Passover and Its Deadly Imitations (Fatal Counterfeits)

Thank you, Robert. By the way, we do have a nice coffee social today after services. And remember, the choir will stay to do the cantata here in this hall.

Brethren, we are in the midst of preparing for the coming Passover. And it's interesting when you ask, what did Christ say to His disciples about teaching His doctrines, His truths? Notice in John 21, verse 15. And He repeated this three times to Peter. Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonah, do you love me more than these? Talking about the rest of the disciples. He said to him, Yes, Lord, you know that I love you. He said to him, Feed my lambs. He said this three times, Feed my lambs, feed my sheep, feed my flock, take care of them. But He wasn't talking about feeding them with physical food.

They were able to provide that for themselves. What He's talking about is providing them with spiritual nourishment. That's what He is concerned about when He talked to His disciples. Make sure you're feeding my flock. He emphasized that. In Matthew 28, in verse 20, before He rose up to heaven, the last instructions He gave them, it says that He said the following, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you, and lo, I am with you always. Even to the end of the age, Jesus Christ was never going to abandon His Church. That persecuted remnant, that Church many times in the wilderness, that the world would not be able to identify, but it would be there.

Now, why did He emphasize so much, Feed my flock? Make sure you're feeding them with my wonderful teachings, what I have commanded you. One of the reasons He knew false religions, disguising as the truth, would deceive many. So He didn't say to His apostles, well, go out and just entertain people. Give them feel-good religion. Just have them all feel good about themselves. No, He was there stressing this point that Satan is still alive. He is actively deceiving the world. In Revelation 12, verse 9, it describes Satan and his actions. He means business. He is the master deceiver. Revelation 12, verse 9, it says, So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of all called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world. So he doesn't deceive part of the world. He has deceived the whole world. Now, how has he been able to do so? After all, we have the world's major religions. People go to their different churches and mosques and temples. You mean to say that the great majority of these people are deceived? Could that be so? Let's turn to another scripture in 2 Thessalonians 2, verse 7. Even in Paul's day, that false religion was already at work. It was already sowing the false gospel to the world. And, of course, they would grow and become very powerful. 2 Thessalonians 2, verses 7 through 10.

Paul says to the Thessalonian church, For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, talking about a false Christianity. He was not worried about some other religion of the world. He was talking to the church. He said, Be careful, because here is this mystery religion. Lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way. It is probably an angel that God keeps Satan from doing all the harm he would like to do.

He says, And then the lawless one, talking about the end time period, will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of his mouth, and destroy with the brightness of his coming. It was not talking about Paul's day, but it was talking about this system that would continue on until the coming of Christ.

He explains a little bit of what it does, verse 8. Then the lawless one will be revealed. It says in verse 9, The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders. This is the epitome, the climax of Satan's deception in the world.

But this system has been going on for thousands of years. It is going to reach its apex, its culmination. During that end time period, it says, verse 10, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth that they might be saved. So, brethren, God's truth is not really appreciated in this world. It is tried to be stamped out. The press isn't interested in it. Most people in different religions, they're not interested in truly finding the truth of God's teachings. And so, we live in a deceived world, incredibly as it sounds. The entire world is under the sway of Satan the devil, except for those that small group that has been called out by God to know and love the truth.

Now, we're going to be talking about this because it has to do with the Passover that is coming and how Satan's in such a clever way has deceived the world with substitutes. Instead of the Passover, we have all of these counterfeits that Satan has spread out in the world. So, there are false Passovers being taken every year.

So, the title of this message is the Passover and its deadly imitations, because we have all of these imitations. So, the Passover, Satan was going to find an imitation, a counterfeit, for people to think they were going to be following God and following Christ.

Jesus Christ revealed some of this in the parable of the tares in Matthew 13. So, let's turn to Matthew 13 starting in verse 36. Matthew 13 in verse 36.

After he gave it to his disciples, they didn't know what it meant. And so, it says in verse 36, Then Jesus sent the multitude away and went into the house. And his disciples came to him, saying, Explain to us the parable of the tares of the field. He answered and said to them, He who sows the good seed is the Son of man. In a parallel, I mentioned that it is the Word of God. That is the truth. That is the revealed truth. That is the basis for true religion, the only true foundation for it. And Jesus Christ has sown that good seed. The field is the world. So, here we have the true religion that Jesus Christ has sent out.

The good seeds are the sons of the kingdom. They are the ones that carry the gospel. They are the ones that are doing the work of God, sending out these precious truths. And the tares are the sons of the wicked one. So, we have competitors. We have rivals. And the tares look pretty close to similar to the shafts of wheat. They're very similar. Verse 39, The enemy who sowed them is the devil. So, we know this is the way Satan has been able to deceive the whole world. He has used human leaders to carry out his deception, all of these false religions that are out there, all of these false substitutes for the Passover, for the Sabbath. For every one of God's truths, Satan has his alternative, falsehood. He has something that looks similar to it. And would you say he has succeeded? Certainly he has.

It says, the harvest is the end of the age. The end of the age has to do with when Christ comes back, and then those that are of the true faith will be resurrected into that first resurrection. That's the first harvest that the angels will be there. Christ will send out with a trumpet blast, and his angels will all come, and we will all be gathered together as Christ descends to the earth. Now, that's not talking about millions of people. That is talking about, even through the time of Adam when Abel was the first one that called the righteous one, we're talking about thousands of people. We're not talking about millions of people that will be part of that first resurrection. Of which now, here on this earth, we have again thousands, but we don't have millions with the truth of God. Not remotely so. And then it goes on to say, And the reapers are the angels. Therefore, as the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of this age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and those who practice lawlessness, and will cast them into the furnace of fire. Notice here, talking equivalent to the lake of fire, the first two that we know are going to land in that lake of fire are the beast and the false prophet. That's mentioned in Revelation 19, that they are cast into this lake of fire. They're the first ones because they were some of the chief leaders that deceived the world. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, and that's talking about they're going to be going there into the lake of fire with fear, with frustration, some with anger, because they got caught, because now they're going to receive their just desserts. So we see that Christ anticipated. Be careful, because for every truth that he would teach, that he would command, there would be this falsehood, this very deceptive imitation of what Christ was going to teach. And in this sermon, I'm going to open your eyes to so much of this truth. We're going to go back to that time as Satan started sowing the chief tares and how he cleverly has deceived this entire world.

Now, part of the tares are back in the Old Testament times. Satan sowed some of those falsehoods in the Old Testament. We even have one of the names of this false religion that was trying to deceive, and actually some of the Israelites were following the false religion. Let's turn to Ezekiel chapter 8. Ezekiel chapter 8 verse 14. We have the name here of one of these false gods, one of the heads that people worshiped at that time instead of God. Ezekiel chapter 8 in verse 14. Notice how much corruption had happened during this time. Verse 14, it says, So he brought me to the door of the north gate of the Lord s house. This is talking about the temple, Solomon's temple. And to my dismay, women were sitting there weeping for Tamas. Tamas is one of the false Christ, in that sense, false saviors. And Satan has sown these counterfeit figures so that they would deceive people. This came at the time from Babylon. I'd like to read from the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia talking about Tamas. It says, He was originally a Samarian or Babylonian son god called Dumuzu, the husband of Ishtar. Ishtar was the wife of this Tamas individual, and she became the queen of heaven. Eventually, her name in different pronunciations came to mean Easter.

And of course, from the Norse gods, it was Óreaster. But this all came from this worship of Ishtar. Who corresponds to Aphrodite of the Greeks? The worship of these deities was introduced into Syria in very early times under the designation of Tamas and Estrady. It appears among the Greeks in the myth of Adonis and Aphrodite, who are identified with Osiris in the Isis of the Egyptian pantheon, showing how widespread the cult became. So again, it's all this the sowing of these false gods, these false saviors, so they would fool and deceive mankind into following these false teachers. Now, there's a moment in history when Satan starts working overtime. He is worried because God had revealed to the prophet Daniel the coming of the Messiah. He also talked about the coming of the kingdom of God on earth and how the saints were going to receive the kingdom and also about the different beast powers that would take place. So in the Old Testament, the book of Daniel is the equivalent of the book of Revelation in the New Testament. This was a very powerful revelation of God's truths. There are other prophets that bring up a lot of things, but it was with the prophet Daniel that God spelt it out in a historical way.

And this made an impact not only with the Jews in Babylon at the time, but spread out through the Persian Empire, which was the dominant power. And eventually, many of these writings came to the knowledge in India and all the way to China, because many of these were caravan routes. And so when the prophet Daniel revealed this during the time of Cyrus, the king, it shook the religions of the world. They had no equivalent to it, and so Satan had to do something very quickly. I'm going to read here from a book by Wilkinson called Truth Triumphant.

By the way, that's if you have a Kindle edition, it's an easy book to download. And he writes this. He says, While these writers, talk about historians, are divided over the facts concerning Zoroaster, we will present strong evidence to show that he, like other certain worldwide religious imposters, appears on the pages of the past as a counterfeiter of the Old Testament in general. And in particular, of the fertile visions granted to the prophet Daniel. So all of a sudden, you start having these reformers appear to reform the old religions and that way get up to speed and have their false saviors. So the sowing of tares takes place here in an accelerated way. And Satan began to work overtime.

Seven new religious reformers appeared eventually in history. Four happened during or shortly after Daniel's time. Four of these, the men that are sort of the head of the religions of the world today, they appeared after Daniel gives his prophecy, shakes the entire religious world known at that time. And so now you have these reformers getting those religions up to speed with their imitators of what would come with the Messiah. We have Zoroaster, who was the founder of Zoroastrianism with the worship of Mithra, a Christ-like Savior that appears through all of Persia and eventually goes into the Roman Empire later on. And you have this false Messiah. You have a type of baptism involved. You have sun worship. And the military in the Roman Empire were particularly involved. Remember Emperor Constantine, dedicated in 321 AD, the Roman Empire, that they would have Sunday worship. And it was to the venerable day of the sun. And that's a term used for Mithra worship, because at that time, like I said, most of these soldiers, and he had been, of course, one of the generals that was involved in this. So we have Zoroaster. So Zoroastrianism still has a couple of million people on the earth that keep Zoroastrianism with their fire temples. They're still out there in that area of Iraq and Persia. You have then another one that appears is Buddha. He is established as the new savior type for the Hinduism. So he broke away and developed Buddhism around the year 500 BC, shortly after Daniel's revelations. And so he reforms Hinduism. It becomes far more of a personal religion, very much a spiritual-minded. And Buddhism, they say, probably has anywhere from 600 million to a billion followers today.

Back then, one of the imitators of what Daniel had been teaching about the coming Messiah, here's the Messiah for the Oriental race. And he abolished all of the other gods in Hinduism, and he became the object of their idol worship. That's why you see the little fat, smiling Buddhas. That's the founder there that established this. Again, he brought a much more humane system, doing good to others, being patient, not being violent. And so he brought this moral religion to the Asian people.

So that's the second one. The third one was another, this was within Hinduism, because Buddhism broke away from Hinduism. But actually in Hinduism, they were starting to be worried because of the need for a Messiah-type figure. And so later on, they invented Krishna. Now, even here in California, you have all the Hare Krishna's. Well, this is another type of a savior, came to the earth to serve man, to give an example, and this is another false savior.

Then we have the fourth one, which is in China. Who appears in China? Confucius! He always confuses you with Confucius, but he was also one of these savior types. And so we have Confucianism in China. Again, many millions of people follow his teachings, appears around 500 BC, after Daniel's visions. So here's in the major areas of the world. At that time, you have these false teachers. Zoroaster, Buddha, Krishna, Confucius. And then you have some that come in Europe, which is called Sophism, Greek Sophism, which was Pythagoras and Plato.

So they start this renewed religion in Europe. The Greek, more intellectual, more sophisticated. That's the Sophism has to do with smart and so Plato, Pythagoras, set up a system there. Again, it's kind of like hamburger helper. For the old religions, they put this hamburger helper to make it a little stronger because of what God was doing through the Old Testament prophets, especially with the prophet Daniel.

He basically gave a timeline all the way to the coming of Christ. And so now you have these false teachers coming in. And then, after Christianity, the tares that would be sown would be Catholicism. That would be the papacy up to our days, sowing false teachings about Christianity. Catholicism has approximately a billion followers. Anywhere from a billion to a billion point two followers. Imagine, almost talking about almost a sixth of humanity.

And then you have Islam with Mohammed. So again, after the time of Daniel was the sowing of these false messiahs. I mentioned four, but they're actually five that I brought up. Zoroaster, Buddha, Krishna, Confucius, and then Pythagoras with Plato and other Greek philosophers at the time.

And then, after Christianity and the book of Revelation comes out, Satan is very concerned. So he has to sow more of these tares. So part of it has to do with Catholicism. 1.2 billion out of 2.2 billion Christians in the world. And then, like I mentioned, Islam with Mohammed. That was around a little over 600 years after the birth of Christ. It comes another false prophet, another kind of a savior, and that has 1.6 billion followers.

And it's the fastest growing religion because their birth rate is higher than any of the other groups. And so this was another tear, another false teaching along the way. And then, adding one more, this would be the eighth, is Mormonism with their prophet Joseph Smith. That's another tear. That's another falsification of Christianity, which also has millions of followers. Now, I'd like to quote again from Wilkinson and his book, Truth, Triumphant, the Church in the Wilderness. He says, The following doctrines from the prophet Daniel reappear in the teachings of Zoroaster, one supreme God.

This is what Zoroaster taught, just like in what Daniel had been teaching. Now, they have the Persian version of a false Christ. One supreme God, the coming of the Messiah, the existence of angels and their revelations to man, the resurrection of the dead, the judgment of all mankind, and Adam and Eve, the first parents. There is a collection of sacred volumes by Zoroaster, which are called the Book of Abraham. The same observances about meats, clean and unclean, are found there as given to Moses.

There are commands for the payment of tithe, the ordaining of one high priest overall, and references to Joseph, Moses, and Solomon in the same way as they are presented in the Old Testament. Zoroaster also hated idolatry. So, from this pagan Persian religion, now you have this Reformation taking place under Zoroasterism, which is very similar to the Bible. So, they could head people off. They could deceive people into following these false teachings.

God said He would allow these false religions to grow and test the Church. Would the Church be faithful, or would it be corrupted by these false teachings?

Now, as we get into the tares and the wheat, one of the tares in Christianity has to do with Easter and Sunday worship. Easter and Sunday worship are the equivalents in the true religion to Passover and the Sabbath. So, here we have two imitators that have grown and have multiplied, but they come from the same false teaching.

Jesus had told His disciples in Luke chapter 22 verse 16. I'm going to read it to you in the contemporary English version. He says, I tell you that I will not eat another Passover meal until it is finally eaten in God's kingdom. So, He says, I'm not going to eat this until we all eat it together. Notice in the complete Jewish Bible, it says, for I tell you, it is certain that I will not celebrate it again until it is given its full meaning in the kingdom of God. Christ is going to give it the full meaning. The message Bible puts it this way. It's the last one, talking about the Passover. I'll eat until we all eat it together in the kingdom of God. So, for Christ is very important for us to keep the ceremony of the Passover just as when He comes back to keep it. He's not going to be keeping Easter. He's not going to be keeping any other thing. He wants to keep it with His disciples, with all of His followers. Satan hates this.

The Passover is the sign of His ultimate defeat. And so, He gets to working again. How am I going to deceive mankind now? How do the device more counterfeits? In Daniel 7, verse 25, I'll read this. It was prophesied. He says, talking about the false prophet who, along with the beast's power, says, He shall speak pompous words against the Most High, shall persecute the saints of the Most High, and shall intend to change times and law. Then the saints shall be given into His hand for a time and times and half a time. The Amplified Bible says, and He shall speak words against the Most High God, and shall wear out the saints of the Most High, and think to change the time of sacred feasts and holy days and the law. In the contemporary English version, it says, this king will speak evil of God Most High, and he will be cruel to God's chosen ones. He will try to change God's law and the sacred seasons, and he will be able to do this for a time and two times and half a time. So it was prophesied that we would have some religious leader that would rise up and do his utmost to change the Bible times, the Sabbath, the holy days, all of this. So in the first two centuries of the Christian era, in particular the second century, there was this Passover and Easter controversy, which went along with the Sabbath and Sunday controversy. Now this is something that I didn't realize until I studied this deeper, that they're both connected. Easter Sunday is connected to the weekly Sunday. They were basically originated at the same time at the same place. Let me read to you from this book, Wayne Talbot, defending God's Sabbath. By the way, it costs three dollars as a Kindle book.

He says the following. He quotes Bakiyoki, the historian, Seventh-day Adventist, says, in numerous patristic testimonies, the weekly and annual Easter Sunday are treated as basically the same feast commemorating the same event of the resurrection. So Easter Sunday and weekly Sunday, they all come from this idea of Christ's resurrection. Origen, one of the historians, third century, explicitly unites the weekly with the yearly commemoration of the resurrection. He writes, the resurrection of the Lord is celebrated not only once a year at Easter, but constantly every eight days, every Sunday. Eusebius, the historian, states, while the Jews, faithful to Moses, sacrificed the Passover lamb once, a year, we men of the New Covenant celebrate every Sunday our Passover. That's why they have mass. It's a type of a Passover ceremony that they have every Sunday.

Pope Innocent I, who was the first one to unite with Emperor Constantine in a letter to the Bishop of Gubbio, confirms the unity existing between the two feasts. This is what Pope Innocent I, back around the year 325-28, right there with the Council of Nicaea, he writes, we celebrate Sunday because of the venerable resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, not only at Easter, but in actuality, by the single weekly cycle. He means every Sunday.

The reasons for this change, which took place in Rome around the year 135 AD, was that Satan was sewing the tears, especially in Rome.

Bacchiolchi traces the changes in Passover and Sunday to Rome. It had to do with anti-Jewish sentiment, the increase in sun worship on Sunday, and Mithra, that it falls God, was all very popular at that time, the mistaken idea that Christ rose on Sunday, the growing power of the church in Rome, and as a substitute to the Jewish Sabbath and Passover. So from the year 321 AD to the year 325 AD, in four years, Constantine, with his collusion with the Catholic Church at that time, changed the Sabbath to Sunday, he ordered people all throughout the empire to rest on Sunday, the venerable day of the sun, but he knew the Catholic Church was already keeping that Sunday that way. So this was very popular to the church in Rome, and in 325 he ordered all Christians in the empire to keep Easter Sunday instead of the Passover time. So just in a span of four years, you had the Sabbath being abolished in the Roman Empire, Sunday being elevated, and then you have the Passover being abolished and Easter being elevated.

And these counterfeits have been in place for some 1600 years.

During the time of the Middle Ages, historical books from the Waldensians, who were one of the persecuted ones for not keeping Easter or Sunday, they write that it was during Easter time, once a year, that the officials in the empire at that time, they watched to see which people didn't come to Easter Sunday services. And that was one way they knew that these people were heretics in their eyes. So the test, the yearly test, was, are they going to come? Are they going to keep Easter Sunday with us? Or that denounces them as heretics, Christians that do not follow Rome? It was a type of a mark of the beast. So the Sabbath was one of the marks. You see, you could keep the Sabbath in your home without much publicity. But once in a year, everybody in that whole area had to go and gather for Easter Sunday. And if you weren't there automatically, unless you were sick or something, they knew that you were part of the false followers, that they weren't part of the Church of Rome. It's interesting that people come back right before Passover season.

The physical presence of taking the Passover is so important for people who have done it through the years to renew the covenant with God that we have not gone for these counterfeit religions. We have not accepted the false grace, which became the universal acid to corrode and to eliminate these precious truths. It's interesting that in the book of Revelation, the last revelation that God gives in His Word, He does not describe the Church as the Church of Grace or the Church of Love. No, it describes Him as those that keep the commandments of God and have the faith of Jesus. Now, the faith of Jesus includes the grace of God, as we have brought out in the first message. There is a biblical grace which is very important and needed, and for Passover time, it's very important, but not the second-rate grace of the world that washes God's truth out, that corrodes it and just eliminates it.

In 1 John chapter 2, let's read. We're finishing up here. 1 John chapter 2. I told you it was going to be a short sermon. 1 John chapter 2 and verse 3.

John had to repeat this three times in his epistle about keeping the commandments of God. Why? Because people were quitting keeping these commandments. He said in verse 3, Now, by this we know that we know Him, that we actually have a relationship with God that is the true and correct one. If we keep His commandments, He who says, I know Him, and does not keep His commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in Him. I'm sorry, but that means that they're in a counterfeit religion. As nice and dedicated as they can be, they have been deceived by Satan. Easter is one of those false teachings. Easter is not taught in the Bible. God did not change the Passover to Easter. That was the church in Rome that set it up. And there was a whole battle between the Church of Rome and the Quarter Decimans and Asia Minor that continued to keep the Passover as they had kept it with the Apostle John and Philip, who were in that area until they died. And they said, we're not going to change this. These changes from Rome, and they got excommunicated because of it. Why? Because they weren't part of the system. God's truth will prevail where God's Spirit dwells.

The importance of keeping the Passover in Numbers 9, verses 13 through 14. I'll read it quickly. It says, but the man who is clean and is not on a journey and ceases to keep the Passover, that same person shall be cut off from among his people, because he did not bring the offering of the Lord at its appointed time. That man shall bear his sin. And if a stranger dwells among you and would keep the Lord's Passover, he must do so according to the right of the Passover and according to its ceremony, you shall have one ordinance, both for the stranger and the native of the land. Does it matter what race you are? What color? If you are part of God's people, you have a right to participate of the Passover. And that person who doesn't do so, God says he will be cut off. Now, that's something new that I've learned. The word cutting off is the same expression as cutting a covenant with God, where, remember, they placed the animals, they split them, they cut them, and then Abraham walked, and then the cloud walked, representing God. That when you cut a covenant, you cut an animal into pieces, and you say, may I end up this way if I do not fulfill the covenant? So it's talking about being cut off from God. And so that's the seriousness of it. If you look it up in the Hebrew and Greek dictionary, it's dealing with a covenant vow that you have committed yourself to following God, or may I be cut off in this way, cut from life.

So, brethren, it's a privilege to know and to love God's truths, and knowing the difference between the wheat and the tares. Let's prepare ourselves for the coming Passover and be very thankful. Just think what percentage of mankind is keeping the true Passover and not the false Easter legend. This way, we're fulfilling what Christ said at the beginning that I read, fulfilling the feeding of God's sheep. That's what we're here to do.