Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
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. 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).
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: October 31, 2007.
Copyright © 2013 by "Dial Daily Bread."
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Note: For interested readers, "Dial Daily Bread" has a paper on the subject, "Have We Followed Cunningly Devised Fables?" The 20-page PDF file can be obtained by sending an e-mail to dailybread@1888message.org. Ask for "Fables.
Be sure to check your e-mail for "Dial Daily Bread" again tomorrow.
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