Editorials
the roots of easter
The oft-repeated observation that Easter and Christmas have roots in ancient
pagan traditions may be true enough, as far as it goes. But that partial truth,
or conjecture, can easily be turned into a falsity if it is misconstrued as
evidence that the miracles memorialized in these Christian holidays are only
reformulated “myths.”
And the natural desire to appear knowledgeable and sophisticated
increases the possibility of such a misinterpretation.
To say the story of Easter has its roots in pagan myth is like saying the
New Testament has its roots in the Old Testament. Well, yes, but the far more
important point is that the truth of the Gospels is a new, fuller revelation of the
same eternal truth contained in the Old Testament (in a more heavily veiled
form).
Every church has roots in the previous one, but all of them have their
taproot in heaven.
The story of the Lord’s life in the Gospels, including His resurrection, is the
“original,” and the myths that preceded it – even though they came beforehand
in time – are the imitations. They are allegorical, prophetic previews of the
Divine Truth personified by the Lord Jesus Christ, “the Word made flesh.”
Whatever the order of their appearance in human history, all events in this
world of time are but shadows of realities in the eternal world of heaven.
Imagine that as you are walking along you see the shadow of a tree on
the ground ahead of you even though the tree itself is out of sight around the
side of a hill or the edge of a building. Then when you get to where you can see
around the corner you see the tree. You saw the shadow first, but the tree was
prior to it; without the tree there would have been no shadow.
In a similar way, the Lord’s life on earth was foreshadowed by the gods and
heroes of mythology, as well as Old Testament figures such as Joseph, who was
drawn out of a pit, and Jonah, who spent three days and nights in the fish’s
belly. (See Matthew 12:40) As the Lord said: “Before Abraham was, I AM.”
(John 8:58)
Nature itself is a theater in which spiritual realities are represented. Long
before the Lord was born, caterpillars were emerging as butterflies from the
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