Celebrate Something Better Than Halloween

Oct 31, 2016 3660

On the day I’m writing this, it’s Halloween. But I’ve got something better to celebrate. You see, I’m a Christian. Christians celebrate life. Halloween celebrates death.

Halloween has its origins in the ancient pagan festivals in honour of the dead. These festivals are found in almost every ancient pre-Christian culture. In these festivals, on certain days, the dead were permitted to have contact with the world of the living.

In these pagan cultures, the living have always had an ambiguous relationship with the dead. On the one hand, the living feared the dead, because they could come back to harm them. But on the other hand, the living also celebrated the dead. Of course, one reason was because the dead were those whom we had loved in life. But the other reason was precisely to keep the dead happy and quiet, so they wouldn’t harm the living. That’s why in these pagan festivals it was customary to have a party and to offer the dead sweets and other kinds of foods for that very purpose.

While the world celebrates death, Christianity celebrates life.

The idea was to make friends with death, after all, we’re all going there!

The Christian faith is the very opposite to this. While the world celebrates death, Christianity celebrates life.

For Christians death is not a friend, and will never be a friend. In 1 Cor 15:26, the Bible calls death an “enemy” (1 Cor 15:26). The word that the Apostle Paul uses here refers to someone who is hateful. Death is the ultimate enemy!

In the west, we live in a largely post-religious world, and so the fear of death remains. Although we consider ourselves so much more sophisticated than those ancient pagans, the ideas behind Halloween still fascinate many people. While we may think that people celebrate Halloween “just for fun,” our culture celebrates death very prominently in a myriad of ways through movies and music and through the many expressions of popular culture.

Christians do not celebrate death. But although we hate death, we face it with hope, and our sorrow is not like those who have no hope. Because the Bible tells us that the power of death has already been destroyed by Jesus Christ, who gives us the victory. Our victory will be seen on the day of resurrection.

Here is what Christians celebrate:

Christ has been risen from the dead. He is the first of a great harvest of all who have died. (1 Cor 15:20, NLT).

That’s a much better kind of celebration! – Eliezer Gonzalez

Tolera

Apr 23, 2019

God is good. I will like your written document God bless you my sister

D. Shrum

Nov 13, 2016

Thank you for starting this major topic. Blessed be our precious messiah the Hope of Israel Salvation, Yeshua the Son. Joy and Shalom.

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