True Meaning of Easter and the Passover

A Holiday Filling the Pews

In this message I’m going to cover one of the most popular holidays in which pews are noticeably filled to capacity. Many programs are conducted through the religious and church communities in celebration of Easter. Even many businesses like banks will close for three hours on Good Friday in honor of this holiday. The ACLU, with its anti-Christian and pro-pagan lawsuits, has never really mounted a major challenge to this federal holiday — only bits and pieces, likely owing to its sheer popularity. This message will also cover the true meaning of the Passover as it was practiced by Old Testament believers.

Constantine, Nicaea, and a Manufactured Holiday

Where did the very popular holiday called “Easter” originally come from, and did New Testament believers set a series of days in order to celebrate the Passover? Prior to 325 AD there is no record of what the modern era now celebrates. At the Council of Nicaea that year, Emperor Constantine claimed to have converted to Christianity but was still very much involved with paganism. His objective, as effectively the first Pope, was to unite both pagans and Christians under his own leadership — the same concept we see today concerning unity under the current Pope of Rome. In order to accomplish this, Constantine sought to add festivals (see our message on Christmas) that appealed to pagans and adopt them into church worship, where they would also appeal to the church community making professions of faith in the Lord. By decree at the Council of Nicaea, Easter became a holiday to be celebrated on the first Sunday occurring after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox.

Today, if the Pope of Rome were to declare a new holiday — say, a celebration of the miracles of Jesus — how many non-Catholic churches would join in? Would it become as popular as Easter or Christmas among Protestants, including Baptists? At first, such a holiday would likely be adopted by many outside Catholicism, but also rejected by others in the beginning. Eventually, most of those who first rejected it would come around and adopt it into their own practice, leaving only the few who truly name Christ as Lord and Saviour still refusing it. This is exactly what happened throughout history with the two other holidays of Christmas and Easter.

Lent: A Babylonian Import

The tradition of Easter has bits and pieces of truth in it, but it also contains many errors that are not biblical. The Lent tradition and practice is a typical example. There is no record of the Apostles, or of Jesus, celebrating forty days of abstinence — refraining from normal, worldly, sinful behavior — for a set period of time. It is essentially a form of works, an attempt to appease God for sins committed over the past year. True believers are commanded by God to practice holiness daily, not merely for forty days out of the year, and not because we need to obtain forgiveness, but because we are already forgiven. So where did this man-made tradition come from?

Lent, which means “spring time,” was originally a pagan practice first invented by the Babylonians in honor of their “Queen of Heaven and her son Tammuz.”

The women wept for Tammuz because of his death; the pagan belief held that he then came back to life. Sound familiar? It should, because it is a distorted counterfeit of what Christ actually did on the cross (Genesis 3:15) and of His victory over Satan in rising from the dead. In reality, Tammuz never actually rose from the dead — he was simply an object of worship for many pagan cultures throughout history.

Eventually Lent was adopted by the Egyptians in honor of one of their own gods, another version of Tammuz named Adonis. Because there were variants of Lent as practiced by the ancient pagans, Catholic leaders of the time disagreed on how to observe the new tradition. It wasn’t until the sixth century that the Pope made it official, calling the Lent observance a “sacred fast” and ordering the people to abstain from meat and a few other foods for a set period. Scripture plainly condemns such a practice:

Lent started out as thirty-six days, but by 800 AD it was expanded to forty days, and it has remained that way ever since. Part of the Lent tradition was to abstain from meat on every Friday during the season, with fish endorsed as a substitute — in honor of the ancient pagan goddess Freya, goddess of peace, joy, and fertility. Fish, known to the ancient pagans for a high reproduction rate, was a holy symbol to their goddess; Freya is, incidentally, where we get the word “Friday.” Some Protestants have limited the tradition to Good Friday alone, but as 1 Timothy 4:2–3 shows, it is not a biblical practice for the worship of God, in any form.

The Bunny and the Egg: Fertility Symbols, Not Christian Ones

Many Protestants, including Baptists, who celebrate this holiday reject the Easter bunny — though in some cases it is not a total rejection, but rather a modification. The bunny symbol originated with the pagan festival of Eastre, a goddess worshipped by the Anglo-Saxons, also known as Astarte, honored in the spring festival as the goddess of fertility. Rabbits, with their high reproduction rate, were considered by the ancient pagans to be fitting objects to sacrifice to their goddess.

The egg was likewise a symbol of rebirth across most ancient pagan cultures. Pagans would color eggs brightly by boiling them with the leaves or petals of certain flowers. The ancient Druids believed the egg was a sacred emblem of their idolatrous religion. In Hinduism the egg is honored in gold; in Japan, in brass; in China, dyed or painted eggs appear at “sacred” heathen festivals. In America, the Easter egg today comes in every color, reflecting a society that is itself a mixed blend of many cultures.

It may surprise some Christians, but Easter and the Passover have nothing in common. Even though the Bible uses the term “Passover,” that alone doesn’t create common ground with the modern holiday. The true Passover is a memorial of the crucifixion of Christ — the true Passover for New Testament believers. In the Old Testament it was a shadow of what was to come, namely Christ, for true believers. The Passover was never conducted on a Sunday, or on any fixed day of the week, but on a calendar day of the year; the day of the week it falls on varies from year to year, as we shall see from Scripture.

Tracing the Real Timeline of Christ’s Death and Resurrection

This is the most important part of understanding the true meaning of Passover. One of the very things the Easter holiday has done is distort the real timeline of Christ’s death and resurrection. How many people really believe Christ was crucified on a Friday afternoon, only to rise again less than three days later, on a Sunday morning? How many churches actually know the true timeline, yet still go along with the holiday by conducting an “Easter” or “Good Friday” service just like every other so-called church that celebrates the skewed timeframe? The question we must ask is simply: what do the Scriptures say concerning this matter?

Christ gave this sign as proof that He was the Saviour. If this Scripture did not come to pass exactly as Christ said it would, He would not be Lord and Saviour over His people. Jesus said He would be in the ground for “three days and three nights” — a span that conflicts directly with the Easter holiday’s Friday-to-Sunday timeframe. There is little dispute here on how long Christ was buried; even most scholars agree it was a 72-hour period.

Jonah’s three days and three nights in the fish, set beside Christ’s own three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

What Was the “High Day” Sabbath?

Concerning Christ’s crucifixion, the Scriptures reveal something important. All four Gospels refer to the day of Christ’s death on the cross as the day of preparation for the “high day” Sabbath.

What is a “high day” Sabbath? Leviticus 23 tells us the Jews were to keep seven such days, year by year: “Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, Concerning the feasts of the LORD, which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations, even these are my feasts” (Leviticus 23:2). These days were called “holy convocations” and “my feasts,” and they do not fall on the same day every year, as Numbers 28:16–17 tells us: “And in the fourteenth day of the first month is the passover of the LORD. And in the fifteenth day of this month is the feast.” This feast was the first Day of Unleavened Bread. Matthew 26:2 records Christ Himself saying, “Ye know that after two days is the feast of the passover, and the Son of man is betrayed to be crucified.”

We know for certain Christ was crucified on the Passover described in Exodus 12. The original Passover was when the Jews were instructed to slay a lamb and put its blood on the doorposts, causing the angel of death to pass over their households and spare their firstborn — a shadow of the true Messiah, Jesus. Christ was crucified on the exact day the lamb was slain every year. That day, then, would automatically also be the preparation day for the annual “high day” Sabbath, which was to begin almost immediately after His burial.

Following the True Account of the Passover

So what day did the Passover actually occur? According to the Jewish calendar, the Passover occurred on a Wednesday. This means the annual Sabbath had to fall one day later, on Thursday. As that Sabbath approached, a quick burial of Christ’s body was required before its arrival. The weekly Sabbath, which falls on Saturday, came two days after that. So Christ was crucified on Wednesday afternoon. Understood correctly, Matthew 12:40 places His resurrection on Saturday afternoon — which is also why Mary Magdalene and the others with her saw angels on Sunday morning, rather than Christ Himself (Luke 24:6).

Christ’s prophecy of these events came to pass in every aspect, with no errors in His plan. Since we know the true timeline from the Scriptures, the question stands: why do so many churches continue with the Easter tradition regardless? Even some Christian churches that claim to know better — certain Baptist assemblies among them — hold either a “Good Friday” or an “Easter” service, while rejecting the Lent tradition outright. Their symbolic representation of the Lord’s death and resurrection is faulty all the same, denying what the Scriptures actually reveal — something true Christians should instead rejoice in and remember at the Lord’s table.

Come Out of Her, My People

The Bible makes it clear we are not to “Christianize” a pagan tradition, even one containing bits of truth. We are not to be partakers of her sins, nor show the appearance of evil by going along with a holiday that symbolizes a rejection of what Christ Himself predicted about His own death and resurrection. Old Testament believers show us no such changes in celebration — no additional customs added outside Scripture, no altering of the Sabbath days — for hundreds of years before Christ came, died, and rose again, exactly as God had instructed. Change came only where prophecy itself was fulfilled in the New Testament.

While Christians serve the Lord humbly by remembering Him not only at the Lord’s table but in daily life, the practices we see today go beyond the bounds of Scripture in this Easter holiday, which honors a pagan god whose traditions remain embedded within it — something the early church never practiced concerning the true Passover, and something true believers should not practice alongside the world. As true Christians, we should rejoice in the Lord’s great accomplishment, His great sacrifice, His rising from the dead, and His unmerited mercy upon us — ever thankful for it in our daily lives, and ever gleaning what pertains to the Lord in order to conform more fully to His will.