Chapter 8: Christmas and Sun god worship

[faithlovinmom]

Chapter 8: Christmas and Sun god worship

Pagan idolatry is readily practiced today in all our Holidays, feasts and customs of men. Lets take a look at their history and how these festivities came about and how they were disguised within the Christian religion.

In order to understand how and why Christmas came into the Christian church back in those early centuries, we need to understand the tremendous influence of pagan worship and Mithraism and its origins and how Christian leaders decided to adopt the customs of paganism.

Sun worship was the earliest form of idolatry. The Arabians appear to have worshiped it directly without using any statue or symbol. "If I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walking in brightness: and my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand: This also were an iniquity to be punished by the judge: for I should have denied the God that is above."Job 26-28

Abraham was called out of sun god worship when he went to the promise land. Ra was the Sun god of Egypt; and On (Heliopolis, which means "city of the sun" in Greek) was the center of Egyptian Sun worship. The Hebrews, being lead by Joshua into Canaan, encountered many Sun worshipers: Baal of the Phoenicians, Molech or Milcom of the Ammonites, Hadad of the Syrians, and later the Persian Mitras or Mithra. Shemesh was an especially important Sun god in the Middle east. " He shall break also the images of Bethshe'mesh, that is in the land of Egypt; and the houses of the gods of the Egyptians shall he burn with fire." Jer. 43:13 Later in Egypt, Aton was the name of the god of the Sun disk. The temple at Baalbet was also dedicated to sun worship. The Israelites, living in foreign lands, could not help but mingle with these pagans and frequently practiced the idolatry themselves, ".......In that ye provoke me unto wrath with the works of your hands, burning incense unto other gods in the land of Egypt, wither ye be gone to dwell, that ye might be a curse and a reproach among all the nations of the earth?............Then all the men which knew that their wives had burned incense unto other gods, and all the women that stood by, a great multitude, even all the people that dwelt in the land of Egypt, in Pathros, answered Jeremiah, saying, as for the word that thou hast spoken unto us in the name of the Lord, we will not hearken unto thee. But we will certainly do whatsoever thing goeth forth out of our own mouth, to burn incense unto the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, as we have done, we, and our fathers, our kings, and our princes, in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem: for then we had plenty of victuals, and were well and saw no evil........" Jer. 44

Even so also King Manasseh practiced direct Sun worship as written in 2 Kings 21:3 ... "For he built up again the High places which Hezekiah his father had destroyed; and he reared up altars for Baal, and made a grove, as did Ahab king of Israel; and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them." After king Manesseh's death, Josiah began to reign as king. King Josiah made a covenant with the Lord to follow his commandments. Intern, Josiah ordered all the vessels that were made for Baal, and for the grove, and for all the host of heaven (sun, moon, planets, etc.) to be burned. Also, the chariots of the sun were burned with fire and all altars were beat down and destroyed. 2 Kings 23

Ezekiel, while caught up in the visions of the Lord, was shown the "greatest abomination"......."And he brought me into the inner court of the Lord's house, and behold, at the door of the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty men, with their backs toward the temple of the Lord, and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east." Eze. 8:17

The worship of the sun arose from a devotion to that most powerful of natural objects. It was one of the most ancient forms of worship and is represented by solar-disk images found on nearly every continent of our world. The most important of all the heathen gods(Mithra) was originally an ancient god of Iran, and for centuries had been worshiped as the god of strength and war by the descendants of the Persians. But, by the first century A.D., Mithra had been transformed into the foremost pagan god of any kind. There had been no particular day that was used for heathen worship of the Sun god. But then, about the time of Christ, or a little before, the various days of the week were dedicated to specific pagan celestial gods.....dies Solis.....the day of the Sun, dies Lunae.....the day of the moon, and so on. This was known to the pagans as the "planetary week." Now, although these names for the days of the week were new, the day devoted to the Sun god was not new. Each day was ruled over by a different god; but the most important of all gods was given the rule of the first day of the week, with the idea in mind that the first is always more important than that which follows it. Mithra was given the rule over the first of the seven days. It was his day, the day of the Sun. And Mithra, the Sun god was worshiped each week on his day, the Sun day.

The Romans often called Mithra by a new name, Sol Invictus, "the Invincible sun." Mithra was the greatest pagan rival of Christianity. Satan carefully designed a plan so that Mithraism would closely approximate, in several ways, the only true religion in the world.......Christianity. It had such similar features as a dying-rising Savior, a special religious supper, a special holy day out of the weekly

seven.......Sun Day, and the baptism of converts to the faith by having blood from a slaughtered bull sprinkled upon them. It counterfeited the religion of the True God more cleverly than any other religion up to that time in history.

Gradually, the worship of the Invincible sun became even more popular and widespread among the Roman Empire as they began observing Sunday as a holy day in honor of Mithra. Then, about 200 years after the last book of the Bible had been penned, emperor Aurelian (A.D. 270-275) whose mother was a priestess of the Sun, made the solar cult the official religion of the empire. The priests of the temple were called pontiffs. They were priests of their dying-rising Savior, Mithra, and vicegerents in religious matters next to him. They called his worship day "the Lord's Day."

Sun worship continued to be the official religion of the empire until Constantine I defeated Lincinius in 323, after which it was replaced by Romanized Christianity. Constantine, then gave Christianity full legal equality with every other religion in the empire. In spite of the Roman church's new found freedom of worship, church leaders adopted a pagan holiday. This was Idolatry since it was a heathen day of worship. In addition, the day for the worship had been selected in honor of Mithra, the sun god. The sun had reached its lowest angle in the sky on December 21 (winter solstice), and the 25th was the first observable day it began rising in the noon sky. So December 25 had, for centuries been celebrated as the "birth of the sun god," the son of the Babylonian queen of heaven. Can you see the similarities between the birth of the sun god and his mother, the queen of heaven and also the Roman catholic religion of worship of the birth of the son Jesus and Mother Mary of heaven? The roman world was essentially pagan. Many converts to Christianity had come to enjoy those festivities and did not want to forsake them after baptism in to the Christian church. In order to conciliate the heathen and to swell the number of the nominal adherents of Christianity, the same festival was adopted by the Roman Church, giving it only the name of Christ, "Christ Mass". Through the combining of two religions....the pagan sun god worship and true Christianity, the Christmas Holiday was born.

The period from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries was the peak of a general Christian celebration of the nativity...It was at this period, too, that most of the festive Christmas customs of each country were introduced. Some have since died out; others have changed slightly through the ages. Many have survived to our day.

I must also note that, in this same way of combining pagan idolatry with true Christianity creating Christmas, so also was it done with other pagan festivities to create some of our modern day holidays such as Halloween and Easter.