Can anything good be said for Halloween?
Not really, except to confess the honest truth that it is purest paganism that has wormed its way into the supposedly Christian faith of many millions.
So the question resolves itself into a simpler one: can anything good be said for paganism itself? The Bible offers the repeated comment that paganism imported into the supposedly Christian church is "Babylon" from which the sincere follower of Jesus Christ is sternly commanded forthwith to "come out!" (Rev. 14:8; 18:1-4).
But let's use sanctified common sense in the process: just to come down hard on Halloween alone and neglect the real significance of paganism entrenched in professed Christian thought is to repeat the whole sad apostasy from its beginning.
The story takes us to Daniel, the one book of the Old Testament that Jesus earnestly urges us to "read" and "understand" (Matt. 24:15). In chapters 8:11-13; 11:31, and 12:11, 12 paganism figures as impacting itself on the captive people of God taken to a 70-year exile in ancient Babylon.
As one who spent years in a missionary "exile" in eastern Uganda, this writer can testify: the endless night-time pagan singing and dancing and drum-beating are a continual harassment when you have to be a next-door neighbor. There is evidence in Daniel that the Israelites in captivity in literal Babylon had an idiom for what endlessly surrounded them: "the continual in transgression."
The literal Hebrew is: ha tamid be pesha, the word tamid being translated as "daily," and ha as the article, "the." It occurs those five times in Daniel, and nowhere else in Scripture in that way.
The Hebrew verb in 8:11-13 is rum, which does not mean primarily "take away" but "lift up," "exalt." The Catholic and Protestant Christians who lived through the end of the 1260 years of papal oppression in 1798 A.D. recognized "the daily" as paganism which became exalted in the early apostasy of much professed Christianity. The result has been described as "baptized paganism." The classic volume, The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan, describes the process as "paganism incorporated" into Christianity (p. 50).
For interested readers, Dial Daily Bread has a little paper on the subject, "Have We Followed Cunningly Devised Fables?" which can be obtained by e-mail. Hit your reply button, and ask for "Fables."
Copyright © 2009 by Robert J. Wieland.
Be sure to check your e-mail for "Dial Daily Bread" again tomorrow.
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