Holy Days?

It is the time of the year again, when many people around the world will soon be celebrating Easter, or, as some put it, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Some take it very literally, to the point of re-crucifying and re-raising Him from the dead, while others say it is only a symbolic commemoration of those events, that took place some 2000 years ago.

There is no small debate in the Christian circles, so much about the various aspects and traditions included in that commemoration, as much as the validity of such celebrations. And this is not particular to Easter, but it includes all such holidays that have been labeled as “Christian” ones. Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, Assumption Day, and many more, have become the subject of such debates. And those debates become sometimes so heated, and adherents of particular opinions become so dogmatic, that it has led to many splits and divisions in the body of Christ. And while I understand how this can happen to people who, although claim to be followers of the Lord, have not been regenerated by the Holy Spirit (John 3:3, 5), I am appalled by the fact that many true followers of the Lord, who love Him and want to live for Him, get sucked in to such debates that profit nothing to their spirits.

I must admit that, at some point in the past, I too was caught up in those debates. That is, until the Lord opened my eyes to see the point in this issue. Surely, many of those festivities have their roots in ancient paganism, which made its way into the Christian faith. But that is a minor point. Many choose to follow tradition, despite knowing fully well its origins. And I am not going to try to convince anybody about “the error of their belief and the correctness of mine”. Strife is not from God. Instead, I will bring up the truth that set me free from such unprofitable debates, and which brought me deeper in the knowledge of the Lord.

We get into debates because we have been asking the wrong questions. We ask, “How did those things come about?”, or “What is the correct way to commemorate Christ’s birth, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension to heaven?”, or “How do we celebrate free from human tradition?”, and other relevant questions. Instead, we need to ask, “Why did the Lord Jesus come to the earth, to be born and live as a human, to teach people God’s ways, to suffer horrible torture, to die on the cross, to be raised from the dead, to appear risen to His disciples, and then to ascend to heaven?”. This is the real question that, if asked with the pure expectation to find the truth, will bring us freedom, because the truth is the very same person of Jesus Christ (John 14:6).

Now, one should seek the answer directly from the Holy Spirit, who is our guide to the whole truth, as I did. That way there will no doubt be a convincing and fulfilling truthful reply. But for the sake of the readers I will say what He showed me. He told me that the whole reason of the Lord’s coming to my own level was so that I too can see God, that I should die to the world together with Him, and that I will be raised with Him to a new life! In other words, the whole problem is that we see those events as something to be commemorated, instead of something to be experienced. Just think about it – what do we commemorate and why? We commemorate events that happened once in time and that are not to be repeated anymore, and we do that so that we remember those events to draw certain valuable lessons from them.

You may say, “Ok, so what is wrong with remembering that time when the Lord was crucified for our sins and rose for our life? The lessons to be drawn from that are not just valuable, but life changing”. All right, I concede, but if you say they are life changing, tell me, how exactly have they changed your own life? Is it that, because you observe them, they give you the right to call yourself with the Lord’s name? Or is it that His actions motivate you to do good works? If that is all, then you have missed the point by thousands of miles. Let us hear again what the Lord Himself told a very devoted, religious person: “…Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (John 3:3). And Paul of Tarsus confirms this: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me…” (Galatians 2:20). The Lord’s death and resurrection was not a symbolic act, but one that ought to change radically every person who comes to Him with faith. And if this has happened to you, then you will no longer need to recollect some distant event of the past, but you will be living out that new life that the Holy Spirit has brought you into, thus making you a living example of the entire dramatic scope of events that took place 2000 years ago. If Christ lives in you now, you will have no need of any external rituals and acts to “help you remember”.

I don’t want to end this without addressing the various traditions that accompany such holidays. It is a historically proven fact that many such traditions have found their way by adoption of pagan rituals, offered to idols before the Lord came to live as a man. Those are to be rejected without question. But there are other items, such as food issues: Should we follow a certain pattern of abstaining from certain foods during those observations? What does the Bible say about this? Here is what we see: “Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.” (Colossians 2:16-17). In other words, those are just symbols, or shadows. Put in another way, we are free to eat and drink anything we please, as long as we are not convicted by the Holy Spirit as doing something sinful. Personally, I find no fault in eating lamb and unleavened bread during Easter, as is the tradition of the Greek Orthodox faith. The food has no effect to my soul.

In closing, I want to stress that, in everything we think and do, the central focus must be on Christ and on the fact that He is to live through us. When this happens, we see everything under His point of view. May this become a revelation in all of us.

THE CROSS

What is it

“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.” (Luke 9:23; Matthew 16:24)

The cross is the central tenet of Christian faith. It is very widely talked about, made into “relics” and images, used in “motivational quotes”, and generally has become one of the most popular and well known symbols in the world. Thousands and millions of people use it without knowing why, just out of habit, out of tradition, many of whom don’t even know how it became so famous and who made it.

The cross was an instrument of punishment and death, used by the Roman empire. Even today it is being used in some places for the same purpose. Now, if you ask people what do they associate the cross with, the majority will answer Christ or Christianity. Yet the cross existed for many years before Christ came to earth as a human, and many people had been put to death before Him and after Him on that death machine. So it seems that it is Jesus who made it popular, yet that was not His intention. Every time He spoke of the cross, He clearly associated it with sacrifice and death. In that sense, it can never be something that anyone would want to embrace or take for themselves. So why is it such a popular item?

The Role of Religion

Just as everything else that the Lord meant to bring to us so that we will be blessed with, the cross has been “hijacked” by religion to mean things that it doesn’t. Thus the great popularity it has today. Religion took the cross, its meaning and everything it symbolizes out of its place, and it gave it attributes that don’t belong to it. Just like so many other things, people who lived early after the death of the apostles, the chief of them being the emperor Constantine, gave religious overtones to it. He (Constantine), with the inspiration of his mother Helen, turned the cross into a talisman, that supposedly protects those who wear it. Then he claimed he saw its sign in the sky and that helped him defeat his enemies. The first false church, the Roman Catholic, used it in its temples, and that was how it made it the symbol of the “Christian” religion. It turned it into a lifeless symbol and ascribed to it “magical” powers. And because of its practice to re-crucify Christ every year and then “resurrect” Him, yet keeps Him on the cross throughout the year in the form of crucifix, it has given it a somber, almost terrifying note. It is odd for the followers of the “Christian” religion to see any joy into the cross. In addition, the “symbol of the cross” that Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox people do with their hands, the gesture has become an outward sign that makes them thing of it as an expression of a Christian life.

And lest anyone thinks that only the Roman church is to blame for the terrible distortion of what is supposed to be life for the believers, the movement of Reformation did absolutely nothing to change that. The reformers kept it as an outward symbol on their temples, they just did away with the gesture. Even in Evangelical sermons, the emphasis is placed on the horrors of the cross, on the martyrdom of Christ on it, on our sins that were placed there, and generally on everything negative and terrible that the cross represents. Therefore, the message they convey on the people is that to take up one’s cross is to subject oneself to a gloomy process of self-punishment. It is rather non-desirable, almost sinful, to display any kind of joy when even mentioning the cross. And because naturally nobody can live such a life of pity and gloom, it has become a comm0n practice in all of the “Christian” religious denominations, for one to put on such an attitude when participating in the “church’s” sacred places (the temples they call “churches”), thus fooling oneself that once we go through such religious rituals, we have done our duties and we will satisfy God.

But is that what Jesus had in mind when He said that we should take up our cross daily? Does He want for us to live a sad, pitiful life of gloom every day of our lives? Is that the correct way to follow Him? Is He desiring penance from us? Let’s see what applies here.

The Example

We read in the New Testament the following exhortation: “Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Hebrews 12:2). If there was one person in the world who had every right to feel agony about the cross, that was Jesus of Nazareth. And He did, when in the garden of Gethsemane He shed sweat of blood and asked the Father to remove, if possible, that bitter cup from Him. If we think we ever get nightmares about troubles that await us, we have no clue as to what was going on through the Lord’s mind then. He was destined to take upon Himself the entire load of sins of the world, none of which was His own! And if we are honest, none of us would have undertaken such a responsibility; we would all have turned around and left. Worse yet, if we had the same attitude that we have now about the cross, we wouldn’t even entertain the thought of ever going close to it. I know I wouldn’t have. So what did Christ have that gave Him the strength not only to accept the father’s will, but to also carry it on to the end? The answer is in the previous scripture: “…the JOY that was set before Him…”

Jesus did not allow the shame and horror of the load of sins to stop Him; He didn’t make it His focus. For Him, the cross represented triumph over sin and death, and the means to the glory of the resurrected life. The cross was the end of the record of ordinances that brought nothing but death. The cross was the end of the old system and the birth of the new. It was the birth of His bride, His beloved ekklesia. It is no wonder then that the other woman, the harlot, the religious system, tried to manipulate that symbol of passage to glory and new life and turn it into a tool of sorrow and death.

Power to Life

“For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18).

“But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:23-24)

These scriptures have been quoted and preached innumerable times, yet the lives transformed by them are very few and far apart in comparison. The reason is that while preaching them, religious teachers have first taken out all the “juice” from them. Why is the message of the cross a scandal (translated as “stumbling block” into English) to the Jews, and foolishness t0 the Greeks? What elements of those two groups are offended to have that effect on them? To get an answer to this, we first need to see what that message really contains.

Yes, we know that Jesus took our sins on the cross, we know that we have forgiveness and redemption there, we know all that very well. But how does that message give us power? We have been saved, made new creation, but besides the assurance that this gives us, it is hard to see how this can be power for us. There has to be something more to it, that religion prefers to keep hidden, lest we actually see it and benefit from it. We are grateful that the Lord did not remain on that cross. He is not the crucifix that religious people keep. He rose from the dead, and He is now glorified, on the right hand of the Father. But even so, what application does that have to us who believe? Unless we realize the heart of this message, we only have a mental knowledge that profits us nothing.

The apostle Paul definitely did “get it”, as we see him say, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me…” (Galatians 2:20) That is why he can exhort us also: “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 6:11) THIS is what the message of the cross is! This is the theory of it, of our need to take up our cross daily. We need to bring to the cross every bit of ourselves and let Christ live in us! Well, I am sure we have also heard this countless times from the pulpit, right? But do we really understand what it is in practical terms?

Real Life

Like everything else, we tend to over-spiritualize what we read in the Bible. The evidence is there in our everyday life. While we read of our need to crucify ourselves and let Christ live in us, that we are made alive through Jesus Christ, we continue to “try our best” to live the life that we perceive the Lord wants us to live. We continue to practice religion, to represent the harlot and not the bride. We continue to seek that “experience” of the Sunday morning service, while living every other moment, either in the self-deceit of being “right with God” because we keep certain religious types, or in self-condemnation because we find that we cannot “measure up” to God’s standards. We keep struggling with the flesh and with various sins, and instead of going to the cross, we try harder with our human means to reach God.

We need to realize that there is only one option for us, if we are to live a life that pleases God: to die to self every single day and allow Christ to live His glorious life through us. This is the cross that we need to take up. It seems hard, even impossible for us to let go of all control and cares and simply surrender ourselves to the Holy Spirit. That is why Jesus said that it is our cross. Our ego has been in control forever. We think it a “shame” to be controlled by someone else. What we fail to realize though, is that we are actually being controlled by our fallen nature, the flesh, unless we yield that control of ourselves to the Lord through the cross.

It is no wonder that the Jews considered this act a scandal. Their confidence was (and still is, to most of them) in keeping the commandments of the law, the same law that Jesus completed and brought to an end on the cross. Religion is their practice. As for the Greeks, wisdom was their ultimate pursuit. The concept of the cross, as we saw it, does not make any sense to the human mind. Surrender our control to someone else? No way! We will try and with our wisdom we will reach God! That is what they believed. And we see both those movements in action in today’s “church”. The general idea is that we need to keep doing certain things (attend church services, pay tithes, do charitable acts, evangelize), and combined with the “wisdom” we get from preached sermons, we can reach God. I challenge anyone to prove me wrong in this. What else would anyone call the majority’s practice of “attending church”, listening passively to sermons, taking part of rallies and “revival” concerts, and idolizing “star” preachers and “miracle workers”? Today’s “Christianity” is nothing else than a combination of Judaic religion and Greek wisdom! There is only a remnant that has the boldness of worshiping Jesus in spirit and in truth, and those are the true, pure bride of Christ. The religion that calls herself “Christian” is none else than the harlot, the prostitute who hates the bride with passion.

So What Should I Do?

To you who are reading this, I have this to say: You are challenged to make a choice, especially if you are a part of the harlot. You can ignore all this, continue to be contented with your religious life, because “this is how you found it, why bother changing it now?” Or you can sense how uncomfortable you grow in that situation and go to the cross. I must warn you though, if you choose the latter, you are in for a real experience of the cross.

The cross is neither pleasant nor comfortable. It calls for total and honest surrender of everything we hold dear, our lifestyle, our perceptions, our desires, everything will be turned upside-down. For some it will mean very drastic changes, even in status, job, family, you name it. Most notably, it will bring us in opposition and conflict with the established religious order. It did so to Jesus, so it will happen to us as well. For some will also mean persecution and torture. The only way to willfully go through all that is to focus on the outcome, “the joy that is set before us”. We are called to bring all of ourselves to the cross, as a living sacrifice, and do this daily. We cannot rely on yesterday’s success or blessings, we need to do it every single day, or else the Lord would not have said it.

Do you want to follow Jesus? In reality? In spirit and in truth? Now you see that it’s no “walk in the park”, but the result is glory and eternal life. This is not for cowards or for the comfortable. It is only for those determined to have the experience of resurrected life of Jesus in them. I hope and pray that you are one of them. Go to the cross, allow your entire self to die there, and let Christ’s life make you alive.