we see merging is the key word, was merged with the celebration.

In Ireland, people held a parade in honor of Makala, a God. They followed a leader dressed in white robe with a mask from the head of an animal and begged for food. There you have your costume again. I never knew this before. I was looking at it, and they have a little inset here. Ireland is also the source of the jackal lantern, Fable. A man named Jack was not able to enter heaven because of his miserliness, and he couldn't enter hell because he played practical jokes on the devil.

So he was condemned to walk the earth with his lantern until Judgment Day. I mean, don't you have to wonder how people even come up with this stuff? Yeah, but they believed it. And so today, we still have the jackal lanterns out there originating out of this. And then it also goes under the Scots walkthrough fields and villages carrying torches and lit bonfires to ward off witches and other evil spirits. Well, as a people of God, we don't have to build bonfires to ward off evil spirits. We don't have to do the things that the Celtics did or that people do today. We don't have to just have treats on our table for God to ward off evil spirits.

James 4-7 tells us the answer, resist the devil and he will flee from you. And turn to God and follow him and let his spirit lead you and guide you, and follow him with all your heart and all your soul. Now, all this, you know, is just something that Satan has devised.

And sometimes I look at the customs of the world around us and people apart from God. And I have to think Satan has to be somewhere off kind of smiling and thinking, look what I got these people to believe. Look what I got them to do. Look at this group over here. They did the same thing. And all I've done is direct them from God, direct them from the truth, and they are believing things that are just ridiculous when we look at it. You know, God himself in the Bible derides people who will worship idols of stone, idols of wood, and bow down and worship them and think that they can have any influence in their lives.

And even we may look back as a country and look back at some of those idols and shake our heads, but we do have our idols with us today. We may not have idols of wood or stone, but we certainly have idols that we worship and that we are willing to do whatever it takes to. And I just started looking at a book that talked about the very many idols that we have in America.

And some of them, as I think through them, I think never thought of that one, but we all can be prey to that. But everything, when you look at this holiday coming up, Halloween, every single thing about it is wrong. Every single thing. And yet in the nation today is the second largest grossing holiday of the year, right behind Christmas. More things sold on this day than anything. America has embraced it. And when you look back at history, it wasn't even until the 1920s and 30s that people began celebrating Halloween. It's just kind of escalated from there.

But it's just one of those things that is there, and everything about it is wrong. The basis of it is wrong, the customs of it are wrong, and we'll see the other things that were wrong as the guide adopted into culture. We can go back and let's look at the Bible now. Turn with me to Deuteronomy 18.

Long before the Celts, there were the people of that world back in the time, when God was bringing Israel out of Egypt, and He was going to take them to a promised land. Long before the Celts, people were involved in the spirit world, trying to come up with their own answers and doing those type of things. Satan is the same. He uses the same ploys and what he got the Celts to celebrate, what he has our nation celebrating. The nations around Israel were as well. Deuteronomy 18. And as we read through this, just think about the things as we see in the world around us today. Deuteronomy 18, verse 9. God inspiring Moses, Moses says, When you come into the land, which the Eternal your God has given you, you shall not learn to follow the abominations of those nations. Notice the word God uses is abominations, things He detests. There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer. Later on, we'll talk a little bit about sorcery because it's mentioned in the New Testament as well. None of those things that are affiliated with the spirit world where people find themselves attracted and dabbling in it and doing those things that we can even see implicit in the holiday coming up. There shall not be among you, verse 11, one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. The dead, we know. The dead are not conscious. The dead are dead, waiting until the time that they are resurrected. Verse 12, for all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominations, the Lord your God drives them out from before you. They were sheathed in this stuff. They celebrated the demons and the other worldly events that was mentioned there in History.com. They celebrated it, and God says, because of that, I'm driving them out of the land that I gave them, and you will have it in Israel. Verse 13 says, you Israel, speaking to His people then, speaking to His people now, us, you shall be blameless before the Lord your God. You shall not do what they do. Don't cuddle up to it. Don't think it's okay. Don't think, as some people say, when you mention something about Halloween or Christmas to people in the world and mention the pagan origins of it and that we shouldn't be participating in that type of stuff, a lot of people will just say, oh, I know about that, but it's all harmless fun, right? It's just harmless. I don't really do it today to worship a God. But does God look at it that way? We're participating in the same customs, the same activities that it originated with. Verse 14, for these nations which you shall will dispossess, listened to soothsayers and diviners. But as for you, the Eternal, your God, has not appointed such for you. You're not going to find your prophecies from that. You're not going to conjure up the dead into a séance and have Him tell you or her tell you what's coming next.

He says He'll appoint a prophet for them.

Israel should have known. God warned him over and over again, don't look at the people around you. Don't think that just because of what they did to their gods, it's kind of clever, kind of cute, looks kind of fun. God said, stay away from it. Stay away from things the way that I said. Israel didn't listen. Later Judah, when the nations were split, they didn't listen either. Let's go back to 2 Kings.

2 Kings 17. Let's look at the history of Israel. This is 2 Kings 17, when they have been taken into captivity. They've lost the land that God had given them. They disrespected God. They rejected Him, and they did all the things, just the opposite of what He warned them not to do. 2 Kings 17. Let's begin in verse 6.

In the ninth year of Hoshiah, the king of Assyria took Samaria, that's the capital of Israel, and carried Israel away to Assyria and placed them in Halah by the Havel, or the river goes in, and the cities of the Medes. So they not only lost their land if they're carried away, they're now captive to the Assyrians. For so it was that the children of Israel had sinned against the eternal of their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt, from under the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and they had feared other gods.

They respected and worshipped those other gods, and they had walked in the statutes of the nations which the Lord had cast out from before the children of Israel, and of the kings of Israel which they had made. Also, the children of Israel, notice the word, secretly, secretly did, against the Lord their God, things that were not right, and they built for themselves high places in all their cities, from watchtower to fortified city. They set up for themselves sacred pillars and wooden images on every high hill and under every green tree. They burned incense in all the high places like the nations, who the Lord had carried away before them, and they did wicked things to provoke the Lord to anchor, for they served idols, of which the Lord had said to them, You shall not do this thing. So, they continued to do what God had warned them not to do. Let's drop down to verse 15.

He sent people, He sent prophets to warn them, turned back to Me. Verse 14 says, They wouldn't listen. Verse 15, They rejected His statutes and His covenant that He had made with their fathers, and His testimonies which He had testified against them. They followed idols. They became idolaters, and they went after the nations who were all around them, concerning them the Lord had charged them that they shouldn't do likewise. Verse 16, dropping down to the middle of the, They made a woman image, and worshiped all the hosts of heaven, and they served but bale, and they caused their sons and daughters to pass through the fire. They practiced witchcraft, soothed things, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord to provoke Him to anger.

No wonder God cast them out of that land. He did it to the people before them who He hadn't even warned what to do, because it was so abominable in His sight that these things were going on in those lands. And then He gave Israel that land, and He said, Pay attention. Don't do what they do.

Stay clear. Stay pure. You be blameless. And Israel disregarded. Israel disrespected.

God cast them out of their lands, and they lost everything. Because of the things they did, they cuddled up to the world around them. They saw what other people did, and they thought, Well, that kind of looks fun. That kind of looks interesting. Maybe we should do that, too.

No? No, not for the people of God. Israel lost their inheritance. And Judas should have known better. Judas should have known better, but they didn't pay attention to God, either. They followed the same course of Israel. Let's go back this time to 2 Chronicles. 2 Chronicles 33.

2 Chronicles 33. This is King Manasseh. Not to be confused with the Ephraim of Manasseh. This is King Manasseh of Judah, and he had quite a reputation. 2 Chronicles 33, verse 1.

Manasseh was twelve years old when he became king, and he reigned fifty-five years in Jerusalem.

But he did evil in the sight of the Lord according to the abominations of the nations whom the Eternal had cast out before the children of Israel. And while his father tore down the high places and tore down the wooden images, Manasseh built them all back. He liked that pagan culture. He liked those idols and those wooden images on all the hills, and he built them all back.

Let's drop down to verse 5. He built altars for all the hosts of heaven in the two courts of the house of the Lord, and he caused his sons to pass through the fire in the valley of the son of Hinnom. He practiced to sing, used witchcraft and sorcery, and consulted mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the sight of the Lord to provoke him to anger, and even put a carved image in the house of God. So here we have this king departing from God, looking at the spirit world, using these things of the world around him and the nations around him. Not looking to God, but looking other places, engaging the spirit world, engaging those high things, getting close to it.

And God created pronouncement on him. Now God did send an affliction on Judah and Manasseh, and Manasseh, to his credit, repented, and he turned from the way he was going to the way that God had done. We can give him credit for that. Let's look at it down here in verse 12.

When he was in affliction, Manasseh implored God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers, and he prayed to him. And he received his entreaty, God received his entreaty, heard his supplication and brought him back to Jerusalem into his kingdom. And Manasseh knew that the eternal was God. And he lived his life that way the rest of time. He turned from his evil ways, he turned back to God. He recognized that what he had done was wrong. But what he did, and what he led Judah into, and what Judah willingly participated in, God made them pay. He held them accountable for what they had done. While Manasseh was able to live his years out, Judah was going to pay for what they had done. Let's go back to 2 Kings, 2 Kings 23, 2 Kings 23, and verse 26.

Succeeding Manasseh, Josiah was a good king. And he tore down all the altars, he tore down all the women images, he tore down all the high places, one of two kings in Judah, who actually tore down the high places and totally tried to clear Judah of the pagan influence. And he died. But God says this in verse 26. Nevertheless, the Lord did not turn from the fierceness of his great wrath, with which his anger was aroused against Judah, because of all the provocations with which Manasseh had provoked him. And Judah went into captivity. Because of Manasseh, because what he led the nation into, and because the nation willingly followed him, and chief among what God accuses him of, his idolatry, doing things the way the world around it did, to an extent that even beyond what could be considered reasonable. And there is no reasonable with God except not doing it at all. But because of what they did, God said, Judah, you too, you too are going to lose your land because you disregarded and disrespected me so much.

And you were so fascinated with what the world around you was doing in the spirit element of the world, and you participated in it willingly. You lost. You lost it all. Over in Isaiah 2, verse 6, Isaiah has this to say, of course, another inspiration from God. Verse 6, he says, For you, God, you, God, have forsaken your people, the house of Jacob, because they are filled with eastern ways. They do things like the Easterners do. They don't do things the way that you said. They've adopted the customs from other lands. They've looked into places that they should have rejected, but they brought it in among them. They are filled with eastern ways. They are soothsayers, like the Philistines, and they are pleased with the children of foreigners. They take the light in them. They like those things. They find them entertaining. Their land is full of silver and gold. There's no end to their treasures. Their land is full of horses, and there is no end to their chariots. Their land is also full of idols. They worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made. People bow down, and each man humbles himself. Therefore, don't forgive them. Think God takes seriously what we do, what customs we have, what we allow into our lives, what we may deceive ourselves into thinking, it's just harmless fun. What can be wrong with that? You've all heard that as you talk to people about various holidays. I've heard it many times with people who say, I just don't care what the pagan origin of Christmas is. It's good for the kids. It's good for the kids, and I like the spirit around it. How can God be upset with that? People who are about Halloween. Ah, it's all in good fun. It's all in good fun. It's harmless. It's not harmless by any stretch of the imagination. Let's go back to 1 Corinthians. 1 Corinthians 10 and verse 20. I remember Corinth was a city much like our nation today, a corrupt city with all sorts of things going on, very wealthy. When Paul wrote to the Corinthians, you'll recall me saying, pay attention to what's going on in Corinthians, because a lot of it so directly applies to us today. But in 1 Corinthians 10 verse 20, Paul in this chapter, he's talking about eating food, worshiping the idols, but he finishes it up here in his discourse in verse 20. He says, rather, that the things with the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice the demons and not to God. What they're doing is they're sacrificing them to demons. They're not sacrificing them to God, and I don't want you to have fellowship with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the Lord's table and of the table of demons.

You cannot be in God's church. You cannot be a true Christian and participate in the ways of this world or in the customs of this world or in the holidays of this world that have these rooted, pagan beliefs with the customs just faring forward. You can't do it both. You can't have it both ways.

God expected His people to be blameless, and this holiday that's coming up, and the Christmas and the New Year's and the Valentine's and the others that we could talk about somewhere down the road, all of them. Not okay to cuddle up to. Not okay to deceive ourselves into thinking, it's okay if I'm with them a little bit. God won't mind. It's the spirit that I'm there. God minds. And when we get too close to something and we allow ourselves to start thinking that it's okay and I can compromise a little and I can merge a little bit and I'm okay, I'm strong enough to not deal with that, watch out. Watch out. Watch out. God says, be apart from those things. Let's go over to 2 Corinthians 6. In the context of what we've talked about so far and looking at the customs that are there and what has gone on with Halloween, what all those things mean? We've seen the trick-or-treating. We've seen the we've seen the I don't even think I mentioned about the bobbing of apples, but maybe that's later on. That even dates back to there. When we look at the merging of the spirit and the fascination with the dead and fascination with the demons and hobgoblins and all these things, let's read what it says in 2 Corinthians 6 verse 14. Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? So we can ask, what would the person of God have anything to do with sowing or Halloween? What communion has light with darkness? We've just gone through the holy day season, holy days of light. Why would we even consider being part of anything or getting close to anything that is a holiday of darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Belial is another name for Satan the devil. What accord? There is no accord between the people of God and the ways of the pagans. Or what part has a believer with an unbeliever? And what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For you are the temple of the living God. As God has said, I will dwell in them, and I will walk among them. I will be their God, and they will be my people. Therefore, come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord.

Don't touch what is unclean. Don't get close to it. Don't think it's okay.

Don't do it to appease family. Don't do it to appease friends. Don't do it to appease children.

Do what God says. He says, don't even touch it. Don't even get close to it, and you will be, and I will receive you. You know, Jesus Christ, when He was on earth, He cast out demons.

He didn't engage them. He wasn't looking to be around them. He cast them out of people.

All of you here have Wicca. You know what Wicca, W-I-C-C-A, is? Let me read to you from Wikipedia what Wicca is. Wicca, it says, is also termed pagan witchcraft. It's a contemporary pagan new religious movement developed in England during the first half of the 20th century and was introduced to the public in 1954 by Gerald Gardner, a retired British civil servant.

Wicca is a religion in its own right, and they readily acknowledge pagan witchcraft. They worship nature and they worship the earth. They have eight holy days. They don't call them holy days. They call them sabbats, S-A-B-B-A-T-S. Eight sabbats a year. You know what the eighth one listed is?

Halloween. Halloween. They call it sawan, S-A-M-H-A-I-N. One of their holy days, pagan religion. So, when we see Halloween, for a group, certainly that's anti-God, it's one of their holy days. One of their holy days.

Well, let's go on. Let's go on, because, of course, the festival of sawan didn't end with the Celtics. It was a popular festival. The people seemed to enjoy it. It took on its own life after the time, and when the Romans came in to conquer the Celtics, we'll see what their modus operandi was.

This comes from History.com. By 43 A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the 400 years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of sawan. Now, I said, look at the word merge before. Look at the word combined there. They came in, and they saw this festival, and they decided they would merge or combine one of their festivals because of what the Celtics were doing. Now, when we were over in Greece, Rome finally conquered Greece.

You can see a lot of the influence of Greek culture in Rome. I mean, they even adopted the Greek language. Koine Greek was the official language of the Roman Empire. One of the tour guys I thought nailed it pretty well. She said, you know, Rome conquered Greece militarily, but they adopted our art, they adopted our culture, they adopted our language, they adopted our other culture. She goes, I have to ask, who conquered who? Isn't that interesting? So here's the Romans. They come and they conquer the Celts. They look at this festival and they think, we've got to, you know, we'll combine it with ours. The first that they combined was a day they called Phareleia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple, and the incorporation of the celebration into Solomon probably explains the tradition of bobbing for apples at its practice today on Halloween. Isn't it amazing how every little thing goes back to some kind of custom and worship of some God? Well, many, many centuries later, several centuries later, the Catholic Church is in vogue, and it is promoting itself as the universal church. It's the true church, and it's looking to grow its membership in Europe. And so they have All Saints Day. Let me read. Let me read. This is from Encyclopedia Britannica and some from History.com about All Saints Day. It says, on May 13th, 609 A.D., Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs' Day was established in the Western Church. Pope Gregory III later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all martyrs. It became known as All Saints Day. So All Saints Day today, even today, is on November 1st. In the eight-hundred, two hundred years later, the Celts were still observing the festival of Saman. The Catholic Church took note, and Pope Gregory IV in the eight-hundred attempted to replace it by moving All Saints Day—and this is their quote, not mine—a day they had created to take the place of the pagan day for Pharelea, on which the dead were honored with drunkenness and parties, because as things went on, it became a day to party and all sorts of revelty and a kind of an anything-goes attitude. So the Romans had the history, and the Catholic Church had the history, we'll create this day, we'll replace this day with that day, and as they came into the Celtic territories and watched what the Celts were doing, it's like, you know what, this festival that people really like, what we'll do is we will move All Saints Day from May 13th to November 1st to coincide with their festival, and somehow that would make it all right.

So they did that. They moved All Saints Day from May 13th to November 1st, the same day as Sowen, officially extending the festival to the entire Church. All Saints Day became known as All Hollows Day, while October 31st became All Hollows Eve, and eventually known as Hollow, Hollow Eve. Now, from CatholicTradeAnswers.com, is there explaining this and trying to answer the question, did paganism get mixed? Was the Catholic Church pretty much just giving in to the Celtics? And there's a long answer written by a priest. It isn't written by any allergicist official thing. It says, it talks about things, and it talks about the elements of pagan practices that are now associated with Halloween that the Catholic Church endorses, and many churches. You can walk or run around Orlando, Jacksonville, wherever you are, and you can see the churches have embraced Halloween. We, in fact, right here on the corner when we came by, we saw a whole pumpkin patch going on right on a church cart yard up there. So they write, elements of pagan practices were perhaps, and they use the word, baptized. Elements of pagan practices were perhaps baptized by some cultures or attached themselves to the celebration of All Saints Day.

Baptized. A way to make it okay, right? If we can just marry it, if we can just baptize it, we can purify that. We can say it's okay. It's of God. Can baptism legitimize sin? No.

Baptism washes away sin. We don't baptize until there's genuine repentance ahead of time, putting away of sin. But here in this treatise, the priest says, it was baptized. Therefore, it was cleansed by the church. And yes, some cultures adopted it, but not all is what he's saying.

Okay. He goes on. Hollows Eve, or what we call Halloween today, perhaps at first more out of superstition and later more out of fun without any real tide of paganism. Was that interesting? Well, we kind of kept the customs. We kind of let them happen. We kind of baptized them and tried to clarify them or purify them by that. And some people kept keeping them because of superstition.

You know, if you become a member of the True Church of God, you put away all your former ways. We don't keep Christmas anymore. We don't keep Halloween anymore. We don't keep Easter. We don't we adopt and we keep the holy days of God. We don't just kind of hold on to it out of superstition, but some of the people did. Perhaps the first more out of superstition, but then more out of fun without any real tide of paganism. For this reason, he writes little ones and some big ones still dress in a variety of costumes and pretend for the evening to be ghosts, witches, vampires, monsters, ninjas, pirates, and so on without any thought of paganism. That's if that makes it okay.

Nevertheless, he says, all saints day clearly arose from a genuine Christian devotion independent of paganism. I mean, I had to laugh when I read that one. We've justified this and we've gone through the whole circle and, hey, we did it not ended with any kind of idea of marrying paganism with the truth. The festival became merged, he says, with all saints day and continues.

Now, that's that church, what they say. That's how they justify what they've done. Is that how the true Church of God works? Does it marry the customs of the land with the truth of the Bible?

Absolutely not. The Bible is clear on what God wants us to do. The Bible is clear that we don't participate with or participate in the festivities that would have to do with the pagan culture.

That we don't want any part of that, nor should we be any part of it. In Ephesians 6 and verse 12, as Paul is exhorting the church to stand true and to be strong, he says this, we don't wrestle against flesh and blood, but we wrestle against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.

That's what we wrestle against. We don't participate. We don't merge. We don't say, oh, we did it out of the spirit of fun. It's really harmless. We wrestle against those things. We identify those things, and we reject them completely and totally.

In Galatians 5, it talks about a word that we read in the Old Testament that was associated with these things, that the celtics and the druids and those who practiced these things on those days went into it. In Galatians 5, of course, here we have the works of the flesh. In verse 19, we have the fruits of the Holy Spirit. In verse 22 and for the rest of the chapter, let's look at the works of the flesh here in Galatians 5.19. The works of the flesh are evident, which are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, and then sorcery. Sorcery. God said, Manasseh, King Manasseh, sorcery, Israel, sorcery, don't have sorcerers among you.

What is this word, sorcery? What does it mean? Because it's alive and well in this stage, just as much as it was back in the Old Testament time. We may call it something different, but it's still with us today. Galatians 5.19, when it says sorcery, it comes from the Greek word pharmakea, from which we get our English word pharmacy. Now, some have taken the liberty to say that pharmacy, indicating drugs, that all drugs and all medications, is sorcery. And that's not a correct definition of the word. Pharmakea, back in the Greek times, had to do with magic potions. People that would conjure up things to elucidate, if you will, or to hallucinate, to create something for themselves, looking for answers, trying to contact the spirit world of their own inner self in some way. And they had people who would do these things. Let me read to you from the Webster's 1828 dictionary, because the word sorcery today may be something different than what it did back in 1828. But here it says, sorcery, magic, enchantment, witchcraft, divination by the assistance of evil spirits, or the power of commanding evil spirits. And that's what it's doing. Doing a spell, enchanting. Some people say that drug use, illegal drug use today, drug addicts. That could well be included in the word sorcery, because it's conjuring up things to do something, to find yourself in a different state than you were before.

So sorcery is well among us. Now we know that rampant in this country is illegal drug use. We know still on the face of the earth there are still those who would practice the magic potions and have their magic things on what you can do and whatever. So sorcery is still there as it was in the time before. Now I'll let you study more on that word and think about it more, because it's a work of the flesh. It's not something of God. Back in Revelation, the word sorcerers, the word sorcery shows up many times too, or several times as well. Here in chapter 22, after God's plan for the physical earth is done, after God's plan for physical man is done, Christ is on earth, the new heaven and the new Jerusalem have come down to earth. And in chapter 22, in verse 12, we see Jesus Christ saying, I'm coming quickly and my reward is with me to give everyone according to his work. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. Verse 14, blessed, blessed are those who do his commandments, that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter through the gate into the city.

Do what God said to do. But outside, he says, are dogs and sorcerers and sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters and whoever loves and practices a lie. God says, stay away from all of that. Stay away from those things. Be only unto him. Be only unto him and do what he says.

Now, let's go back to Deuteronomy 12 and address the subject of a church that would embrace these customs and the church that would embrace and have a habit of embracing and merging their beliefs with those of the people that they conquer. When God clearly states, his people are to do nothing of the kind. Deuteronomy 12, verse 29. Probably a large part of this you already have committed to memory, but let's read through it anyway. In light of what we're about to face here in three or four days in this country and as we see the world and our country embrace these customs that now we know clearly where they come from and what they indicate. Verse 29. When the Lord your God cuts off from before you, the nations which you go to dispossess, and you displace them and dwell in their land, take heed to yourself. Be very careful, he would say, that you are not ensnared to follow them after they are destroyed from before you, and that you do not inquire after their God, saying, how did these nations serve their gods? I will do likewise. Don't adopt their customs. Don't look around and say, well, that looks kind of fun. We'll do it that way. We'll take that custom and we'll apply it into God's faith. Don't do it that way. And perhaps some of us have even done some of that unwittingly in some of God's faith in adopting one thing and trying to plant it into God's festivals. Take heed that you don't do that. Don't look at other nations and say, I will do likewise. You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way. For every abomination to the Lord which He hates they have done to their gods, for they burn even their sons and daughters into fire to their gods. Whatever I command you, be careful to observe it. You shall not add to it, nor take away from it. Crystal Clear, the true Church of God would never compromise with the ways of the world. The people of God would never compromise with the ways of the world. They would be separate just as Jesus Christ and God the Father would have us be. That said, don't even touch them. Don't even go close to them. Keep yourself separate and follow Me and Me alone. The religion that we practice is not one of compromise. It's not one that's devised by any man or any organization. What we worship is the true God, and what we practice is what the Bible says. And what you should hear us say in this Church every week, any Church of God you go to, should be preached from the Gospel. No compromise, no merging, no mixing with pagan symbols, no adding things to it, but what the Bible says, doing it and keeping to it. James 1, verse 27.

Pure and undefiled religion. Both as a Church and as us individuals who practice the religion God has called us to. Pure and undefiled religion. Not tainted, not colored, is this. To visit orphans and widows in their trouble. That is, we should all have that agape love that God looks for us to have, that we are looking out for the needs of others, that we are concerned for one another, that we make the choices in our lives to have that agape love and do even what may not be comfortable for us to do in that regard. And that is the first fruit of the Holy Spirit.

That's the fruit that Christ said should be evident in the Church, His Church.

Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this. To visit orphans and widows in their trouble and to keep oneself unspotted from the world. Not this little wrinkle over here that, you know, well, okay, I'll compromise on that and it's okay to participate in this or do that.

No, keep oneself unspotted from the world. Not merging, not compromising, not looking to add in, but keeping oneself unspotted from the world as we enter into some months where this holiday is in a very dark season of the year. Let's thrive in not only that, but in everything we do to keep ourselves unspotted from the world.