The majority of people alive today don’t remember Easter taking place on April Fool’s Day, because you have to go back more than 60 years to 1956 to find when it previously happened. In the twentieth century, Easter fell on April 1 only four times – 1923, 1934, 1945 and 1956; and it won’t happen again until 2029. When something happens so infrequent, there’s usually a message in it. So, I sought the Lord and heard: The Antichrist’s prank is being turned on its head by His Word Warriors.
Did you know that the kings and priests of the Order of Melchizedek are Word Warriors? That’s right! The word “order” in the Order of Melchizedek shares the same Hebrew root as davar, which primarily means “word.” Each king and priest of the Order of Melchizedek are leading their own inner fire bride forth. In her fullness, the Bride of the Messiah will resonate at the exact same frequency as the Word of God Himself (Revelation 19:13).
The Anti-Messiah and its associated spirit (in other words the Antichrist) does the opposite. It is the spirit of the Antichrist, which intends first to change God’s appointed times and then His laws. “He will speak against the Most High and oppress his saints and try to change the set times and the laws” (Daniel 7:25). This can be called an Antichrist’s prank on God’s people. Changing biblical time-keeping has caused God’s people to modify some of what needed to be kept in God’s Word—like the Essential Commandments for All Believers.
Christianity’s first move in the direction away from the biblical calendar happened in the second century. It began with a slight compromise to Passover, where the nearest Sunday was chosen to mark the day of Christ’s resurrection, rather than starting with the beginning of the Passover season on the fourteenth of Nisan; and then, celebrating Jesus Christ’s resurrection on Bikkurim (The Feast of First Fruits detailed in Leviticus 23:9-14).
Bikkurim was the actual day that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, which literally was a biblical feast day. Know that Word Warriors will restore this significant detail of resurrection. Please understand that the Hebrew term “bikkurim” and related terms for the “first fruits” derive from the same Hebrew root as “bekhor” – firstborn. As in Romans 8:29 NASB – “to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the FIRSTBORN among many brethren.”
It’s not a coincidence that April Fool’s Day, celebrated on April 1, has existed in some form since the ancient Romans. The ancient Romans are also largely responsible for the change in biblical time keeping. To be fair, the Greeks had their thumbs in the time changing pie too. Do your research. Check out Julius Caesar’s establishment of the Julian Year. Check out Constantine and the Council of Nicaea.
Let’s return to focus on the Antichrist’s prank that Word Warriors will turn on its head. It’s extremely interesting that God’s biblical calendar will not support a pagan-mixed holiday like Easter or Christmas. When you check out how hilariously absurd the history of the Institutional Church support of Easter has been, you can get what an April Fool’s Day joke or Antichrist’s prank it has been. The following is from my book SANTA-TIZING with some slight modifications:
The church in Constantine’s day, and after, had a problem with the date of Easter, due to their changing God’s set times and ways. In Constantine’s effort to unify a divided empire, he forced the bishops at Nicaea to resolve the Asian church difference in Easter from the Roman-African church, by declaring the Quartodeciman practice of the Asian church heretical. Quartodeciman meant the “fourteenth day.” The Asian church did as Jesus and His first-century believers, as defined in the Bible. They celebrated God’s holy feast called Passover on the fourteenth day of Nisan, followed by the Feast of First Fruits. The Feast of First Fruits was encompassed by the Festival of Unleavened Bread, celebrated on the fifteenth through twenty-first days of Nisan, as prescribed by the Lord Himself and fulfilled in Christ. Constantine’s practice of setting up a difference-obliterating universalism that swallowed up all religious distinctiveness in a triumphant Christianity sided with the Roman-African practice of choosing the closest Sunday to the first full-moon after the spring equinox as the day all Christian communities should celebrate Easter.
Thus, Constantine and his compromising cohorts led the movement that no longer looked to Scripture as the last word. This was later affirmed by Pope Paul III, when his council stipulated that Scripture be understood in light of tradition.
When Constantine’s Nicene Council declared the Quartodeciman practice heretical, they came against what God prescribed as perpetual in His eternal Word. The exact date that God established His Passover Feast was tweaked by the church. Now, to come up with the universal time for Easter, Constantine turned to the wise men of Alexandria, Egypt, to compute Easter and inform the rest of the world of its given time. Alexandria was the center of mathematical learning in the Hellenistic world, which was the same cultural influence being propagated by Antiochus Epiphanes IV.
Heilbron’s excellent book entitled The Sun in the Church informs us: “The Romans began with a calendar that tried to respect both sun and moon, But the arithmetic and the politics of intercalation became so entangled that Julius Caesar had to make the year now called 44 B.C. 445 days long to restore the spring equinox to its traditional [Roman] calendar date of 25 March. He decided to keep it there by detaching the lengths of the months from the motions of the moon.” Remember, that a spirit of Antichrist, made manifest through people, will aim to first alter God’s times and then His law. Gentiles (i.e., the nations) may not like it, but the key to God’s time(s) was given to the Hebrews, and even then, they had to take their cues solely from Him. The Lord instructed His people to begin a month by sighting the new moon at dusk, which could not be predicted far in advance. The rulers of the Jewish people—the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem—appointed an official sighting committee to determine the onset of the month via the astronomical moon. So, the Hebrews followed God’s instructions by employing the moon to specify the times of civil and religious transactions. God’s people had to rely on Him by looking up at His dusky sky to see the sign of His time. The Romans, after Caesar, picked the sun to specify civil and religious time. The Christians mixed the two, compromising between Jewish and Gentile practices of using the moon and the sun to specify a calendar year.
Notably, there is an eleven-day difference between the solar and lunar year. The number eleven in Scripture is said to represent disorder, disorganization, imperfection, and disintegration. The “eleventh hour” in Scripture (Matt. 20:6, 9) is proverbial as being contrary both to what is right in order and what is right in arrangement. I believe this reveals that orderly time can only be done God’s way. When God made everything on earth according to measure and number, He purposely chose difficult ones for astronomy. “He assigned 29.53059 days for the moon to fulfill its phases, and 365.2422 days for the sun to run from one vernal equinox to the next.” Perhaps. Just perhaps. God wants us dependent upon Him to get our time and timing, not on man-made formulas. Time is in perpetual motion. However, the days are distributed among the months, they will never sum to a year. Can you say, “We are dependent on God to show us His time?”
To keep the vernal equinox on, or as close to 25 March as possible, Caesar also brought an Alexandian astronomer named Sosigenes to Rome. Recall that Alexandria was the center of mathematical learning in the Hellenistic world. Sosigenes brilliantly came up with the formula for the Julian year, which gave a year 326.25 days. Sosigenes set a year at 365 days, with every fourth year containing 366 days, so the vernal equinox would stay put in the calendar. This Julius Caesar practice of setting a year was so good that we still use the Julian year model in America today. But, was it good enough? Sosigenes made the year too long by about eleven minutes. Eleven minutes? Yes, eleven minutes. A Roman year, set according to the dictates of Julius Caesar, is eleven minutes too long. And a solar year is eleven days too long.
The Roman Catholic Church gave the greatest amount of money to the study of astronomy for six centuries during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, not because of its love for science, but because the date of Easter throughout the ages was very screwed up. Let go into greater depth by diving into how man’s establishment of Christ’s resurrection, on the basis of the pagan holiday of Easter, resulted in disorder, disorganization, imperfection, and disintegration.
The church insisted on celebrating Easter on a Sunday close to the first full moon of spring. By the way, “there is a hint of the anti-Jewish spirit of the Nicene fathers in their ban of the celebration of Easter in the same week as Passover.” By the twelfth century, the date of Easter was no longer in harmony with the heavens, which destroyed the image of the miracle of the solar eclipse at the crucifixion.
As time rolled on, the errors in the reckoning of Easter compounded. In 1276, man’s computations for setting Easter displayed its incompetence to the entire world by erring by a whole month. The calculated Easter differed from the set date by eight days in 1345, a month in 1356, five weeks in 1424, and one week off in 1433 and 1437. “The professional astronomers then took the matter in hand, calculating not from average, but from real moons.” The church tried to square its year with the astronomy of the sun, and its Easter to the moon in 1511; but to no avail. Martin Luther recommended that the problem be dissolved by nailing Easter in the calendar like Christmas. When the Catholic-Protestant split happened to the church, they each followed different calendars. During the seventeenth century, correspondence between Europeans usually bore two dates, for example, “10/20 January.” The Catholic Easter had coincided with the Anglican Easter less than half the time (thirty-six years out of eighty), despite placing both of their vernal equinox on the same day of 21 March. In the seventeenth century, the Catholic Easter preceded the Anglican one by one week twenty-six times, by four weeks five times, and by five weeks thirteen times. This sounds like an acute case of disorder to me. All mathematicians knew that the discrepancies would only grow worse in the eighteenth century. The civil calendars would diverge by eleven, count them, eleven days rather than ten, owing to the Gregorian suppression of the Julian leap day of 1700. The religious calendars of the church were moving further and further out of step, which is a progressive phenomenon that happens when man makes calculation errors. In hindsight, we could say that when the church chose to run itself according to an earthly kingdom rather than God’s kingdom, it made a calculated error. “Moreover, man does not know his time: like fish caught in a treacherous net, and birds trapped in a snare, so the sons of men are ensnared at an evil time when it suddenly falls on them” (Ecclesiastes. 9:12 NASB).
It’s time!!! It’s time for God’s Word Warriors to turn the Antichrist’s prank of changing God’s appointed times and then His laws on its head. Kings and priests of the Order of Melchizedek know that biblical time-keeping and biblical feasts are vital ingredients to the restoration of all things.
~ Robin Main
www.sapphirethroneministries.com
www.santa-tizing.com
www.mysticmentoring.com
Excerpt from SANTA-TIZING: What’s wrong with Christmas and how to clean it up, Chapter 4 – Age-Old Foundation, Greco-Roman Marks on Time, p. 97-100. Footnote provided in the book => https://www.amazon.com/SANTA-TIZING-Whats-wrong-Christmas-clean/dp/1607911159/
Written April 1, 2018 – Sapphire Throne Ministries – Robin Main. Copyrighted – If you are going to copy this, please copy it right by giving attributions to this source.
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