Halloween III - Thanksgiving

Think you know where Halloween came from? Maybe you do. Or maybe you've just heard the same story repeated often enough that it sounds like history. Here are some quick facts and observations to separate the historical record from the Halloween mythology.

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In the previous post, we went over Samhain and we found it bears little resemblance to the story widely told about it. Today, we look at those modern Halloween traditions we love to hate: trick-or-treating and jack-o'-lanterns. You may be surprised at what the real history actually holds. Some people are absolutely convinced Halloween is pagan because of the errors they believe about Samhain, which we addressed in the previous post. Others are convinced Halloween is pagan because of errors they believe about the traditions. Well, that is what I hope to clear up now. Today, in the last post of the series, we will go over trick-ot-treating and jack-o'-lanterns.

Please take this quote from the History.com as our introduction:

"Halloween has its roots in the ancient, pre-Christian Celtic festival of Samhain, which was celebrated on the night of October 31. The Celts, who lived 3,000 years ago in Central and Western Europe, believed that the dead returned to earth on Samhain. On that sacred night, people gathered to light bonfires, offer sacrifices and pay homage to the dead.
During some Celtic celebrations of Samhain, villagers disguised themselves in costumes made of animal skins to drive away phantom visitors; banquet tables were prepared and food was left out to placate unwelcome spirits."
-"How Trick-or-Treating Became a Halloween Tradition", History.com, October 23, 2026.

This quote is simply abysmal. But you, my esteemed reader, have been educating yourself in this series, and I am confident that you see glaring errors in it.

It's approaching Thanksgiving now, and you might be wondering why we are still posting about Halloween. There is a method to my madness. I've said in many articles that the traditions we usually find at Halloween were once ubiquitous throughout Fall. Let us see a prime example of that.

TRICKS OR TREATS

Can trick-or-treating be traced back to pagan Druids? Hardly. This custom does not come from any one thing, but none of those things can be traced to ancient Druids, let alone Irish ones at Samhain in particular.
This is not to say that pagans never wore costumes or traipsed around, but commonality is not causality. (We have to prove that something is pagan beyond just saying the traditions look similar.) I cannot find such proof in any primary or reliable secondary sources. The evidence I have shows the history of our modern traditions is quite Christian.

The practice of dressing up in costume was called "masking" in medieval England. Putting on costume and then going around to entertain or to ask for a handout or collect charity (called 'ritualized begging') went by many names; "guising" and "mumming" for example. Most other cultures in Europe had similar traditions. For convenience, I will lump them all under the term mumming.

Mumming was surprisingly popular. It was done at many holidays throughout the year. It was a convenient way to raise money for church or charity. Sometimes the practice was called after the holiday on which it was done: "clementing" on the Feast of St. Clement (Nov. 23), "catterning" on the Feast of St. Catherine (Nov. 25), and "souling" on All Souls' Day. Souling could happen at any time during All Hallowtide, but it was particularly focused on All Souls' Day. It was not particularly focused on Halloween. The opposite, in fact. I can find no record of a medieval mumming tradition that was specific to October 31, as 'catterning' was for the St. Catherine's Day. So, how did mumming (trick-or-treat) become specific to Halloween?

Surprises are expected in October, and modern trick-or-treat has a surprise twist. Mumming on Halloween did not come from Europe to America directly, since there were no Halloween-specific mumming traditions. Instead, it came first to another popular holiday. All Souls' Day? No. America was primarily Protestant and didn't favor All Souls' Day. Instead, it came through ... Thanksgiving.

Starting in the mid-1800s and lasting through the early-1900s, there were several mumming traditions on or near Thanksgiving Day in America. I have said many times over the years that certain Halloween and Christmas traditions were done throughout the Autumn, and only later coalesced onto these days. This is now my favorite example.

I learned about this when I happened across the article "Masking and Mumming for the Holidays, Thanksgiving Style!" by Stephen Winick on Library of Congress Blogs. In it, he makes a concrete case that mumming on Thanksgiving predated Halloween trick-or-treating by several decades. It begins with these words:

"Happy Thanksgiving! In this post, we’ll take a look at a set of interesting photos from the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division. They depict a custom most people nowadays don’t know much about: Thanksgiving masking. Thanksgiving maskers, like trick-or-treaters on contemporary Halloween, used to go door to door, begging for handouts."
-Stephen Winick, "Masking and Mumming for the Holidays, Thanksgiving Style!", blogs.loc.gov, November 25, 2020.

Did you know about that? Likely not. But I bet you "knew" that trick-or-treat comes from the Druids (as History.com claims), even though it didn't. Winick goes on to say something quite revealing:

"To discuss a more specific anachronism, [Linton Weeks, of NPR] claimed that by dressing up at Thanksgiving and going door to door looking for treats, the people in these photos 'effectively created a mash-up of Halloween and Turkey Day.' This idea could only occur to someone looking back at these pictures from a later time, for the simple reason that Thanksgiving masking predates trick-or-treating in the United States. When these pictures were taken, kids did play in the streets and play tricks on Halloween night, and adults held masquerade balls, but trick-or-treating as we know it did not exist, and children didn’t dress in raggedy costumes or go from house to house on Halloween. These might look like Halloween pictures to us, but they didn’t look anything like Halloween in 1910."
-Stephen Winick, "Masking and Mumming for the Holidays, Thanksgiving Style!", blogs.loc.gov, November 25, 2020.

And there you have it. That article has links to several sources and terms which should help you on your way to learning more about this if you are interested.

Most of the Thanksgiving mumming traditions were specifically found in New York City. However, when I dug through old newspaper records, I began to find the same activities had spread to other areas around the country. I have found several references to an 1897 Los Angeles Times article stating Thanksgiving was one of the busiest times of the year for manufacturers of false faces and masks. That Masking and Mumming article cites this same, but from Chicago. That means this was probably syndicated and printed in several papers across the country.

You might wonder, how can these traditions happen around Thanksgiving before there was a Thanksgiving Day? The answer seems to be that Thanksgiving mumming does not come from any single people group or tradition. America is the Great Melting Pot after all, and the Old World brought many autumn customs and traditions to the New World. In the 1860s-70s, they came together at Thanksgiving, apparently starting in New York. It wouldn't be until the 1920s that they began to migrate to Halloween. 

Yes, that's right, your ancient Druidic Halloween trick-or-treat custom really comes from the 1930s.

"In the important article 'Trick or Treat: Pre-Texts and Contexts,' which appeared in this edited volume by Jack Santino [a link to a book is provided in the original article, which I will put at the end of this post], folklorist Tad Tuleja dates American trick-or-treating to the 1930s, and points out that even in the 1940s articles about Halloween traditions do not mention it, suggesting it did not become truly widespread until later"
-Stephen Winick, "Masking and Mumming for the Holidays, Thanksgiving Style!", blogs.loc.gov, November 25, 2020.

All this talk about Druids and costumes to scare away demons is rather pointless after that. And you should know the phrase "trick-or-treat" is credited to Canada, from the early-1900s. The earliest known documented evidence of this phrase is from the November 1, 1917 edition of the Sault Daily Star (Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada), which reported that children were calling out “tricks or treats.” I thought "tricks or treats" was just an oddity found in the "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" Halloween Special. Apparently not. By 1927, the now familiar "trick or treat" appears in the historical record, also in Canada.

Our modern Halloween trick-or-treating tradition is an American phenomenon from the 1930s. We know that Halloween activities in the 1800s included adults going to masquerade balls, but that says nothing about children. As the popular story goes, kids caused trouble on Halloween, and somebody got the bright idea to dress them up and send them trick-or-treating to keep them out of trouble. Is that how it really went? I don't know. It is supported and makes sense. But skip a few years, and children are still doing the same thing to this day.

That is your true history of trick-or-treating. Do you recall the quote from The Sun which opened this series? Here is a refresher: "Trick or treating may seem like a modern event, but it can actually be traced back to Celtic Britain and Ireland in the 9th century." Now how do you feel about that?

Many modern Evangelical Christians have modified trick-or-treating into "trunk-or-treat", where children do not go door-to-door but car-to-car. At first, it was popularized as a way to push back against the accusations surrounding Halloween, most of which we now know are false. That reason seems rather superfluous knowing what we know now. Trunk-or-treat is still a much safer and more controlled environment, however, and that's a perfectly good reason to keep doing it.

That Halloween costumes have recently become increasingly dark and grotesque does not in any way mean they always were, much less that they must be. Fallen things happen in a fallen world. As for me, I feel our job is not to declare defeat and scurry away, but to oppose this darker direction. There are plenty of harmless and even wholesome alternatives to the morbid.

And now, about those pumpkins...

JACK-O'-LANTERNS

The term "jack-o'-lantern" and similar phrases did not originally refer to a carved vegetable. By the mid-1600s, these related expressions were being used both for night watchmen carrying lanterns and for mysterious wandering lights in marshes and bogs, also called will-o'-the-wisps or fool's fire.

As for the tradition of vegetable-carving, the oldest extant written record of the custom is also from the mid-1600s. That is considerably later than the pagan Irish Druid origins you have heard about. A 1640 letter by English writer James Howell describes a turnip carved like a death's head with a candle inside, used to frighten people. That is the earliest reference we have. But they were not called jack-o-lanterns at this time.

The earliest reference we have of carved vegetables being called 'jack-o-lantern' comes from the mid-1800s. In 1837, the Limerick Chronicle reported a carved-gourd competition, awarding a prize for the “best crown of Jack McLantern.” It was after this, in the 1840s, that the term jack-o'-lantern and the tradition of carved pumpkins were brought together.

Now we have carved vegetables, lights, and the term jack-o'-lantern all in the same place. But you might not have noticed that we are missing one final ingredient: Halloween.

By the late-1800s, reports appear which explicitly connect illuminated carved pumpkins with Halloween in North America. But that makes me curious about what happened before the late 1800s? Would you believe ... Thanksgiving again?

Jack-o'-lanterns were not exclusively a Halloween custom. Ronald Hutton, in "Stations of the Sun", mentions carved vegetables at Christmas time. Also, take the following quote from the New York Times November 24, 1895 edition, titled "The Day We Celebrate; Thanksgiving Treated Gastronomically and Socially". The article is about how to host a good Thanksgiving. In a section about how to entertain the children, it suggests a scavenger hunt for nuts, then it says:

"A 'booby' prize, that never fails to please the children, is an old-fashioned jack o' lantern, made from a small pumpkin, and brought in lighted, on a salver, to be presented to the luckless nut hunter."

Ccarved vegetables happened throughout the Autumn. Only later did the custom migrate to become exclusively a Halloween custom, as we see it today.

So, jack-o'-lanterns are relatively recent and were used throughout the Fall holidays, therefore they cannot be evidence that Halloween came from paganism any more than Thanksgiving did. The case that Halloween comes specifically from ancient, pagan Samhain is quite overstated. Believe it or not, Christians have imaginations, too.

CONCLUSION

In the first post, we learned about how Halloween is misunderstood. In the second post, we learned how Samhain is misunderstood. Today, we've learned how Halloween traditions are misunderstood. And now you know why I am still putting up these posts after Halloween ... because Halloween history is Thanksgiving history.
So, for all those people who cry rivers over the pagan origins of Halloween customs, you can rest comfortably knowing the Thanksgiving you celebrate once had trick-or-treat well before Halloween did, and jack-o'-lantern customs, too. Those old, tired excuses of "it's pagan" or "it imitates what Druids did" etc etc are simply false.

My objective in this series is truth. It is not to convince anyone to celebrate Halloween. If you don't want to, then don't. It's not required. But at least be honest with yourself about why you've chosen as you have. Someone might say to me, "You've cleared up a few things, but I still cannot see how this day honors God," and you know what, that's fine. I think the better question than "does it glorify God" is "can it glorify God", and I believe the answer to that is yes. The choice before us is to either insist on making it honor God as we are able, as we do for all the other perfectly acceptable days in our lives, or to surrender and concede it to the modern culture. Take your pick. This is the exact same choice you must make whether you spend some time in a costume in late October or not. As for me, personally, I don't agree that we honor God by doing nothing. I say bring a little light into it. Since it started as a day to honor the faithful departed, perhaps we should consider returning it to that. But the least effective way to honor God would be to persist in accusing the day of being pagan despite all the evidence we've seen. That sounds too much to me like bearing false witness.

Other posts in this series:
Halloween I, Halloween II

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Here is a bullet point summary covering the highlights of what we learned in this series which you can share with your family and friends and former church mates (because once you share this, surely you will be disfellowshipped):

• In 609 AD Pope Boniface IV created a memorial to all martyrs on May 13 for the diocese of Rome.
• In 731-741 AD Pope Gregory III created a memorial to all departed saints in Heaven on November 1, again for the diocese of Rome, apparently as part of his dispute with the Byzantine Emperor.
• In 835 AD Pope Gregory IV expanded the all saints memorial to the whole church.
• At some point in the 800s, the first mention of Samhain appears in Irish literature.
• The claim that Samhain was so popular that the Pope moved All Saints’ Day to co-opt it is unsupported by the historical evidence.
• There was no single Celtic culture. Samhain is distinctly Irish, and evidence from Ireland cannot automatically be applied to peoples outside Ireland.
• Samhain may have originated as a seasonal marker associated with the end of the harvest, the beginning of winter, and the annual cycle of farming and community life.
• The earliest Irish sources date Samhain to the beginning of November, but they were written in the Christian era.
• The date November 1 in the Julian calendar in 800 AD (when the earliest mentions appear) would actually be November 5 on our Gregorian calendar.
• The earliest sources do not tell us how or when Samhain first became associated with November 1, nor do they prove that the date was observed in pre-Christian Ireland.
• Detailed accounts of Samhain festivities appear in medieval Irish literature, recorded by Christian authors.
• The medieval Irish legends were recorded, adapted, or possibly developed by Christian monks. They cannot simply be treated as eyewitness accounts of ancient pagan practices.
• The Otherworld in these legends was not a realm of the dead. It was a fairy world, and was often portrayed as an alluring, beautiful world, quite unlike the frightening land of ghosts and demons described in modern Halloween-origin stories.
• Beginning in the 1500s, writers increasingly romanticized the Druids and invented a Celtic past that went well beyond the available evidence.
• The modern claim that Samhain was the Celtic New Year and a great festival of the dead was heavily influenced by nineteenth-century writers, particularly John Rhys and James Frazer.
• Modern Wicca helped popularize Samhain as a major pagan festival, but creating new customs and calling them ancient does not make them actual ancient practices.
• Nothing establishes a direct historical connection between the Druids and the Halloween customs commonly attributed to them.
• Many Halloween traditions, including costumes, going door to door for treats, and carved vegetable lanterns, have documented parallels in Christian-era customs. These traditions were often practiced throughout the autumn holidays, and some have particularly interesting connections to Thanksgiving.
• Jack-o'-lanterns have a history of their own, but there's no reliable evidence that they originated as an ancient Druidic or Samhain custom.
• Just because two customs look alike doesn't mean one came from the other. Commonality does not prove causality.
• Modern historical research is chipping away at claims about Samhain, the Druids, and Halloween that people once repeated as established fact.

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Some interesting sources to help you dig further into the link between Halloween and Thanksgiving:

"Masking and Mumming for the Holidays, Thanksgiving Style!" on Library of Congress Blogs.
https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2020/11/masking-and-mumming-for-the-holidays-thanksgiving-style/

"Unmasking a Thanksgiving Tradition Through Photos and Newspapers" on Library of Congress Blogs.
https://blogs.loc.gov/teachers/2015/11/unmasking-a-thanksgiving-tradition-through-photos-and-newspapers/

"The Ancient Irish Get Far Too Much Credit for Halloween" on USC Dornsife.
https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/ancient-irish-get-too-much-credit-for-halloween/

"Trick or Treat" on Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles 3rd Edition
https://dchp.arts.ubc.ca/entries/trick%20or%20treat

"The Jack-o-Lantern Story: Uncut and Uncensored" on lesleybannatyne.com.
https://lesleybannatyne.com/JOL.html

Link to historical newspapers about Thanksgiving "fantasticals".
https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/?q=thanksgiving+fantasticals

Link to historical newspapers about Thanksgiving "ragamuffins".
https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/?q=thanksgiving+ragamuffin

Jack Santo, "Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life", 1994. On Internet Archive.
https://archive.org/details/halloweenotherfe0000unse/mode/2up

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It is important that you understand; Everything on this blog is based on the current understanding of each author. Never take anyone's word for it, always prove it for yourself, it is your responsibility. You cannot ride someone else's coattail into the Kingdom. ; )

Acts 17:11

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Revealing Sabbatarian Conditioning

The problem with the title of this article is that the same conditioning Sabbatarian and legalistic churches inflict upon their members makes it highly unlikely what I write will be revealed to those same people, whereas those who have transitioned out and embraced the true Gospel can readily see what the others are blinded from seeing. For their exists another aspect of this, a truth of God, that is also not believed by them and that is, there are those who God has blinded from seeing truth, having earlier rejected truth.

(John 9:39) And Jesus said, For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind.

I begin this journey of exposure with this:

(Jeremiah 32:30) For the children of Israel and the children of Judah have only done evil before me from their youth: for the children of Israel have only provoked me to anger with the work of their hands, saith the LORD.

A simple question for those reading this… Was God telling the truth, or was He lying? In other words, do you believe God? Or, does your mind look for reasons this might not be true? You might conclude that even an evil person can do a good thing, but what needs to be considered is motive. Evil people may well do what is perceived as good, while the motive for doing so was evil.

(1 Samuel 16:7) But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.

Two truths of God revealed: 1) How He judges, according to the heart, and 2) How man judges, according to appearance.

Jesus elaborated on this here:

(John 7:24) Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment.

How God judges is righteous judgment, and how man judges, according to appearance, is not. And if it is not righteous judgment, there is only one other kind of judgment that it can be, and that is unrighteous judgment.

Now lets take what God declared through Jeremiah about all the works of the Hebrews from their youth were only evil in the sight of God.

They were given the Sabbath. The Sabbath commandment decrees that no one was to do any work on the Sabbath. Given what God said through Jeremiah, what would you conclude, logically? The only works they could rest from were evil works, for that was all they were doing, according to a God who judges mankind based on their hearts, and not according to appearance; righteous judgment as opposed to unrighteous judgment. Their rest from work was a rest from evil works, only.

Now, were a typical Sabbatarian to agree that all their works; the work of their hands, were evil, what happens when confronted with a scenario that Sabbatarianism disagrees with, fundamentally?

You see back-peddling. You see rationalizations so as to maintain the cognitive dissonance inherent in Sabbatarian theology. You see the redefinition of words, terms, and concepts so that “any” work doesn’t mean “any” and works performed with one’s hands are not necessarily evil, seeing as some works were still done, or could be done on the Sabbath like rescuing an animal from a pit or turning one’s livestock out to pasture; works where no charge of sin resulted. And if you are working from a position where sin is the result of transgressing the law (read: Decalogue), then you can’t be claiming all their works were evil, where evil is a sin, and where sin ALSO transgresses the law as stated in the first half of 1John 3:4 that disrupts the Sabbatarian belief and insistence that sin only occurs and is chargeable upon transgression of the law.

With an understanding and belief that all their works, no matter what they were, were evil in the sight of God, the Sabbatarian definition of sin falls apart and crumbles into proverbial dust. Too much of Sabbatarianism rides on, and is dependent on the belief that sin results when someone transgresses the law, which, by the way, reinforces unrighteous judgment based on appearance, which Jesus also addressed in the context of working on the Sabbath.

(John 7:22-24) Moses therefore gave unto you circumcision; (not because it is of Moses, but of the fathers;) and ye on the sabbath day circumcise a man. °If a man on the sabbath day receive circumcision, that the law of Moses should not be broken; are ye angry at me, because I have made a man every whit whole on the sabbath day? °Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment.

Righteous judgment looks to the heart and intent of the heart, where those with evil hearts God judges where evil hearted people only do evil in His sight. Conversely, good people do good in His sight, which begs the logical question, who has a good heart if all the Hebrew’s works were deemed evil due to having what God described again through Jeremiah:

(Jeremiah 17:9) The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?

What God spoke through Jeremiah is not believed; not accepted as presented. It is modified to conform to the conditioning received routinely, on a weekly basis. The Sabbath law is also modified, despite Jeremiah and what God said, for the alternatives are unacceptable. For those accepted and exempted works were not evil and sin… somehow… the reality being elusive to Sabbatarians where everything is black and white thinking. With God however, justice is tempered with mercy, else justice is simply tyranny.

An animal rescued from a ditch on the Sabbath alleviates the suffering of the animal, which if left unattended until after the Sabbath was cruelty to the animal, and the Sabbath was not about inflicting cruelty. It also set the stage for later events performed by Jesus; God Incarnate.

(Luke 13:10-16) And he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. °And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself. °And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity. °And he laid his hands on her: and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God. °And the ruler of the synagogue answered with indignation, because that Jesus had healed on the sabbath day, and said unto the people, There are six days in which men ought to work: in them therefore come and be healed, and not on the sabbath day. °The Lord then answered him, and said, Thou hypocrite, doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering? °And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?

What were the Hebrews told to remember on the Sabbath day when they were resting from their works? The Sabbath itself, like Sabbatarians conclude? They were to remember how they were slaves in Egypt, where there was no rest from the bonds of slavery. And now, here was the God who told them what to remember on the Sabbath having to remind them of what they forgot on the Sabbath.

They were told to keep the Sabbath holy, by doing what? Not working. How then does not doing anything equate with keeping the day holy? The sacrifices were holy, but first the animals had to be sacrificed, by working to do so in a manner specifically commanded by God who also told them not to do any work on the Sabbath. The Sabbath command did not apply to works that were in compliance with the will of God.

Now, another question which Sabbatarians prefer not to answer… Is it God’s will that we do good works, or evil works? It seems like a silly question up front; a ‘no-brainer’ if you will. In this context, I remind the reader that Jesus said good works were lawful on the Sabbath as contrasted by Him with evil works.

Jesus identified the will of the Father for us today by reading in the narratives of what all He said and taught:

For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me. °And this is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day. °And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day. — John 6:38-40

(Ephesians 2:10) What happens to those who believe Him and believe IN Him? They are given the Holy Spirit, also referred to as a “new heart” that replaces the evil one all mankind starts out with; a GOOD heart. A heart that produces good fruits; good works, and not evil works. The believer is called to good works.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.

Do Christians then suspend their good works on the Sabbath, or do they emulate Christ who worked on the Sabbath, doing good works?

Now, here’s where it gets truly interesting… What do Sabbatarians conclude when others who are actual Christians, with new hearts from God, where all their works are now good fruits, work on the (their) Sabbath? They sin. Their works are a transgression of the Sabbath commandment, resulting in a charge of sin.

Who then calls good, evil? Those with good hearts, or evil hearts? Who judges another to be a sinner for having transgressed the Sabbath command, based on judging according to appearance, where they SEE another working on the Sabbath?

I don’t know how to make all of this any plainer or easier to understand. Christians, with a new heart imparted to them by God, are now categorized by God as good trees that can only produce good fruits, regardless of what day it is. Sabbatarians will read this, and still conclude, due to their deceitful and desperately wicked hearts, that some works, such as works of employment and for gain, are still sin if done on the (their) Sabbath, which, when you pay attention to what Jesus said and taught, makes works of employment evil works to begin with!

I remind the reader what God said through Jeremiah, that the works of their hands were only evil in His sight, and that Sabbatarians insist the works of Jesus were in a spiritual category; works of healing, supernatural in nature, so I present this:

And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. °And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? °Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. °I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work. °As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world. °When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay, °And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, (which is by interpretation, Sent.) He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing.

(John 9:1-14) °The neighbours therefore, and they which before had seen him that he was blind, said, Is not this he that sat and begged? °Some said, This is he: others said, He is like him: but he said, I am he. °Therefore said they unto him, How were thine eyes opened? °He answered and said, A man that is called Jesus made clay, and anointed mine eyes, and said unto me, Go to the pool of Siloam, and wash: and I went and washed, and I received sight. °Then said they unto him, Where is he? He said, I know not.

°°They brought to the Pharisees him that aforetime was blind. °And it was the sabbath day when Jesus made the clay, and opened his eyes.

The significance of making this clay is easily overlooked. It was Jesus working with His hands as part of this miracle.

Witness then what Paul referred to as the “severity of God” (Romans 11:22). Those with the evil hearts of unbelief, who demonstrate no love of truth, receive what is translated in 2Thessalonians as a “strong delusion” that they are given that they do believe in, which is a lie, that ultimately condemns them. They had “pleasure in unrighteousness” by judging others with unrighteous judgment, according to appearance.

Sabbatarians demonstrate on a daily basis on social media the pleasure they derive by accusing others of sin based on unrighteous judgment according to appearance when it comes to the Sabbath as well as charging those same people with another sin for worshiping God on a “Sunday” they associate with sun worship; again all according to appearance; the fruit/works of an evil heart of unbelief.

What happened on the first day of Creation Week? Light came forth from darkness.

What happened on the day following the Sabbath when Christ Jesus was resurrected from the dead? The light of the world came forth from the darkness of death.

How then is Christ pictured by the prophet Malachi?

The “Sun” of righteousness. Christians are worshiping the “Sun” of righteousness on the first day of the week when the “Sun” of righteousness met the typology of the first day of Creation Week, with a new beginning now; a new “work” now, where Christians are the work of Jesus; a new creation that is truly made in His image.

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It is important that you understand; Everything on this blog is based on the current understanding of each author. Never take anyone's word for it, always prove it for yourself, it is your responsibility. You cannot ride someone else's coattail into the Kingdom. ; )

Acts 17:11

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Banking on the Law and False Profits...

All too many people see religion as an investment. They expect a ‘return’ on their investment, that being an eternity in a paradise they were convinced to invest in. They are, for the most part, ‘banking’ on the wrong banks and bankers.

Scripture calls them wolves in sheep’s clothing. They appear to be sheep, even the lamb of God, yet they devour flocks, financially. They use them to feed their own bellies at the expense of others they convinced to bank their future on them. They are the religious ‘middle-men’ who have placed themselves between God and others. They are the religious gurus who interpret the Scriptures for those not willing to invest the time to read and interpret the Scriptures for themselves. They bought into the wolf’s advertising that instilled fearful responses of what happens to those who refuse to commit.

The investment seems reasonable up front. Seeing though they were among those unwilling to invest the time and effort to ‘decipher’ Scripture, they are unlikely to read the fine-print of what they are getting involved in, where the investment will cost them dearly in the end.

Jesus came among His own, who, for the most part, rejected Him. They were already vested in the law, where the Rabbis were there; the Pharisees and others, interpreting Scripture for them. They were perceived as legitimate ‘investment counselors’ so that, when Jesus referred to them as evil children of the devil, doing the will of their father the devil, Jesus’ testimony was rejected. The Pharisees were already well established as the religious elite and teachers, instructing them in the way they should walk within the framework of the law.

With the law, and the interpretation of the Pharisees, they could see where deceivers and false prophets would arise to test them, and here was a prophet, right on queue, as they were taught, who went about flaunting the law; specifically the sign of that covenant between God and themselves. Here was now an opportunity to demonstrate their dedication; their obedience to the law and the prophets. Condemn this impostor, like so many others that preceded Him. He broke the law, the Sabbath, and gave a ‘lame’ excuse about good works being lawful on the Sabbath, when all could plainly read the Sabbath law forbade all work; any work. The law was the final arbiter, and not this itinerant self-appointed and proclaimed Rabbi with no schooling in the law from the Rabbinical teachers of the law.

There was a lot for any of them to overcome in order to recognize Him as the actual Messiah. Messiah was to restore Israel to its dominance among the nations, they were told. This man appeared to only be interested in gathering a following to Himself for who knows what purpose.

The Pharisees had an easy method for testing Him, and that was that the real Messiah to come surely would validate them as the guardians of the law; that the real Messiah would not allow Himself to be put to death by them or the Roman occupation. So all they had to do to prove or disprove Him was to charge Him with sin, condemn Him according to the law, and see what happens. If He dies, they were right. If He didn’t, they could always claim they were following the law to the letter. He broke the law; He sinned, and they acted accordingly, as they were commanded in the law.

Consider this carefully. It was their interpretation of the law that was the final arbiter of their decision process; not God who performed miraculous healing through the Holy Spirit that only could be attributed to God. They attributed those things to the devil anyway, even raising the dead.

The law was their de facto god… their graven images of stone that they never questioned as actually being treated by them as another god they obeyed in the hope of being blessed as a result. Appease the law and receive blessings. Ignore the law and the law would curse them.

Today’s Pharisees take this even further, openly assigning the attributes of God to that same law, engraved in stones. Eternal. Unchanging. A transcript of God’s Character.

To “change” the Sabbath commandment so as to permit “good works” would open the floodgates on the Sabbath command where everyone would deem their works good and not evil, seeing as that was the contrast Jesus presented. That God said He judges according to the heart didn’t come into the equation of the law, especially the Decalogue.

It was God Himself who called out from Mt. Sinai none of them were to do any work on the Sabbath, where many years later God also, through the prophet Jeremiah, informed those descendants of those Hebrews that in God’s eyes, ALL the works of their hands were only evil in His sight. They would have concluded this was rhetorical and not actually literal, as they believed they could do good and did do good, despite God also declaring their hearts were deceitful and desperately wicked through the same prophet.

What desperately wicked people do as a result is not to conclude the true purpose and function of the law really was: To regulate an evil people in order to minimize the damage they cause.

All the signs were there, that they being evil, could not perceive; the constant sacrifices for sin at the temple where the place was a literal blood bath. They were a constant reminder of sin.

Contrast this with the prophesied New Covenant to come, said by God NOT to be like the old covenant with the constant reminder of sin through the constant sacrifices. With the new, there would be no remembrance of sin. (Jeremiah 31:34)

What is the emphasis with today’s modern Sabbatarians, such as Adventism? There is a constant, incessant reminder of sin through the declaration that it is the law; the Decalogue that defines sin. Break this law, especially the Sabbath, and you sin. You stand condemned before God who said through the prophet He would remember our sins no more. God is no longer condemning sin and sinners through that law, replaced by the new that is of such a nature, there is no remembrance of sin on the part of God regarding those called of God who have responded.

Adventism thrives on sin; the sins of others who refuse to be dragged back to the old covenant ministration of condemnation and death.

In the New Covenant, our sins have been forgiven and forgotten. The true believers are given a new heart by God, where the fruits of the Spirit are such that the apostle Paul wrote that against such there is no law. Those led by the Holy Spirit cannot be charged with sin by a God who said He judges according to the heart. It is ludicrous in the extreme to conclude God would judge and condemn a person led now by the Holy Spirit in them with their “new” heart and “law” of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made us free from the law of sin and death. (Romans 8:2)

Those with a carnal heart; an evil heart, have the attributes that are the diametrically opposite of the fruits of the Spirit. Instead of humility, there is arrogance that leads them to believe they can keep the law and not sin. They overestimate themselves, so that the very law they opt for still condemns them in the end, where they avidly embrace it. Their own pulls of the flesh end up condemning them with the very thing they rely upon to prove otherwise.

The next time, it won’t be the Pharisees; keepers of the law and Sabbath, standing there condemning Christ. It will be Christ standing there, allowing the law they embraced to do the condemning of them. They believe in the law. They have faith in the law that it will not condemn them because they “keep” the law. They will realize then that the law they used to condemn others condemns themselves, but ultimately, what truly condemns them before God is their faithlessness; their unbelief regarding Him who they already rejected. (John 16:7-9)

The Hebrews believed the same thing, and it is expressed in Psalms 44. They claimed to be keeping the law and bewildered why they were being punished as though they were not.

What was the condition of their collective hearts?

Deceitful. Desperately wicked. Stony. Evil hearts of unbelief when it came to God.

Don’t be banking on the law. The law can’t save you. The law cannot hear you. The law can only take your sins and condemn you with them, and all have sinned.

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It is important that you understand; Everything on this blog is based on the current understanding of each author. Never take anyone's word for it, always prove it for yourself, it is your responsibility. You cannot ride someone else's coattail into the Kingdom. ; )

Acts 17:11

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Halloween II - Samhain

Think you know where Halloween came from? Maybe you do. Or maybe you've just heard the same story repeated often enough that it sounds like history. Here are some quick facts and observations to separate the historical record from the Halloween mythology.

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In the previous post, we discussed who the Celts are and what the history of Halloween is. This time, we focus on Samhain. We shouldn't have to, but apparently, because of misinformation, we must.

Please take this quote from the Smithsonian (of all places) as our introduction:

"Halloween’s origins go back 2,000 years, to the Celtic holiday of Samhain, which marked their new year, according to National Geographic. Ancient Irish and Scottish people believed the veil between the worlds of the dead and living grew thin each year on November 1, allowing demons to roam the earth again. Along with displaying offerings and lighting bonfires for spirits, the Celts dressed up as the dead, hoping to blend in with real demons and therefore skirt spiritual confrontation."
-Rose Eveleth, “The History of Trick-or-Treating Goes Back Centuries” Smithsonian Magazine, originally published: October 18, 2012 | updated: October 24, 2023.

The Smithsonian is THE name in history in the United States, they had more than one person working on the article, and not just that, but National Geographic gets some credit. How on earth can it possibly be so wrong??
Yet it is. Let us turn aside and see.

What I am going to attempt to do today is give you a very, very simplified version of a very, very complicated topic. Anyone who studies Samhain professionally would likely tell you today's article is over simplified. Well, that's what you get in one blog post with scholarly material written for a casual audience. But I don't want to dive into details here. I only want to give you the overview that you need so you can better understand Halloween.

SAMHAIN HISTORY

What was Samhain? 

Samhain means "summer's end". It was the traditional last day of summer. The word is Irish. It might be better to think of it not as Celtic, since Celt is a very broad term, and instead think of it as Gaelic.
Besides the Gaels, no other Celtic group is known to have shared the concept of Samhain. This does not paint a picture of a day so widely popular that the Pope felt compelled to co-opt it.

We have no record from the Druids themselves. The oldest material on the Celts comes from the Greeks and Romans, but they do not mention Samhain. If the Druids marked the end of summer with a festival at all (and though it is reasonable, there is no solid evidence to prove they did) that doesn't establish that they called it Samhain, or observed it on October 31 or November 1.

The oldest material that mentions Samhain arrives several hundred years after the Druids disappear from the record. The word samhain (it was spelled in a few different ways, but it's all the same thing) appears in several old Irish texts. The only surviving copies of those texts are in manuscripts which date from the 1100s to the 1600s. But, scholars believe those manuscripts are copies of earlier material. Based on the language used, scholars estimate those texts to originally come from the 700s through the 1100s. Old, yes, but even that is solidly within the Christian era. (For more details on these texts, see "The Plain Truth About Samhain".)

This dating causes scholars to debate whether that earliest material was preserved (yet heavily edited) by Christians or wholly created by Christians.

These oldest Irish texts can be divided into two categories: Irish non-fiction, and medieval Irish legends.

Legends
The medieval legends - where human armies battled fairies, a corpse asks for a drink, and a supernatural being puts people to sleep with music then burns their buildings - do treat Samhain like a holiday. But not a single word of ritualized begging or dressing up. Any claim of a pre-Christian Samhain holiday is based on legends. It used to be widely thought that the legends are traditions from ancient Druidic paganism that survived into the Christian era. With modern archaeology and textual criticism, many folklorists and historians are abandoning that position.

Narrative
The non-fiction (a dictionary, a martyrology, and a list of events) does not treat samhain as a holiday. It treats samhain as a timestamp; a way to point out that something happened at the end of summer. The non-fiction aren't about samhain, they only use that word. Like I said, as timestamp.

So, we really have two very different ways to understand Samhain: a "samhain" (lower-case s) time-stamp that means "the last day of summer" and falls on November 1 but has nothing to do with a festival, and a "Samhain" (upper-case S) holiday from medieval legends that may or may not have been real.
A real Samhain festival hinges on two things:
1) Do the legends contain truth here, or are they merely fairytales, and
2) Were the legends created from stories that survived from Druids, or were they invented by the Christians who wrote them.
We do not know for sure, but modern scholarship is moving in the direction of fairytales invented by Christians.

Why might Christians write such fairytales? One possible answer is because they wanted to explain and expand the history of Ireland. "Why is that building in ruins? Ah! Because of a great battle in ancient times between men and fairies."

So, we don't know if Samhain was a literal festival or not. But if it were, the strongest scholarly position is that Samhain was a seasonal festival in early medieval Ireland, associated with the end of the farming season and transition into winter, and marked by communal feasting and assemblies. In other words, something much like a harvest festival. How much of this reflects actual pre-Christian religious practice is uncertain.

When was Samhain?

The medieval Irish legends do not give a date for Samhain at all. The Irish non-fiction puts samhain on November 1, never October 31.

It is important to understand a few things.

• No one knows for certain exactly when summer's end was to the Druids. Remember, the Irish non-fiction, where the November 1 date comes from, was written by Christians during the Christian era. Exactly when the Druids believed summer ended is anybody's guess, but it could not have been tied to November 1 originally because the Druids didn't have a November.
• November is a Roman month. We don't know what calendar the Irish Druids used, but it is highly unlikely they used the calendar of their enemies. A Celtic calendar was found in France. It is a luni-solar calendar. But that could be specific to France. We have no such example from Ireland.
• When the earliest material was being created by Irish Christians, around 700-800 AD or so, they were using the Julian calendar, not the Gregorian calendar we use today. Our November 1 today is 4 days ahead of November 1 from 800 AD. What was November 1 then would be November 5 now.

How was Samhain observed?

If we pull from the legends again, it was a time of feasting, royal gatherings, acts of courage, and, of course, encounters with fairies. There you go. Not so much like Halloween after all.
Again, not a single word of ritualized begging or dressing up.

Most of what people claim about Samhain and its traditions doesn't come from the oldest sources. It comes from material written much later, beginning in the 1500s. That's a pretty important distinction. The writers of that time were trying to reconstruct an ancient past they no longer understood, and they were doing it before modern historical and archaeological methods had been established. The disciplines of history and archaeology wouldn't become systematic, evidence-driven fields until the 1800s. Much of what earlier writers presented as pre-Christian Celtic history was actually speculation and romanticized reconstruction, not established fact. Rigorous disciplines did not correct the issues at first. On the contrary, well-known scholars like John Rhys and James Frazer made it worse. The idea that Samhain was the feast of the dead comes from James Frazer, as does the claim that the Catholic Church coopted Samhain and labeled it All Hallows. Specialists today are still working correcting the many misconceptions about this. Many of those claims from the 1500s through the early-1900s have since been disproved, abandoned as implausible, and rejected by modern scholars. Yet, articles like the one from the Smithsonian are helping to keep that questionable information alive.

Samhain is currently a festival for Wiccans and neo-pagans. No denying that. Some people use that as evidence that Samhain is ancient, and therefore Halloween is ancient ...and evil. But as I said in the last post, Druidism, and by extension Samhain, was recently reinvented. Most of these groups popped up in the 1700-1900s. That isn't evidence of ancient age at all. The Samhain they observe today bears little resemblance to the Samhain from the Irish legends. The same goes for Halloween. It was these groups who popularized many of the misconceptions about Halloween that this article was intended to clear up. (For more, see "The Plain Truth About Samhain".)

I came across a woman on social media who was adamant that since Halloween is a high day for Satanists, it must not be touched by Christians. (Her real goal was to promote Old Covenant feasts.) I asked her, "If Satanists made the Feast of Tabernacles an annual high day, would you abandon it?" She adamantly rejected that notion. So, why should anyone else hold to a standard she herself doesn't stick to? In my experience, the people who fret most about pagan origins of holidays are far less concerned about paganism than they are about finding a wedge issue with which to promote their own system.

Did Irish Celts believe the dead walked the earth on Samhain?
Yes and no. Remember in the last post where we learned that Celts are a people group, and Celt is not the same thing as Druid? The Irish really did believe the dead walked among the living. It's true! ...But probably not the Druidic Irish, because it looks like this is a later development.
As I said, this claim comes from James Frazer. None of the oldest material supports this. The ancient Greek/Roman sources tell us the Druids believed in reincarnation. The medieval legends do not portray the dead returning to the earth. What they do portray is the human and fairy worlds coming close. The fairy world was a dangerous place but not a horrific place. Quite the opposite.

"The Irish otherworld was no hell, either. In medieval tales, it is a sunny place in perpetual spring. Everyone who lives there is beautiful, powerful, immortal and blond. They have good teeth. The rivers flow with mead and wine, and food appears on command. No sexual act is a sin. The houses sparkle with gems and precious metals. Even the horses are perfect."
-Lisa Bitel, "The Ancient Irish Get Far Too Much Credit for Halloween", on USC Dornsife, October 29, 2024.

It was Christians who clearly believed in an afterlife and a realm where the dead are. It was All Saints' Day that honored and brought the mind to the realm of the dead. "Memento mori." Taken together, this information strongly indicates this 'dead walk the earth' superstition developed from Irish Christians not Irish Druids.

Was Samhain a demon lord?
No. I wanted to include a mention of this because it superbly illustrates the problem of bad source material and common knowledge. That claim originated with one Charles Vallancey, a self-taught authority in Irish history. Vallancey mythologized Samhain into a demon lord and paired him with Satan. His claims about Samhain were false, and even his contemporaries knew it. Later, James Bonwick borrowed and added to Vallancey's ideas with even more horrific etymology, which made it into publications from other authors, and eventually resources like the Encyclopedia Britannica 1911 edition. Still more authors picked this up and put some lipstick on it, which was read by the likes of Herman Hoeh, and it all somehow made it into Chick Tracts, the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia, and the movie Halloween II.
And, like many other claims about Samhain, it was never true to begin with. (For more, see "Samhain Lord of the Dead".)

CONCLUSION

What did we learn about Samhain? The real story is not at all what you've been told. If you go with the version found in non-fiction, then it was simply the last day of summer. If you go with the version in legends, then it was a time of fairies and kings. It was only after that when we start to see costumes, bonfires, and worlds of the dead. But then, after 1500, the back story was considerably altered (one might say, retconned).

To have any hope whatsoever of understanding the history of Samhain and Halloween, you absolutely must, at the very least, understand the timeline (the dates given here are very rough):

• 200 BC–400 AD: Druidism was practiced in the British Isles, and we know next to nothing about it.
• 400–700 AD: Christianity flourished among the Celts of the British Isles.
• 700-1000 AD: We get two versions of Samhain from this period: the non-fiction, where it's a timestamp, and the legends, where there be fairies.
• 1000–1500 AD: Christianity develops many traditions and customs, some of them bizarre to our modern minds, including getting dressed up and going door-to-door.
• 1500–1950 AD: Some individuals reconstruct Druidism into a new, highly romanticized version that never existed before. Some widely-recognized scholars appear and inadvertently make the problem worse. New religions emerge based largely on these reconstructions, popularizing them.
• 1950 AD–present: Scholars reverse course, stripping away much of the mystique surrounding this reinvented Druidism. The debate about the real Samhain continues.

Articles like the one from Smithsonian Magazine, citing National Geographic, which we saw at the start of this post, blend all these periods together and treat everything as if it were ancient and Druidic. It simply wasn't. They also seem to treat the word Celt as synonymous with pagan. It just isn't. This misshapen version is the one you see in popular knowledge.

Here's the thing ... I have given you links in this series so that you can chase down every claim I've made. I encourage you to follow those links and see for yourself. When you happen across some "helpful' peddler of paganism on the internet who is trying to convince you that all the elements of Halloween come from Samhain, and you are worshipping Satan because of it, you feel free to ask them if they can prove their claims - not from some magazine article, but from primary source documents or trusted secondary source material.

Next time, we will look into those modern Halloween traditions that we are told were born of pure evil. Were they?

Other posts in this series:
Halloween I, Halloween III

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Here are some sources relevant to today's article.

Material on ABD:

Samhain Was Not On October 31
Samhain Lord of the Dead
The Plain Truth About Samhain
The Real History Of The Druids
Peddlers of Paganism

Material off ABD:

"Samhain and Halloween". God Cannot Be Contained blog.
https://godcannotbecontained.blogspot.com/2024/10/samhain-and-halloween.html
Note: This is Lonnie's post which got me started reading about Halloween in the first place.

Sanas Carmaic (Cormac's Glossary): https://archive.org/details/cu31924071173474/page/n101/mode/2up. See p.102 of that link, under Gamuin. Note: items in parenthesis are not original.

Annála Uladh (Annals of Ulster): https://archive.org/stream/annalauladhannal01royauoft/annalauladhannal01royauoft_djvu.txt. See p.158 of that link. Note: English translations use "Samhain" or "Allhallowtide", but that is not in the oldest manuscripts.

Tochmarc Emire (The Wooing of Emer):
https://www.paddybrown.co.uk/pdfs/The_Wooing_of_Emer.pdf. See pp.7 & 13 of that link; "Samain".

Félire Óengusso (The Martyrology of Oengus):
https://archive.org/details/martyrologyofoen29oenguoft/page/232/mode/2up. See p.232 of that link.

Acallam na Senórach (Tales of the Elders of Ireland):
https://archive.org/details/silvagadelicaix00gragoog/page/77/mode/1up?q=Sam.

Echtra Nerai (The Adventure of Nera):
https://www.ucc.ie/en/media/academic/seanmeanghaeilge/cdi/texts/Meyer-Echtra-Nerai.pdf. See pp. 4, 10, & 14 of that link. Note: This translation transliterates samuin as Halloween.

Ronald Hutton, "The Celtic New Year and Feast of the Dead", 2024.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0015587X.2023.2282282

Ronald Hutton, "Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain", (Oxford University Press, 2001). Note: I cannot find an online, free version.

Ronald Hutton, "Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain", (Yale University Press, 2009). Note: I cannot find an online, free version.

"Scribes and Kings: Religion, Politics and the Medieval Manuscripts of Ireland". On Mythical Ireland. https://mythicalireland.com/blogs/news/scribes-and-kings-religion-politics-and-the-medieval-manuscripts-of-ireland.
Note: This is a fine example of a reasoned attempt to identify the balance between old and new in the medieval Irish legends.

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It is important that you understand; Everything on this blog is based on the current understanding of each author. Never take anyone's word for it, always prove it for yourself, it is your responsibility. You cannot ride someone else's coattail into the Kingdom. ; )

Acts 17:11

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Revealed Faith, Resisted

(Galatians 3:23) But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed.

Here’s the 64 dollar question for you to answer — Did Jesus come and reveal (unveil) this faith?

And if He came to reveal this faith, then what would the merchants of evil; the children of the devil, wish to do in this regard?

Keep this faith UN revealed. Obscured. Nullified. Rejected, by placing a “veil’ before the eyes of men so that they do not see; do not comprehend this faith that was to be revealed.

Why? Simple. So that people remain under the law, still shut up in regards to this faith to be revealed. Under lock and key, imprisoned by the law; a gilded cage, without bars, made to look inviting and comfortable, right up to the day one are led off to the gallows.

The law kills. It is the Spirit that imparts life. You cannot mix life and death. You cannot embrace the “tree of Life” (Christ Jesus) and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, whose fruit is death and that is the fruit of the law. It imparts a knowledge of good and sin. It provides a modicum of wisdom.

The Hebrews, who were given the law, and heard the book of the law read to them, never made the connection between the law and that tree. They never made the connection between the tree of Life and God and the One who was to come. They knew the law, and liked what they saw; the sense of security it emanated. They took that rope, and gladly hung it around their collective necks; the faithless Hebrews with the deceitful and desperately wicked hearts of unbelief.

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It is important that you understand; Everything on this blog is based on the current understanding of each author. Never take anyone's word for it, always prove it for yourself, it is your responsibility. You cannot ride someone else's coattail into the Kingdom. ; )

Acts 17:11

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Faith, Law, and Deception

There are commonalities among the deceived; commonly held traits that cause people to reject Scriptural truths and accept lies and deceptions, all the while totally convinced what is believed is true, for from a strictly humanistic perspective, they are what is naturally assumed to be true.

But we are dealing with things outside the realm of the physical world we live in. What you grew up in; the environment, and the experiences based in the physical world, have an impact on the thought processes you develop over time.

In order to “get ahead” in this world, you have to do what it takes to get ahead, educationally, as well as other factors that can even include where you live. A competitive nature develops that can reflect itself in a number of ways, some of them following dishonest endeavors, criminal in nature. In many businesses, there develops a “department” of “pencil pushers” who seek to maximize profits while minimizing costs, so that the end product, whether it be fast food or widgets, people may well refuse to buy what they are selling.

In religion, specifically false religions, they are selling a lie; a “cheapened” product, where the difference however is that this trend can be reversed where salvation is sold as an expensive product that is going to cost you, plenty, and the real thing is compared to their more expensive product as merely cheap knockoffs.

And so, the truth of the matter when it comes to religion and Salvation is that the wolves, in order to achieve their goals, inflate the price of the product, while “exposing” the true product as the cheap copy; “cheap grace” if you will.

What Scripture reveals is that the cost of Salvation is beyond the ability of any man who ever lived to pay it. The deceiver’s work-around is to actually cheapen it, some, but still present it as achievable, albeit expensive comparatively, where human nature agrees with the assessment. You have to give up; surrender something in order to acquire something.

Salvation does not follow the physical patterns everyone becomes accustomed to dealing with. Salvation is a gift, not given to criminals. It is given to the family members of the family of God, sold by the deceivers as the kingdom of God in the sense of those in the kingdom being subjects of the kingdom, and not family members, constrained by law even as the Hebrews were when they were established as a nation; a kingdom.

The analogy given regarding salvation being a gift is that which is bequeathed to the children in the testament of the father, inherited from the father.

Take a concordance and look up and read all the passages of Scripture that use the words “inherit” and “inheritance.”

Understand that you acquire an inheritance upon the death of the one who bequeaths those things of his or her possession to you upon their death, where Jesus died in order to pass on to you an inheritance of eternal life if you be one who belongs to His family through a new birth of the Spirit and where your sins that made you a ‘criminal’ in the sight of God freed from your sins also by His death.

The price of your salvation is paid for by the One who in turn gives it to you. You cannot pay it, in full or partially, like some “matching funds” transaction.

The argument is put forward that people need to keep the old covenant law; the ‘works’ of the law, whether as a condition of salvation (compliance or ‘payment) which is in keeping with the conditioning we all received growing up in a physical environment described above in the opening statements. It is part of our conditioning received in the environment we all were born into.

The function of the law; its purpose, comes down to two things of note:

1. It produces wrath and makes all guilty before God. It lets it be known that no man can measure up to the standard of God and the perfection of God. All have sinned and have been found wanting when it comes to the glory of God.
2. It provides the way out of man’s dilemma through Christ Jesus paying the debt of sin prescribed by the law, that law being a blood covenant law where the sinner; the transgressor was to be put to death; their blood spilled out, which for a man produces a final and irreversible death where recovery is impossible, once the blood is drained out, seeing as the life is in the blood.

In this manner, the sin-debt is paid. You sin, you die. With Christ standing in for you, you do not personally pay the debt of irreversible death whereas Christ could do so, where He, being God, could not suffer irreversible death, being primarily a Spirit Being to begin with. He could survive what you could not, and where His death in the flesh made you legally dead to sin and dead to the law that prescribed that death, now freed from both, as Scripture declares.

Deceivers, who seek personal gain; wolves in sheep’s clothing (altered exterior appearance) have no leverage to use against those so freed from sin and the law. Their power and control revolves around there being a law that can still condemn, thereby instilling fear within people who are influenced by them, who manipulate the conditioning we all normally receive in this physical world and build on this. Faith in God who gifts us eternal live with Him through what He has done for us is supplanted by deceivers who insist it is you that must comply with requirements you must perform in order to acquire or qualify for eternal life, and they are there to guide you in the process… for a price.

Such people are led to believe, as a result, Jesus did not pay the price; the full price, and this is indicative of faithlessness in what He did and accomplished.

The price you pay the wolves so that they can feed their own bellies is both monetary and spiritual. You abandon faith in God even as Eve believed the serpent, thereby compromising faith in God and what God had declared; that partaking of that tree would result in death; a death penalty, no matter how attractive the fruit appeared; how beneficial appearing it was sold to them by the serpent.

The parallel here is the law. The typology of that tree was the law. When it comes to salvation, that was to be derived from the other tree; the Tree of Life, which was not available after choosing the other tree whose fruit was death.

The Devil is framed as the father of lies AND deceit. He used God’s tree as the means of subverting Eve, followed by Adam.

God gave them a life of relative ease, with abundant food resources. There was but one negative commandment; do not eat of that tree. Condemnation would result. You can perceive it either as a violation of the commandment of God, like the law, or look deeper and see that the real violation was in not believing what God had declared would be the consequences.

Now look again at the law; the consequences of the law as spelled out, plainly. The law produces wrath and makes all guilty before God. The only way to no longer be guilty before God is to pay the DEBT of the law; not try to keep the law that already establishes it’s sole fruit as wrath; condemnation and a death sentence. The solution is to actually believe God and what His inspired, written ‘testament’ states about the law and faith; that our salvation is tied to faith and not the law. There is no such thing as faith in God AND faith in the law. A faith in the law that the law will not condemn you; produce wrath with you by embracing the law is a fantasy put forward by deceivers that have something to gain by your disobedience to the faith. They gain, financially, and personally through power and control over your life, and the devil gains by having you abandon faith in God, even as did he.

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It is important that you understand; Everything on this blog is based on the current understanding of each author. Never take anyone's word for it, always prove it for yourself, it is your responsibility. You cannot ride someone else's coattail into the Kingdom. ; )

Acts 17:11

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